Urban Nightmares: The Media, The Right, And The Moral Panic Over The City

Urban Nightmares: The Media, The Right, And The Moral Panic Over The City [ Steve Macek] on leondumoulin.nl *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. For the past .
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Beginning with the assumption from Chomsky and Herman that corporate news media serves the ends of a dominant elite, Macek reports that:. Systematic study after systematic study confirms the soundness of these offhand impressions: Looking at a specific story aired on CBS on 22 September , Macek points out how news coverage enhances the perception of the inner city as the origin of social blight. That is, the inner city is invariably a kind of living hell, while suburbia is defined by its manicured lawns and garden sprinklers as places of peace and tranquillity.

Macek cites several ads for cars, including those for Jeep and Hyundai, which appear to suggest that inner cities in themselves are places that must be escaped from. That is, with the right vehicle, one can escape the horrors of the city for the wide-open spaces of the country-side. However, an equally valid interpretation of these same ads may be that the drive away from the city is less an escape from the city but from the self, and the drudgery of work, family and so on.

Overall, Macek offers an insightful interpretation of the political, social and cultural constructions of the inner city as places of violence and poverty — the basic ideas of which I fully agree with — but tends to be prone to looking at the argument from only one side and failing to see what other approaches and other interpretations may be made of the same material. His other academic interests include media regulation especially censorship and classification , television, media history and media representations of difference.

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Neil has enjoyed film since his childhood and drew on these experiences for his studies and subsequent academic career, and is now keen to pass on this knowledge to his adored wife, Andrea, and her three children, as well as to anyone else with a passion for cinema and other forms of media. Beginning with the assumption from Chomsky and Herman that corporate news media serves the ends of a dominant elite, Macek reports that: Saturday, 1 December Urban America has been consistently depicted as a site of moral decay and uncontrollable violence, held in stark contrast to the allegedly moral, orderly suburbs and exurbs.

In Urban Nightmares, Steve Macek documents the scope of these alarmist representations of the city, examines the ideologies that informed them, and exposes the interests they ultimately served. Macek begins by exploring the conservative analysis of the urban poverty, joblessness, and crime that became entrenched during the post-Vietnam War era. Instead of attributing these conditions to broad social and economic conditions, right-wing intellectuals, pundits, policy analysts, and politicians blamed urban problems on the urban underclass itself. This strategy was successful, Macek argues, in deflecting attention from growing income disparities and in helping to secure popular support both for reactionary social policies and the assumptions underwriting them.

Turning to the media, Macek explains how Hollywood filmmakers, advertisers, and journalists validated the right-wing discourse on the urban crisis, popularizing its vocabulary. Network television news and weekly news magazines, he shows, covered the inner city and its inhabitants in ways consonant with the right's alarmist discourse.

At the same time, Hollywood zealously recycled this antiurban bias in films ranging from genre thrillers like Falling Down and Judgment Night to auteurist efforts like Batman and Seven.


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Even advertising, Macek argues, mobilized fears of a perilous urban realm to sell products from SUVs to home alarm systems. Published during the second term of an American president whose conservative agenda has been an ongoing disaster for the poor and the working class, Urban Nightmares exposes a divisive legacy of media bias against the cities and their inhabitants and issues a wake-up call to readers to recognize that media images shape what we believe about others' and our own place in the real world-and the consequences of those beliefs can be devastating.

Library of Congress subject headings for this publication: Cities and towns -- United States -- Public opinion. Inner cities -- United States.

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Cities and towns in mass media. Urban policy -- United States. Fear of crime -- United States. Read more Read less. Add both to Cart Add both to List. Buy the selected items together This item: Ships from and sold by Amazon. Strangers in Their Own Land: Customers who bought this item also bought. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. Anger and Mourning on the American Right.

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The Culture of Fear: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Sponsored products related to this item What's this? The mechanisms of evil behind the worldwide eugenics craze. Learn how citizens become murderous supporters of euthanasia. Sacred Scroll of Seven Seals: Decoding Adolf Hitler - The mechanisms of evil behind the worldwide eugenics craze. Ace your daily challenges from health, work, and relationships.

Find more happiness and meaning. Follows the ancient wisdom of the 8 Limbs of Yoga. Find your path to meaningful life. Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be? About the Author Steve Macek teaches media studies, urban and suburbia studies, and speech communication at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois.

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Urban Nightmares — University of Minnesota Press

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