Mass Media Products Research Articles

Os lugares onde os estudos de audiência e os estudos de produção se encontram

Os estudos de audiência e os estudos de produção possuem trajetórias de pesquisa bastante distintas, apesar de suas compartilhadas preferências pela teoria baseada na realidade empírica e metodologias de pesquisa. A partir de uma ampla etnografia de mídia das audiências e produtores, esse artigo mostra como os sujeitos humanos dos estudos de audiência e estudos de produção podem ser estudados em conjunto, para revelar as relações de poder envolvidas nos processos da produção dos meios de comunicação de massa. Nesse estudo de caso específico, fãs e figurantes da série de televisão Treme (2010-2013) compartilharam um discurso sobre o lugar da espectatorialidade e o da produção que se esforça para articular uma cultura comum, apesar das barreiras concretas hierárquicas entre públicos e equipe de produção.

The Multiple Functions of Criollo, Gaucho and Indigenous Symbols in La Historieta Patoruzú, 1936–50: The Conflicts of Peronism, Nationalism and Migration

This article considers the comic book Patoruzú in light of the cultural expressions of Argentine criollismo between the 1930s and 50s. It begins by examining the political and class conflicts that informed the meanings of criollo symbols, and how Dante Quinterno’s creation interacts with them. Perón’s political organisation, for example, constantly resorted to discourses and images of a gaucho and rural nature in order to propagate the ideals of nationalist corporatism. From one perspective, the drawings, storylines and characters of Patoruzú articulate the arguments set forth by Perón in his battles with neo-colonial and oligarchic forces. However, as Anthony Cohen and Stuart Hall argue, mass-media products and popular national symbols are dialogic; they enter into a dialogue with different competing discourses. Thus the comic book is also analysed in respect of the different and conflictive uses and potential interpretations of criollo symbols. One such conflict, it is proposed, resides in the understudied effect of modernisation and urbanisation on the rural criollo migrants, who moved to the provinces of Buenos Aires in large numbers in the 1930s. The comic book, therefore, is not understood simply as an expression of Peronist ideals, but as a footprint of the complex political and identity conflicts of the period.

The Revival of Local Fairy Tales for Children Education

This study explored the function of fairy tales as a means of entertainment and education for children. Fairy tales in children's literature have gradually shifted from an oral storytelling tradition to a mass media product. The role of the mother as the first and foremost teacher of her children is increasingly challenged in modern education. From pre-school age up to junior high school level, a child needs special attention from his or her parents, especially the mother. From the age of three until a child enters primary school, the parents, especially the mother, play a strategic role in fostering various aspects of development language, psychology and character. One way in which this takes place is through storytelling, however unfortunately children's literature in the form of local fairy tales often no longer has a place in the home or the kindergarten. This case study in South Sulawesi, Indonesia explored the causes behind this change. Data were gathered through interviews and questionnaires. A simple statistical method was used to analyse the data. The results show that telling fairy tales to children is still relevant and can help to instil character values in young children.

Computational Models Used to Assess US Tobacco Control Policies.

Simulation models can be used to evaluate existing and potential tobacco control interventions, including policies. The purpose of this systematic review was to synthesize evidence from computational models used to project population-level effects of tobacco control interventions. We provide recommendations to strengthen simulation models that evaluate tobacco control interventions. Studies were eligible for review if they employed a computational model to predict the expected effects of a non-clinical US-based tobacco control intervention. We searched five electronic databases on July 1, 2013 with no date restrictions and synthesized studies qualitatively. Six primary non-clinical intervention types were examined across the 40 studies: taxation, youth prevention, smoke-free policies, mass media campaigns, marketing/advertising restrictions, and product regulation. Simulation models demonstrated the independent and combined effects of these interventions on decreasing projected future smoking prevalence. Taxation effects were the most robust, as studies examining other interventions exhibited substantial heterogeneity with regard to the outcomes and specific policies examined across models. Models should project the impact of interventions on overall tobacco use, including nicotine delivery product use, to estimate preventable health and cost-saving outcomes. Model validation, transparency, more sophisticated models, and modeling policy interactions are also needed to inform policymakers to make decisions that will minimize harm and maximize health. In this systematic review, evidence from multiple studies demonstrated the independent effect of taxation on decreasing future smoking prevalence, and models for other tobacco control interventions showed that these strategies are expected to decrease smoking, benefit population health, and are reasonable to implement from a cost perspective. Our recommendations aim to help policymakers and researchers minimize harm and maximize overall population-level health benefits by considering the real-world context in which tobacco control interventions are implemented.

