ENTERTAINMENT Chapter 9 Who drives celebrity coverage? - PowerPoint Presentation

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ENTERTAINMENT

Chapter 9

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Who drives celebrity coverage?

Finite amount of news on celebrities, so:

1) Tabloid thinking – who cares if it’s true if it will sell? We can retract it later.

2) Spying

3) Phone hacking

*In 2011, Rupert Murdoch shut down

168-year-old

News of the World

Are we to blame? Or poor journalism? (Chicken-egg)

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Entertainment in History

PRE-MASS MEDIA ROOTS

Entertainment predates the written history of the human species…oral tradition, cave art, early performers, Olympic games, Circus Maximus

Entertainment that has survived the ages include music, literature, sports, and sex

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Entertainment in History

TECHNOLOGY-DRIVEN ENTERTAINMENT

Age of Communication begins w/Gutenberg’s printing press in 1440s…messages could be mass-produced to reach large audiences.

Through technological advancements people are being entertained more than ever before in history

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Entertainment in History

ENTERTAINMENT GENRES-

subdivisions of storytelling and music

*

Storytelling

-suspense, romance, horror, fantasy, biography, history and Westerns

*

Music

-many ways to categorize the many types

*

Sports

-clearest in sports because of rules

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Mediated Performance

Media change performance for many reasons:

Audience –

authentic performance

– live with the audience on-site (

exs

. Broadway or CHS)

Feedback – performers on stage affected by audience’s reaction

Technology-the equipment that make mass communication possible and transforms performance into

mediated performance

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Mediated Performance

Media technology affects and often shapes the messages the media disseminate. To make a

mediated message

work-changes happen in the technology that makes it possible to reach large audience.

Music

– early audio machines made brass bands, loud voices, and high-pitched voices sound best so that’s what was popular. As technology improved and more subtle sounds could be recorded other voices and bands became popular.

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Mediated Performance

Movies – Media technology profoundly affects art. Audio and film technology merged to create “talkies” and now moviemakers had more creative options for storytelling.

Sports – Instant replay on

tv

– 1960s Army-Navy game – gave home viewers advantage. Then came miniature cameras, microphones, and different camera options that changed the experience.

(XFL may not have been success but it gave tech advancement – camera on cable line.)

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Storytelling

GENRES OF LITERATURE

Genres help us make sense of literature, giving basis for comparison and contrast.

Can be categorized in many ways:

Fiction & Nonfiction

Prose & Poetry

Periods: medieval, postmodern, realism, etc.

Geographic: Russian, Hispanic, French

Ideologies: Marxist, fascist, libertarian

Bookstores – for inventory and selling by interest

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Storytelling

MEDIA-DEFINED TRENDS

Genres rise and fall in popularity

Early TV – variety shows of song, dance, comedy, acts

1950s quiz shows, then Westerns, then police shows

21

st

c. – talk shows, reality shows, forensic science

Genre trends are audience-driven

Hard to keep genre fresh

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Music

ROCKABILLY REVOLUTION – Most historians trace contemporary pop music to roots in 2 distinctive types of American folk music: black music from enslaved black culture or hillbilly music from rural Appalachia.

Black music – slaves used music to soothe their difficult lives – reflected oppression and hopeless poverty. African roots with black American experience and strong religious themes. After civil war, black musicians found white audience on riverboats and in saloons

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Music

1930s and 1940s new form black music called

rhythm and blues

–enjoyed by blacks & whites. Mainstream American music includes firm African-American presence

Hillbilly Music

- from lives of Appalachian and Southern whites. Strong colonial heritage in English ballads

Fiddle playing,

twangy

lyrics, reflected poverty of “hillbillies”

1950s black + hillbilly = rockabilly- becomes rock ‘

n’roll

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Music

Rock ‘n’ Roll –

Sam Phillips

– Memphis disc jockey and promoter started in 1951 w/

Rocket 88

but new to really get white crowd needed white performer – 1954 Elvis Presley

Racial integration of music potentially paved way for civil rights movement of 1960s

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Music

Music of Dissent (examples)

-folk revival of anti-Vietnam war movement of late 60s-70s and patriotic works at same time

-1863 – legend George Washington

-Civil War and WWI– patriotic music

-Dixie Chicks – negative comment on Bush

-political campaigns

*Music has powerful impact on human beings and technology just amplifies that impact.

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Music

Rap – starts 40 years after rock in Bronx section of New York and spread to other black urban areas

Intense bass for dancing, rhyming riffs, rapid-fire attitude overlaid on the music.

