US Media System
Professor Elavsky
Week 1/2

Questions
•Where have you been in the world? What countries have you visited?
•What countries or regions of the world do you feel that you have some familiarity with? Why?
•What countries or regions of the world do you feel that you know very little about? Why?
•What kinds of foreign newspapers, radio programs, television shows, and web sites from other
countries have you been exposed to?
•What is the distinction between Entertainment and News ?
•What are the main sources of information in your life (media sources and non-media sources) that
have taught you about those countries and regions of the world that you have not visited?
•Do you follow the news?
•How do you understand the media? The media system from your culture
•Comparing?
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What does it mean to compare?
•United States
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• Czech Republic
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• Your Country
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§How do we grasp the Structure of Feeling & Cultural Logics in a country?
§What are the pros/cons of interpreting foreign ideas, belief systems, policies, symbols, meanings,
and actions through your cultural lens?
§What is cultural myopia?
§How can we interpret the dynamics of media/cultural systems?
§Difficulties of “Interpreting”?
§Interpreting “America”
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What is Critical Thinking?
•Putting it all together so it makes “sense”:
•Culture
•Structure
•Logics
•Representation
•Observation
•Interpretation
•Understanding (your own culture)

Rhetorical Perspective
•Refers to how the audience is invited to think/feel/behave in a particular context
•There is no fixed meaning to a phenomenon
•meaning emerges in context with audience proclivities (i.e. audiences are active and
contextualized)
•It provides a way to analyze what we THINK we know through the media
•looks at how thoughts and opinions are shaped by routine sources of information and entertainment,
which are further shaped by the unique elements and dynamics of a country’s media system in its
larger systemic interactions
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•Comparisons: denaturalize social relations, helping us understand that media systems are
historically constructed, culturally inflected and mutable
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•Society and Nation-State are intertwined; organizes rights and duties of citizens
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•The relationships between society, culture, and the media = complex and constantly changing
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•Comparisons allow for
•A vision of relationships in a society
•A better understanding of that society in its context
•A vision of the complexity and constant changing of those relationships between culture, society,
and media
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•Comparing media environments against one another
•illuminates how media environments are part of overlapping nationally and internationally defined
sociocultural and political milieu
•allows us to explore the different ways in which the relationships between society, culture, and
the media have been defined within each system and the ways in which they have changed over time,
as they deal with numerous internal and external pressures

The Nation State as Framework for Analysis
•3 Critiques
•concept is outdated and methodologically flawed;
•ties media cultures to nation-states in ways that are no longer appropriate;
•a ‘system’ itself is not an analytical unit for comparative study
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•Nation-State
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•“Global” Culture/Media vs. “National” Culture/Media
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•‘the national remains a powerful mode for engaging the spatial and temporal practices that
organize the contemporary media industries across various economies of scale … [and] have created a
powerful incentive for media industries to continue to “think nationally” even in a globally
dispersed field of cultural production’