War and Television

War and Television PDF Author: Bruce Cumings
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9780860916826
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Television has come to play an ever more decisive role in the preparation and planning of war, as well as in its execution. In War and Television Bruce Cumings carefully explores the history of television's relationship to US warmaking since World War II, up to and including its presentation of the carnage in Kuwait and Iraq. Cumings examines Vietnam, long thought to have been the first television war, but finds that characterization more apt for the Gulf conflict which was fought through, packaged by, and sold to the public on television. At the centre of the book is the extraordinary tale of Cumings's own experience as historical consultant to a Thames Television production, Korea: The Unknown War, and his subsequent trials with the Public Broadcasting System when the film was released for North American distribution.

War and Television

War and Television PDF Author: Bruce Cumings
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9780860916826
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book

Book Description
Television has come to play an ever more decisive role in the preparation and planning of war, as well as in its execution. In War and Television Bruce Cumings carefully explores the history of television's relationship to US warmaking since World War II, up to and including its presentation of the carnage in Kuwait and Iraq. Cumings examines Vietnam, long thought to have been the first television war, but finds that characterization more apt for the Gulf conflict which was fought through, packaged by, and sold to the public on television. At the centre of the book is the extraordinary tale of Cumings's own experience as historical consultant to a Thames Television production, Korea: The Unknown War, and his subsequent trials with the Public Broadcasting System when the film was released for North American distribution.

Television and the Afghan Culture Wars

Television and the Afghan Culture Wars PDF Author: Wazhmah Osman
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252052439
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Portrayed in Western discourse as tribal and traditional, Afghans have in fact intensely debated women's rights, democracy, modernity, and Islam as part of their nation building in the post-9/11 era. Wazhmah Osman places television at the heart of these public and politically charged clashes while revealing how the medium also provides war-weary Afghans with a semblance of open discussion and healing. After four decades of gender and sectarian violence, she argues, the internationally funded media sector has the potential to bring about justice, national integration, and peace. Fieldwork from across Afghanistan allowed Osman to record the voices of many Afghan media producers and people. Afghans offer their own seldom-heard views on the country's cultural progress and belief systems, their understandings of themselves, and the role of international interventions. Osman analyzes the impact of transnational media and foreign funding while keeping the focus on local cultural contestations, productions, and social movements. As a result, she redirects the global dialogue about Afghanistan to Afghans and challenges top-down narratives of humanitarian development.

On the Frontlines of the Television War

On the Frontlines of the Television War PDF Author: Yasutsune Hirashiki
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
ISBN: 1612004733
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
“The eyewitness accounts of the many phases of the war in this memoir bring events to life as if they had happened yesterday” (Vietnam Veterans of America Book Reviews). On the Frontlines of the Television War is the story of Yasutsune “Tony” Hirashiki’s ten years in Vietnam—beginning when he arrived in 1966 as a young freelancer with a 16mm camera, but without a job or the slightest grasp of English, and ending in the hectic fall of Saigon in 1975, when he was literally thrown on one of the last flights out. His memoir has all the exciting tales of peril, hardship, and close calls of the best battle memoirs, but it is primarily a story of very real and yet remarkable people: the soldiers who fought, bled, and died, and the reporters and photographers who went right to the frontlines to record their stories and memorialize their sacrifice. If this was truly the first “television war,” then it is time to hear the story of the cameramen who shot the pictures and the reporters who wrote the stories that the average American witnessed daily in their living rooms. An award-winning sensation when it was released in Japan in 2008, this book has been completely recreated for an international audience. “Tony Hirashiki is an essential piece of the foundation on which ABC was built . . . Tony reported the news with his camera and in doing so, he brought the truth about the important events of our day to millions of Americans.” —David Westin, former President of ABC News

The Cold War and Entertainment Television

The Cold War and Entertainment Television PDF Author: Lori Maguire
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443899259
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
An essential dimension of the Cold War took place in the realm of ideas and culture. While much work exists on cinema, relatively little research has been conducted on this subject in relation to television, despite the latter being a technology and popular cultural form that emerged during this period. This book rectifies that absence by examining the impact of the Cold War on entertainment television, and underlines the comparative aspect by studying programs from both blocs – without forgetting, of course, the outsize impact of American television. Although most of the focus is on the two main protagonists, the US and the USSR, chapters also consider programming from the UK, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and both East and West Germany. This book represents a contribution to the debate about the cultural Cold War through a rigorously comparative analysis of the two blocs. For this reason, the approach used is thematic. The study begins by considering the subject of censorship, and then goes on to look at the very particular case of the two Germanys. A series of comparative genre studies follow, including police and war, variety shows, and documentaries and docudramas. Perhaps surprisingly, the similarities are often greater than the differences between television in the two blocs.

