Wacana Media dan Propaganda: Menelisik peran Koran Angkatan Bersenjata dan Berita Yudha tahun 1965-1968

WACANA MEDIA DAN PROPAGANDA¹

Usaha menelisik peran “Angkatan Bersenjata dan “Berita Yudha”

dalam situasi krisis 1965 –1968

(AG. Eka Wenats Wuryanta)

Pra-Tesis:

1. Peristiwa G30S masih menyimpan misteri dan kontroversi, terutama dalam proses pemberangusan PKI sebagai partai politik dan pola kekerasan horizontal pasca G30-S yang terjadi (peristiwa pembantaian massa PKI di Jawa-Bali atau pelaksanaan Operasi Trisula di Jawa Timur).

2. Setelah tumbangnya Orde Baru, banyak literatur baik literatur lokal maupun terjemahan; yang mau mencoba merekam peristiwa G30S 1965 dengan beragam versi. Hal ini terjadi karena selama pimpinan Soeharto, telah terjadi monopoli wacana sejarah, di mana peristiwa tersebut diolah dan direkonstruksi sesuai dengan kepentingan elite pemerintahan pada waktu itu.

3. Dari sekian literatur yang menonjol, sebut saja; tulisan Saskia Wieringa, Hermawan Sulistyo, Memoar Soebandrio, Latief, Atmadji, Harsutejo, CIA dan lain-lain; literatur-literatur tersebut lebih berpola pada soal:

• Siapa yang harus bertanggung jawab dalam peristiwa tersebut ? (Cornell paper, Siapa menebar angin, Mendung di atas Istana Gerakan 30 September – versi pemerintah, Soeharto sisi gelap sejarah Indonesia dan lainnya.)
• Kejanggalan-kejanggalan macam apa yang dibentuk Angkatan Darat atas peristiwa tersebut ? (Penghancuran Gerakan Perempuan-Saskia W, G30S:sejarah yang dikaburkan-Harsutejo)
• Pola konflik sosial apa yang terjadi menyusul peristiwa G30S ? (Palu Arit-Hermawan S, Pembantaian PKI di Jawa-Bali-Robert Cribbs
• Usaha pembersihan atau rehabilitasi nama oleh institusi atau perorangan yang diduga oleh AD terlibat (Kesaksian Soebandrio, memoar Oei Tju Tat, Mengungkap kabut Halim 1965)
• Kesaksian-kesaksian korban pasca peristiwa G30S (Kesaksian Tapol Orde Baru, Aku bangga menjadi anak PKI, Memoar Pulau Buru, Aku Eks Tapol, Tahun yang Tak Pernah Berakhir, dan lainnya)
• Sejumlah wacana historiografi tentang peristiwa G30S (Kontroversi Sejarah di Indonesia –Syamdani, Mematahkan Pewarisan Ingatan-Budiawan)

4. Dari pola-pola di atas, terlihat bahwa narasi tragedi dan situasi krisis tahun 1965 berkutat pada soal narasi sejarah, narasi pelaku dan penanggung jawab, narasi korban serta konsekuensi yang membayangi generasi anak-cucu anggota PKI. Narasi tentang peran media tidak begitu nampak menyolok, kalau pun ada; terdapat asumsi propagandis dan sisi negatif konstruksi media yang dipakai Angkatan Darat pada waktu itu.

Tesis Antara:

1. Penelitian yang telah dilakukan dan diuji secara ilmiah sebenarnya ingin melihat pola atau representasi krisis macam apa yang sebenarnya mau dibentuk oleh Koran “Angkatan Bersenjata” dan “Berita Yudha” dalam konteks legitimasi dan delegitimasi sosial yang sedang terjadi pada waktu itu ?

2. Fokus penelitian: Harian Angkatan Bersenjata dan Berita Yudha (dua koran militer waktu itu, dengan tidak melepas kemungkinan memang koran tersebut memang menjadi koran propagandis)

3. Pada sisi makro penelitian ini menemukan bahwa situasi sosial-ekonomi dan politik global - Indonesia mempengaruhi keberadaan dua harian tersebut. Setidaknya, pers berbasis militer ini membawa kepentingan Angkatan Bersenjata, terutama Angkatan Darat dalam melakukan perubahan mendasar, melegitimasikan kepentingan kapitalisme birokratik dengan simbol “amanat penderitaan rakyat” dan mendelegitimasikan idea - kepentingan pemikiran sosialistik-komunis, diktatorial-populistik Soekarno dan praktek politik borjuistik tradisional.

4. Pada tataran meso, penelitian ini mengidentifikasi bahwa industri pers militer diadakan dan dibentuk untuk melakukan wacana tandingan terhadap media berbasis komunis dan Orde Lama. Segala bentuk massifikasi dan pengontrolan media massa dilakukan oleh faksi militer (pembatasan kertas koran, pengetatan aturan terbit koran, pembatasan tinta cetak sampai penggunaan mesin cetak) demi tujuan ekonomi-politik militer waktu itu. Ada proses politik dagang sapi yang dilakukan oleh militer kepada para pelaku media waktu itu. Angkatan Darat memetik keuntungan opini publik yang didistribusikan oleh industri media massa tersebut tapi di lain pihak industri media massa non militer secara umum diberi kesempatan hidup sejauh relevan dan berkepentingan sama dengan faksi Angkatan Darat.

5. Pada tataran mikro, terlihat bahwa teks memberikan pembingkaian penuh pada proses mendelegitimasikan sekaligus meminggirkan PKI dan Soekarno, melegitimasikan Angkatan Darat sebagai pelaku perubahan sosial yang konstruktif, pemulihan ekonomi menuju sistem kapitalistik, baik secara global maupun nasional (lihat gambar 01)

6. Temuan lain yang menonjol dan layak diperhatikan adalah bahwa pola pembingkaian dalam serial editorial dan beberapa teks utama yang ada dalam Berita Yudha dan Angkatan Bersenjata memakai pola alterasi-konflik-negasi- dan legitimasi. Strategi pembingkaian kedua harian militer rupanya mengarahkan opini publik dalam tiga ragam strategi, yaitu strategi opini, strategi kontroversi dan strategi moral.

