Critical Studies in Media Communication

Critical Studies in Media Communication, 19(4). (2002). ISSN 0739-3180. Published quarterly by the National Communication Association; 1765 N Street, NW; Washington, DC 20036; USA, as “a forum for cross-disciplinary scholarship treating issues related to mediated communication.”

Several articles in this issue may interest readers of Trends:

Picking up on globalization concerns, Timothy Havens draws “on interviews with more than thirty international television executives from around the world . . . [to] provide a case study of how distribution and acquisition practices in international television trade extract profit from television culture. . . . Specifically, the artilce explores how economic and cultural forces intersect to shape the global flow of African American situation comedies.” “‘It’s still a white world out there’: The interplay of culture and economics in international television trade” (pp. 377-397).
Karin Wilkins and John Downing return to the theme of media an terrorism (Trends, Vol. 21, #1) in “Mediating terrorism: Text and protest in interpretations of The Siege” (pp. 419-437). “In this study we focus on the film The Siege (1998), as an illustration of how mediated representations of terrorism serve as a vehicle for Orientalist discourse. This text serves as a specific location of struggle and negotiation over interpretations of media characterizations of Arabs, Arab Americans, Muslims, and Islam.”
Fern L. Johnson and Karren Young, “Gendered voices in children’s advertising” (pp. 461-480) find that “ads for boy-oriented toys outnumbered those oriented to girls” (in a sample from 1996, 1997, and 1999). “In boy-oriented ads, the voice-overs were exclusively male, and in the girl-oriented ads, they were mainly female.”
Espen Ytreberg, “Erving Goffman as a theorist of the mass media” (pp. 481-497), reviews Goffman’s theoretical work on the mass media. “I emphasize the way that Goffman situates mass communication in relation to the interpersonal realm as a model version of the later, as mass communication is crafted, concentrated, and planned to a degree that interpersonal communication is not.”