Book traces relationship between media workers and media industry
A career in Media is precarious & venerable
People may be drawn in by the promise of success, wealth and fame
People may also be drawn to media work after being driven away from the boring repetitive nature of other careers such as finance which is more predictable
Creative work is often imagined to be a self actualising pleasure instead of a potentially arduous or problematic obligation undertaken through material necessity
06/01/22
Products exist as a result of their economic context
The media industry is a high risk business
Media businesses are reliant upon changing audience consumption patterns
The media is reliant on marketing and publicity functions
Media products have limited consumption capacity
Hesmondhalgh argues that the risk associated with the creation on media leads the industry to to employ highly tuned range of production practices
David Hesmondhalgh critically analyse the relationship between media work and the media industry. In his seminal book, The Culture Industries (Sage, 2019) he suggested that:
“the distinctive organisational form of the cultural industries has considerable implications for the conditions under which symbolic creativity is carried out“
Often, this ‘myth-like’ narrative young people aspire to is unachievable. They are seduced easily into wanting to work within creative industries and fail to see the counter side, the reality, to what is on the surface.
“in its utopian presentation, creative work is now imagined only asa self-actualising pleasure, rather than a potentially arduous or problematic obligation undertaken through material necessity” (2009, p. 417)
The creative industry is stereotypically presented as a ‘utopian’ career choice in which, workers have fun at all times whereas it is risky and involves many aspects such as business and money as well. Success in creative industries is largely based off of contacts, connections and luck rather than pure talent and effort.
David Hesmondhalgh says; “All business is risky, but the cultural industries constitute a particularly risky business”
The media and creative industry is based off of audience preference, taste, and how audiences will react to productions. For example, if a production gets a unexpected, negative reaction, money is lost without being made back and jobs are lost, making it a risky venture. Artists and producers take a risk when creating a product as they don’t have any idea how it will be received by the consumers.
“Media buisnesses are reliant upon changing audience consumption patterns”
As audience taste changes, it has a knock on effect to the productions being made.
Risk is minimized by many different things:
‘Fan culture’, if productions develop a strong, reliable and loyal fan base, producers can almost rely on a positive reaction from these consumers towards future productions.
Marketing and advertising, the use of advertisement allows creative/ media products to gain the attention of their target audience
Trying not to create a ‘monopoly’, often, large, worldwide companies such as ‘Disney’ and ‘Apple’ leave one aspect of production, distribution or consumption to a third party company in order to create a legal monopoly.
Repetition; Producers stick to their strengths and create similar products time and time again to create a loyal fan base so that they don’t have to continue finding new target audience.
The Media and creative industries are categorized into sub sectors;
Production = Artists, designers, actors etc who create the product.
Distribution = Marketers, publicists, advertisers etc who promote the product to the audience.
Consumption = Workers who allow the product to be brought to the audience and consumers who consume the products.
Roger Eugene Ailes (May 15, 1940 – May 18, 2017) was an American television executive and media consultant. He was the chairman and CEO of Fox News, In July 2016, he resigned from Fox News after being accused of sexual harassment by several female Fox employee.
In a book published in 2014, Gabriel Sherman alleged that, in the 1980s, Ailes offered a television producer a raise if she would sleep with him. Fox News denied the allegation and rejected the authenticity of Sherman’s book. On July 6, 2016, former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against Ailes; Carlson’s allegations were the impetus for more than a dozen female employees at 21st Century Fox to step forward regarding their own experiences with Ailes’s behaviour.
Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist. Butler’s work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory. She argued that gender is a social construct, which is performed rather than adopted. Because gender identity is established through behaviour, there is a possibility to construct different genders via different behaviours. Butler offers a critique of the terms gender and sex as they have been used by feminists. Butler argues that feminism made a mistake in trying to make “women” a discrete, ahistorical group with common characteristics. Butler writes that this approach reinforces the binary view of gender relations. Butler believes that feminists should not try to define “women” and they also believe that feminists should “focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement. Judith herself is a lesbian, whose legally non-binary, and goes by she or they pronouns.
For his first job, he briefly worked as an editor on Lord Beaverbrook’s London Daily Express.
He is worth $17.1 Billion.
