Harvey Molotch

NEWS AS PURPOSIVE BEHAVIOR: ON THE STRATEGIC USE OF ROUTINE EVENTS, ACCIDENTS, AND SCANDALS*

The manner in which access is accomplished can vary and these variations lead to a typology of event types: routines, accidents, scandals and serendipitous events. Each type of event tends to reveal different kinds of information about the ways society is organized, and each type holds different challenges to those who have or lack power. The general implications of this schema for the study of media and power are discussed. veryone needs news. In everyday life, news tells us what we do not experience directly and thus renders otherwise remote happenings observable and meaningful. Conversely, we fill each other in with news. Although those who make their living at newswork (reporters, copy editors, publishers, typesetters, etc.) have additional needs for news, all individuals, by virtue of the ways they attend to and give accounts of what they believe to be a pregiven world, are daily newsmakers.

History repeats itself, but how? City character, urban tradition, and the accomplishment of place

This study shows how places, and by implication other societal units as well, achieve and reproduce distinctiveness. It does this by specifying how actors in two California urban areas, over approximately 100 years, responded differently to the same exogenous forces. Each place is examined to determine how unlike elements conjoin to produce a particular character at any given moment and how this character travels through time to constitute a local tradition. Borrowing from advances in analyses of structure and agency, this study displays character and tradition as accomplished interaction and helps make an elusive process empirically evident and accessible for study

Accidental News: The Great Oil Spill as Local Occurrence and National Event

Beginning with the assumption that news is constituted through purpopse at hand, we examine the coverage given the Santa Barbara oil spill by a national sample of newspapers, determining the types of news subjects and news activities which become national events. It is found that federal officials and business spokesmen have greater access to news media than conservationists and local officials. It is found that symbolic topics and not topics with implications for distribution of wealth receive preponderant coverage. Implications of current methods of news gathering for the maintenance of ideological domination are discussed.

Talking Social Structure: Discourse, Domination and the Watergate Hearings

While all conversation requires use of context to make communication meaningful, one interactant always has the potential of depriving another of this communicative resource. Power can thus be achieved by insisting that all accounts meet a formal test of literal, objective truth-a test that no account can pass. At stake in the success of such a maneuver is the capacity to control conversation and thereby determine substantive outcomes. Through analysis of Watergate Hearings videotapes, we show how such a power struggle is managed as a moment-to-moment, sequential unfolding of manipulations among interactants. The larger goal is to display the mechanisms through which social process and social structure cohere through interaction.

Talking City Trouble: Interactional Vandalism, Social Inequality, and the "Urban Interaction Problem"

This article uses ethnography and conversation analysis to pinpoint what “goes wrong” when certain so‐called street people “harass” pas‐sersby. The technical properties of sidewalk encounters between particular black street men and middle‐class white female residents of Greenwich Village are compared with interactions expected from studies of other conversation situations. The men attempt to initiate conversations and to deal with efforts to close them in ways that betray the practical ethics fundamental to all social interaction. In this way they undermine the requisites not just for “urbanism as a way of life,” but the bases for how sociability generally proceeds. These acts of “interactional vandalism” both reflect and contribute to the larger structural conditions shaping the local scene.

Tensions in the Growth Machine: Overcoming Resistance to Value-Free Development

Cities and towns in the United States have traditionally welcomed capital investment, with little regard to the social or fiscal costs involved. But under tensions generated by the growing international concentration of capital, communities are realizing that the costs of such investments have risen. Some localities are resisting the usual growth agenda, and both the property-oriented “rentier” elite and the middle and working classes are trying to substitute other local goals. Capital is responding with new efforts to penetrate localities by activating their branch managers, increasing political campaign contributions, and directly participating in the property development business. President Ronald Reagans “New Federalism” helps capital by manipulating urban policy to provide advantageous sites.

Capital and Neighborhood in the United States: Some Conceptual Links.

An attempt is made to solve the problem of how the existence of a natural ruling class in the United States determines the shape and character of locality, particularly the urban residential neighborhood. It is posited that the connecting link is the local rentier class, which prepares the ground for capital, on the one hand, and organizes the built environ ment and local ideological system on the other. This structure is illustrated through a number of historical and contemporary examples: the oil spill in Santa Barbara, racial change in old cities, the development of the contemporary Sun Belt and the emergence of big capital as a force in city building.

Who Supports the Troops? Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the Making of Collective Memory

During the Gulf War, U.S. media portrayed Vietnam-era protesters as having treated American soldiers shamefully during the Vietnam War. Even Gulf War protesters lent credence to this historical interpretation. By “supporting the troops,” dissenters distanced themselves from their counterparts during the Vietnam era and its “remembered” anti-troop sentiments. But after analysis of Vietnam era media, we find that the media of the time—consistent with most subsequent published accounts—did not report the movement as “anti-troop.” Although policymakers frequently attempted to imply that protesters were anti-troop, we find virtually no instances of protesters themselves being reported as targeting the troops. Our findings show that the memory of protester-troop antagonism is not so much the product of conflict between these two groups, but rather of a selectively remembered and edited past. Just as it hamstrung the anti-war movement during the Gulf War, the current recollection may endure as part of the conditions facing opponents of future military actions.

Power to Build How Development Persists Despite Local Controls

Growth controls and related regulations have been blamed for slowing economies and creating housing shortages and praised for preserving the environment. At first glance, these measures appear to challenge the priorities of the growth machines that dominate most urban governance. By analyzing a series of Southern California jurisdictions, the authors explain how growth takes place even under tight controls. Growth controls do not significantly limit development but, rather, enable local officials to generate higher public benefits from the growth that occurs. The specific conditions of growth under growth control help reveal how urban growth works in a more environmentalist era.

The space of Lefebvre

The translation of The Production of Space into English is a major event for those, like myself, otherwise lacking access to so much of Lefebvres work. Of the sixty-six volumes he published before his death last year, only six have previously appeared in this language. The availability of The Production of Space will now help advance for Lefebvre, in the English-speaking countries, the kind of influence he has long had in Europe. Some of the books contents have filtered into English-only circles through the writings of others (Castells, Harvey, and, most explicitly, Gottdiener);2 some insights have come our way through more or less simultaneous invention. But almost two decades after being first published, the content is rich enough to reward sustained attention. This work makes an important contribution not only to urban theory but, if appropriately understood, to theory more generally.