Run-DMC

and

King of Rock

were 1

st

black rap to break into US music mainstream

1990s – themes of violence and racism make rap public issue

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Music

Music as Multimedia Content

Music has always been integrated with other things – hard to separate:

Dance and theater

Movies

Sound tracks

Jingles for advertising

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Sports as Media Entertainment

James Gordon Bennett

– saw potential for sports to build circulation of 1930s

Herald

newspaper- assigned reporters to just cover sports

Joseph Pulitzer

– organized first separate sports dept. of

World

– started specializing in sports

Times

- introduced celebrity coverage in 1910 hiring retired prizefighter to cover bout in Nevada

KDKA-

1920s --first play-by-plays, World Series live coverage, and

Golden Age of Sports

(where newspapers glorify athletes as heroes).

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Sports as Media Entertainment

Henry

Luce

–

in 1954 founds

Sports Illustrated

*other sports magazines in 1829 and 1877

*

Wide World of Sports

– 1961 on

tv

– by ABC programmer

Roone

Arledge

*ESPN

– people got cable to be able to watch

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Sports as Media Entertainment

Audience and Advertiser Confluence

Friday Night Lights

– sponsored by Gillette razors and

Wednesday Night Fights

– sponsored by Pabst beer in 1950s

Super Bowl

– in 2011 packed stadium AND 111 million U.S. households tuned in

Some firms bought stadium and put name on like Target

Interest comes and goes – so formats come and go.

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Sports as Media Entertainment

Cost of Sports Broadcasting

Networks seldom generate enough revenue to offset fees negotiated by sports leagues

CBS/Fox pay NFL $1.3 billion a year for broadcast rights, CBS/Turner pay NCCA $771 million, and ESPN/Fox/TNT pay NASCAR $570 million

Sometimes have to bow out of bidding because they’ve lost millions BUT have to be careful because not having the coverage can cost male demographics which are

impt

. to advertisers

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Sports as Media Entertainment

Networks have adjusted business model from sports being profit center to a

loss leader

. So now new goal is to use them to promote other network programming, to enhance network as brand WHILE generating enough in ads and subscription revenue to minimize loss

Pays for mega-salary athletes

Put more reality shows/cheap shows to offset loss

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Sex as Media Content

Adult Entertainment

Ulysses

by James Joyce in 1930 – sex sells so it causes questions/protests

Big Business - $8-10 billion in revenue with about 8,000 adult movie titles released yearly

Pay-per-view adult movies - $600 million yearly –also in hotels

Created by likes of Random House, HBO, Cinemax

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Sex as Media Content

Decency Requirements

Courts distinguish between

obscenity

and

pornography

1973 Miller v. California set

Miller Standard

which protects sexual content if it doesn’t fail test:

Appealing mainly for sexually arousing effect?

Material devoid of serious literary, artistic, political or science?

Is sexual act depicted offensively?

* FCC fined CBS $550,000 for wardrobe malfunction – 89 million people watching and some lodged complaints

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Sex as Media Content

Sexual content and Children

1968 NY court case where

Sam Ginsberg

sells porn magazine to 16-yr-old – est. child exception

Pacifica Case – George Carlin

on air says a lot of offensive things and FCC went after license holder,

Pacifica Foundation

. Basic problem was the 2 PM time when kids might be listening

Also can’t use kids in sexually explicit material that is distributed – or possess material that does

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Gaming as Media Content

Growing Entertainment Form

Sales on release weekend ($125 million)surpass year’s leading film opening-weekend draw ($70 million)

Gamers play a lot of hours and half of Americans 6 and older play games – males 18+ = 26 % of gamers

* Censorship and Gaming – rating questions and banning selling to youth

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Artistic Values

Media Content as High Art

DW Griffith in 1910 used new medium of film to contribute to culture and share what he had to say

Andre

Bazin

– devised the term

auteur

to denote significant and original cinematic contributions

During 1950s – French New Wave directors

Most famous European– Ingmar Berman

2 The Seventh Seal

Famous Americans: John Ford, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, and Spike Lee

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Artistic Values

Lesser Art – not all media content is high art

Production-Line Entertainment – our need for media is so great that all media produced is not great

1920s – movies popular –

studio system

– turns moviemaking into a factory process – quantity before quality

Harlequin –Canadian publisher grinds out romance novels – not high art

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Artistic Values

Copycat Content – if something is successful it will spawn a group of copycat media

Cross-Media Adaptions – some a great success and some a great failure

Unpretentious Media Content: sometimes the lowbrow or middlebrow art finds large audience – like pulp fiction, soap operas, horror films, etc.

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Artistic Values

Elitist versus Populist Values

*high art: requires sophisticated/and cultivated tastes to appreciate

(

Highbow

)

*low art: requires little sophistication to enjoy –kitsch (trashy)

*elitist: mass media should gear to sophisticated audiences

*populist: okay for mass media to cater to mass tastes even if it is unsophisticated

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Artistic Values

Case against Pop Art – which is of the moment, whatever is hip or hot.

Low art that has immense although short-lived popularity – more about marketing than art

Pop Art Revisionism

Susan Sontag writes influential essay in defense of pop art – can raise serious issues/unifies society

High art can

be popular