Nonverbal Communication as a Key Feature of the Nigerian Print Advertising Text

Based on observations, qualitative content analysis and secondary sources, this paper critically examines the importance of nonverbal communication in the Nigerian mass media particularly in print advertising. Hinging principally on two theories (namely semiotics and structuralism theory), the paper argues that despite the fact that they are difficult to systematically be quantified in a mass communication context, nonverbal cues are very important parts to all media producers’ efforts to convey emotional, intellectual and informational meanings to audiences. In tandem with this, nonverbal communication cues actually pervade the Nigerian mass media production. The paper demonstrates this fact with illustrations from the Nigerian print advertising. It argues that in the Nigerian print advertising text, nonverbal communication is achieved through specific visual compositions and paralanguage. Print adverts often contain a mix of visuals which are/represent indexical or symbolic signs of positive attributes that advertisers seek to associate with the products or services on promotion. Various forms of paralanguage are equally deployed to suggest the benefits and gratification one may derive from consuming the product or using the services on promotion.

MENEBAR BENIH KEBENCIAN MELALUI VISUALISASI ‘BANCI’ KARTUN BENNY DAN MICE

Cartoon with its concise, simple and attractive characteristic allows the reader to digest the ideas of the cartoonist. As one of the products of mass media, a cartoon is never neutral and value-free, it oftenly carries an ideology. Culture and the domination of an ideology contribute to the production process of the symbols that are articulated in a cartoon. This qualitative research used a methodology of critical study based on image-based research, which reveals the visual image as a research foundation. In the process of interpretation, the researchers are conducting a dialect with the text as an object. Then analyze it so that it becomes cohesive. After that, it could obtaine a relative reality. Benny and Mice cartoon implicitly states that heterosexuals are the 'normal' sex relationships. Beyond that, is a deviation. Deserves to be blamed, humiliated even ridiculed. Benny and Mice cartoon show that transsexual / transvestite / transgender as a source of fear. The package of it pictorial and verbal language wrapped in hyperbole and joke, and becomes the 'seeds' of homophobia amid the hegemony of heterosexual community.

FEMINISME DALAM COVER KOMIK SRI ASIH SEBAGAI KOMIK KLASIK PERTAMA INDONESIA

Comic is one of the mass media product that is very popular in the 1950s. Indonesian Comic at beginning was only in form of strip comic in a newspaper and then came on demand from the public for the compiled strip comic. Then, up to the merged comic of Sri Asih, written by RA. Kosasih, and later known as the first comic indonesia which was written and painted by Indonesian native.Before the comic of sri asih arouse, the community were introduced by translated foreign comic that had been popular in their origin country. This research aims to define feminism originate in Sri Asih comic that described with qualitative research methodology. The comic of Sri Asih is analyzed by using Semiotics Charles Pierce which consists of sign, object and interpretation. The result showed that of abuse and violence against womens both in the verbal and nonverbal became the reason for the emergence of feminism in Sri Asih comic besides women situation that occurs in the 1950s and the publisher demands on RA Kosasih to make comic titled superheroes. This research also shows radical cultural feminism in Sri Asih comic as form of fight represented by Sri Asih in achieving the objective of gender equality between man and woman.Keywords: Feminism, Charles Pierce semiotics, Sri Asih Comics

