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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
Public-relations professionals do not simply help their clients to communicate with the public, they also create news—many of the news stories that one reads and watches come from materials provided by PR firms. For example, women’s smoking stopped being a taboo when Edward Bernays, hired by American Tobacco Company asked his women friends to smoke during an Easter parade on New York’s Fifth Avenue (1929). This image of women smoking in public appeared in newspapers, and Bernays, a nephew of Freud, used psychology to build the image of an emancipated woman as one who smoked. Public relations is not simply a press-wing for different big corporations, governments and non-profit organizations; its professionals exert the power of persuasion by gauging cultural trends and representing them to the public in a way that is beneficial to its clients, thus affecting social policies and the cultural landscape.
PR professionals are recruited not only from young people who have specialized degrees, but are also former journalists and retired politicians who know the system of the press, the government and their relationship with the public. These firms specialize in issue and crisis management. Hence, when Cyanide-tainted Tylenol was found in 1982, resulting in seven deaths, its manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson spent millions to rebuild its image; by promoting itself as a socially responsible company, PR helped it successfully overcome this crisis.
In contemporary America, more than $10 billion is spent on public relations annually.
With fewer journalists and the price of investigative news reporting high, news divisions are relying on PR news releases to fill up their pages and airtime. There are more people working for PR than for news; they provide sophisticated press packages and video clips that may be published without changes.
Government policies are affected when corporations hire public-relations firms to found so-called grassroots citizen campaigns to lobby Washington and other local and state governments. National Smokers Alliance, a group that champions smokers’ rights, was created by a PR firm with money from Phillip Morris. The government itself has also relied on PR, from the setting-up of the office of War Information during the Second World War to spin-doctors hired by different administrations. Not only American government, but foreign governments, like Kuwait, during the Gulf War, and Colombia, also hire big American PR firms to build their image. Other non-profit organizations also hire PR firms (for example, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, to promote an antiabortion message).
The image of the PR professional remains rather unsavory in media, especially when associated in the 1990s with political lies and manipulation (Wag the Dog, 1998; Primary Colors, 1999; television’s Spin City, ABC, 1996–).
Industry:Culture
Puritanism began as a religious reform movement within the Church of England and spread to the northern English colonies in the early and middle seventeenth century. In recent years the term has often been used simply as a pejorative to designate anyone who is prudish, unemotional or intolerant. However, strains of Puritanism persisted even in the last half of the twentieth century.
Early American puritans hoped to establish a city of God that would fuse the political and religious community into a theocracy. Although less prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s, this changed in the 1970s with the development of organizations such as the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition. These groups pursued avowedly Christian agendas and became influential in politics, especially at the level of congressional and senatorial primaries. A second element in Puritanism was the castigation of sensual pleasures. While the 1960s marked a substantial change in social conventions, it continued to be the case that prostitution was only legal in certain parts of Nevada, recreational drug use was severely punished and references to sex on radio and television were highly constricted. A less famous aspect of Puritanism was its emphasis on public sermons as a means of excoriating the sins of the community. These often strayed from traditional Biblical topics and became detailed critiques of the political system and the personal responsibility of those within it. This use of the sermon was employed by both ends of the political spectrum, from Martin Luther King, Jr.
challenging segregation to conservative television evangelists attacking the moral decay of the country and its leaders.
Industry:Culture
Quintessential balladeers of surf, summer, sixties and California. Formed in 1961 by brothers Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson, their cousin Mike Love and David Marks, they produced twenty albums by 1970, ranging from “California Girls” to the more complex concepts of Pet Sounds (1966, including “God Only Knows”), one of rock ’n’ roll’s finest albums, or the classic “Good Vibrations” (1966). The band lost its way thereafter as a group and through personal stories of some members, including Brian’s addictions and Dennis’ 1983 drowning, while new British, California and folk-music sounds competed for the market. The band experienced a popular revival in the 1980s.
Industry:Culture
Race riots at the beginning of the twentieth century were generally white rampages through black neighborhoods, shooting and burning. By the 1960s, they had become uprisings within the black communities themselves.
