Scandal: Textual Analysis

     But, for most part, author feel television is 'drug'; that is corrupting today's society. Many of us fail to recognize how it has caused the decline of family rituals, the avoidance of relationships and the destruction of the family. Our addiction to this daily habit cause us to escape the real world.

    The form of communication created by the television is not only a part of how our modern society communicates, but is has changed public discourse to the point that it has completely redefined it, argued Neil Postman in his convincing book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He viewed this as very harmful, and additionally so because our society is ignorant of it as they quickly becomes engulfed in its epistemology. When faced with the question about whether the television shapes or reflects culture, Postman pointed out that it is no longer applicable because "television has gradually become our culture" (79). What kind of culture is this? Postman warned that it is one in which we

Another event that led to the Rampart scandal was in November 6, 1997 when $722,000 was stolen from a Bank of America in Los Angeles. Later the bank manager confessed that her boyfriend, a LAPD officer, played a major role and planned the robbery. The officer was taken to prison for 14 years.

Popular culture is the artistic and creative expression in entertainment and style that appeals to society as whole. It includes music, film, sports, painting, sculpture, and even photography. It can be diffused in many ways, but one of the most powerful and effective ways to address society is through film and television. Broadcasting, radio and television are the primary means by which information and entertainment are delivered to the public in virtually every nation around the world, and they have become a crucial instrument of modern social and political organization. Most of today’s television programming genres are derived from earlier media such as stage, cinema and radio. In the area of comedy, sitcoms have proven

Drawing on a rhetorical critical analysis to studying technology, this paper outlines a proposal to research how Orange Is The New Black (OITNB) is affecting the women of the multiple races portrayed in the show. I will also discuss if binge watching can institute cultivation and affect a viewer’s perceptions as a result of constant content exposure. Specifically, I will conduct a rhetorical analysis of symbolic artifacts including, language, images, and gestures displayed in OITNB. To supplement the rhetorical critical analysis, I will conduct in-depth interviews with female OITNB viewers, who are from each race depicted in the show, in which I will ask them questions to solicit their perspectives of the female racial representations presented in the show.

According to Hall, the mass media creates and defines issues of public concern and interest through audience positioning (Barker 271) and according to Nielsen ranking, “Scandal” is the highest rated scripted drama among African-Americans, with a demographic of 18-49 (Vega). The episode which aired on March 5, 2015, had 9.57 million US viewers rating (Scandal, season 4). Scandal is created by a black woman, Shonda Rhimes, inspired by a black woman, Judy Smith, and has a black woman as its star, Kerry Washington (Scandal). And according to Hall, to the degree that the audience share cultural codes with producer or encoders, they will decode meaning within the same framework (Barker 271).

The Netflix satire not only explores how media perpetuates racial narratives that ultimately give way to the jaw-dropping moments of racial tension in episodes 5 and 10. It simultaneously explores how the same media spaces provide distraction and even comfort for the traumatized through the proliferation of reality television and “Shondaland” shows. Following the chaos surrounding Troy’s arrest, Dear White People ends on Defamation Wednesday at the dorm. Defamation is one of many callbacks to popular media in mainstream culture, as it parodies the outlandish and often problematic narratives of Scandal. Another reference includes Dereca, Set Me Straight, a parody of faux-help reality television show, Iyanla, Fix My Life. Simien’s clear callbacks

As a polysemic text, television has the power to inspire a range of interpretations according to the encoding of the producers and the decoding of the televisual consumer. As first described by Stuart Hall in Encoding/Decoding, and then by Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch in Television as a Cultural Forum there exist three basic categories of potential readings of a singular text within the broad range of potential interpretations: dominant or preferred, negotiated, and oppositional, each of which depends on the ideological, political, and social position of the interpreter, as well as their experiences, which makes them, according to Newcomb and Hirsch cultural interpreters, or cultural bricoleurs. As such, Documentary Now! elicits three

Cultural studies are influenced by the “Marxist interpretation of society,” but according to, “Stuart Hall believed that mass media has highlighted those people that are already in positions of power” and the media has exploited the poor keeping them powerless. “Hall says that he describes mass media as the dominance that maintain

Can T.V. shows be the reflection of our society or influence the behavior of the members of our community? Since 1936 when television broadcasting begin, it priority was to inform and to entertain our society; subsequently, a massive amount of rules and regulations were created to control the material presented in TV, which principal goal was to safeguard the moral and ethical standards of it time. Nevertheless, from its beginning to the present home entertainment television standards contents have change; likewise, the moral an ethics values of our society have change and continuing changing from generation to generation. TV shows from the 50’s, 80’s, and the present exposed many changes in the way human role are exposed, the language

The difference between the intended meaning of media texts and what the audience actually perceives can be shockingly different. Producers of media can do everything possible to force audiences to experience their work in the way they want them to, but in the end they still take away many different meanings even within the same audience. Stuart Hall outlines this in his encoding and decoding model. One of the most apparent examples of this is the television show South Park. The television show South Park is a media text with the producers’ preferred meaning of being decoded as joke or as being satire, but many audience members take an oppositional stance of taking it seriously. This is clear from the examples of controversy when South Park aired episodes focused on Scientology, red-headed people, and Islam. Through these examples it is demonstrated that the producers of media have less power compared to the audience in determining the meaning of media.

In our society, there are many forms of mediated texts ranging from newspapers and magazines to films and television shows. Each of these media forms can be seen from different theoretical perspectives and analyzed to understand the different concepts that may influence them. Television shows are one of the most popular media texts with approximately 400 new shows airing each year (Ryan, 2016). However, it is often very unlikely for these television shows to strive as 65% are cancelled after their first season (Ocasio, 2012). This then, brings Marxist scholars into the picture as they are interested in how economic factors affect the production and distribution of media content (Mack & Ott, 2016). The Marxist theoretical perspective allows Marxist scholars to study television shows in order to understand why they were cancelled and how certain roles in the media lead to this.

Television can be considered a cultural forum. By cultural forum, this means issues and points of view can be discussed openly and almost without punishment. These issues can vary anywhere from male dominance in the household, to wars, to racism, to political jabs and still be covered under freedom of speech. Television can hold a wide variety of opinions which may offend, but for the most part due so to prove a point.

In 1952, John Rigas purchased his own cable company. By the late 1990's, he had turned it into the sixth largest cable company in the United States with 5.6 million customers. The business was always run as a family style business which led to fraudulent acts among family members and upper level executives. The family has been accused of stealing $3.1 billion from Adelphia and is now facing criminal charges. Adelphia was forced to file chapter 11 bankruptcy and as of April 24, 2004, the new board of directors made the decision to break up the company and sell it. The Adelphia scandal is morally wrong because the Rigas family coerced and exploited employees, harmed all stakeholders as well as stockholders, and

“What is television? What kinds of conversations does it permit? What are intellectual tendencies it encourages? What sort of culture does it produce?” (84) are a few of the questions Postman tries to address throughout the remainder of the book. He wants us to think of television as a medium rather than technology. Postman points out that we do not use television as a communication device, but as an entertainment device. The message of the material has been lost and the entrainment value has become what’s important. Because television is about visuals, it must be rapidly stimulating compared to a book where rational thought is being strategically laid