Screening the Los Angeles 'Riots': Race, Seeing, and Resistance (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies)
Cambridge University Press, 2/22/2010
EAN 9780521578141, ISBN10: 0521578140
Paperback, 332 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
On April 29 1992, the 'worst riots of the century' (Los Angeles Times) erupted. Television news-workers tried frantically to keep up with what was happening on the streets while, around the city, nation and globe, viewers watched intently as leaders, participants and fires flashed across their television screens. Screening the Los Angeles 'Riots' zeros in on the first night of these events, exploring in detail the meanings one news organisation found in them, as well as those made by fifteen groups of viewers in the events' aftermath. Combining ethnographic and quasi-experimental methods, Darnell M. Hunt's account reveals how race shapes both television's construction of news and viewers' understandings of it. He engages with the long-standing debates about the power of television to shape our thoughts versus our ability to resist, and concludes with implications for progressive change.
List of figures
List of tables
Preface
1. Introduction
Part I. Context and Text
2. Media, race and resistance
3. Establishing a meaningful benchmark
the KTTV text and its assumptions
Part II. Audience
4. Stigmatized by association
Latino-raced informants and the KTTV text
5. Ambivalent insiders
black-raced informants and the KTTV text
6. Innocent bystanders
white-raced informants and the KTTV text
Part III. Analysis and Conclusions
7. Raced ways of seeing
8. Meaning-making and resistance
Postscript
Appendices
Notes
References
Index.