7. Dalam ragam pembingkaian pemberitaan macam di atas, maka penelitian ini juga mengidentifikasi bahwa media dimanfaatkan untuk memulai “kudeta yang sesungguhnya” dengan rangkaian framing teks berita sebagai berikut (Contoh hasil yang didapatkan):

Deskripsi dan konstruksi kejadian G30S dijelaskan secara sistematis dan seolah-olah “logis”. Kebejatan sosial dan politik yang dilabelkan pada kelompok komunis semakin dipertajam dengan penilaian kebejatan moral yang memang patut untuk dikikis habis. Pembiaran siaran RRI sampai dua kali menyiarkan pengumuman Dewan Revolusi dan penerbitan “Harian Rakyat pada tanggal 2 Oktober 1965 (meski gerakan 30 september sudah tidak efektif semenjak tanggal 1 Oktober sehingga bisa dipertanyakan siapa yang sesungguhnya menerbitkan Harian Rakyat pada 2 Oktober 1965). Ada indikasi bahwa pembiaran tersebut dilakukan untuk membiarkan situasi krisis yang memuncak dan menjadi alasan rasional untuk “menggebuk” G30S secara lebih keras. Bahkan harian Angkatan Bersenjata menyatakan bahwa momen dan kelompok G30S tidak perlu ada penyelesaian hukum tapi penyelesaian politik secara tuntas, bahkan dengan proposisi “dikikis habis”

Dalam proses pembingkaian kelompok komunis, Angkatan Bersenjata dan Berita Yudha sangat jelas dan terang-terangan. Interpelasi teks yang sangat jelas dalam editorial atau tajuk rencana ini merupakan bahan-bahan otentik yang bisa diperlihatkan bahwa media Angkatan Bersenjata dan Berita Yudha telah dengan sengaja melaksanakan strategi propagandis dengan strategi opini, kontroversi dan moral-etis. Ketiga strategi ini menjadi strategi yang kurang lebih efektif dalam mengisi kekosongan informasi yang dialami masyarakat pada waktu itu
Pola pembingkaian teks media yang dilakukan melalui beberapa bingkai konflik terhadap PKI sebagai konflik terhadap ideologi sosialisme-komunis serta perbuatan yang hina-biadab dan brutal, bingkai konflik terhadap sistem pemerintahan sipil yang korup dan secara moral tidak legitim lagi, bingkai penyadaran pemulihan ekonomi sebagai usaha melegitimasi proses kapitalisasi Indonesia sekaligus mendelegitimasikan praktek ekonomi yang terlalu percaya pada diri sendiri, bingkai delegitimasi kekuasaan kepresidenan yang tidak dilakukan secara frontal tapi mengerosi sumber-sumber legitimasi sosial politik Presiden Soekarno, bingkai pembangunan ekonomi yang lebih pragmatis demi kepentingan rakyat.

Anti Tesis:

1. Beberapa ragam narasi tentang peristiwa G30S mencatat bahwa media massa Indonesia berpengaruh dalam memberikan konstruksi eforia anti-komunis pasca G30S 1965 (lihat Wieringa) tapi pertanyaan kritis yang belum terjawab secara tuntas: bagaimana media massa waktu itu mengkonstruksi emosi anti komunis ? Jawaban Saskia dalam bukunya tidak memperlihatkan dinamika produksi teks koran yang direkamnya. Dengan model seperti apa ? (tidak banyak yang meneliti)

2. Penelitian media massa era 1965-1968 merupakan arena penelitian yang berada dalam “dark area”, dalam arti bahwa sulit atau tidak mudah menemukan penelitian ilmiah media massa tahun-tahun tersebut (Disertasi Daniel Dhakidae saja hanya menyinggung sedikit atau tulisan atau tulisan tentang dinamika pers mahasiswa pada tahun-tahun tersebut). Banyak keterbatasan yang muncul: keterbatasan akses informasi atas media atau pelaku media, keterbatasan sumber-sumber media yang otentik (arsip otoritatif)

3. Timbul kecurigaan bahwa sebetulnya media massa yang berperan aktif dalam proses krisis pasca G30S adalah radio. Tingkat “melek huruf” masyarakat yang tinggi, terutama masyarakat tradisional waktu itu patut dipertanyakan. Maka sebetulnya, ada dugaan bahwa radio (pembawa pesan tradisi lisan c.q Radio Republik Indonesia) justru yang lebih bisa diterima akal sebagai media yang efektif menyebarkan pesan manipulatif-destruktif selama pasca G30S.

4. Dugaan diperkuat dengan model “two step flow information” dalam arti bahwa sebenarnya media massa telah diterjemahkan atau ditafsir oleh para “gate-keeper” dalam hal ini para pemimpin sipil - militer daerah, pemimpin agama (bisa dibandingkan dengan naskah Anthony Reid yang menyatakan bahwa telah terjadi permusuhan laten antara komunisme dengan Islam sejak 1948, atau tulisan Hermawan Sulistyo dalam bukunya Palu dan Arit). Para “gate-keeper” ini menjadi “editor” lanjutan sebelum informasi yang disebarkan oleh media massa diterima oleh masyarakat umum.

5. Masih ada banyak pertanyaan yang menggantung mengenai peran media pada eforia anti komunis pada waktu itu. Apakah memang pada waktu itu terjadi “bulan madu” antara militer dengan pers Indonesia ? Apakah memang pada waktu itu terjadi “dominasi hati nurani” di kalangan para wartawan atau pekerja pers ? Apakah memang pertimbangan ekonomi –politik pragmatis industri pers Indonesia waktu itu lebih menang dibandingkan dengan objektivitas dan prinsip jurnalistik yang fair dan benar ? Apakah memang pantas pers pada waktu itu dijuluki sebagai “pers patriotik” atau dengan sebutan “pers Pancasila” ?

6. Atau memang harus dikatakan telah terjadi sejarah gelap pers Indonesia. Gelap dalam arti bahwa pers ikut-ikutan menjadi alat efektif kekuasaan gelap. Atau gelap dalam arti bahwa pers Indonesia mengalami kebuntuan dinamikanya sebagai penjaga demokrasi.

1 Makalah ini merupakan bentuk ringkas dari tesis program pascasarjana Universitas Indonesia yang oleh penulis diberi judul IDEOLOGI, MILITERISME DAN MEDIA MASSA: Representasi Legitimasi dan Delegitimasi Ideologi dalam Media Massa (Studi Analisis Wacana Kritis Media Massa dalam Situasi Krisis di Indonesia terutama untuk Harian Angkatan Bersenjata dan Berita Yudha periode 1965-1966) Jakarta 2004. Penulis bisa dihubungi di ekawenatsw@yahoo.com

Global media, neoliberalism & imperialism

Robert McChesney

IN CONVENTIONAL parlance, the current era in history is generally characterized as one of globalization, technological revolution, and democratization. In all three of these areas, media and communication play a central, perhaps even a defining, role. Economic and cultural globalization arguably would be impossible without a global commercial media system to promote global markets and to encourage consumer values. The very essence of the technological revolution is the radical development in digital communication and computing.

For capitalism's cheerleaders, like Thomas Friedman of the` New York Times, all of this suggests that the human race is entering a new Golden Age. All people need to do is sit back, shut up, and shop, and let markets and technologies work their ) magical wonders. For socialists and those committed to radical social change, these claims should be regarded with the utmost skepticism. In my view, the notion of "globalization," as it is commonly used to describe some natural and inexorable force, the telos of capitalism as it were, is misleading and ideologically loaded. A superior term would be "neoliberalism"; this refers to the set of national and international policies that call for business domination of all social affairs with minimal countervailing force. Neoliberalism is almost always intertwined with a deep belief in the ability of markets to use new technologies to solve social problems far better than any alternative course. The centerpiece of neoliberal policies is invariably a call for commercial media and communication markets to be deregulated.

