Farrel Corcoran

Myth in the Television Discourse.

With perspectives from both traditional and contemporary disciplines, the universality of myth and its functions are investigated within the framework of television, employing examples from television news coverage and popular culture. The role of the communication scholar and the artist with regard to the creation and destruction of mythologies is examined.

KAL 007 and the evil empire: Mediated disaster and forms of rationalization

News magazine coverage of the Soviet attack on KAL 007 is examined as a text in which a particular view of the USSR, close to that of the Reagan administration, is established and legitimized. The ideological closure imposed on the disaster is pried open by analyzing the twin processes of selection and structuring giving coherence to the text. The conclusion is that cultural analysis should look on this dominant discourse about the USSR, which naturalizes calls for accelerating the arms race, as challenging scholars to explore how the synchronization of government and media points of view takes place in a society free from overt government censorship.

The bear in the back yard: Myth, ideology, and victimage ritual in soviet funerals

A longitudinal myth analysis of American news magazine reports on the USSR reveals a pattern of image‐clusters that endures from the time of Stalins funeral to Brezhnevs, almost 30 years later. A Russophobic worldview is explored through a symbolic vocabulary in which clusters of images cohere into a few dominant, generative myths. It is argued that the resultant rhetorical vision, which chains out across three major news magazines over a 30 year period, functions as victimage ritual. Through this rhetorical form, a society that repeatedly espouses peace can cathartically be relieved of the guilt it might otherwise feel as it drifts into another Cold War. It is dramatistically purified by imagining an enemy that is coercive, irrational, visceral, cunning, animalistic, thus simplifying the complexities of culpability. What remains to be studied is how recurrent myths are perpetuated over long periods of time, and how the ideologies they fashion produce an effect on individual consciousness.

Television as ideological apparatus: The power and the pleasure

Many ideological approaches to television criticism assume the power of the medium in securing hegemonic social definitions. This essay attempts to explicate the pleasure which, presumably, motivates acquiescence to this power. It argues that the detachment from television content (which typically characterizes the viewing situation) and the mediums adaptation of the narrative mode of classical realism established in cinema, pose problems not yet being addressed in the developing tradition of ideological criticism.

Processing Information from Screen Media: A Psycholinguistic Approach.

How do viewers derive meaning from sequenced images shown on a screen? The author attempted to determine whether methodologies employed in psycholinguistic investigation of sentence perception can be used to ascertain how screen media communicate. In the present study, techniques similar to those used to explore linguistic perception were not transferable to the examination of visual perception. However, the author believes that as researchers proceed to explore the area of screen literacy, the analogy with language will continue to be of heuristic value.

Towards a Semiotic of Screen Media: Problems in the Use of Linguistic Models.

Using language as a model for discovering the codes that govern the assembly of images in film and television holds out the promise of discovering the grammar that controls the interaction of viewers with the screen. This study examines whether linguistic models can be transferred wholesale into media studies, and cautions that important differences between language and screen media make the transference difficult. A linguistic approach raises interesting questions, however, about media literacy and whether screen media may have important perceptual and cognitive effects.

Correlates of the Interpretation of Televised Drama: A Study of Young Children's Abilities.

One important recent trend in mass communication research and development studies is the focus on childrens abilities to comprehend emotions and actions portrayed through televised drama. This study explored the social correlates of the interpretive abilities of young children in the assessment of televised narratives. In this study forty‐four pre‐school children viewed preconstructed videotapes and responded to interpretive tests. Their parents responded to a questionnaire concerning the childs background and experience with media. A number of hypotheses were tested concerning the correlates of childrens comprehension skills. Though most were not confirmed, the study did demonstrate important correlations concerning the amount of TV viewing by parents and childrens TV comprehension‐‐the correlations were negative, indicating that the more parents viewed TV, the worse their children performed on comprehension tests.