When Sex Is on TV

Wade Rowland Canada Lives Here: The Case for Public Broadcasting. Westmount, Quebec, Canada: Linda Leith Publishing, 2015. 240 pp.Canada Lives Here is a call for action to the Canadian people and their government. Wade Rowland draws upon his many years of experience in Canadian public television news and management to make a strong case supporting the importance of a robust public service broadcasting system to Canadian culture and democracy. However, Canada Lives Here also has an important message that goes beyond the borders of Canada. The message is that the role of the public broadcaster is to ensure that people in a democratic society can learn about important issues, engage culture and the arts, and constructively tackle the issues facing their nation.For Rowland, this role can only be fully achieved through noncommercial media. He asserts that crafters of necessary illusions and the manufacturers of consent theoretically do not influence noncommercial media, unlike their commercial counterparts (p. 2). Rowland is quite harsh on commercial broadcasters throughout this book, and he sometimes glosses over the fact that the governments with direct or indirect control of public broadcasting's purse strings may also have points of view that they hope will be expressed. However, the essence of this point is well-taken.Rowland believes that public broadcasting in Canada is in a state of decline. He supports this thesis by taking the reader on a historical tour of the origins of public broadcasting in Canada, through several administrations. Some of those administrations nurtured public broadcasting and others, through a number of measures, including budget cutting and administrative reorganization, brought the service to the brink of extinction.All public television systems receive some sort of funding from their country's government or a quasi-governmental agency like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in the United States. But ultimately the actual funds come from the people, and in the end, public broadcasting is expected to give back in the form of high quality programming that is beneficial to society. To do this effectively, a public broadcasting system must be adequately resourced. Rowland argues that Canadian public broadcasting lags far behind its European counterparts in the per capita subsidies at $28CAD. For example, he notes that in Norway's public broadcasting, funding is $180CAD per capita, while Germany's is $124 per capita and the United Kingdom is $97CAD per capita. As a point of information, in 2011, the United States spent $4USD per capita for public broadcasting (http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/03/ Funding-Public-Media-How-The-US-Compares-To-The-Rest-of-the-world/).Rowland worries that a combination of a dwindling subsidy, the migration of some heretofore public TV programs to commercial networks-including NHL Hockey-and a sense by some regulators that terrestrial broadcast television might no longer be necessary means that it could be replaced by less-expensive-to-operate online media services. …

Panel 2: finding solutions through partnerships, education, and technology: Speaker 1

Public broadcasting in the United States is in its adolescence. Just as a parent may feel frustration with teenage children who do not appear to be fulfilling expectations, contemporary media critics express frustration when evaluating public broadcasting. The optimism that followed the birth of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 has given way to ambivalence and frustration: frustration with the fact that the system's early potential has not been realized, and ambivalence about which path to take to avoid future mediocrity. The following essay summarizes the themes discussed in three recent publications about public broadcasting in the United States. All three texts suggest public broadcasting's problems are caused by limitations in the way the system is funded and organized. There is also unanimity in the perception that these shortcomings arose from an historical inability of the system to clearly define its purpose. In exploring these areas the books perform a valuable service by helping us understand the industry's current state. A History of Public Broadcasting is an update of a book originally written by John Witherspoon and Roselle Kovitz in 1987 (Witherspoon & Kovitz, 1987). The current edition (Witherspoon et al., 2000) contains the original chapters plus three new ones by Robert K. Avery and Alan G. Stavitsky. The Daily Planet, written by Patricia Aufherheide (2000), deals with a number of media topics of which two chapters are about public broadcasting. Aufderheide interprets history with at least one foot in the revisionist camp, perceiving the events that formed public broadcasting as the logical result of the capitalist system which funded it and directly influenced its programming. Public Television in America is a compilation of essays written by five individuals and edited into book form in 1998 by Eli M. Noam and Jens Waltermann. Although it deals only with television, Noam and Waltermann's (1998) work nonetheless succinctly identifies the contemporary issues surrounding public broadcasting. Historical Issues: Defining a Purpose The American public broadcasting sector has never been able to clearly enunciate its mandate. Many people are able to speak reactively about the need for such a service -- how it performs as a counterbalance to the excesses of the commercial system -- but few have been able to concisely describe a purpose that is not tied to the existence of commercialism. Two dichotomies in public broadcasting have proved resistant to closure and therefore lie at the center of the sector's inability to clearly define its purpose. Mission Versus Market Because public broadcasting was created as an alternative to commercial broadcasting, part of its mission is not to seek mass audiences but, instead, serve differentiated publics. However, because government support has been inadequate, the system has been forced to seek a significant amount of funding from the very marketplace to which it is supposed to serve as an alternative. It has proven very difficult to serve differentiated publics when money must be raised from underwriters which act as advertisers seeking exposure to large undifferentiated masses. One of the prime examples of this conundrum is the issue of service to ethnic minorities. Witherspoon et al. (2000) explain how the Public Broadcasting Service's (PBS) 1982 Programming Goals and Objectives statement contained specific decrees for public broadcasting to target the needs of minorities, children, the elderly, and the handicapped. However, later in the book the authors show that most ethnic minorities prefer the same National Public Radio (NPR) programs as do whites. Therefore, public broadcast programming generally seeks to transcend, rather than target, differences influenced by ethnicity. Witherspoon et al. describe how this safely splendid strategy helps attract corporate underwriting, but at the expense of more controversial and narrowly targeted programming. …