In 1953, his father dies, leaving him in control of the News Ltd. company in Adelaide, Australia, which he turned into a huge success.
Murdoch turned failing newspaper, The Adelaide news, into a huge success. After he started the ‘Australian’ which was the first national paper in the country.
Murdoch became a US Citizen in 1985 in order to be able to expand his market to US television broadcasting.
In Britain in 1989 Murdoch inaugurated Sky Television.
The following year Murdoch sought to expand his presence in American television with the launch of Fox News, a news and political commentary channel that became highly influential.
Murdoch’s media empire includes Fox News, Fox Sports, the Fox Network, The Wall Street Journal, and HarperCollins.
In the general elections of 1997, 2001 and 2005, Murdoch’s papers were either neutral or supported Labour under Tony Blair
In July 2011, Murdoch, along with his youngest son James, provided testimony before a British parliamentary committee regarding phone hacking. In the UK, his media empire came under fire, as investigators probed reports of 2011 phone hacking. This was later known as ‘Leveson’, which came to the public eye after a young girl who was murdered had her phone hacked by reporters/journalists in order to make a story.
On 15 July, Murdoch attended a private meeting in London with the family of Milly Dowler, where he personally apologized for the hacking of their murdered daughter’s phone. He apologized for the “serious wrongdoing” and titled it “Putting right what’s gone wrong”.
May 2012 a parliamentary panel tasked with investigating the scandal released a highly critical report, which stated that Rupert “is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company” and that he showed “willful blindness” concerning misconduct within his corporation
In 2015 Murdoch was succeeded as CEO at 21st Century Fox by James.
In 2017 he agreed to sell most of the holdings of 21st Century Fox to the Disney Company. Two years later the deal closed and was valued at about $71 billion. The hugely profitable Fox News and various other TV channels were excluded from the sale, and they became part of the newly formed Fox Corporation.
Murdoch began building his empire in 1952 when he inherited the family newspaper company. Murdoch is credited for creating the modern tabloid encouraging his newspaper to publish human interest stories focused on controversy, crime, and scandals.
Murdoch turned one failing newspaper, The Adelaide news, into a success. He then started the Australian, the first national paper in the country.
Murdoch’s media empire includes Fox News, Fox Sports, the Fox Network, The Wall Street Journal, and HarperCollins.
In 1968, Murdoch entered the British newspaper market with his acquisition of the populist News of the World, followed in 1969 with the purchase of the struggling daily The Sun from IPC
In 1981, Murdoch acquired the struggling Times and Sunday Times from Canadian newspaper publisher Lord Thomson of Fleet.
In the light of success and expansion at The Sun the owners believed that Murdoch could turn the papers around. Harold Evans, editor of the Sunday Times from 1967, was switched to the daily Times, though he stayed only a year amid editorial conflict with Murdoch.
Murdoch bought the newspaper, ‘News of the World of London’, in 1968
Murdoch became a US Citizen in 1985 in order to be able to expand his market to US television broadcasting.
It is owned by the Murdoch family via a family trust with 39.6% ownership share; Rupert Murdoch is chairman, while his son Lachlan Murdoch is executive chairman and CEO. Fox Corp. deals primarily in the television broadcast, news, and sports broadcasting industries.
The Murdoch Family Trust controls around 40 per cent of the parent company’s voting shares (and a smaller proportion of the total shares on issue).
Bombshell (2019, Dir. Jay Roach) a story based upon the accounts of the women at Fox News who set out to expose CEO Roger Ailes for sexual harassment.
Having had enough of her boss’s sexual harassments, Gretchen Carlson files a lawsuit against Fox News founder Roger Ailes. Her bravery triggers a domino effect, culminating into a liberation movement.
This film providesa narrative of INSTITUTIONAL SEXISM, in the same way that we could look at other stories that are concerned with other institutional prejudices – racism, homophobia, Islamophobia etc. In other words, this film presents a version of the story of INSTITUTIONAL SEXISM and MISOGYNY.