Boris Groys: The Intruder

Boris Groys, In the Flow, London, Verso, 2016.Boris Groys, On the New, London, Verso, 2014.Boris Groys, Under Suspicion: The Phenomenology of Media, New York, Columbia University Press, 2012.Only a handful of philosophers have managed to make a successful transition from Eastern Europe into the Western context and make their impact there over the last one hundred years or so - Alexandre Kojeve, Julia Kristeva, Slavoj Zizek, Boris Groys. To come from another cultural context and philosophical tradition is to be haunted by the spectre of otherness and to act, inevitably, as an intruder in the host culture. Boris Groys has managed to turn these circumstances - his appearance on the Western philosophical scene after his immigration from Russia to Germany in 1981 - into one of the most distinctive aspects of his strategy of inquiry.Holding professorial positions in Karlsruhe and New York universities, while also being part of the European Graduate School as well as acting as a curator of projects ranging from documenta to the Venice Biennale, Groys has attracted a growing following since his Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin (1988), published in English as The Total Art of Stalinism in 1992, urged a radical reconsideration of the relationship between Stalin's totalitarianism and the Russian avant-garde. Fredric Jameson described the book as 'a remarkable act of interpretation' and credited it with a much-needed reinvigoration of the field of utopian studies.1 Groys's thesis in that book was that, instead of being a mortal enemy of the Russian avant-garde of Malevich and the Constructivists, Stalinism represented its logical outcome, fulfilling the most profound avant-garde inspiration: the total transformation of reality in accordance with an aesthetic plan. By claiming for itself the role of demiurge previously occupied by God, the avant-garde prepared the development that Stalin brought to a logical conclusion by merging art and politics and thus achieved a realisation of a utopian vision in practice. Groys's analysis in The Total Art of Stalinism reversed the established understanding of continuity and rupture, and set up paradox as the main methodology of his philosophical work, an impulse that becomes even stronger in his later writing.Groys is fluent in English and French but writes mainly in Russian and German. The complicated history of translation means that Groys's works often reach their Anglophone readership belatedly. Prompted by Verso's recent publication of his new book In the Flow, this article reflects on its relationship with two earlier monographs by Groys: On The New (1992/2014) and Under Suspicion: The Phenomenology of Media (2000/2012). All three deal with one of Groys's primary fields of inquiry: the constant movement and change within the realm of what Yuri Lotman would call the semiosphere, which includes art objects as well as their interpretations, products of mass media, the circulation of theories, and linguistic expression in general. On the New investigates what constitutes innovation in art, theory and thought; Under Suspicion looks at what animates this dynamic of change, or which forces operate beneath the media surface; while In the Flow engages with the recent transformations in art and media brought about by the emergence of the Internet and digitisation more generally. Groys's overriding explanatory logic in these works is based on an economic paradigm, but one that differs in significant respects from both the market economy and the notion of 'creative economies' now favoured in cultural studies.On the New takes as its point of departure postmodern critiques of truth and their insistence on the inaccessibility of 'the signified, reality, being, meaning, evidence, or of the presence of the present' (On the New, p7) - a critique that for Groys, rather than making the question of the new impossible, allows us to pose it adequately for the first time. For, as Groys understands it, innovation does not imply that something has been created or revealed that was previously absent or hidden, but rather that something which has always been seen, known and open is revalued. …

The Places Where Audience Studies and Production Studies Meet

Audience studies and production studies have had largely separate trajectories in research, despite their shared grounded theory agendas and research methods. Drawing on a larger ethnography of media audiences and producers, this article shows how the human subjects of audience studies and production studies might be studied together to reveal the power relations involved in mass media production processes. In this particular case study, fans and extras for the television series Treme (2010–2013) shared a discourse around the place of viewing and making which strove to articulate a common culture despite the real hierarchical barriers between audiences and production personnel.

Shared Faculty–Student Lifestyle Habits and Their Implications for College Student Retention

Previous research confirms that first-semester grade-point average (GPA) is related to college student persistence, retention, and graduation. Thus, it is important to identify factors related to enhancing first-semester GPA. In this study, researchers asked faculty and students in the disciplines of journalism, strategic communication or public relations, mass media production and design, motion picture or film, and mass media in general, to rate themselves on success-related lifestyle habits. Students were grouped according to five GPA categories, and each GPA group's survey responses were compared with faculty survey responses and with every other GPA group's responses. Statistical analyses identified five highly differentiating lifestyle habits that separated both faculty and the highest GPA group from all other GPA groups. Because these five habits related so closely to higher-level GPAs, one major implication of the findings is that institutions could improve retention by encouraging freshmen to develop these five critical lifestyle habits.

Promotion of National Traditions by Kazakhstan Mass Media as a Mean of Ideological Influence

Objectives: The research aim is a search for quality characteristics for the broadcasts selected from TV broadcasts of the mentioned time, almost unknown for the viewers from abroad. Methods/Analysis: This impact is achieved with modern technologies and has been explored with applied methods of general science like those of observation, description, comparison and qualitative assessment. An evidence base for our research included scientific literature on theory and history of television, as well as the TV content from Kazakhstan dated by the second half of the twentieth century: the broadcasts with national traditions and military history as subjects. Findings: According to the survey findings, we have identified specific quality characteristics of the considered broadcasts. The conclusion is that such the best samples of TV arts have themselves become a tradition; they influence the works of both their time and those of the later time. They play an important role in establishing the value system of an individual in his or her learning of history and say of the developed intellectual culture in the society. Novelty/Improvement: Research novelty depends on insufficient studies of Kazakhstan mass media production and still unequal participation of Republic in the global information space.

Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity by Robert Jensen

Reviewed by: Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity by Robert Jensen Andres Lazaro Lopez (bio) Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity by Robert Jensen. Brooklyn, NY: South End Press, 2007, 198 pp., $18.79 paper. In Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, Robert Jensen analyzes contemporary mainstream (most commonly rented or purchased) heterosexual pornography as one key method of domination in the US patriarchal system of oppression, along with its effects on both men and women. Jensen argues that pornography has normalized and mainstreamed a particular conception of sex as both violent and degrading. He details how mechanisms of power are eroticized and unchallenged, where men dominate, and women’s sexuality is objectified and commodified. Jensen labels and rejects systems of oppression as anti-human and inconsistent with general principles of justice. He demonstrates how pornography reinforces patriarchy through misogyny and racism, and he challenges men to interrogate their relationship with pornography, their positions of dominance and control in their relationships, and to stop participating in sexual exploitation industries. On all accounts, Jensen is successful. He eloquently blends personal narratives, textual analysis, interviews, and cultural/social theory to explore the effects of pornography’s misogynist themes that limit men’s selves, poisons masculinity, and bolsters patriarchy. Working from a radical critique of the sex industry and sexual violence, Jensen offers a rich study loaded with meaningful questions about the conventions, narratives, strategies, and ideologies of mainstream pornography escalating in US culture. He makes a compelling case for how pornography has become normalized, and that the values that drive pornography are normative mainstream patriarchal values. Jensen suggests we examine the multi-billion dollar porn industry as any product of mass media, through its content, production, and consumption—the main chapters of analysis in the book. Jensen argues that three major themes exist in all mass-marketed heterosexual pornography: (1) all women, at all times, want sex from all men, (2) women enjoy all the sexual acts that men perform or demand, and (3) women who do not at first realize this can be easily persuaded with a little force. These themes contain elements of objectification, control, hierarchy, submission, and violence that aligns with idealized notions of manhood. For Jensen, the pairing of these masculine elements with the main themes in pornography extends an invitation for men to absorb patriarchal ideologies. Jensen asks powerful questions about pornography’s role in the proliferation of sexual discourses that are grounded in dominating notions of masculinity and regulated by institutions, identities, and misogynistic discourse. For example, he poses the question, in a society where men learn that sex and manhood are about conquest, control, and domination, can pornography with those same values help reinforce such behaviors? Does pornography offer young boys and [End Page 266] men a male-dominate, often one-sided view of sexuality? Why do men not question why getting off to degrading and pain-inflicting pornography “excites” them? How does this make the uncoupling of sexual fantasy and reality challenging for men? When taken to the extreme, can it not serve as a way for men to learn how to recruit sexual victims and/or offer strategies to break down women’s resistance to sex? Jensen argues that pornography may only be “one part of a sexist system, but its messages of sexuality are reinforced everywhere,” almost never questioned, and often defended (102). It is not uncommon in the United States to hear critical perspectives of violent video games and what it teaches young boys about the use of weapons and the normalization of violent manhood, yet pornography goes unquestioned. Jensen exposes various discourses that are meant to depoliticize pornography. For example, one will often hear that “women want to make porn,” “there are clear differences between violence and pleasure and pain,” and “plenty of ‘good guys’ who consume porn who do not do violence.” While these arguments might have some truth, they often mask and dismiss the harmful and violent nature of mainstream heterosexual pornography. Jensen explains that this pornography is for the pleasure of all men, not merely some, and its roots are in women hating, and even the well-intentioned “good men” who...

Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World by Anne Jamison (review)

Reviewed by: Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World by Anne Jamison Allison McCracken (bio) Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World by Anne Jamison. BenBella Books. 2013. $14.95 paperback. 418 pages. One of the richest yet understudied areas of media cultural production, engagement, and consumption is the world of fan fiction. Anne Jamison’s new book, Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World, is a much-needed introduction to this topic for the nonexpert and a valuable summary of its history and social significance for those both inside and outside of this community. Although the worldwide success of Fifty Shades of Grey, a book famously adapted from fan fiction based on the Twilight novels, drew more attention to the topic, it is still unfamiliar territory for many in academia, even for those in cinema and media studies.1 Jamison, a professor of English at the University of Utah, has been an active voice in fan fiction studies for a number of years and is often quoted as an authority in mainstream media publications. Fic broadens, synthesizes, and updates the scholarly work on fan fiction initiated by Henry Jenkins’s landmark Textual Poachers.2 As Jamison defines it, fan fiction (or “fic”) is “writing that continues, interrupts, or just riffs on stories and characters other people have already written about.”3 As a form of grassroots cultural production, fan fiction offers new ways to view canonical texts that are freely shared within communities. Most fan fiction engages with mass-media texts, such as the Harry Potter books and films (Warner Bros., 2001–2011) or the television program Supernatural (CW, 2005– ).4 Stories are often (but not always) published on a chapter-by-chapter basis, like serial narratives in nineteenth-century magazines, and they can involve [End Page 170] similar kinds of opportunities for readers to participate in the ongoing development of the narrative. Fan fiction fosters a community in which appreciation, encouragement, and feedback are readily available for both new and established writers. Tens of thousands of people write fic, and their stories are usually read within a few days of their appearance online; the most popular stories can attract hundreds of thousands of readers. Indeed, fan fiction is at once so vast and so specialized that it can be daunting and difficult for scholars to navigate it. In that sense, fan fiction’s diversity is reflective of current mass-media production practices in serving niche audiences who are looking for (and finding) content that serves their particular interests. Fic provides an invaluable and remarkably thorough survey of both the macro and micro aspects of fan fiction, an accomplishment due in large part to the organization of the book, which reflects the collective nature of this world. Jamison describes her role in the book as giving “a tour through a curated exhibit.”5 She provides structure and writes introductory material to various sections, but she gives almost half of the book over to essays by experts in their particular areas. She includes essays by, for example, fan fiction scholars such as Kristina Busse and Francesca Coppa, leading figures in the development of fan fiction since the 1960s such as Jacqueline Lichtenberg, influential fan fiction writers such as Jen Zern (“Nautibitz”), organizers of fan fiction websites and charity drives, and those writers who have worked in both the commercial publishing and the fan worlds. These collaborators greatly enrich the book by offering their knowledge of fan fiction’s history and key developments in its content, form, and community since the 1960s. Together, these writers offer a fan fiction primer that brings together a great deal of material in a largely accessible way for non–fic readers. Fic identifies the form’s aesthetic structures (including major genres, tropes, and terms), provides a detailed history of its evolution, addresses tensions within the community, and examines the increasingly blurred lines between the worlds of fic and commercial publishing. Fic is also a helpful chronology of the development of the fan fiction world in relation to changing technologies, industrial practices, and social mores. Jamison and her collaborators demonstrate how fan fiction writers have not only exploited every new technology to produce...

The mediation of ‘youth language’ in mainstream mass culture: evidence from a Greek family sitcom

?y acknowledging the ideological framework upon which the media and mass culture operate, contemporary sociolinguistic research aims to explore how such texts shape viewers’ understanding about the speech of social groups and the way they eventually perpetuate or challenge certain social and linguistic stereotypes. In light of this, we examine the way ‘youth language’ is represented in a popular Greek family sitcom. As a product of late modern mass media, which tend to celebrate nonstandard, oral and conversational styles of talk, the TV series under analysis set out to familiarise a widely diversified TV audience with ‘youth language’. Hence, the construction of youth identity through the speech style teenage characters were depicted to employ was relatively favorable. Nevertheless, the TV series did not avoid perpetuating ?mostly through the visual images of young people it built? many of the stereotypes of the dominant discourse of adolescence. Eventually, this TV series contributes, even though in a subtle way, to the confirmation of established ideas about young people and their identity, and is in dialogue with relevant representations of youth detected in other mainstream mass media.

Estudio crítico de la representación del estado de la pobreza en la televisión

This article offers an innovative research of the mediatic representation of poverty in mass media. This visual study, which compares Baroque Art to Neo-baroque mass media production, aims to notice similarities and differences and watch that there are cultural parameters that have settled in the collective ideals about the concept of poverty. Moreover, the paper proceeds to an analysis of media representation of social exclusion and its interpretation within popular culture.