Public broadcasting was the single most important social, cultural, and journalistic institution of the twentieth century. In the 15 years preceding the publication of this book, it had been assaulted politically, ideologically, technologically, and was everywhere in retreat. This book considers the idea of public service broadcasting and examines in detail the assault made upon it, with specific emphasis on global developments and events in the United Kingdom, Japan, Europe, and the United States. It argues that public service broadcasting has been a vital and democratically significant institution now experiencing a terminal decline brought about by changes in political, economic, and technological circumstances. Based on years of research and extensive contact with leading public broadcasters around the world, the book examines the idea of public service broadcasting and how for the most part it has vainly (and often ineffectually) struggled to survive. It concludes that public broadcasting is, as was once said of Weimar, a corpse on leave. Its likely disappearance constitutes an indication of a real and deep-seated crisis within liberal democracy.

This article is about an ideological and political set-to over defining, discussing and organizing around sexuality as lesbians in the mid-80s in Britain. We were both involved in the battle at the London Lesbian and Gay Centre (LLGC) over whether SM (sadomasochism) groups should be able to meet there. This battle went on for almost six months in 1985 - explosively, at times viciously. It was not just confined to the centre. Battlelines were drawn in many lesbian groups, women's centres, even bars and discos. The consequences linger today. We want to talk about the different feminist politics which informed the groups engaged in the tactics and open fights which went on over the months. We want critically to examine SM and its lesbian feminist manifestations. We want to discuss politics which arise out of and around our sexual practice. Although this was ostensibly a political struggle over a sexual practice, sex remained the silent item on the agenda. It seems to us that in the London Women's Liberation Movement (WLM) there is often a chasm between discussions about the 'politics of sexuality' and discussions about what our actual different sexual practices are. Over and over, workshops at conferences, even whole conferences, bill themselves as being about sexuality, only to turn into talk shops about the things which determine sexuality, or how frightening it is actually to talk about sex. Evocative words are thrown around, like 'pleasure', 'danger', 'lust', 'romance', but as often as not, on the day, it's other words which apply, like distance, analysis, evasion and above all, frustration, confusion and boredom. Sexuality is for both of us a political and a personal concept and fact. Intriguing, jagged, hurting, sunlight and shadows, movement and moment. Recalled alone and recalling together. But the divide remains as we attempt to bridge it. That's the skirmish which we, two socialist-feminist lesbian friends, are having to go through to get this article out. We approach our sexuality to capture it. But is it ever steady

In the past few years, American public broadcasting has faced severe pressures from conservative politicians, the challenge of preparing for new technologies, and fickle audiences. Yet it may be as well-off today as it ever has been, in part because public broadcasting has always been on the margins of American broadcasting. It has been in more parlous circumstances and in fact has certain advantages at this point. Public broadcasting in the United States is not essentially a public service broadcaster, although it sometimes acts as one. It thus has a certain flexibility in a time of great change. American public broadcasting is not a unified structure, but an ad hoc assemblage of stations united both by the fluctuating patronage of the institutions that fund them and in their cultivating the capricious support of the audiences they serve.

