¶ … Television, the four powers of television are characterized as the power to entertain, the power to socialize and educate, the power to inform, and the power to create community and consensus. The four are not mutually exclusive and can be found operating in pairs or larger groupings on individual shows.
The power to entertain is understood by everyone and is the primary power for most people. The television networks have played to this power from the beginning, carrying over what they had been doing on radio into the new medium to create programs that would gather large audiences around comedies, dramas, variety shows, and the like. This primary power has continued into the cable era, with many cable networks imitating the broadcast networks in these terms by presenting movies, dramatic shows, and comedies or by shaping non-fictional programs so they entertain, seen in the many so-called reality shows that are currently on the air. Television has indeed been charged more and more with elevating entertainment over the other powers, so that news programs show ore and more effort at being entertaining rather than informative, from the so-called "happy talk" between anchors to an emphasis on fluffy news about celebrities instead of national and world affairs, or the shift in local news to stories about crime, producing the phrase, "If it bleeds, it leads."
The power to socialize and educate is seen in programs with a clear educational intent, such as many shows on public broadcasting. In the broader sense, however, all of television has this power because people watching television acquire knowledge, even if it is only knowledge of the culture. Television provides many shared images and messages that shape the way people view themselves and the world around them.
Similarly, the power to inform can be taken broadly to include more than news and public affairs, though these are clearly represented. Television viewers can see the world outside their immediate community to a much greater degree than was ever possible in the past. Viewers also vicariously experience real events, real people, and history itself by what they see on television.
The power to create community and consensus is seen in the way television repeats aspects...
Television The history of television is at once familiar and unexpected, in that television, like every new medium, experienced a time when it was simultaneously written off as a fad and hailed as a world-changing wave of the future. The truth was somewhat more nuanced, because although television did change the world in serious, wide-ranging ways, it did not do so in the way many early critics and theorists suspected. By
Television in Australia Television itself was quite an invention and made significant changes all around the world. It became common in the United Kingdom and the United States by the end of the Second World War. The American system basically had the commercial system in which government interference wasn't so pronounced. On the other hand, the British system was more government owned and dominated by BBC. The television in Australia has
Television's Depiction Of American Family In The 1950s And 1960s Television depiction of the American family in the 1950s and early 1960s Television has for many years shaped the American society depending on the prevailing circumstances at that time. Ordinarily it is expected that television as a form of art would mimic the real life, but this has not always been true across the eras since at some point, television shaped and
In terms of a feature film like the Spiderman series, there is much revenue to be generated from merchandise, DVD and video sales, tie-in promotions from companies like McDonalds, and spin-off video games. Therefore, the stakes are higher. A feature film producer who has been granted a 200 million dollar budget had better deliver an audience, and deliver it in spades. A telemovie producer, however, working much faster with
Power of Media in American Values Contemporary Discuss the power of the media in shaping contemporary American values. The online oxford dictionary defines media as "the main means of mass communication (television, radio, and newspapers) regarded collectively" (oxforddictionaries.com). This implies that the public globally are highly dependent on media to get information regarding what surrounds them, so is the American public (Edwards, 2001;9). In any case, the most efficient way of transmitting information
Thus, the initial negotiation was not a difficult choice, as Miami had both the lowest opportunity cost and the highest benefits. Later, when Washington re-entered the picture, it was because the league had raised suspicion with respect to the Miami contract with Howard. As a result, the cost-benefit analysis and risk analysis shifted. If Howard went to arbitration against the league, he would risk losing $50-60 million over the length
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