Eternal Recurrence of (almost) the Same. Nostalgia in Italian Advertising from Carmencita and Gringo to Jake la Furia

The paper sets out to analyse the relationship between past, present, and future as applied to the behaviour of consumption. The favoured approach examines the use of nostalgia in advertising and in several forms of Italian contemporary national popular culture. The hypothesis posits that the emotion of nostalgia acts as a powerful factor in mobilising consumers because it inspires a desire that can speak not only to the past (which is impossible to recover) but also to the future; the latter here is taken as what one could achieve via a consumption which employs the past as a symbolic resource to activate desire. The study delineates three main strategies via which communication makes efficient use of nostalgia: the special dynamic of drawing the subject and object closer together and farther apart, the past’s identity-related function, and the memory’s complex work of interpretation and reconstruction of the past. The text will examine some specific examples of advertising commercials and mass-media products which demonstrate the emotion of nostalgia’s capacity to mobilise consumers.

Spreading Map Information over Different Depth Layers – An Improvement for Map-Reading Efficiency?

In recent years, True-3D representations such as lenticular visualization have entered the stage of analogue and, especially, digital cartography. The increase of 3D displays as products of mass media raises some fundamental questions about a new generation of 3D maps. Auto-stereoscopic displays allow cartographers to design 3D maps covering several information layers located at different positions along the depth axis. However, it remains unclear whether the opportunity to spread map information over different information depth layers can improve cartographic communication by helping to increase the duration and accuracy of map reading. This article presents the results of an empirical study, based on the test results achieved by 83 geography students who counted different map symbols in a series of 2D or 3D thematic maps of differing complexity.

Informal Learning Through Science Media Usage

This article reviews current research on informal science learning through news media. Based on a descriptive model of media-based science communication we distinguish between (a) the professional routines by which journalists select and depict scientific information in traditional media and (b) the psychological processes that account for how media recipients select, process and integrate such information. We argue that science literacy and media literacy in laypersons can be promoted by combining insights from the research on mass media production, laypersons’ reception processes and the interplay of both. Moreover, we point out potential obstacles and biases in the process of science communication and suggest strategies to prevent such problems using media-based elements of science communication. Focusing on “traditional” news media in the main parts of the article, we conclude with reflections on how online sources might change the interplay between information demand and supply.

Confronting the Urban Nightmare: La pared transparente by Ernestina de Champourcin

After thirty-three years of exile in Mexico, Ernestina de Champourcin returned to Madrid in 1972, in time to witness the profound political changes in Spain prompted by the death of Franco and by the cultural revolution originating in the capital known as the “movida madrileña.” Between 1979 and 1980, she responded to the explosion of mass media products and subculture activities by writing La pared transparente (1984), a series of poems that portray the postmodern city as an alienating and dehumanized place symbolized primarily as a wall of obstructions. The poet employs multiple synonyms for “wall,” along with allusions to the emptiness of the hole, the blankness of the color white, and the estrangement provoked by silence to complete her depictions of the modern big city. She especially laments the incapacity for calm, verbal communication within this crowded and animated, yet lonely and impersonal, environment. After expressing her anxiety, in the second half of the collection, Champourcin discovers that the wall erected between human beings can be mitigated or traversed through memory, love, and looking to the reality within the self and ultimately beyond.

The Value of Ethnography

As an anthropologist whose main methodological approach to the study of media industries is long-term ethnographic fieldwork, in my essay I want to highlight the importance of the issues of practice, social relations, and subjectivity to the study of mass media production as well as the utility of ethnography as a method. My approach to a large-scale market-driven media industry differs considerably from the legacy established by the Frankfurt School’s “culture industry” approach to the analysis of mass media, whereby the political economic structures of production preclude discussions of subjectivity, agency, and meaning. I contend that in order to understand the complexities of media production, it is necessary to examine producers’ sentiments and subjectivities in conjunction with questions of political economy. Regarding media producers as agents grounded in specific social, historical, and interpretive locations and their activity of production as comprising a domain of social practice complicates the discussion of commercial mass media production and takes it beyond simplistic assertions of the “bottom-line”—that somehow the pursuit of profit provides the limits of analysis.