Here, I should like to sketch out the main developments and contours of the emerging global media system and their political-economic implications. I believe that when one takes a close look at the political economy of the contemporary global media and communication industries, we can cut through much of the mythology and hype surrounding our era and have the basis for a much more accurate understanding of what is taking place, and what socialists must do to organize effectively for social justice and democratic values.

The global media system

Whereas, previously, media systems were primarily national, in the past few years a global commercial-media market has emerged. This global oligopoly has two distinct but related facets. First, it means the dominant firms-nearly all U.S. based-are moving across the planet at breakneck speed. The point is to capitalize on the potential for growth abroad-and not get outflanked by competitors-since the U.S. market is well developed and only permits incremental expansion. Second, convergence and consolidation are the order of the day. Specific media industries are becoming more and more concentrated, and the dominant players in each media industry increasingly are subsidiaries of huge global media conglomerates. The level of mergers and acquisitions is breathtaking.

In short order, the global media market has come to be dominated by seven multinational corporations: Disney, AOL Time Warner, Sony, News Corporation, Viacom, Vivendi, and Bertelsmann. None of these companies existed in their present form as media companies as recently as 15 years ago; today, nearly all of them will rank among the largest 300 nonfinancial firms in the world for 2001. Of the seven, only three are truly U.S. firms, though all of them have core operations there. Between them, these seven companies own the major U.S. film studios, all but one of the U.S. television networks, the few companies that control 80-85 percent of the global music | market, the preponderance of satellite broadcasting worldwide, | a significant percentage of book publishing and commercial magazine publishing, all or part of most of the commercial cable TV channels in the U.S. and worldwide, a significant portion of European terrestrial (traditional over-the-air) television, and on and on and on. By nearly all accounts, the level of concentration is only going to increase in the near future.

Why has this taken place? The conventional explanation is technology; i.e., radical improvements in communication technology make global media empires feasible and lucrative in a manner unthinkable in the past. This is similar to the technological explanation for globalization writ large. But this is only a partial explanation, at best. The real motor force has been the incessant pursuit for profit that marks capitalism, which has applied pressure for a shift to neoliberal deregulation. In media, this means the relaxation or elimination of barriers to commercial exploitation of media and to concentrated media ownership.

Once the national deregulation of media began in major nations like the United States and Britain, it was followed by global measures like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the formation of the World Trade Organization, all designed to clear the ground for investment and sales by multinational corporations in regional and global markets. This has laid the foundation for the creation of the global media system, dominated by the aforementioned conglomerates. Now in place, the system has its own logic. Firms must become larger and diversified to reduce risk and enhance profit-making opportunities, and they must straddle the globe so as to never be outflanked by competitors.

Perhaps the best way to understand how closely the global commercial media system is linked to the neoliberal global capitalist economy is to consider the role of advertising. Advertising is a business expense incurred by the largest firms in the economy. The commercial media system is the necessary transmission belt for businesses to market their wares across the world; indeed, globalization as we know it could not exist without it. A whopping three-quarters of global spending on advertising ends up in the pockets of a mere 20 media companies. Ad spending has grown by leaps and bounds in the past decade, as TV has been opened to commercial exploitation, and is growing at more than twice the rate of gross domestic product growth.

There are a few other points to make to put the global media system in proper perspective. The global media market is rounded out by a second tier of six or seven dozen firms that are national or regional powerhouses or that control niche markets, like business or trade publishing. Between one-third and one-half of these second-tier firms come from North America; most of the rest are from Western Europe and Japan. Many national and regional conglomerates have been established on the backs of publishing or television empires. Each of these second-tier firms is a giant in its own right, often ranking among the thousand largest companies in the world and doing more than one billion dollars per year in business. But the system is still very much evolving.

The global media system is only partially competitive in any meaningful economic sense of the term. Many of the largest media firms have some of the same major shareholders, own pieces of one another, or have interlocking boards of directors. When Variety compiled its list of the 50 largest global media firms for 1997, it observed that "merger mania" and crossownership had "resulted in a complex web of interrelationships" that will "make you dizzy." In some respects, the global media market more closely resembles a cartel than it does the competitive marketplace found in economics textbooks.

This conscious coordination does not simply affect economic behavior; it makes the media giants particularly effective political lobbyists at the national, regional, and global levels. The global media system is not the result of "free markets" or natural law; it is the consequence of a number of important state policies that have been made that created the system. The media giants have had a heavy hand in drafting these laws and regulations, and the public tends to have little or no input. In the United States, the corporate media lobbies are notorious for their ability to get their way with politicians, especially if their adversary is not another powerful corporate sector, but that amorphous entity called the "public interest."

Finally, a word should be said about the Internet, the two-ton gorilla of global media and communication. The Internet is increasingly becoming a part of our media and telecommunication systems, and a genuine technological convergence is taking place. Accordingly, there has been a wave of mergers between traditional media and telecom firms, and by each of these with Internet and computer firms. Already companies like Microsoft, AOL, AT&T and Telefonica have become media players in their own right. It is possible that the global media system is in the process of converging with the telecommunications and computer industries to form an integrated global communication system, where anywhere from six to a dozen supercompanies will rule the roost. The notion that the Internet would "set us free," and permit anyone to communicate effectively, hence undermining the monopoly power of the corporate media giants, has not transpired. Although the Internet offers extraordinary promise in many regards, it alone cannot slay the power of the media giants. Indeed, no commercially viable media content site has been launched on the Internet, and it would be difficult to find an investor willing to bankroll any additional attempts. To the extent the Internet becomes part of the commercially viable media system, it looks to be under the thumb of the usual corporate suspects.

Global media and neoliberal democracy

I earlier alluded to the importance of the global media system to the formation and expansion of global and regional markets for goods and services, often sold by the largest multinational corporations. The emerging global media system also has significant cultural and political implications, specifically with regard to political democracy, imperialism, and the nature of socialist resistance in the coming years. In the balance of this review, I will outline a few comments on these issues.

In the area of democracy, the emergence of such a highly concentrated media system in the hands of huge private concerns violates in a fundamental manner any notion of a free press in democratic theory. The problems of having wealthy private owners dominate the journalism and media in a society have been well understood all along: Journalism, in particular, which is the oxygen necessary for self-government to be viable, will be controlled by those who benefit by existing inequality and the preservation of the status quo.

