Cultural Studies, Media Spectacle, and Election 2004

Abstract

A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both . —James Madison Since the rise of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham England in the 1960s as well as in subsequent versions of cultural studies throughout the world, there has been a long-standing tradition of taking on the big issues of the era. The Birmingham School took on the assaults against working class culture by American and mass media culture. In this conjuncture, British cultural studies stressed the need for media literacy and critique, learning to read newspapers, TV news, advertisements, TV shows and the like just as one learns to read books (see Kellner, 1995). The project helped generate a media literacy movement, expanded the concept of literacy, and introduced a new, powerful dimension of pedagogy into cultural studies. Later, in the 1980s, British cultural studies took on the rise of Thatcherism and the emergence of a new rightwing conservative hegemony in Britain, by explaining how British culture, media, politics, and various economic factors led to the emergence of a new conservative hegemony (see Hall & Jacques, 1983). Larry Grossberg (1992), Stanley Aronowitz (1993), myself (Kellner & Ryan, 1988; Kellner, 1991 & 1995), and others engaged in similar work within the U.S. throughout the Reagan era of the 1980s, applying cultural studies to analyze the big issues of the time. Indeed, one of my major focuses of the past two decades has been the use of cultural studies and critical social theory to interrogate the big events of the time: The Persian Gulf TV War (Kellner, 1992), Grand Theft 2000: Media Spectacle and a Stolen Election (Kellner, 2001), From September 11 th to Terror War (Kellner, 2003b) on the September 11 th terrorist attacks and their exploitation by the Bush administration to push through rightwing militarism, interventionism, unilateralism and a hard-right domestic agenda, including the Patriot Act (Kellner 2003b), and Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy (Kellner, 2005), which demonstrated how the Bush administration consistently manipulated media spectacle during its first term and in the highly contested and controversial 2004 election. In my books Media Culture (Kellner, 1995) and Media Spectacle (Kellner 2003a), I use cultural studies to critically interrogate major phenomena of the day like Reagan and Rambo, Madonna and pop feminism, rap and hip hop, cyberpunk and the Internet, McDonald's and globalization, Michael Jordan and the Nike spectacle, and other defining cultural phenomena of the era. Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary, trans-disciplinary, and counter- disciplinary approach that can be used to address a wide range of cultural phenomena from advertising to political narratives (see Kellner, 1995; 2003a). A