Media Matters

Race & Gender in U.S. Politics

John Fiske, Black Hawk Hancock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317498520
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Now, more than 20 years since its initial release, John Fiske's classic text Media Matters remains both timely and insightful as an empirically rich examination of how the fierce battle over cultural meaning is negotiated in American popular culture.

Media Matters takes us to the heart of social inequality and the call for social justice by interrogating some of the most important issues of its time. Fiske offers a practical guide to learning how to interpret the ways that media events shape the social landscape, to contest official and taken-for-granted accounts of how events are presented/conveyed through media, and to affect social change by putting intellectual labor to public use.

A new introductory essay by former Fiske student Black Hawk Hancock entitled 'Learning How to Fiske: Theorizing Cultural Literacy, Counter-History, and the Politics of Media Events in the 21st Century' explains the theoretical and methodological tools with which Fiske approaches cultural analysis, highlighting the lessons today's students can continue to draw upon in order to understand society today.

1

MURPHY BROWN, DAN QUAYLE, AND THE FAMILY ROW OF THE YEAR

On May 19, 1992, shortly after the Los Angeles uprisings, Dan Quayle, the vice president of the United States, delivered a speech to the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco. In it he argued that the root cause of the uprisings was the collapse of traditional family values, particularly among African Americans. Toward the end of the speech he turned to a prime-time sitcom, Murphy Brown, and suggested that the situation had been made worse by the decision of its eponymous heroine to become a single mother (see Sidebar: Dan Quayle, p. 72).

Next day, the press went ballistic: across the nation, papers headlined the vice president’s attack on a sitcom (see Sidebar: Press Headlines on Murphy Brown, p. 72). The day after, the New York Times devoted its front-page photograph and lead story to the issue. The photograph, or rather photographic layout, was far removed from the objective style appropriate to the nation’s “paper of record,” and was closer to that of a tabloid. At its center was a soft-focus photograph of Murphy and her baby in a fuzzy-edged oval, and the top corners of the layout were occupied by small head shots of Dan Quayle and Marlin Fitzwater, “the White House spokesman” (sic).¹ Under each was a pair of quotations. Dan Quayle’s read:

TUESDAY AFTERNOON

It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown … mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it “just another lifestyle choice.”

WEDNESDAY MORNING

I have the greatest respect for single mothers. They are true heroes [sic]. Marlin Fitzwater’s were as follows:

WEDNESDAY MORNING

The glorification of the life of an unwed mother does not do good service to most unwed mothers who are not highly paid, glamorous anchorwomen.

WEDNESDAY MIDMORNING

The Murphy Brown Show [exhibits] pro-life values, which we think are good.

Press Headlines on Murphy Brown
(as shown on Murphy Brown)

USA Today	Quayle: Murphy No Role Model
Chicago Sun Times	Quayle Reads Riot Act to Murphy Brown
New York Times	Views on Single Motherhood Are Multiple at White House
New York Post	Dan Rips Murphy Brown
Daily News	Quayle to Murphy Brown: You Tramp
La Journal de France	Murphy A Donne Naissence en Scandale
The News	Quayle Has a Cow

At the bottom of the layout was a remark by President Bush to the Canadian prime minister during a televised news conference in which U.S.-Canadian relations had received less attention than Murphy Brown: “I told you what the issue was. You thought I was kidding.” (The telecast of this remark was replayed on the episode of the show in which Murphy replied to Quayle.)

Immediately below the photographic layout was the headline “Views on Single Motherhood Are Multiple at White House” (see Sidebar: The New York Times, p. 23) and the story began with a slightly uneasy comparison between the seriousness of “real” politics and the triviality of this issue.² This playful skepticism, quite untypical of a New York Times lead story, is symptomatic of the paper’s own uncertainty about how to handle a seemingly trivial issue that had become so important, an uncertainty mirrored in that of the White House. Throughout the election campaign, the “official” media showed signs of concern that much of the public debate was taking place in arenas beyond their control. The Democrats were using TV and radio talk shows, MTV and telephone call-ins; Ross Perot was using talk shows, thirty-minute “infomercials,” and grassroots organizing; and the second TV debate among the presidential candidates even dispensed with the traditional panel of journalists, with their power to ask balanced, informed, and probing questions, in favor of allowing members of the public in the audience to set their own agenda and ask questions for themselves. And here was a TV sitcom, way off the beat of a serious journalist, raising some of the most passionate interest in the campaign so far. What style should the “paper of record” adopt to cope with the paradox that under the triviality of a sitcom “the most serious politics were at work here”?

The New York Times

Views on Single Motherhood Are Multiple at White House

WASHINGTON, May 20—Thailand is in turmoil, the Federal deficit is ballooning and hot embers of racial resentment still smolder in the ruins of inner-city Los Angeles. But today the high councils of government were preoccupied with a truly vexing question: Is Murphy Brown really a tramp? A day after Vice President Dan Quayle suggested that the television show has served to hasten the erosion of family values by glorifying unwed motherhood, the White House first applauded, then dithered, then beat a befuddled retreat….

