Introduction to Media Studies Test Two

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First run theaters

(about 15% of the nation's theaters), which premiered new films in major downtown areas and generated 85 to 95 percent of all film revenue

narrative

American filmmakers from D. W. Griffith to Steven Spielberg have understood the allure of _________, which always includes two basic components: the story (what happens to whom) and the discourse (how the story is told). Further, Hollywood codified a familiar ___________ structure across all genres. Most movies, like most TV shows and novels, feature recognizable character types (protagonist, antagonist, romantic interest, sidekick); a clear beginning, middle, and end (even with flashbacks and flash-forwards, the sequence of events is usually clear to the viewer); and a plot propelled by the main character's experiencing and resolving a conflict by the end of the movie.

The payola scandals of the 1950s were another cloud over rock-and-roll music and its artists. In the music industry, payola is the practice of record promoters' paying deejays or radio programmers to play particular songs. As recorded rock and roll became central to commercial radio's success in the 1950s and the demand for airplay grew, independent promoters hired by record labels used payola to pressure deejays into playing songs by the artists they represented. Although payola was considered a form of bribery, no laws prohibited its practice. However, following closely on the heels of television's quiz-show scandals (see Chapter 6), congressional hearings on radio payola began in December 1959. The hearings were partly a response to generally fraudulent business practices, but they were also an opportunity to blame deejays and radio for rock and roll's supposedly negative impact on teens by portraying rock and roll (and its radio advocates) as a corrupt industry. The payola scandals threatened, ended, or damaged the careers of a number of rock-and-roll deejays and undermined rock and roll's credibility for a number of years. At the hearings in 1960, Alan Freed admitted to participating in payola, although he said he did not believe there was anything illegal about such deals, and his career soon ended. Dick Clark, then an influential deejay and the host of TV's American Bandstand, would not admit to participating in payola. The hearings committee nevertheless chastised Clark and alleged that some of his complicated business deals were ethically questionable, a censure that hung over him for years. Congress eventually added a law concerning payola to the Federal Communications Act, prescribing a $10,000 fine and/or a year in jail for each violation (see Chapter 5).

Payola Scandal Tarnishes Rock and Roll

The MPAA copyrighted all ratings designations as trademarks except for the X rating, which was gradually appropriated as a promotional tool by the pornographic film industry. In fact, between 1972 and 1989, the MPAA stopped issuing the X rating. In 1990, however, based on protests from filmmakers over movies with adult sexual themes that they did not consider pornographic, the industry copyrighted the NC-17 rating—no children age seventeen or under. In 1995, Showgirls became the first movie to intentionally seek an NC-17 to demonstrate that the rating was commercially viable. However, many theater chains refused to carry NC-17 movies, fearing economic sanctions and boycotts by their customers or religious groups. Many newspapers also refused to carry ads for NC-17 films. Panned by the critics, Showgirls flopped at the box office. Since then, the NC-17 rating has not proved commercially viable, and distributors avoid releasing films with the rating, preferring either to label such films "unrated" or to cut the films to earn an R rating, as happened with Clerks (1994), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Brüno (2009), and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). Today, there is mounting protest against the MPAA, which many argue is essentially a censorship board that limits the First Amendment rights of filmmakers.

Pros and cons of the MPAA

In 1952, the Supreme Court heard the Miracle case—officially Burstyn v. Wilson—named after Roberto Rossellini's film Il Miracolo (The Miracle). The movie's distributor sued the head of the New York Film Licensing Board for banning the film. A few New York City religious and political leaders considered the 1948 Italian film sacrilegious and pressured the film board for the ban. In the film, an unmarried peasant girl is impregnated by a scheming vagrant who tells her that he is St. Joseph and she has conceived the baby Jesus. The importers of the film argued that censoring it constituted illegal prior restraint under the First Amendment. Because such an action could not be imposed on a print version of the same story, the film's distributor argued that the same freedom should apply to the film. The Supreme Court agreed, declaring movies "a significant medium for the communication of ideas." The decision granted films the same constitutional protections as those enjoyed by the print media and other forms of speech. Even more important, the decision rendered most activities of film review boards unconstitutional because these boards had been engaged in prior restraint. Although a few local boards survived into the 1990s to handle complaints about obscenity, most of them had disbanded by the early 1970s.