Some historians argue that the increased black militancy led to disenchantment among whites, to the white backlash and the demise of the Democratic Party’s consensus on civil rights and eradicating racial discrimination. Others have argued that black militancy increased because the kind of commitment made to real changes seemed so minimal, and that militancy brought about change where none had been occurring.
Throughout the civil-rights era, while political changes were occurring in the South, things worsened for Northern urban African Americans. As blacks entered the cities, whites and businesses left for the suburbs, leaving impoverished segregated neighborhoods with few employment opportunities.
Between 1964 and 1968, a large number of cities witnessed major rioting. The first riot occurred in Harlem, NY after a policeman shot a black criminal suspect. In August riots broke out in Newark, NJ, Philadelphia, PA and Chicago, IL. But the riot that had the most symbolic impact broke out in Watts (Los Angeles) in 1965, also sparked following a case of police brutality. Thirty-four African Americans died in this riot in a section of the city where 60 percent of the adult population was on welfare relief. Coming five days after President Johnson passed the Voting Rights Act, the riot seemed to highlight the limited effectiveness of the Civil Rights movement.
The worst summer of rioting happened in 1967. Twenty-two cities witnessed riots that July and August. Forty-three people were killed in Detroit, MI (site of the infamous Algiers Motel incident), nearly all of them black, and at least a quarter of the city was burned, with $50 million worth of property destroyed. Federal paratroopers, some just back from the Vietnam War, were sent in to restore order.
The riots provoked a response from the federal government, most notably the Kerner Commission, which reported in March of 1968, and urged more development of inner cities, which President Johnson incorporated into his War on Poverty. Within a few days of the report’s release, on May 4, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, leading to further rioting.
Apart from obvious conditions of deprivation that have been smoldering in the inner cities for decades, a major reason for this rioting has been police brutality. In this regard, the more recent events in 1992, in South Central Los Angeles, were typical. Rodney King, stopped for a traffic violation, was beaten senseless by white policemen from the notorious LAPD, and the incident was captured in graphic detail on video. When the policemen were acquitted of any wrong doing, the city erupted in a day of looting, burning and interracial violence that spread across the country. The riots were followed by tours from presidential candidates and by promises, still largely unfulfilled, of funding for redevelopment.
Industry:Culture
Radical changes have occurred in women’s sports in the United States, especially in the last two decades, having a lasting impact on many aspects of American culture and society. While women have not achieved parity—especially in professional salaries—it is no longer a man’s game.
Victorian notions that women were physiologically inferior and that sports would diminish a woman’s femininity began to give way to new notions about sport and gender after the First World War. Two new perspectives towards sports emerged: one stressing equal rights and access to a system already in place; the other, promoted initially by female educators in the 1920s and picked up later by radical feminists, advocated alternative sports (based on the notion that women were indeed different from men).
While proponents of the equal-rights view believed that facilities should be equal for both sexes, and that women would begin to catch up with men once the effects of their socialization were overcome, female educators tended to be more critical of the commercialism and excessive competitiveness associated with organized sports and wanted games that complemented what they considered “female” characteristics.
The passage of Title IX as part of the Educational Amendment of 1972 led to the triumph of the equal-rights approach to sports. In order for colleges and universities to receive federal funding, it became necessary for them to provide equal funding for men and women. A redistribution of funding occurred to establish facilities and teams for women in places where there had been none before. Discrimination is still evident, with men’s college football programs eating up vast resources and women still receiving in 1996 only one-third of all scholarship money. Overall, male athletes receive $179 million dollars more per year than female athletes. The change has nevertheless been a momentous and irreversible one.
Moving together in terms of body types, sports considered anathema among women before—body-building and wrestling, for example—are now engaged in with great enthusiasm. Others have been transformed as women have begun to incorporate men’s approaches to particular games, or have become more physically capable of performing the same feats. Basketball has seen a radical transformation partly as a result of the success of the equal-rights approach to sport. In the 1940s the game most commonly played was “girl’srules” basketball, akin to the game called netball in Britain. On the grounds that many women could not tax their hearts the same way as men without doing themselves permanent physical damage, educators developed the game in which women were confined to particular zones and were not allowed to dribble more than a few paces before passing. This allowed for the emergence of a more passing-oriented game with less physical contact than men’s basketball. By the 1960s this game was already losing ground, and by the 1980s the game had all but disappeared except in a few elite colleges.