The attack on the professional autonomy of journalism that has taken place is simply a broader part of the neoliberal transformation of media and communication. Neoliberalism is more than an economic theory, however. It is also a political theory. It posits that business domination of society proceeds most effectively when there is a representative democracy, but only when it is a weak and ineffectual polity typified by high degrees of depoliticization, especially among the poor and working class. It is here that one can see why the existing commercial media system is so important to the neoliberal project, for it is singularly brilliant at generating the precise sort of bogus political culture that permits business domination to proceed without using a police state or facing effective popular resistance.

The global media and imperialism

The relationship of the global media system to the question of imperialism is complex. In the 1970s, much of the Third World mobilized through the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization to battle the cultural imperialism of the Western powers. The Third World nations developed plans for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) to address their concerns that Western domination over journalism and culture made it virtually impossible for newly independent nations to escape colonial status. Similar concerns about U.S. media domination were heard across Europe. The NWICO campaign was part of a broader struggle at that time by Third World nations to address formally the global economic inequality that was seen as a legacy of imperialism. Both of these movements were impaled on the sword of neoliberalism wielded by the United States and Britain.

Global journalism is dominated by Western news services, which regard existing capitalism, the United States, its allies, and their motives in the most charitable manner imaginable. As for culture, the "Hollywood juggernaut" and the specter of U.S. cultural domination remain a central concern in many countries, for obvious reasons.

But, with the changing global political economy, there are problems with leaving the discussion at this point. The notion that corporate media firms are merely purveyors of U.S. culture is ever less plausible as the media system becomes increasingly concentrated, commercialized, and globalized. The global media giants are the quintessential multinational firms, with shareholders, headquarters, and operations scattered across the globe. The global media system is better understood as one that advances corporate and commercial interests and values and denigrates or ignores that which cannot be incorporated into its mission. There is no discernible difference in the J firms' content, whether they are owned by shareholders in Japan or France or have corporate headquarters in New York, Germany, or Sydney. In this sense, the basic split is not between nation-states, but between the rich and the poor, across national borders.

But it would be a mistake to buy into the notion that the global media system makes nation-state boundaries and geopolitical empire irrelevant. A large portion of contemporary capitalist activity, clearly a majority of investment and employment, operates primarily within national confines, and their nation-states play a key role in representing these interests. The entire global regime is the result of neoliberal political policies, urged on by the U.S. government. Most important, not far below the surface is the role of the U.S. military as the global enforcer of capitalism, with U.S.-based corporations and investors in the driver's seat. In short, we need to develop an understanding of neoliberal globalization that is joined at the hip to U.S. militarism-and all the dreadful implications that suggests-rather than one that is in opposition to it.

Prospects

It would be all too easy, given the above conditions, to succumb to despair or simply acquiesce to changes from which there seems no escape. Matters appear quite depressing from a democratic standpoint, and it may be difficult to see much hope for change. As one Swedish journalist noted in 1997, "Unfortunately, the trends are very clear, moving in the wrong direction on virtually every score, and there is a desperate lack of public discussion of the long-term implications of current developments for democracy and accountability." But the global system is highly unstable. As lucrative as neoliberalism has been for the rich, it has been a disaster for the world's poor and working classes.

While the dominance of commercial media makes resistance more difficult, widespread opposition to these trends has begun to emerge in the form of huge demonstrations across the planet, including in the United States. It seems that the depoliticization fostered by neoliberalism and commercial media is bumping up against the harsh reality of exploitation, inequality, and the bankruptcy of capitalist politics and culture experienced by significant parts of the population. Just as all) organized resistance to capitalism appeared to be stomped out, it now threatens to rise again from the very ground.

This leads to my final point. What is striking is that progressive anti-neoliberal political movements around the world are increasingly making media issues part of their political platforms. From Sweden, France, and India, to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, democratic left political parties are giving structural media reform-e.g., breaking up the big companies, recharging nonprofit and noncommercial broadcasting, creating a sector of nonprofit and noncommercial independent media under popular control-a larger role in their platforms. They are finding out that this is a successful issue with the broad population. Other activists are putting considerable emphasis upon developing independent and so-called pirate media to counteract the corporate system. Across the board on the anti-neoliberal and socialist left, there is a recognition that the issue of media has grown dramatically in importance, and no successful social movement can dismiss this as a matter that can be addressed "after the revolution." Organizing for democratic media must be part of the current struggle, if we are going to have a viable chance of success.

Robert McChesney is the author of numerous hooks on the media, including Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (New Press), and is coeditor of Monthly Review. He is a professor of communications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism and Media Culture

CULTURAL STUDIES, MULTICULTURALISM, AND MEDIA CULTURE

Douglas Kellner

Radio, television, film, and the other products of media culture provide materials out of which we forge our very identities; our sense of selfhood; our notion of what it means to be male or female; our sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of sexuality; and of "us" and "them." Media images help shape our view of the world and our deepest values: what we consider good or bad, positive or negative, moral or evil. Media stories provide the symbols, myths, and resources through which we constitute a common culture and through the appropriation of which we insert ourselves into this culture. Media spectacles demonstrate who has power and who is powerless, who is allowed to exercise force and violence, and who is not. They dramatize and legitimate the power of the forces that be and show the powerless that they must stay in their places or be oppressed.

We are immersed from cradle to grave in a media and consumer society and thus it is important to learn how to understand, interpret, and criticize its meanings and messages. The media are a profound and often misperceived source of cultural pedagogy: They contribute to educating us how to behave and what to think, feel, believe, fear, and desire -- and what not to. The media are forms of pedagogy which teach us how to be men and women. They show us how to dress, look and consume; how to react to members of different social groups; how to be popular and successful and how to avoid failure; and how to conform to the dominant system of norms, values, practices, and institutions. Consequently, the gaining of critical media literacy is an important resource for individuals and citizens in learning how to cope with a seductive cultural environment. Learning how to read, criticize, and resist socio-cultural manipulation can help empower oneself in relation to dominant forms of media and culture. It can enhance individual sovereignty vis-a-vis media culture and give people more power over their cultural environment.

In this essay, I will discuss the potential contributions of a cultural studies perspective to media critique and literacy. In recent years, cultural studies has emerged as a set of approaches to the study of culture and society. The project was inaugurated by the University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies which developed a variety of critical methods for the analysis, interpretation, and criticism of cultural artifacts. Through a set of internal debates, and responding to social struggles and movements of the 1960s and the 1970s, the Birmingham group came to focus on the interplay of representations and ideologies of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality in cultural texts, including media culture. They were among the first to study the effects of newspapers, radio, television, film, and other popular cultural forms on audiences. They also focused on how various audiences interpreted and used media culture differently, analyzing the factors that made different audiences respond in contrasting ways to various media texts.