Cornelia H. Dayton and Lisa Levenstein have done a brilliant job corralling recent publications in U.S. women’s and gender history under a big tent. Focusing on scholarship published in the last ten years that “reconceives gender” and/or rewrites mainstream historical narratives, Dayton and Levenstein point to new directions and challenge readers to consider the future of U.S. women’s and gender history. They open their essay by contrasting the current generational splits among feminist activists with the relative unity among scholars of women’s and gender history and remind us of the field’s long and deep connections to feminist politics. Noting the dynamic relationship between women’s and gender history and feminist politics, they convincingly argue that the simultaneous explication of race and gender has produced radical questions about intersectionality, relational differences among and between women, overlapping constructions of sexuality and gender, and the unfixed relationship between gender identity and sex. Yet Dayton and Levenstein say very little about the racial and sexual politics of the late twentieth century that provoked radical changes in the field of women’s and gender history. Understanding the emergence of the new scholarship that Dayton and Levenstein highlight is difficult without serious consideration of the political crisis that provoked women’s and gender historians to rethink issues of “intersectionality”: the idea that “emphasiz[es] that race and gender were not experienced separately and thus could not be analyzed independently of each other.” Acknowledging the political origins of this new literature provides a fuller picture of how the field has evolved over the last five decades. Moreover, the scholarship of the last ten years reflects not only an engagement with the sexual and racial politics of the late twentieth century but also a radical shift in the field of women’s and gender history that began in the 1990s. For decades, women of color in various disciplines and women’s historians working in the fields of African American, southern, and labor history had been quietly insisting on the significance of examining race and gender together. The racialized gender politics of the Ronald Reagan–George H. W. Bush era finally forced feminist scholars to insist that

Sex and the Me Decade:Sex and Dating Advice Literature of the 1970s Anna E. Ward (bio) In an article published in 1976 in New York magazine, author and journalist Tom Wolfe declared the arrival of the “Me Decade,” arguing, “The old alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold. The new alchemical dream is: changing one’s personality—remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one’s very self … and observing, studying, and doting on it” (1988, 143). Wolfe highlights sex and sexuality as a key component of this “new alchemical dream,” and indeed, the 1970s saw a solidification of self-help and therapeutic approaches to sex and sexuality aimed at self-exploration and personal transformation. This solidification is particularly noticeable within the booming dating and sex advice literature market of the 1970s. In stark contrast to earlier iterations of this genre, these texts helped establish a market for individually oriented relationship and sex guides that encourage the notion that sex is a constitutive part of identity formation and a critical element of self-awareness. Given the considerable scholarly attention paid to the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s in the United States, the 1970s is often treated as merely an extension of the previous decade, or as a dramatic and unfortunate reversal of gains made in the 60s. This lack of attention to the specificity of the 1970s is troubling for two reasons. First, the 1970s was a decade of profound shifts in the terrain of sexual and gender politics in the U.S., including the two landmark Supreme Court cases Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) and Roe v. Wade (1973); the publication of William Masters and Virginia Johnson’s Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970), Shere Hite’s The Hite Report: A Nationwide Report on Female Sexuality (1976), Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex (1972), and the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s Women and Their Bodies: A Course (1970); [End Page 120] and the release of Deep Throat (1972). The decade was also marked by high-profile battles over the Equal Rights Amendment and sexual orientation antidiscrimination legislation; both issues generated considerable steam for what would become a powerful force in U.S. politics—the religious right and its insistent invocation of sexual and gender politics as wedge issues in the American political landscape. Second, the 1970s was a vitally important decade for specifically feminist and lesbian and gay inquiry into sex and sexual politics, in which both domains (and their overlaps) exerted considerable pressure on popular sexual discourse. To ignore the 1970s as a distinct era of sexual thought in the U.S. is to miss an opportunity to understand the legacies of feminist and queer activism and scholarship and their continuing import for contemporary sexual politics. Revisiting the 1970s as feminist scholars may help illuminate contemporary struggles around sex and their feminist and queer implications. If the 1970s tends to be overlooked more generally, the role of dating and sex advice literature of this era, in particular, is grossly underexamined within feminist and sexuality studies, garnering significantly less attention than early- and mid-twentieth-century marriage manuals. While sales figures alone cannot help us gauge the impact these manuals had on people’s sexual behavior, the impressive circulation of texts like Comfort’s The Joy of Sex, for example, suggests that this literature struck a cultural nerve. The purchase and circulation of texts such as Comfort’s is, in and of itself, a behavior that warrants scholarly attention, particularly given that these texts had to be acquired in brick-and-mortar shops. The acquisition of guides such as these suggests a public increasingly interested in pursuing sexual knowledge, and titillation, beyond the bounds of traditional sexual and gender norms. In this essay, I first trace a brief history of sex advice literature in the U.S., demonstrating that the 1970s literature marks a distinct shift in tone, audience, and content from the literature of earlier decades. I then examine sex and relationship advice literature of the 1970s, considering mass-market literature alongside feminist writings on sexuality during the decade in order to unearth the connections between the two domains. By closely examining 1970s dating and sex advice literature...