One irony of this transformation is that women who had taken on coaching positions in the women’s game found themselves displaced by men who were more familiar with men’s basketball. This was also an effect of Title IX generally since better-funded women’s teams meant that coaching such teams became more attractive to men. The visibility of some very successful women coaches, however, has challenged this gender imbalance.
The notion of gender difference has survived, however. There has been no rush among women to establish American football teams; this is not expected any time soon. Even in basketball there is the assumption that women’s height disadvantage requires that their game be one based less on dunking the ball through the hoop and more on shooting (with lower field-goal percentages, since the basket is further away).
In another major sport, softball, the move towards the men’s game hasn’t occurred.
Perhaps because this game has been played on an informal basis by both sexes in parks and colleges across the country it has retained legitimacy apart from traditional baseball.
Moreover, the proficiency of women in throwing fastballs, spitballs and curve balls underarm has been such that the game has an appeal that is different from, but complementary to, that of men’s baseball. Moreover, baseball officialdom has been very slow to recognize the need to attract women as individuals and athletes to the sports arena; instead, it has tended to rely on the notion that it is a “family” game, the whole family turning out to watch the son perform. While women may have been content with such a role in the past, the fact that little-league baseball is losing out to rising sports like soccer suggests that this is no longer the case. The one short-lived attempt to establish a women’s baseball league, memorialized in A League of their Own (1992), was made possible by the exigencies of the World War. Nonetheless, it spurred many women to continue to demand opportunities for themselves and their daughters in the years following the war.
The accentuation of difference is especially noticeable in the commercial world of advertising. Sporting-goods producers, like other capitalists in the marketplace, have realized that catering to different consumers is the key to selling more goods. While automobile manufacturers before them built cars to appeal to particular segments of the market, thereby expanding the number of consumers overall, sporting-goods producers like Nike and Reebok have realized that they should be marketing their products to different groups based upon gender difference. Whether or not actual differences do exist (and the high level of demand for such women’s products suggest that many women feel they do), completely different product lines exist in all goods from clothing to equipment not just in terms of color but also in terms of design. The effect of stressing that women have different feet and need different kinds of shoes, for example, serves both to bring about product diversification and the suggestion to women who haven’t run before that they perhaps might have done so had they not been discouraged by the male bias inherent throughout sport. This gendering of sports products also means that women role models like Chris Evert (tennis), Mia Hamm (soccer) and Linda Swoopes (basketball) can be used to promote the goods to impressionable youngsters less impressed by Andre Agassi, Alexi Lalas and Michael Jordan, respectively.
Sex appeal has also been an important element of sports promotion. While women athletes’ body types have transformed significantly in the years since the passage of Title IX, with the increased level of training, so has the growing divergence in notions of attractive female forms (identified by men and, perhaps more significantly, women themselves). Women’s sports have made women’s bodies the objects of the spectator’s gaze, and some women have used this to their advantage. The soccer team for the Women’s World Cup of 1999 posed in T-shirts for a photo given to the David Letterman Show. The establishment of the Women’s National Basketball Association was also accompanied by hype that the players had more sex appeal than their counterparts in the NBA. Such appeal, though, is no longer always accompanied by gestures to heterosexuality in the face of media and public scrutiny. While the old assumption that the woman athlete may be gay (something that haunted both Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova, who later confirmed on the Phil Donahue Show that she was) is not dead, it is muted nonetheless. Concern with female sexuality has also deflected discussion of homophilic and homophobic behaviors in male sports, as well as rare cases of “out” athletes like Greg Louganis (though the growing support for the Gay Games suggests gay athletes may be more common in future). Many of these issues relating to women athletes were raised in the movie Personal Best (1982).
Sexual difference has also been used in other ways. Women figure skaters and gymnasts, for example, although many of them are capable of outperforming men in terms of their ability to execute jumps and spins, will not do away with their different styles of costume and performing and methods of adjudication since the present system has demonstrated its audience appeal.