Through studies of youth subcultures, British cultural studies demonstrated how culture came to constitute distinct forms of identity and group membership. For cultural studies, media culture provides the materials for constructing views of the world, behavior, and even identities. Those who uncritically follow the dictates of media culture tend to "mainstream" themselves, conforming to the dominant fashion, values, and behavior. Yet cultural studies is also interested in how subcultural groups and individuals resist dominant forms of culture and identity, creating their own style and identities. Those who obey ruling dress and fashion codes, behavior, and political ideologies thus produce their identities within mainstream group, as members of specific social groupings (such as white, middle-class conservative Americans). Persons who identify with subcultures, like punk culture, or black nationalist subcultures, look and act differently from those in the mainstream, and thus create oppositional identities, defining themselves against standard models.

Cultural studies insists that culture must be studied within the social relations and system through which culture is produced and consumed, and that thus study of culture is intimately bound up with the study of society, politics, and economics. Cultural studies shows how media culture articulates the dominant values, political ideologies, and social developments and novelties of the era. It conceives of U.S. culture and society as a contested terrain with various groups and ideologies struggling for dominance (Kellner 1995). Television, film, music, and other popular cultural forms are thus often liberal or conservative, or occasionally express more radical or oppositional views.

Cultural studies is valuable because it provides some tools that enable one to read and interpret one's culture critically. It also subverts distinctions between "high" and "low" culture by considering a wide continuum of cultural artifacts ranging from novels to television and by refusing to erect any specific cultural hierarchies or canons. Previous approaches to culture tended to be primarily literary and elitist, dismissing media culture as banal, trashy, and not worthy of serious attention. The project of cultural studies, by contrast, avoids cutting the field of culture into high and low, or popular against elite. Such distinctions are difficult to maintain and generally serve as a front for normative aesthetic valuations and, often, a political program (i.e. either dismissing mass culture for high culture, or celebrating what is deemed "popular" while scorning "elitist" high culture).

Cultural studies allows us to examine and critically scrutinize the whole range of culture without prior prejudices toward one or another sort of cultural text, institution, or practice. It also opens the way toward more differentiated political, rather than aesthetic, valuations of cultural artifacts in which one attempts to distinguish critical and oppositional from conformist and conservative moments in a cultural artifact. For instance, studies of Hollywood film show how key 1960s films promoted the views of radicals and the counterculture and how film in the 1970s was a battleground between liberal and conservative positions; late 1970s films, however, tended toward conservative positions that helped elect Ronald Reagan as president (See Kellner and Ryan, 1988).

There is an intrinsically critical and political dimension to the project of cultural studies which distinguishes it from objectivist and apolitical academic approaches to the study of culture and society. British cultural studies, for example, analyzed culture historically in the context of its societal origins and effects. It situated culture within a theory of social production and reproduction, specifying the ways that cultural forms served either to further social domination or to enable people to resist and struggle against domination. It analyzed society as a hierarchical and antagonistic set of social relations characterized by the oppression of subordinate class, gender, race, ethnic, and national strata. Employing Gramsci's model of hegemony and counterhegemony, it sought to analyze "hegemonic," or ruling, social and cultural forces of domination and to seek "counterhegemonic" forces of resistance and struggle. The project was aimed at social transformation and attempted to specify forces of domination and resistance in order to aid the process of political struggle and emancipation from oppression and domination.

For cultural studies, the concept of ideology is of central importance, for dominant ideologies serve to reproduce social relations of domination and subordination. Ideologies of class, for instance, celebrate upper class life and denigrate the working class. Ideologies of gender promote sexist representations of women and ideologies of race utilize racist representations of people of color and various minority groups. Ideologies make inequalities and subordination appear natural and just, and thus induce consent to relations of domination. Contemporary societies are structured by opposing groups who have different political ideologies (liberal, conservative, radical, etc.) and cultural studies specifies what, if any, ideologies are operative in a given cultural artifact (which could involved, of course, the specification of ideological contradictions). In the course of this study, I will provide some examples of how different ideologies are operative in media cultural texts and will accordingly provide examples of ideological analysis and critique.

Because of its focus on representations of race, gender, and class, and its critique of ideologies that promote various forms of oppression, cultural studies lends itself to a multiculturalist program that demonstrates how culture reproduces certain forms of racism, sexism, and biases against members of subordinate classes, social groups, or alternative life-styles. Multiculturalism affirms the worth of different types of culture and cultural groups, claiming, for instance, that black, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, and lesbian, and other oppressed and marginal voices have their own validity and importance. An insurgent multiculturalism attempts to show how various people's voices and experiences are silenced and omitted from mainstream culture and struggles to aid in the articulation of diverse views, experiences, and cultural forms, from groups excluded from the mainstream. This makes it a target of conservative forces who wish to preserve the existing canons of white male, Euro-centric privilege and thus attack multiculturalism in cultural wars raging from the 1960s to the present over education, the arts, and the limits of free expression.

Cultural studies thus promotes a multiculturalist politics and media pedagogy that aims to make people sensitive to how relations of power and domination are "encoded" in cultural texts, such as those of television or film. But it also specifies how people can resist the dominant encoded meanings and produce their own critical and alternative readings. Cultural studies can show how media culture manipulates and indoctrinates us, and thus can empower individuals to resist the dominant meanings in media cultural products and to produce their own meanings. It can also point to moments of resistance and criticism within media culture and thus help promote development of more critical consciousness.

A critical cultural studies -- embodied in many of the articles collected in this reader -- thus develops concepts and analyses that will enable readers to analytically dissect the artifacts of contemporary media culture and to gain power over their cultural environment. By exposing the entire field of culture to knowledgeable scrutiny, cultural studies provides a broad, comprehensive framework to undertake studies of culture, politics, and society for the purposes of individual empowerment and social and political struggle and transformation. In the following pages, I will therefore indicate some of the chief components of the type of cultural studies that I find most useful.

Components of a Critical Cultural Studies

At its strongest, cultural studies contains a three-fold project of analyzing the production and political economy of culture, cultural texts, and the audience reception of those texts and their effects. This comprehensive approach avoids too narrowly focusing on one dimension of the project to the exclusion of others. To avoid such limitations, I would thus propose a multi-perspectival approach that (a) discusses production and political economy, (b) engages in textual analysis, and (c) studies the reception and use of cultural texts.

Production and Political Economy

Because it has been neglected in many modes of recent cultural studies, it is important to stress the importance of analyzing cultural texts within their system of production and distribution, often referred to as the political economy of culture. Inserting texts into the system of culture within which they are produced and distributed can help elucidate features and effects of the texts that textual analysis alone might miss or downplay. Rather than being antithetical approaches to culture, political economy can actually contribute to textual analysis and critique. The system of production often determines what sort of artifacts will be produced, what structural limits there will be as to what can and cannot be said and shown, and what sort of audience effects the text may generate.

