Reproducing “Really Useful” Workers: Children's Television as an Ideological State Apparatus

Abstract

This article compares three popular children's public television shows—Thomas & Friends, Barney & Friends, and Bob the Builder—to an earlier PBS children's program, Sesame Street. Utilizing Althusser's theory of ideology and Hall's theory on encoding/decoding, we examine the underlying process of signification in these media texts and argue that children's television plays an important role as an Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). We complicate the existing research on children's television programming and provide an alternative approach for understanding, situating the content of these shows against the sociohistorical changes in the social relations of production that have occurred since the emergence of neoliberal capitalism as a dominant ideological discourse. We argue that newer media texts such as Thomas are more closed than Sesame Street, which emerged prior to the shift toward neoliberalism, though in the newer programs contradictions exist that could serve to undermine rather than support neoliberalism.