Two events in recent years have served well to highlight the transformation that has occurred in sports. First the Atlanta Olympics of 1996, which for the first time saw an equal number of women athletes as men performing. At the event, more interest was shown in the women’s teams than the men’s in sports like softball (as compared to baseball), basketball (in which the winner of the men’s event was a foregone conclusion) and soccer. The success of these games led to the emergence of two professional women’s basketball leagues (one of which was dismantled within three years). Similarly great attention was given to the American women’s soccer team, which also captured the gold medal, leading to considerable anticipation for the second event of note, the Women’s World Cup held in the United States in 1999. The largest crowds ever to witness women’s team events in the United States greeted every game in which the American team played (the US eventually defeating China in the final). This can only increase the interest among girls and women in this sport, perhaps reaching new, untapped groups like African Americans who will have seen the numerous feature stories on Briana Scurry.
The combination of these two events symbolizes the success of the equal-rights approach thus far. Whether women are able to avoid some of the pitfalls of commercial sports more generally and whether they should try to do so, are questions that remain unanswered. The final verbal exchange of Pat and Mike, a 1952 movie about a male promoter and a female athlete, suggests that the athlete will “own” the promoter. This remains to be seen.
Industry:Culture
Radio chains or groups represent an increasing portion of American radio ownership.
Group ownership affects a market’s programming, advertising revenues, technological capabilities and hiring, both with positive and negative effects on a market. The FCC rules limit the number of radio and television stations a group can own in any one market in order to prevent a market monopoly Major players in the mid-1990s were CBS, Evergeen, American Radio Systems, ABC (Disney), Chancellor (the Hicks-Muse companies), Jacor and Clear Channel Communication.
Industry:Culture
Radio serial, relying on white minstrelsy that came to early CBS television (1951–3) with African American actors Alvin Childress and Spencer Williams, before being driven from the air by NAACP protests. The show embodies problems of racial stereotypes that have continually plagued mass media, even in sympathetic portraits like the 1950s domestics of Beulah or the later black middle class of Julia and the Cosby Show. David Bianculli suggests it is not the content of the show itself that developed strong characters and broad slapstick, but the lack of a wider, varied context that made this singular representation so problematic. Issues of artistic ownership and control and audience also separate this world from African American humor of the 1990s.
Industry:Culture
Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed (1965) warned Americans that many “things” could kill as surely as people. Freedom to consume entails risks which have become hotly debated in the litigious ambience of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century where not only faulty products—flammable children’s pajamas, unsafe cars or faulty construction—but guns, tobacco and medicine have been subject to scrutiny in the courts and the media. While federal and state consumer product safety commissions, investigative journalism and lawsuits sometimes pin down clear dangers and culpable manufacturers or marketers, these class action lawsuits—representing claims of millions of smokers or thousands of women who received breast implants—have often faced more difficult questions of who is responsible in knowledgeable consumption and use, as well as what chains of causality must be established when billions of dollars in damages are at stake. Consumer-safety issues are frequent themes in both news, which duly publicizes weekly product recalls, and fictional media. Hence, Jonathan Harr’s 1995 bestseller A Civil Action, which deals with the search for responsibility for cancer in a contaminated Massachusetts city became a major 1999 film, followed by The Insider, which explores secrets of tobacco and television. In the end, it is unclear if the US is less careful in manufacturing or control, more litigious in its responses to product failure, or simply more embroiled in constant consumption where expectations and satisfactions do not coincide.
Industry:Culture
Ranching is the grazing of livestock over grasslands where animals may roam or feed; cattle ranching is the dominant range industry in the US. Ranching is associated with the sparsely populated West and Midwestern Plains states. Old World cultural stock practices were adapted to diverse environments to create Texan, Californian and Midwestern ranching practices. Modern ranches in these regions continue to accommodate constantly changing politics, technologies and markets.
Westward expansion introduced ranching as a frontier pursuit on the western fringe of settlement, displacing the native buffalo with beef cattle. The range cattle industry grew when post-Civil War cattle drives moved huge herds of untended cattle from Texas to railheads and markets. English breeds of cattle were introduced to the East and Midwest, and industrialization and eastern urbanization led to increased market demand for cornfed beef. Refrigerated transport facilities, industrialized meatpacking plants, and large feedyards enabled stockmen to respond to increased beef demand. While ranching was less affected by government intervention than farming, governmental influence in agricultural policy encouraged the larger, specialized, high-output land tract over the smaller, diversified family farm.