Study of the codes of television, film, or popular music, for instance, is enhanced by studying the formulas and conventions of production. These cultural forms are structured by well-defined rules and conventions, and the study of the production of culture can help elucidate the codes actually in play. Because of the demands of the format of radio or music television, for instance, most popular songs are three to five minutes, fitting into the format of the distribution system. Because of their control by giant corporations oriented primarily toward profit, film and television production in the U.S. is dominated by specific genres such as talk and game shows, soap operas, situation comedies, action/adventure series, reality TV, and so on. This economic factor explains why there are cycles of certain genres and subgenres, sequelmania in the film industry, crossovers of popular films into television series, and a certain homogeneity in products constituted within systems of production marked by rigid generic codes, formulaic conventions, and well-defined ideological boundaries.

Likewise, study of political economy can help determine the limits and range of political and ideological discourses and effects. My study of television in the United States, for instance, disclosed that takeover of the television networks by major transnational corporations and communications conglomerates was part of a "right turn" within U.S. society in the 1980s whereby powerful corporate groups won control of the state and the mainstream media (Kellner, 1990). For example, during the 1980s all three networks were taken over by major corporate conglomerates: ABC was taken over in 1985 by Capital Cities, NBC was taken over by GE, and CBS was taken over by the Tisch Financial Group. Both ABC and NBC sought corporate mergers and this motivation, along with other benefits derived from Reaganism, might well have influenced them to downplay criticisms of Reagan and to generally support his conservative programs, military adventures, and simulated presidency.

Corporate conglomeratization has intensified further and today AOL and Time Warner, Disney, and other global media conglomerates control ever more domains of the production and distribution of culture (McChesney 2000). In this global context, one cannot really analyze the role of the media in the Gulf war, for instance, without analyzing the production and political economy of news and information, as well as the actual text of the Gulf war and its reception by its audience (see Kellner, 1992). Likewise, the ownership by conservative corporations of dominant media corporations helps explain mainstream media support of the Bush administration and their policies, such as the war in Afghanistan (Kellner 2001).

Looking toward entertainment, one cannot fully grasp the Madonna phenomenon without analyzing her marketing strategies, her political environment, her cultural artifacts, and their effects (Kellner, 1995). In a similar fashion, younger female pop music stars and groups such as Mariah Carey, Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, or NπSync also deploy the tools of the glamour industry and media spectacle to make certain stars icons of fashion, beauty, style, and sexuality, as well as purveyors of music. And in appraising the full social impact of pornography, one needs to be aware of the sex industry and the production process of, say, pornographic films, and not just dwell on the texts themselves and their effects on audiences.

Furthremore, in an era of globalization, one must be aware of the global networks that produce and distribute cultural in the interests of profit and corporate hegemony. Yet political economy alone does not hold the key to cultural studies and important as it is, it has limitations as a single approach. Some political economy analyses reduce the meanings and effects of texts to rather circumscribed and reductive ideological functions, arguing that media culture merely reflects the ideology of the ruling economic elite that controls the culture industries and is nothing more than a vehicle for capitalist ideology. It is true that media culture overwhelmingly supports capitalist values, but it is also a site of intense struggle between different races, classes, gender, and social groups. Thus, in order to fully grasp the nature and effects of media culture, one needs to develop methods to analyze the full range of its meanings and effects.

Textual Analysis

The products of media culture require multidimensional close textual readings to analyze their various forms of discourses, ideological positions, narrative strategies, image construction, and effects. There have been a wide range of types of textual criticism of media culture, ranging from quantitative content analysis that dissects the number of, say, episodes of violence in a text, to qualitative study that examines images of women, blacks, or other groups, or that applies various critical theories to unpack the meanings of the texts or to explicate how texts function to produce meaning. Traditionally, the qualitative analysis of texts has been the task of formalist literary criticism, which explicates the central meanings, values, symbols, and ideologies in cultural artifacts by attending to the formal properties of imaginative literature texts ã- such as style, verbal imagery, characterization, narrative structure and point of view, and other formal elements of the artifact. From the 1960s on, however, literary-formalist textual analysis has been enhanced by methods derived from semiotics, a system for investigating the creation of meaning not only in written languages but also in other, nonverbal codes, such as the visual and auditory languages of film and TV.

Semiotics analyzes how linguistic and nonlinguistic cultural ≥signs≤ form systems of meanings, as when giving someone a rose is interpreted as a sign of love, or getting an A on a college paper is a sign of mastery of the rules of the specific assignment. Semiotic analysis can be connected with genre criticism (the study of conventions governing established types of cultural forms, such as soap operas) to reveal how the codes and forms of particular genres follow certain meanings. Situation comedies, for instance, classically follow a conflict/resolution model that demonstrates how to solve certain social problems by correct actions and values, and thus provide morality tales of proper and improper behavior. Soap operas, by contrast, proliferate problems and provide messages concerning the endurance and suffering needed to get through lifeπs endless miseries, while generating positive and negative models of social behavior. And advertising shows how commodity solutions solve problems of popularity, acceptance, success, and the like.

A semiotic and genre analysis of the film Rambo (1982) for instance, would show how it follows the conventions of the Hollywood genre of the war film that dramatizes conflicts between the U.S. and its "enemies" (see Kellner 1995). Semiotics describes how the images of the villains are constructed according to the codes of World War II movies and how the resolution of the conflict and happy ending follows the traditional Hollywood classical cinema which portrays the victory of good over evil. Semiotic analysis would also include study of the strictly cinematic and formal elements of a film like Rambo, dissecting the ways that camera angles present Rambo as a god, or slow motion images of him gliding through the jungle code him as a force of nature. Semiotic analysis of 2001 film Vanilla Sky could engage how Cameron Croweπs film presents a remake of a 1997 Spanish film, and how the use of celebrity stars Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz, involved in a real-life romance, provides a spectacle of modern icons of beauty, desire, sexuality, and power. The science fiction thematic and images present semiotic depictions of a future in which technoscience can make everyone beautiful and live out its cultureπs dreams and nightmares.

The textual analysis of cultural studies thus combines formalist analysis with critique of how cultural meanings convey specific ideologies of gender, race, class, sexuality, nation, and other ideological dimensions. Ideological textual analysis should deploy a wide range of methods to fully explicate each dimension and to show how they fit into textual systems. Each critical method focuses on certain features of a text from a specific perspective: the perspective spotlights, or illuminates, some features of a text while ignoring others. Marxist methods tend to focus on class, for instance, while feminist approaches will highlight gender, critical race theory spotlights race and ethnicity, and gay and lesbian theories explicate sexuality.

Various critical methods have their own strengths and limitations, their optics and blindspots. Traditionally, Marxian ideology critiques have been strong on class and historical contextualization and weak on formal analysis, while some versions are highly ≥reductionist,≤ reducing textual analysis to denunciation of ruling class ideology. Feminism excels in gender analysis and in some versions is formally sophisticated, drawing on such methods as psychoanalysis and semiotics, although some versions are reductive and early feminism often limited itself to analysis of images of gender. Psychoanalysis in turn calls for the interpretation of unconscious contents and meaning, which can articulate latent meanings in a text, as when Alfred Hitchcockπs dream sequences project cinematic symbols that illuminate his charactersπ dilemmas, or when the image of the female character in Bonnie and Clyde (1967) framed against the bar of her bed suggests her sexual frustration, imprisonment in middle class family life, and need for revolt.