U.S. Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 1947-1960

U.S. Television News and Cold War Propaganda, 1947-1960 PDF Author: Nancy Bernhard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521543248
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
How US government and media collaborated in their dissemination of Cold War propaganda.

Living-Room War

Living-Room War PDF Author: Michael J. Arlen
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815604662
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
"One doesn't have to be a panjandrum of Communications to realize that television does something to us," Michael Arlen (former TV critic of The New Yorker) writes in the Introduction to Living-Room War. He continues, "Television has a transforming effect on events. It has a transforming effect on the people who watch the transformed events-it's just hard to know what that is." Living-Room War is Arlen's valiant-and entertaining-attempt to figure out exactly what exactly television does to us. This timeless collection of essays provides a poetic look at 1960s television culture, ranging from the Vietnam war to Captain Kangaroo, from the 1968 Democratic convention to televised sports.

Cold War, Cool Medium

Cold War, Cool Medium PDF Author: Thomas Doherty
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023150327X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Conventional wisdom holds that television was a co-conspirator in the repressions of Cold War America, that it was a facilitator to the blacklist and handmaiden to McCarthyism. But Thomas Doherty argues that, through the influence of television, America actually became a more open and tolerant place. Although many books have been written about this period, Cold War, Cool Medium is the only one to examine it through the lens of television programming. To the unjaded viewership of Cold War America, the television set was not a harbinger of intellectual degradation and moral decay, but a thrilling new household appliance capable of bringing the wonders of the world directly into the home. The "cool medium" permeated the lives of every American, quickly becoming one of the most powerful cultural forces of the twentieth century. While television has frequently been blamed for spurring the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, it was also the national stage upon which America witnessed—and ultimately welcomed—his downfall. In this provocative and nuanced cultural history, Doherty chronicles some of the most fascinating and ideologically charged episodes in television history: the warm-hearted Jewish sitcom The Goldbergs; the subversive threat from I Love Lucy; the sermons of Fulton J. Sheen on Life Is Worth Living; the anticommunist series I Led 3 Lives; the legendary jousts between Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy on See It Now; and the hypnotic, 188-hour political spectacle that was the Army-McCarthy hearings. By rerunning the programs, freezing the frames, and reading between the lines, Cold War, Cool Medium paints a picture of Cold War America that belies many black-and-white clichés. Doherty not only details how the blacklist operated within the television industry but also how the shows themselves struggled to defy it, arguing that television was preprogrammed to reinforce the very freedoms that McCarthyism attempted to curtail.