This film provides a narrative of INSTITUTIONAL SEXISM, in the same way that we could look at other stories that are concerned with other institutional prejudices – racism, homophobia, Islamaphobia etc. In other words, this film presents a version of the story of INSTITUTIONAL SEXISM and MISOGYNY. It suggests a link between the presentation / representation of the female form and the ideas of a ruling patriarchy (Fox News, specifically Roger Ailes) and perhaps explains why we are presented with the stories we are presented with and how those stories are presented to us.
Bombshell (2019, Dir. Jay Roach) is a story based upon the accounts of the women at Fox News who set out to expose CEO Roger Ailes for sexual harassment.
Judith Pamela Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory. In 1993, Butler began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, where they have served, beginning in 1998, as the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory. They are also the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School.
Butler is best known for their books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), in which they challenge conventional notions of gender and develop their theory of gender performativity. This theory has had a major influence on feminist and queer scholarship. Their work is often studied and debated in film studies courses emphasizing gender studies and performativity in discourse.
Butler has supported lesbian and gay rights movements, and they have spoken out on many contemporary political issues, including criticism of Israeli politics.
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity was first published in 1990, selling over 100,000 copies internationally, in multiple languages. Gender Trouble discusses the works of Sigmund Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault.
Butler offers a critique of the terms gender and sex as they have been used by feminists. Butler argues that feminism made a mistake in trying to make “women” a discrete, ahistorical group with common characteristics. Butler writes that this approach reinforces the binary view of gender relations. Butler believes that feminists should not try to define “women” and they also believe that feminists should “focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement.” Finally, Butler aims to break the supposed links between sex and gender so that gender and desire can be “flexible, free floating and not caused by other stable factors”. The idea of identity as free and flexible and gender as a performance, not an essence, is one of the foundations of queer theory.
Third-wave feminism is an iteration of the feminist movement. It began in the United States in the early 1990s and continued until the rise of the fourth wave in the 2010s. Born in the 1960s and 1970s as members of Generation X and grounded in the civil-rights advances of the second wave, third-wave feminists embraced individualism in women and diversity and sought to redefine what it meant to be a feminist. The third wave saw the emergence of new feminist currents and theories, such as intersectionality, sex positivity, vegetarian ecofeminism, transfeminism, and postmodern feminism. According to feminist scholar Elizabeth Evans, the “confusion surrounding what constitutes third-wave feminism is in some respects its defining feature.”
The third wave is traced to the emergence of the riot girl feminist punk subculture in Olympia, Washington, in the early 1990s, and to Anita Hill’s televised testimony in 1991—to an all-male, all-white Senate Judiciary Committee—that African-American judge Clarence Thomas, nominated for and eventually confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States, had sexually harassed her. The term third wave is credited to Rebecca Walker, who responded to Thomas’s appointment to the Supreme Court with an article in Ms. magazine, “Becoming the Third Wave” (1992). She wrote:
“So I write this as a plea to all women, especially women of my generation: Let Thomas’ confirmation serve to remind you, as it did me, that the fight is far from over. Let this dismissal of a woman’s experience move you to anger. Turn that outrage into political power. Do not vote for them unless they work for us. Do not have sex with them, do not break bread with them, do not nurture them if they don’t prioritize our freedom to control our bodies and our lives. I am not a post-feminism feminist. I am the Third Wave.”
The rights and programs gained by feminists of the second wave served as a foundation for the third wave. The gains included Title IX (equal access to education), public discussion about the abuse of women, access to contraception and other reproductive services (including the legalization of abortion), the creation and enforcement of sexual-harassment policies for women in the workplace, the creation of domestic-abuse shelters for women and children, child-care services, educational funding for young women, and women’s studies programs.
Feminist leaders rooted in the second wave such as Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, Cherríe Moraga, Audre Lorde, Maxine Hong Kingston, and other feminists of color, sought to negotiate a space within feminist thought for consideration of race. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa had published the anthology This Bridge Called My Back (1981), which, along with All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (1982), edited by Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith, argued that second-wave feminism had focused primarily on the problems of white women. The emphasis on the intersection between race and gender became increasingly prominent.
In the interlude of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the feminist sex wars arose as a reaction against the radical feminism of the second wave and its views on sexuality, therein countering with a concept of “sex-positivity” and heralding the third wave.
Rebecca Walker in 2003. The term third wave is credited to Walker’s 1992 article