Of course, each reading of a text is only one possible reading from one critic's subject position, no matter how multiperspectival, and may or may not be the reading preferred by audiences (which themselves will be significantly different according to their class, race, gender, ethnicity, ideologies, and so on). Because there is a split between textual encoding and audience decoding, there is always the possibility of a multiplicity of readings of any text of media culture (Hall, 1980b). There are limits to the openness or polysemic nature of any text, of course, and textual analysis can explicate the parameters of possible readings and delineate perspectives that aim at illuminating the text and its cultural and ideological effects. Such analysis also provides the materials for criticizing misreadings, or readings that are one-sided and incomplete. Yet to further carry through a cultural studies analysis, one must also examine how diverse audiences actually read media texts, and attempt to determine what effects they have on audience thought and behavior.

Audience Reception and Use of Media Culture

All texts are subject to multiple readings depending on the perspectives and subject positions of the reader. Members of distinct genders, classes, races, nations, regions, sexual preferences, and political ideologies are going to read texts differently, and cultural studies can illuminate why diverse audiences interpret texts in various, sometimes conflicting, ways. It is indeed one of the merits of cultural studies to have focused on audience reception in recent years and this focus provides one of its major contributions, though there are also some limitations and problems with the standard cultural studies approaches to the audience.

A standard way to discover how audiences read texts is to engage in ethnographic research, in an attempt to determine how texts effect audiences and shape their beliefs and behavior. Enthnographic cultural studies have indicated some of the various ways that audiences use and appropriate texts, often to empower themselves. Radway's study of women's use of Harlequin novels (1983), for example, shows how these books provide escapism for women and could be understood as reproducing traditional women's roles, behavior, and attitudes. Yet, they can also empower women by promoting fantasies of a different life and may thus inspire revolt against male domination. Or, they may enforce, in other audiences, female submission to male domination and trap women in ideologies of romance, in which submission to Prince Charming is seen as the alpha and omega of happiness for women.

Media culture provides materials for individuals to create identities and meanings and cultural studies detects uses of cultural forms. Teenagers use video games and music television as an escape from the demands of a disciplinary society. Males use sports as a terrain of fantasy identification, in which they feel empowered as "their" team or star triumphs. Such sports events also generate a form of community, currently being lost in the privatized media and consumer culture of our time. Indeed, fandoms of all sorts, ranging from Star Trek fans ("Trekkies") to devotees of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or various soap operas, also form communities that enable people to relate to others who share their interests and hobbies. Some fans, in fact, actively recreate their favorite cultural forms, such as rewriting the scripts of preferred shows, sometimes in the forms of slash which redefine charactersπ sexuality, or in the forms of music poaching or remaking such as ≥filking≤ (see examples in Lewis 1992 and Jenkins 1992).

This emphasis on audience reception and appropriation helps cultural studies overcome the previous one-sided textualist orientations to culture. It also directs focus on the actual political effects that texts have and how audiences use texts. In fact, sometimes audiences subvert the intentions of the producers or managers of the cultural industries that supply them, as when astute young media users laugh at obvious attempts to hype certain characters, shows, or products (see de Certeau, 1984 for more examples of audiences constructing meaning and engaging in practices in critical and subversive ways). Audience research can reveal how people are actually using cultural texts and what sort of effects they are having on everyday life. Combining quantitative and qualitative research, new reception studies, including some of the essays in this reader, are providing important contributions into how audiences actually interact with cultural texts (see the studies in Lewis 1992 and Ang 1996, and Lee and Cho and xx in this text for further elaboration of decoding and audience reception).

Yet there are several problems that I see with reception studies as they have been constituted within cultural studies, particularly in the U.S. First, there is a danger that class will be downplayed as a significant variable that structures audience decoding and use of cultural texts. Cultural studies in England were particularly sensitive to class differences -- as well as subcultural differences -- in the use and reception of cultural texts, but I have noted many dissertations, books, and articles in cultural studies in the U.S. where attention to class has been downplayed or is missing altogether. This is not surprising as a neglect of class as a constitutive feature of culture and society is an endemic deficiency in the American academy in most disciplines.

There is also the reverse danger, however, of exaggerating the constitutive force of class, and downplaying, or ignoring, such other variables as gender or ethnicity. Staiger (1992) notes that Fiske, building on Hartley, lists seven "subjectivity positions" that are important in cultural reception, "self, gender, age-group, family, class, nation, ethnicity," and proposes adding sexual orientation. All of these factors, and no doubt more, interact in shaping how audiences receive and use texts and must be taken into account in studying cultural reception, for audiences decode and use texts according to the specific constituents of their class, race or ethnicity, gender, sexual preferences and so on.

Furthermore, I would warn against a tendency to romanticize the ≥active audience,≤ by claiming that all audiences produce their own meanings and denying that media culture may have powerful manipulative effects. There is a tendency within the cultural studies tradition of reception research to dichotomize between dominant and oppositional readings (Hall, 1980b, a dichotomy which structures much of Fiske's work). "Dominant" readings are those in which audiences appropriate texts in line with the interests of the dominant culture and the ideological intentions of a text, as when audiences feel pleasure in the restoration of male power, law and order, and social stability at the end of a film like Die Hard, after the hero and representatives of authority eliminate the terrorists who had taken over a high-rise corporate headquarters. An "oppositional" reading, by contrast, celebrates the resistance to this reading in audience appropriation of a text; for example, Fiske (1993) observes resistance to dominant readings when homeless individuals in a shelter cheered the destruction of police and authority figures, during repeated viewings of a video-tape of Die Hard.

Although this can be a useful distinction, there is a tendency in cultural studies to celebrate resistance per se without distinguishing between types and forms of resistance (a similar problem resides with indiscriminate celebration of audience pleasure in certain reception studies). For example, resistance to social authority by the homeless evidenced in their viewing of Die Hard could serve to strengthen brutal masculist behavior and encourage manifestations of physical violence to solve social problems. Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, and Herbert Marcuse, among others, have argued that violence can be either emancipatory, when directed at forces of oppression, or reactionary, when directed at popular forces struggling against oppression. Many feminists, by contrast, or those in the Gandhian tradition, see all violence as forms of brute masculist behavior and many people see it as a problematical form of conflict resolution. Resistance and pleasure cannot therefore be valorized per se as progressive elements of the appropriation of cultural texts, but difficult discriminations must be made as to whether the resistance, oppositional reading, or pleasure in a given experience is progressive or reactionary, emancipatory or destructive.