Inventing Vietnam

Inventing Vietnam PDF Author: Michael Anderegg
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 0877228620
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
The Vietnam War has been depicted by every available medium, each presenting a message, an agenda, of what the filmmakers and producers choose to project about America's involvement in Southeast Asia. This collection of essays, most of which are previously unpublished, analyzes the themes, modes, and stylistic strategies seen in a broad range of films and television programs. From diverse perspectives, the contributors comprehensively examine early documentary and fiction films, postwar films of the 1970s such as The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, and the reformulated postwar films of the 1980s--Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and Born on the Fourth of July. They also address made-for-television movies and serial dramas like China Beach and Tour of Duty. The authors show how the earliest film responses to America's involvement in Vietnam employ myth and metaphor and are at times unable to escape glamorized Hollywood. Later films strive to portray a more realistic Vietnam experience, often creating images that are an attempt to memorialize or to manufacture different kinds of myths. As they consider direct and indirect representations of the war, the contributors also examine the power or powerlessness of individual soldiers, the racial views presented, and inscriptions of gender roles. Also included in this volume is a chapter that discusses teaching Vietnam films and helping students discern and understand film rhetoric, what the movies say, and who they chose to communicate those messages. Excerpt Read an excerpt from Chapter 1 (pdf). Contents Acknowledgments Introduction - Michael Anderegg 1. Hollywood and Vietnam: John Wayne and Jane Fonda as Discourse - Michael Anderegg 2. "All the Animals Come Out at Night": Vietnam Meets Noir in Taxi Driver - Cynthia J. Fuchs 3. Vietnam and the Hollywood Genre Film: Inversions of American Mythology in The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now - John Hellmann 4. "Charlie Don't Surf": Race and Culture in the Vietnam War Films - David Desser 5. Finding a Language for Vietnam in the Action-Adventure Genre - Ellen Draper 6. Narrative Patterns and Mythic Trajectories in Mid-1980s Vietnam Movies - Tony Williams 7. Rambo's Vietnam and Kennedy's New Frontier - John Hellmann 8. Gardens of Stone, Platoon, and Hamburger Hill: Ritual and Remembrance - Judy Lee Kinney 9. Primetime Television's Tour of Duty - Daniel Miller 10. Women Next Door to War: China Beach - Carolyn Reed Vartanian 11. Male Bonding, Hollywood Orientalism, and the Repression of the Feminine in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket - Susan White 12. Vietnam, Chaos, and the Dark Art of Improvisation - Owen W. Gilman, Jr. 13. Witness to War: Oliver Stone, Ron Kovic, and Born on the Fourth of July - Thomas Doherty 14. Teaching Vietnam: The Politics of Documentary - Thomas J. Slater Selected Bibliography Selected Filmography and Videography The Contributors Index About the Author(s) Michael Anderegg is Professor of English at the University of North Dakota, and author of two other books: William Wyler and David Lean. Contributors: Cynthia J. Fuchs, John Hellman, David Desser, Ellen Draper, Tony Williams, Judy Lee Kinney, Daniel Miller, Carolyn Reed Vartanian, Susan White, Owen W. Gilman, Jr., Thomas Doherty, Thomas J. Slater, and the editor.

Television Beyond and Across the Iron Curtain

Television Beyond and Across the Iron Curtain PDF Author: Kirsten Bönker
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443816434
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
From the mid-1950s onwards, the rise of television as a mass medium took place in many East and West European countries. As the most influential mass medium of the Cold War, television triggered new practices of consumption and media production, and of communication and exchange on both sides of the Iron Curtain. This volume leans on the long-neglected fact that, even during the Cold War era, television could easily become a cross-border matter. As such, it brings together transnational perspectives on convergence zones, observations, collaborations, circulations and interdependencies between Eastern and Western television. In particular, the authors provide empirical ground to include socialist television within a European and global media history. Historians and media, cultural and literary scholars take interdisciplinary perspectives to focus on structures, actors, flow, contents or the reception of cross-border television. Their contributions cover Albania, the CSSR, the GDR, Russia and the Soviet Union, Serbia, Slovenia and Yugoslavia, thus complementing Western-dominated perspectives on Cold War mass media with a specific focus on the spaces and actors of East European communication. Last but not least, the volume takes a long-term perspective crossing the fall of the Iron Curtain, as many trends of the post-socialist period are linked to, or pick up, socialist traditions.

Televising War

Televising War PDF Author: Andrew Hoskins
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9780826473066
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Our relationship with the past-whether judgment, celebration, commemoration or denial—has become an important part of public culture. This book explores the relationship between televisual communication and memory—focusing on the conflicts that have disrupted and changed our world over the past 50 years—with particular reference to the current war in Iraq. Case studies cover the Holocaust, Vietnam, both Gulf Wars and Kosovo. Though the Vietnam War was extensively televised, it was framed within a domestic U.S. context. By the time of the latest Gulf War and Kosovo the coverage of warfare was both more immediate and more global. Hoskins illustrates this with a comparative critique of individual countries' national media framing of war (including Middle Eastern perspectives) in contrast to the so-called "global" viewpoint of satellite news networks such as CNN. Televising War examines the intertwining of self, society and media that influences our understanding of both past and present.