TELEVISION THEORY 29

TELEVISION THEORY 29

study of the media is “regarded by the pooh- bahs in history, polit- ical science, and sociology as having roughly the same intellectual merit as, say, driver’s education” (2007: 16). Similar attitudes abound across the humanities (Hilmes 2005: 113): for the Times Literary Supplement, media and cultural studies form the “politico- intellectual junkyard of the Western world” (Minogue 1994: 27). Pet Tory philosopher Roger Scruton denounces media studies as “sub- Marxist gobbledook [sic]” (quoted in Beckett 2004). Probably the most- read academic work on television, The Simpsons and Philo- sophy (Irwin et al. 2001) sold a quarter of a million copies within six years and had no relationship to the work done over many decades in TV studies, so Olympian were its views of the world (as per Amusing Ourselves to Death) (Asma 2007). Britain’s former Inspector of Schools denounces media studies as “a subject with little intellectual coherence and meager relevance to the world of work” (Woodhead 2009). Critics hold it “responsible for every- thing from undergraduates arriving at university unable to write proper sentences to the precipitous decline in the numbers taking Latin and Greek. No subject is the focus of so much sneering” and Cambridge, for example, derides it tout court (Morrison 2008). In Australia, where some media courses are very difficult to get into and require high entry scores, reactionaries decry the area as obscu- rantist, “degenerate” (a wonderful term) and misleading, because it supposedly attracts students through pseudo- vocationalism while in fact lacking articulations to industry (Windschuttle 2006).

Similar attitudes are expressed by the bourgeois British and Yanqui media, business leeches, and politicians. The Observer scornfully mocks us with a parental parody: “what better way to have our little work- shy scholars rushing off to read an improving book than to enthuse loudly in their presence about how the

omnibus edition of EastEnders is the new double physics?” (Hogan 2004). The Village Voice dubs TV studies “the ultimate capitulation to the MTV mind . . . couchpotatodom writ large . . . just as Milton doesn’t belong in the rave scene, sitcoms don’t belong in the canon or the classroom” (Vincent 2000). The Wall Street Journal describes media studies as “deeply threatening to traditional leftist views of commerce,” because its notions of active consumption are close to those of the right: “cultural- studies mavens are betraying the leftist cause, lending support to the corporate enemy and even training

30 TELEVISION STUDIES: THE BASICS graduate students who wind up doing market research” (Postrel

1999). The Daily Telegraph thunders that media studies is “quasi- academic” (Lightfoot 2005; Paton 2007a), while Guardian news- paper columnist Simon Hoggart could be seen on British television in 2000 chiding local universities for wasting time on this nonsense when they should be in step with Harvard and MIT. Chris Patten,

a former Conservative Party politician and the last Governor of Hong Kong, refers to the discipline as “Disneyland for the weaker minded” (quoted in Morley 2007: 17). The Conservative Party and Alan Sugar, UK inquisitor for The Apprentice (2005–), then a Labour Party politico, worry that TV Studies “may be putting future scientific and medical innovation under threat” and “under- mining the economy” (Paton 2007b, 2008).

Media studies’ popularity with students (in 1997, 31,000 English school pupils took it; in 2008, the number was 58,000) often irri- tates right- wing anti- intellectuals working in the media (Morrison 2008; Ellis 2005). Such people favor market- based education derived from preferences – other than when they lead people to learn about television! So we see the study of the media being simultaneously more vocational than many other subjects, due to its commitment to production skills and news- and-current affairs research; more populist, given its legitimization of the everyday and its success with students; and more politicized, because in the British tradition it has been influenced by leftists and feminists (Turner 2007). At the same time, much as it might decry the radi- calism of some of these influences, the shameless UK government claims that Britain “leads the way worldwide in the study of media-