Thus, while emphasis on the audience and reception was an excellent correction to the one-sidedness of purely textual analysis, I believe that in recent years cultural studies has overemphasized reception and textual analysis, while underemphasizing the production of culture and its political economy. This type of cultural studies fetishizes audience reception studies and neglects both production and textual analysis, thus producing populist celebrations of the text and audience pleasure in its use of cultural artifacts. This approach, taken to an extreme, would lose its critical perspective and would lead to a positive gloss on audience experience of whatever is being studied. Such studies also might lose sight of the manipulative and conservative effects of certain types of media culture and thus serve the interests of the cultural industries as they are presently constituted.

A new way, in fact, to research media effects is to use the data bases which collect media texts such as Dialogue or Nexis/Lexis and to trace the effects of media artifacts like The X-Files, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, or advertising corporations like Nike and McDonalds, through analysis of references to them in the media. Likewise, there is a new terrain of Internet audience research which studies how fans act in chat rooms devoted to their favorite artifacts of media culture, create their own fansites, or construct artifacts that disclose how they are living out the fantasies and scripts of the culture industries. Previous studies of the audience and the reception of media privileged ethnographic studies that selected slices of the vast media audiences, usually from the site where researchers themselves lived. Such studies are invariably limited and broader effects research can indicate how the most popular artifacts of media culture have a wide range of effects. In my book Media Culture (1995), I studied some examples of popular cultural artifacts which clearly influenced behavior in audiences throughout the globe. Examples include groups of kids and adults who imitated Rambo in various forms of asocial behavior, or fans of Beavis and Butt-Head who started fires or tortured animals in the modes practiced by the popular MTV cartoon characters. Media effects are complex and controversial and it is the merit of cultural studies to make their study an important part of its agenda.

Toward a Cultural Studies that is Critical, Multicultural, and Multiperspectival

To avoid the one-sidedness of textual analysis approaches, or audience and reception studies, I propose that cultural studies itself be multiperspectival, getting at culture from the perspectives of political economy, text analysis, and audience reception, as outlined above. Textual analysis should utilize a multiplicity of perspectives and critical methods, and audience reception studies should delineate the wide range of subject positions, or perspectives, through which audiences appropriate culture. This requires a multicultural approach that sees the importance of analyzing the dimensions of class, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexual preference within the texts of media culture, while studying as well their impact on how audiences read and interpret media culture.

In addition, a critical cultural studies attacks sexism, racism, or bias against specific social groups (i.e. gays, intellectuals, and so on), and criticizes texts that promote any kind of domination or oppression. As an example of how considerations of production, textual analysis, and audience readings can fruitfully intersect in cultural studies, let us reflect on the Madonna phenomenon. Madonna first appeared in the moment of Reaganism and embodied the materialistic and consumer-oriented ethos of the 1980s ("Material Girl"). She also appeared in a time of dramatic image proliferation, associated with MTV, fashion fever, and intense marketing of products. Madonna was one of the first MTV music video superstars who consciously crafted images to attract a mass audience. Her early music videos were aimed at teen-age girls (the Madonna wanna-beπs), but she soon incorporated black, Hispanic, and minority audiences with her images of interracial sex and multicultural "family" in her concerts. She also appealed to gay and lesbian audiences, as well as to feminist and academic audiences, as her videos became more complex and political (i.e. "Like a Prayer," "Express Yourself," "Vogue," and so on).

Thus, Madonna's popularity was in large part a function of her marketing strategies and her production of music videos and images that appealed to diverse audiences. To conceptualize the meanings and effects in her music, films, concerts, and public relations stunts requires that her artifacts be interpreted within the context of their production and reception, which involves discussion of MTV, the music industry, concerts, marketing, and the production of images (see Kellner 1995). Understanding Madonna's popularity also requires focus on audiences, not just as individuals, but as members of specific groups, such as teen-age girls, who were empowered in their struggles for individual identity by Madonna, or gays, who were also empowered by her incorporation of alternative images of sexuality within popular mainstream cultural artifacts. Yet appraising the politics and effects of Madonna also requires analysis of how her work might merely reproduce a consumer culture that defines identity in terms of images and consumption. It would make an interesting project to examine how former Madonna fans view the evolution and recent incarnations of the superstar, such as her marriage and 2001 Drowned World tour, as well as to examine how contemporary fans view Madonna in an age that embraces younger teen pop singers like Britney Spears or Mariah McCarey.

In short, a cultural studies that is critical and multicultural provides comprehensive approaches to culture that can be applied to a wide variety of artifacts from pornography to Madonna, from MTV to TV news, or to specific events like the 2000 U.S. presidential election (Kellner 2001), or media representations of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. and the U.S. response. Its comprehensive perspectives encompass political economy, textual analysis, and audience research and provide critical and political perspectives that enable individuals to dissect the meanings, messages, and effects of dominant cultural forms. Cultural studies is thus part of a critical media pedagogy that enables individuals to resist media manipulation and to increase their freedom and individuality. It can empower people to gain sovereignty over their culture and to be able to struggle for alternative cultures and political change. Cultural studies is thus not just another academic fad, but can be part of a struggle for a better society and a better life.

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Notes

. For more information on British cultural studies, see Hall 1980b; Johnson 1986/7; Fiske 1986; O'Conner 1989; Turner 1990; Grossberg 1989; Agger 1992; and the articles collected in Grossberg, Nelson, Triechler 1992; During 1992, 1998; and Durham and Kellner 2000. I might note that the Frankfurt School also provided much material for a critical cultural studies in their works on mass culture from the 1930s through the present; on the relation between the Frankfurt School and British cultural studies, see Kellner 1997.

. On the concept of ideology, see Kellner, 1978 and 1979; the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1980; Kellner and Ryan, 1988; and Thompson, 1990.

. This model was adumbrated in Hall, 1980a and Johnson, 1986/87 and guided much of the early Birmingham work. Around the mid-1980s, however, the Birmingham group began to increasingly neglect the production and political economy of culture (some believe that this was always a problem with their work) and much of their studies became more academic, cut off from political struggle. I am thus trying to recapture the spirit of the early Birmingham project, reconstructed for our contemporary moment. For a fuller development of my conception of cultural studies, see Kellner, 1992, 1995, and 2001.

. The term "political economy" calls attention to the fact that the production and distribution of culture takes place within a specific economic system, constituted by relations between the state and economy. For instance, in the United States a capitalist economy dictates that cultural production is governed by laws of the market, but the democratic imperatives of the system mean that there is some regulation of culture by the state. There are often tensions within a given society concerning how many activities should be governed by the imperatives of the market, or economics, alone and how much state regulation or intervention is desirable, to assure a wider diversity of broadcast programming, for instance, or the prohibition of phenomena agreed to be harmful, such as cigarette advertising or pornography. (See Kellner, 1990.)

. Cultural studies which have focused on audience reception include Brunsdon and Morley, 1978; Radway, 1983; Ang, 1985; Morley, 1986; Fiske, 1989a and 1989b; Jenkins 1992; Lewis 1992; and Ang 1996.