Native ranchers, those with work experience and background in livestock, share their trade with many outside investors though the economic gain is limited. The attraction for many outside capital investors continues to be an American fascination with the prestige and mythology surrounding the Romantic West, the American cowboy, and land ownership. Ranching encapsulates deeply American values embracing individualism, independence, freedom, and open space. The cowboy ranch-hand’s dress continues to influence fashion and marketing trends. Suburban sprawl and “ranchettes,” small tracts primarily used for hobby ranching or status leisure retreats, actually threaten ranching cultures as land prices are driven above cattle business profits.
Corporatization of agriculture brought change to agribusiness in the 1970s. Vertical integration in animal production, confined growing from birth to finish, is not conducive to cattle-growing as it has been for swine and poultry production. Therefore, the rancher continues to supply cows grown on range grasses to the huge feeder and packer facilities.
Industrial scales of efficiency presently inhibit specialized beef production such as highly marbled, organic, grass-fed or hormone-free beef, though there is increasing consumer interest. Cattle producers are forming cooperatives to purchase interests in these facilities to increase their control over beef marketing and pricing.
Land-use controversies are of growing concern to ranchers as development encroaches on agricultural land and outside interests affect formerly local politics. Private landowners are affected by rural zoning and environmental and wildlife legislation.
Volatile disputes surrounding some ranchers who maintain grazing contracts with the federal government have brought widespread attention to public domain land use. As cattle grazing produces beef utilizing large land tracts while inhibiting many forms of development, controversies will likely increase.
Industry:Culture
Rather than designating a single denomination, modern American Pentecostalism generally refers to Christian traditions that emphasize supernatural signs or “gifts of the Holy Spirit”—embodied in healing, speaking in tongues and ecstatic possession, or other proofs of divine favor—over ritual and hierarchy While emotional fervor has often characterized ongoing reform in American Christianity (e.g. the Great Awakening and evangelical traditions), a revival in Los Angeles, CA’s Azusa Street Mission in 1906 is taken to mark the birth of modern Pentecostalism. Over subsequent decades, this stress on visible signs of personal salvation and emotional fervor spread among the disfranchised in cities and rural areas, although congregations frequently divided over interpretations of the authenticity of these very signs. While many Pentecostals became associated with the Assemblies of God, Church of God and the Pentecostal Holiness Church, splinter groups built around charismatic leaders were also a constant feature of twentieth-century Pentecostalism—and a focus of attack by outsiders and media. Films, in fact, have almost invariably concentrated on corrupted leaders and fraudulent miracles (Elmer Gantry, 1960; the autobiographical Marjoe, 1973; Leap of Faith, 1992).
Documentaries as well have shown a fascination with exotic concrete signs of the supernatural—especially snake-handling, a test of faith actually confined to a small minority within Pentecostalism.
Pentecostalism experienced its own revival after the Second World War, embodied in builders like Oral Roberts, whose preaching and healing funded a university communication complex. Both tent revivals and the emergent power of television spread this coat-and-tie Pentecostalism, although competition among leaders and intersections of religious and social agendas fragmented religious experience and organization, and led to a decline in the late 1950s, even as both Pentecostalism and Christian media continued to evolve. In the 1990s, the major Pentecostal denominations had American memberships of over 10 million. They have also been active in missionary work among new immigrants as well as global evangelization that has established strong visible Pentecostal communities in Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe (especially the former Soviet Union).
As with earlier general revivals, the appeal of Pentecostalism has also influenced mainstream churches, where various forms of spiritual renewal have intersected, sometimes uneasily, with more traditional rituals and orders since the 1960s. While Catholic Charismatic Renewal, for example, revitalized liturgical music, responses and even sociability in many parishes and college chapels, emphasis on the authority of individual spiritual redemption could also cause conflict with the authority of priests and the traditions of the larger community. In many of these denominations, however, Pentecostal elements have been reintegrated into both ritual and community structures.
Industry:Culture
