Richard K. Popp

‘X’-ing out enemies: Time magazine, visual discourse, and the war in Iraq

This article examines Time magazine’s visual discourse in its coverage of Iraq War insurgent Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s death. Time marked the event by using the same visual trope — a head crossed out by a red ‘X’ — used to mark the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and Adolf Hitler in 1945. The study provides a semiotic analysis of the cover, traces the historic development of the ‘X’, and compares it to rival Newsweek’s coverage. Time’s cover points to the way visuals are used to make journalistic statements that would not be acceptable to convey verbally. The study suggests that Time used Hitler imagery to establish authority by invoking its historical coverage. And by drawing such a close association between Hitler, Hussein, and al-Zarqawi, Time personalized group conflicts, presented a Manichean view of the world, attributed a false sense of finality to ambiguous events, and reinforced administration pro-war arguments.

Visual Culture, Public Space, and Piety in Focus on the Family's Citizen Magazine

This study examines how the far-right Christian group Focus on the Family discussed visual culture—the practices of constructing, seeing, and making sense of visual environments—in its Citizen newsmagazine. Through discourse analysis, I argue that Citizen urged readers to see public imagery through the lens of cultural struggle and pushed them to reshape the seen environment. Readers were encouraged to understand the visual environment as a powerful influence that could either nurture or poison Bible-based values, as a repository stocked with evidence of a pseudo-theocratic national heritage, and as a means of institutionalizing Christian authority over public life. Citizen can thus help us better understand the role media play in constructing visual cultures by circulating ideas about how to look at images. The magazine also offers insights on how media can render space malleable by mobilizing audiences to transform it. Finally, Citizen can tell us much about the relationship between media discourse, public imagery, and cultural power—offering a cautionary note on the importance of safeguarding a democratic visual culture.

“A Measure of Theory?”: Considering the Role of Theory in Media History

“Does journalism history matter?,” communications historian John Nerone recently asked American Journalism readers.1 After grappling with the rhetorical question, he concluded that journalism history should matter a great deal to journalists, historians, and social scientists alike. Indeed, it should matter to anyone interested in the role of media in society. But alas, if one were to look at the impact factors of media history journals, one might argue that the impact of journalism history is negligible—that we matter only marginally, if at all.2 The solution to restoring our relevance, Nerone suggests, is to engage in a more theoretical approach that considers the relationship between the past and the present.3 We agree, but herein lies the predicament, our greatest challenge. Journalism historians, like their brethren in traditional history departments, have always had a tenuous relationship with theory. In fact, the notion that good history should be devoid of theory has its roots in the discipline’s founding. That story, of course, has been well documented, on several occasions by Nerone himself, but it is worth briefly retelling here.4 It goes

Solidarity, Media, and the Limits of Postcapitalist Theory

This essay critically examines the postcapitalist characteristics of civil sphere theory (CST) and their implications for locating media in large-scale processes of social change. Providing a case study of U.S. media between the 1930s and 1980s, the essay argues that because CST treats media as free-floating images, rather than cultural industries and consumer practices, it is unable to account for a wide range of episodes in the making and unmaking of solidarity, including the Depression era’s specter of social unraveling, the suburban dismantling of the industrial city’s public amusement culture, and the emergence of a post-1960s New Right lens on media. The essay suggests that CST’s approach to solidarity should be modified to account for media’s deep embeddedness in the culture of capitalism. This would include recognizing that popular visions of community take shape within, and in response to, an economic culture uniquely prone to change. It would also include recognizing that messages and moments of solidarity are always experienced within built environments shaped by capital flows.

The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture by Timothy D. Taylor (review)

679 history and persistence of a “participatory ethic” in American broadcasting. She reminds us that the road to radio’s standardization and corporate control doubled back on itself many times. In the 1920s, “squatter stations and bootleg receivers provided the initial infrastructure for early radio” (p. 15). Even after corporate-network radio became America’s dominant model, broadcasting remained a two-way technology to a great degree, with a wide and blurry band for tinkerers, callers, writers, and fans who provided an inexhaustible source of innovation, content, and commentary. Such overlapping, voluble publics provided the mid-twentieth-century equivalent of internet bloggers seizing narrative power to redefine, recombine, and customize their media experience. Razlogova’s epilogue draws provocative connections to today’s heated debates around media and technology ethics, including file-sharing, Wikileaks, the “hacker ethic,” and media piracy. These relevant parallels underscore her point that the public’s relationship to radio and other broadcast media has never been a simple quest for unambiguous reception through clear channels, but rather a complex and often contentious dance between technological possibilities and cultural meanings, beginning in radio’s earliest years.

American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning

AMERICAN SOCIAL HISTORY PROJECT / CENTER FOR MEDIA AND LEARNING http://ashp.cuny.edu Founded in 1981 by the distinguished labor historian Herbert Gutman and Stephen Brier and directed since 1998 by Joshua Brown, ASHP/CML has gained an international reputation in the fields of public history and history education. As one of the few history organizations with a full-time staff composed of scholars, artists, media producers, and educators, ASHP/CML’s Who Built America? books and documentaries, digital and online projects (including our new blog and podcasts), and seminars combine rigorous humanities content with innovative methods of presentation. Cited as a model for public humanities programming, ASHP/CML’s projects and programs have received numerous grants and awards. In 1990 the American Social History Project became an official research center at the City University of New York. Known as the Center for Media and Learning, it has been affiliated with the Graduate Center since 1996. The organization is now most commonly known as ASHP/ CML, combining its public and university identities. In 1998, ASHP/CML assumed stewardship of the New Media Lab, the Graduate Center’s state-of-the-art facility for the development of doctoral digital media projects. The New Media Lab (NML) assists Graduate Center faculty and doctoral students from a variety of academic disciplines to create digital projects based on their own scholarly research. Often, the NML provides a stipend to support student work done at the lab.