Eileen R. Meehan

Culture: Text or Artifact or Action?

This article reflects on problems in defining and operationalizing the term culture. Most media scholars interested in cultural studies and most cultural studies scholars define culture as a whole way of life and then operationalize the study of culture as the analysis of texts. This reduction of a whole way of living, being, and doing in the world to reading texts has methodological benefits, but it obscures experiential differences that mark the processes of encoding and decoding artifacts, differences between types of artifacts, and experiential and economic differences in access to the technology necessary to gain exposure to specific artifacts. Furthermore, as the language of this abstract suggests, the reduction tends to eliminate human beings from discussions about texts and culture. Perhaps we need to theorize culture in a way that recognizes human beings as well as texts.

In Defence of a Political Economy of the Media

Abstract This essay addresses recent misrepresentations of the study of political economy of the media. The discussion is grounded in some historical background, including a brief sketch of some of the history of critical communications research in the US, which flourished within the global profusion of critical research in the 1960s and 1970s. Part of this history is the emergence of organisational support for critical scholarship as well as the long-term employment of individual scholars by specific universities that made critical classes part of both graduate and undergraduate curricula. That process of institutionalisation provided the basis for the next generations of critical scholars from the 1980s through the present – generations whose research address a broad range of communications phenomena, use a wide range of research methods, and draw from a wide array of critical theories. This overview sets the stage for a critique of the current attack on radical political economy specifically. That attack is considered in terms of two key texts that caricature political economic research as an enterprise dependent on theories imported from the Frankfurt School, limited to a macroscopic approach, only interested in journalism, and ignoring both media workers and media audiences.

Legacies From the Past: Histories of Television

Three media studies scholars who are very well known for their works on television history, Michele Hilmes, Horace Newcomb, and Eileen Meehan, were invited to speak on a plenary panel that discusses what television was and what we can learn from its past. Michele Hilmes talks about how television is “radio with pictures,” Horace Newcomb talks about early television studies and the Peabody Awards, and Eileen Meehan talks about the “known unknowns” regarding television’s past. This is the transcript of the panel discussion.