On the morning of June 16, 2001, nearly a hundred public broadcasting researchers, professionals, and enthusiasts convened in Neville Hall on the University of Maine campus for the opening plenary session of a conference entitled Broadcasting and the Public Interest. Conceived and organized by Maine assistant professor Michael McCauley, the gathering was designed to capitalize on the ferment and ideological passion that pervaded those in attendance. The ultimate goal of the conference was to serve as a launching pad for a grass roots media reform movement aimed at putting the public back into public broadcasting. This review essay speaks to the circumstances and conditions that motivated this call for action, along with the ever-growing scholarly literature that is either directly or indirectly related to it. In a real sense, this paper serves as an update a 1996 review essay (Avery, 1996) that attempted to identify and contextualize some of the most significant works on public telecommunications that had appeared during the first half of the 1990s. Taken together, these reviews illustrate both the growing interest in, and the increasing concern about, the future of public telecommunications in the United States. Historically, noncommercial educational broadcasting, public broadcasting, and more recently, public telecommunications, has not been well-represented as a significant research venue within mainstream communication scholarship. While such marginalized status may well be consistent with the posture of the public media themselves, a deeper rationale is warranted. Writers trying to explain the paucity of scholarly writings in this important area have pointed to the minimalist position public broadcasting holds in American society, resulting from the small audiences that are equated with the degree of cultural, social and political significance. When corporate, profit-motive ideology dictates the very fabric of American society, it is impossible to determine the value of any offering in public or private life except from that perspective (Streeter, 1996).(1) The highbrow orientation of its programming also has made public broadcasting less appealing as a subject for critical evaluation when the dominant commercial fare lends itself so readily to academic critique. Somewhat more mundane explanations have pointed to the less theoretically informed studies done about public broadcasting institutions that were of little interest to the editors of scholarly journals. But whatever the explanation, or combination of explanations, changes in the political and economic milieu of the 1990s combined to spark a healthy scholarly interest in public telecommunications. The ideology of American capitalism always has been at the heart of U.S. communication policy, despite the cloak of public interest rhetoric. But the astounding speed by which the profit motives of the marketplace began to dismantle any semblance of traditional public service values caught many students of the media off-guard. The dramatic shift in the telecommunications landscape brought on by the arrival of the new technologies and the enormous profit potential they embodied encouraged policy makers to break down protective structures that they began to see as trade barriers, all in the name of the public good. Global privatization began to erode the very concept of the public citizen and to replace it with that of the targeted consumer. In the United States, the combination of the Congressional attempt to zero out public funds to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which opened the flood gates to unprecedented media cross ownership and concentration, made the future of public broadcasting in America much more than cocktail conversation for the New Left. Suddenly, discussion of the impact of the new media on existing public institutions was hot, and, ironically, a new market for books addressing the subject was born. …

In 2007, Texas governor Rick Perry issued an executive order requiring that all females entering sixth grade be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus (HPV), igniting national debate that echoed arguments heard across the globe over public policy, sexual health, and the politics of vaccination. Three Shots at Prevention explores the contentious disputes surrounding the controversial vaccine intended to protect against HPV, the most common sexually transmitted infection. When the HPV vaccine first came to the market in 2006, religious conservatives decried the government's approval of the vaccine as implicitly sanctioning teen sex and encouraging promiscuity while advocates applauded its potential to prevent 4,000 cervical cancer deaths in the United States each year. Families worried that laws requiring vaccination reached too far into their private lives. Public health officials wrestled with concerns over whether the drug was too new to be required and whether opposition to it could endanger support for other, widely accepted vaccinations. Many people questioned the aggressive marketing campaigns of the vaccine's creator, Merck & Co. And, since HPV causes cancers of the cervix, vulva, vagina, penis, and anus, why was the vaccine recommended only for females? What did this reveal about gender and sexual politics in the United States? With hundreds of thousands of HPV-related cancer deaths worldwide, how did similar national debates in Europe and the developing world shape the global possibilities of cancer prevention? This volume provides insight into the deep moral, ethical, and scientific questions that must be addressed when sexual and social politics confront public health initiatives in the United States and around the world.

