TELEVISION THEORY 23

“Television is vast” – both as an institution and an object of analysis (Hilmes 2005: 113). That vastness contributes to the televisual sublime already described. It’s not surprising, then, that TV studies is characterized by major debates and differences, since its analysts “speak different languages, use different methods,” and pursue “different questions” (Hartley 1999: 18). Perhaps “the most salient feature of the study of television may be its institutional dispersal” (Attallah 2007: 339).

TV has given rise to three major topics of scholarly inquiry: •฀ technology, ownership, and control – its political economy;

•฀ textuality – its content; and •฀ audiences – its public.

Within these categories lie three further divisions: •฀ approaches to technology, ownership, and control vary between

neoliberal endorsements of limited regulation by the state, in the interests of protecting property and guaranteeing market entry for new competitors, and Marxist critiques of the bour- geois media for controlling the socio- political agenda;

•฀ approaches to textuality vary between hermeneutics, which unearths the meaning of individual programs and links them to

broader social formations and problems, and content analysis, which establishes patterns across significant numbers of similar texts, rather than close readings of individual ones; and

•฀ approaches to audiences vary between social–psychological attempts to validate correlations between TV and social conduct, political–economic critiques of imported texts threatening national culture, and celebrations of spectators making their own interpretations.

These tasks in turn articulate to particular academic disciplines, which are tied to particular interests of state and capital:

•฀ engineering, computing, public policy, and “film” schools help create and run TV production and reception via business, the military, the community, and the public service;

24 TELEVISION STUDIES: THE BASICS •฀ communication studies focuses on socio- economic projects such

as propaganda, marketing, and citizenship; •฀ economics theorizes and polices doctrines of scarcity, and manages over- production through overseas expansion; •฀ Marxism points to the impact of ownership and control and cultural imperialism on TV and consciousness; and •฀ cultural criticism evaluates representation, justifies protection- ism, and calls for content provision.

Lest this appear to be a tendentious insider’s guide, you can visit the US National Center for Education Statistics’ Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP 2000), which categorizes mass communication/media studies as “the analysis and criticism of media institu- tions and media texts, how people experience and understand media content, and the roles of media in producing and transforming culture” via foci on law, policy, history, aesthetics, effects, economics, and literacy (09.0102), or the British Government’s Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education. It says that critical media literacy is essential equipment for citizenship and “mapping the contemporary” (2002) using tools from political economy, representation, aesthetics, discourse, consumption, identity, and ideol- ogy, frequently wrapped into production training (2007). The British model provides a less positivistic and reactionary set of skills, informed by social theory and progressive politics. This is in keeping with the fact that Western- European academia, for all its shortcom- ings, is less stitched- in than its US equivalent to either the welfare and warfare social- science bureaucracy or the high- aesthetic privi- lege of the philanthropic humanities and art worlds.

more restrictive ideas about how to study television, especially in

Many regulatory bodies with responsibility for the medium have

the US. Reed Hundt, Chair of the Federal Communications Com- mission (FCC) under Bill Clinton, argues that TV regulators must

be “instructed at least rudimentarily in economics, antitrust, network operation, and administrative procedure” (Hundt and Rosston 2006: 33) – a drastically limited toolkit typical of the welfare–warfare bureaucracy/social- science nexus. What would be the impact if we supplemented or supplanted those skills by the labor theory of value, critiques of monopoly capital, content and textual analysis, ethnography, and effects research? This would

TELEVISION THEORY 23