The show’s creator and longtime producer, Diane English, issued a statement in Hollywood on Tuesday saying: “If the Vice President thinks it’s disgraceful for an unmarried woman to bear a child, and if he believes that a woman cannot adequately raise a child without a father, then he’d better make sure abortion remains safe and legal.” …

In fact, the most serious politics were at work here. The President’s political advisers have advertised for months that Mr. Bush would try to make the decline of American morals and family values a major campaign issue, and the disintegration of the two-parent family was the theme of the President’s most recent speech, on Sunday at the University of Notre Dame. Advisers to Mr. Bush’s re-election campaign were described as delighted by the attention given to Mr. Quayle’s message on family values, which appeared in some major newspapers near articles on an appearance by Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas, the likely Democratic Presidential nominee, before an enthusiastic crowd of gay and lesbian supporters….

CBS executives declined to comment on Mr. Quayle’s remarks. But a senior executive at the network who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that at a shareholders’ meeting last week the issue of the unwed pregnancy on “Murphy Brown” was criticized by a representative of the conservative media watchdog group Accuracy in Media….

Asked early today about Mr. Quayle’s speech, Mr. Fitzwater said that Mr. Bush shared “society’s concern” about “television networks’ production and writers and their glorification of social situations.”

“We are certainly concerned about family values and the breakup of the American family and again our concern is with the television networks and the production people who need to be aware of the ramifications of their programming,” he said. Minutes later, however, Mr. Fitzwater pre-empted his attack, saying he was “not comfortable getting involved in criticism” of the “Murphy Brown” show. Indeed, he said, the program exemplifies “pro-life values, which we think are good,” he said. “She is having the baby.”

“In many ways, it does dramatize the difficulty of the social questions involved, questions it’s good for the American people to see and grapple with,” he added. “It demonstrates strong family values.” …

The Vice President warmed to his subject later today, telling reporters, “Probably the only reason they chose to have a child rather than an abortion is because they knew the ratings would go up higher having the child.”

Bathed in the glow of national publicity, he dismissed the comments of the President’s spokesman about the positive attributes of the “Murphy Brown” program with a smile.

“I think it’s important what I say and what the President says,” Mr. Quayle said. “Marlin Fitzwater supports whatever I say.”

Obviously, Murphy Brown did not win the election for Clinton, but the show was a point of high visibility in the election campaign: it served as an important site where the discourse of “family values” could be fought over, where the meanings of each of the phrase’s two heavily laden words could be contested, and where people could relate those meanings to the conditions of their everyday lives. The show was a discursive “relay station”: it drew in the already circulating discourse of “family values,” boosted its strength, directed it slightly leftward, and sent it back into circulation again.

Television often acts like a relay station: it rarely originates topics of public interest (though it may repress them); rather, what it does is give them high visibility, energize them, and direct or redirect their general orientation before relaying them out again into public circulation. But although television may be very effective in giving a topic high public visibility, its power to affect the direction in which that topic continues its circulation is more open to question, and therefore to contestation. If, in this instance, television was more powerful than the White House, and Murphy Brown more influential than Dan Quayle, we must not understand this in terms of a cause-and-effect model of television, or as a sign of TV’s essential powerfulness; it can be understood only in terms of its particular historical context, the structure of feeling that characterized the end of Bush-Reaganism. Murphy Brown “won” because she was more closely aligned with the emerging currents than was Dan Quayle. When Dan Quayle claimed, in his speech to the Republican convention, that “on behalf of family values, we’ve taken on Hollywood and the media elite, and we will not back down,” he was following an established Republican tradition of misunderstanding the role of the media by blaming Republicans’ electoral setbacks on the liberalism of “the Hollywood elite” (of whom Murphy Brown was obviously a leading member). In the social circulation of meanings a relay station is, with its ability to redirect signals, immensely important, but it is neither the primary origin of those meanings nor the primary cause of any sociopolitical effects they might have.

Four months later, on September 21, in the opening episode of the new season, Murphy Brown replied to Dan Quayle. The episode replayed CBS News’s sound bite of the vice president’s speech attacking Murphy and allowed its heroine to reply on air to his accusation. Murphy Brown is a television journalist who works on a current affairs show called FYI. She delivered her reply in character to FYI’s fictional and unseen audience, but as she spoke all signs of her fictionality were erased from our screens and she appeared to be speaking directly to us, the real, not fictional, audience, answering a real, not fictional, Dan Quayle (see Sidebar: Murphy Brown’s Response, p. 76). As she finished, she left her desk on the FYI set and moved to the floor of the studio (now simultaneously the fictional FYI one and the real Murphy Brown one), where she had gathered a group of real, not fictional, single parents and their children. She invited a number of them to introduce themselves and their children by their real names, and they did so.