Having survived efforts by political conservatives to eliminate federal funding for public broadcasting, public television in the United States remade itself as a market-savvy media enterprise in the mid-1990s. This “new PBS” sought to develop new revenue streams and forge new financial partnerships at the same time that public broadcasting found renewed political support on Capitol Hill. In this climate, this study examines the sources and subjects on public television’s public affairs lineup, exploring how public television measures up to the lofty goal of contributing to public life by providing a diverse alternative to commercial broadcasting. Based on a two-week sample of the eighteen most widely distributed public affairs programs on public television, findings indicate that the vast majority of stories focused on either the economy or domestic politics, while coverage of international issues was comparatively small. More than three-quarters of on-camera sources were corporate representatives, government officials, or professionals (mostly journalists), with infrequent appearances by members of the general public and citizen activists. More generally, analysis of sources and qualitative case studies of the most prominent stories in the sample—the 1998 congressional hearings on impeachment and the intertwined coverage of antitrust policy, corporate mergers, and corporate layoffs—suggest that political and economic coverage on public television focuses largely on the views and activities of insiders and routinely emphasizes the strategic dimensions of the political world. The study concludes with a discussion of the similarities between public affairs programs on public and commercial television.

When the Carnegie Commission on the Future of Educational Television coined the term “public television” in its 1967 report, Public Television: A Program for Action, it did so with a belief that television and democratic processes were fundamentally intertwined. The spirit of the Carnegie Commission report, which led to the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act, is infused with both the urgency of the task and the importance of its success for an active citizenry. More than 30 years later, with debates focused more on the logistics of the appropriations process and the merits of specific public television programs, both the urgency of creating and financing a public television system and the importance of such a task for the quality of public life seem long gone. For most of us in the United States, it is as difficult to imagine life without public television as it is to imagine why it would matter. As both public television and the broader media environment have changed over the past three decades, discussion about the relationship between public television and democratic life has been largely absent. However, it is precisely these changes—the increasing concentration of media ownership, technological changes in the media industry, and the growing market orientation of public television—that, once again, have raised such questions. As leading media conglomerates continue to extend their reach, we need to revisit the reason for the existence of non‐commercial television.

In The Queen of America Goes to Washington City , Lauren Berlant focuses on the need to revitalize public life and political agency in the United States. Delivering a devastating critique of contemporary discourses of American citizenship, she addresses the triumph of the idea of private life over that of public life borne in the right-wing agenda of the Reagan revolution. By beaming light onto the idealized images and narratives about sex and citizenship that now dominate the U.S. public sphere, Berlant argues that the political public sphere has become an intimate public sphere. She asks why the contemporary ideal of citizenship is measured by personal and private acts and values rather than civic acts, and the ideal citizen has become one who, paradoxically, cannot yet act as a citizen—epitomized by the American child and the American fetus. As Berlant traces the guiding images of U.S. citizenship through the process of privatization, she discusses the ideas of intimacy that have come to define national culture. From the fantasy of the American dream to the lessons of Forrest Gump, Lisa Simpson to Queer Nation, the reactionary culture of imperilled privilege to the testimony of Anita Hill, Berlant charts the landscape of American politics and culture. She examines the consequences of a shrinking and privatized concept of citizenship on increasing class, racial, sexual, and gender animosity and explores the contradictions of a conservative politics that maintains the sacredness of privacy, the virtue of the free market, and the immorality of state overregulation—except when it comes to issues of intimacy. Drawing on literature, the law, and popular media, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City is a stunning and major statement about the nation and its citizens in an age of mass mediation. As it opens a critical space for new theory of agency, its narratives and gallery of images will challenge readers to rethink what it means to be American and to seek salvation in its promise.

How can civic education in a liberal democracy give social diversity its due? Two complementary concerns have informed a lot of liberal thinking on this subject. Liberals like John Stuart Mill worry that "the plea of liberty" by parents not block "the fulfillment by the State of its duties" to children. They also worry that civic education not be conceived or conducted in such a way as to stifle "diversity in opinions and modes of conduct."' Some prominent contemporary theorists add a new and interesting twist to these common--concerns. They criticize liberals like Mill and Kant for contributing to one of the central problems, the stifling of social diversity, that they are trying to resolve.2 The comprehensive liberal aim of educating children not only for citizenship but also for individuality or autonomy, these political liberals argue, does not leave enough room for social diversity. Would a civic educational program consistent with political liberalism accommodate significantly more social diversity than one guided by comprehensive liberalism?3 Political liberals claim that it would, and some recommend political liberalism to us largely on this basis. This article shows that political liberalism need not, and often does not, accommodate more social diversity through its civic educational program than comprehensive liberalism. Section I examines the defining difference between political and comprehensive liberalism and suggests why we might expect to find a significant difference in the accommodation of social diversity by political and comprehensive liberalism through civic education.

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