“TODAY’S WOMAN” AND FAMILY VALUES

Murphy Brown delivered her response to Dan Quayle at a politically charged moment. One month earlier, the Republican party had held its annual convention in Houston, and speaker after speaker had returned to the theme of “family values.” Two months after Murphy’s response, the Republican presidential candidate, George Bush, with Dan Quayle at his side, lost the election to Bill Clinton, and a Democrat entered the White House for the first time in twelve years.

At the time of Murphy’s response, the Republican campaign was in trouble, Bush was trailing Clinton by a full ten points in the polls, and, in particular, its conservative attack on any lifestyle that did not conform to its traditional “family values” had provoked a backlash. Two copies of the episode’s script had been leaked in advance, one to Dan Quayle’s office and the other to Rush Limbaugh, an ultraconservative radio and TV talk-show host. Both were prepared for the show and poised to recover any gains that it might have made for the Democrats.

One hour after the episode ended, I watched my local CBS affiliate news in Minneapolis-St. Paul. It told how both Republicans and Democrats attempted to recycle Murphy’s and Quayle’s accounts of single motherhood and turn them to their own political advantage (see Sidebar: Local News). Next day, CNN gave a longer account that explicitly linked Murphy Brown with the Republican convention and the failure of the “family values” campaign to resonate with enough of the electorate (see Sidebar: CNN News, p. 28). Next day also, Rush Limbaugh, in his syndicated TV talk show, made Republican meanings out of Murphy Brown’s single motherhood (see Sidebar: Rush Limbaugh on Murphy Brown, p. 28).³ The episode recounted Murphy’s not very successful attempts to cope with her new baby. One scene showed her not knowing how to hold him or how to soothe him to sleep. Later in the episode, she learned both techniques from her friend and colleague Frank. This offered up the nontraditional meanings that motherhood is not an instinctual element of women’s nature, but a set of skills and techniques that can be learned by, or from, either gender. Toward the end of his monologue, Rush Limbaugh replayed the image of Murphy holding the baby awkwardly, replaced her voice with his, and turned it into evidence supporting Dan Quayle’s accusation. He used the term “serial murderer,” whereas Dan Quayle used “rioters” and “killers,” but all three terms are from the same discursive construction of the collapse of “family values.”

Local News

FEMALE ANCHOR: Presidential politics and TV entertainment blended together in the season’s opener of Murphy Brown. Last summer, the pregnancy of the show’s unmarried title character became a rallying point in the issue of “family values.” Tonight, the man who led the charge against the show watched it in the company of single mothers in Washington, D.C. Quayle said earlier that he had respect and understanding for single mothers; he also said he sent Murphy’s baby a card and a toy elephant, hoping to make him a Republican.

Here in the Twin Cities, supporters of Democrat Bill Clinton used tonight’s Murphy Brown as an excuse for a fund-raiser, charging $15 for the chance to watch the show in the proper political company. The evening raised $2,000….

MALE ANCHOR: Earlier today, someone asked a member of Dan Quayle’s staff why did the vice president send a real toy to a fictional baby. He answered, “You tell me where fiction begins and reality ends in this whole business.”

Howard Stern, another talk-show host, joined the conservative chorus when he wrote in TV Guide: “This is parenthood as designed by people with zero love for children…. Say what you will about the much-mocked Ozzie and Harriet, in their world the kids came first. In Murphy’s, as in ours, they far too often come last.”⁴

Stern believes the TV sitcom is one of the key sites where family values are contested, for not only is the sitcom conventionally about the family, it is designed to be watched by the family. It has often, therefore, served as a central site of struggle over family values (see chapter 2). He also makes clear that Murphy, as a figure of, to use Dan Quayle’s phrase, “today’s woman,” is part of, and partly responsible for, the collapse of these values. From the Republican viewpoint, she embodies antifamily values—she puts her career ahead of family, women ahead of men, independence ahead of housewifery, and being single ahead of being married.

And she brings a baby into this perverted world she has created. As the figure of “today’s woman,” Murphy Brown stands in for Hillary Rodham Clinton. Their visual representations underscore their figurative equivalence: both are tall, blonde women, physically fit and active, in the prime of life, with confident facial expressions and assertive body language. Early in their campaign, the Republicans attacked Hillary Clinton as the new woman who would destroy the traditional one (figured as Barbara Bush) and her “natural” role in the family. Hillary Clinton’s off-the-cuff remark that she had chosen a professional career over staying at home and baking cookies became one of the most controversial and politically charged remarks in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Learning How to Fiske: Theorizing Cultural Literacy, Counter-History, and the Politics of Media Events in the 21st Century
• Introduction
• 1 Murphy Brown, Dan Quayle, and the Family Row of the Year
• 2 Hearing Anita Hill (and Viewing Bill Cosby)
• 3 Los Angeles: A Tale of Three Videos
• 4 Blackstream Knowledge: Genocide
• 5 Technostruggles
• Epilogue: O.J. Simpson: “The Juice Is Loose”
• Appendix: The John Fiske Reading List
• Selected Bibliography
• Index