The Miracle Case

During the 1930s, the movie business faced a new round of challenges. First, various conservative and religious groups—including the influential Catholic Legion of Decency—increased their scrutiny of the industry. Second, deteriorating economic conditions during the Great Depression forced the industry to tighten self-regulation in order to maintain profits and keep harmful public pressure at bay. In 1927, the Hays Office had developed a list of "Don'ts and Be Carefuls" to steer producers and directors away from questionable sexual, moral, and social themes. Nevertheless, pressure for a more formal and sweeping code mounted. As a result, in the early 1930s the Hays Office established the Motion Picture Production Code, whose overseers were charged with officially stamping Hollywood films with a moral seal of approval. The Code laid out its mission in its first general principle: "No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrong-doing, evil or sin." The Code dictated how producers and directors should handle "methods of crime," "repellent subjects," and "sex hygiene." A section on profanity outlawed a long list of phrases and topics, including "toilet gags" and "traveling salesmen and farmer's daughter jokes." Under "scenes of passion," the Code dictated that "excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures and gestures are not to be shown," and it required that "passion should be treated in such a manner as not to stimulate the lower and baser emotions." The section on religion revealed the influences of a Jesuit priest and a Catholic publisher, who helped write the Code: "No film or episode may throw ridicule on any religious faith," and "ministers of religion . . . should not be used as comic characters or as villains." Adopted by 95 percent of the industry, the Code influenced nearly every commercial movie made between the mid-1930s and the early 1950s. It also gave the industry a relative degree of freedom, enabling the major studios to remain independent of outside regulation. When television arrived, however, competition from the new family medium forced movie producers to explore more adult subjects.

The Motion Picture Production Code

If the history of recorded music tells us anything, it is that tastes change and formats change over time. Today, streaming music is quickly becoming the format of choice. In the language of the music industry, we are shifting from ownership of music to access to music.13 The access model has been driven by the availability of streaming services such as the Sweden-based Spotify, which made its debut in the United States in 2011 and hit seventy-one million worldwide subscribers in 2018. Other services include Apple Music, Google Play Music, Amazon Music, Tidal, Deezer, and SoundCloud. With these services, listeners can pay a subscription fee (typically $5 to $10 per month) and instantly play millions of songs on demand via the Internet. YouTube and Vevo also supply ad-supported music streaming, and have wide international use. The key difference between streaming music (like Spotify) and streaming radio (like Pandora) is that streaming music enables the listener to select any song on demand. Streaming radio enables the listener to pick a style of music but lacks the option of songs on demand. Yet the line is often blurred, even by streaming services. For example, at $10 per month, premium Spotify is ad-free and allows subscribers to access any song on demand and stream offline. However, the free version of Spotify is more like radio in that listeners do not have complete control over song selection.

What role has the Internet played in the music business? Pandora?

The MP3 file format, developed in 1992, enables digital recordings to be compressed into smaller, more manageable files. With the increasing popularity of the Internet in the mid-1990s, computer users began swapping MP3 music files online because they could be uploaded or downloaded in a fraction of the time it took to exchange noncompressed music files. By 1999, the year Napster's infamous free file-sharing service brought the MP3 format to popular attention, music files were widely available on the Internet—some for sale, some legally available for free downloading, and many for trading in possible violation of copyright laws. Despite the higher quality of industry-manufactured CDs, music fans enjoyed the convenience of downloading MP3 files. Losing countless music sales to illegal downloading, the music industry fought the proliferation of the MP3 format with an array of lawsuits (aimed at file-sharing companies and at individual downloaders), but the popularity of MP3s continued to increase. In 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the music industry and against Napster, declaring free music file-swapping illegal and in violation of music copyrights held by recording labels and artists. It was relatively easy for the music industry to shut down Napster (which later relaunched as a legal service) because it required users to log into a centralized system. However, the music industry's elimination of file-sharing was not complete, as decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, such as Grokster, LimeWire, Morpheus, Kazaa, eDonkey, eMule, and BitTorrent, once again enabled free music file-sharing. The recording industry fought back with thousands of lawsuits, many of them successful. By 2010, Grokster, eDonkey, Morpheus, and LimeWire had been shut down, while Kazaa settled a lawsuit with the music industry and became a legal service.11 By 2011, several major Internet service providers, including AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon, had agreed to help the music industry identify customers who may have been illegally downloading music and try to prevent them from doing so by sending them "copyright alert" warning letters, redirecting them to web pages about digital piracy, and ultimately slowing download speeds or closing their broadband accounts.

What role has the Internet played in the music business? Pirating?

Warner Brothers, Paramount, 21st Century Fox, Universal, Columbia Pictures, and Disney—the Big Six

Who are the current major film studios?

Wanting to free their movie operations from the Trust's tyrannical grasp, two Hungarian immigrants—Adolph Zukor, who would eventually run Paramount Pictures, and William Fox, who would found the Fox Film Corporation (which later became Twentieth Century Fox)—played a role in the collapse of Edison's Trust. Zukor's early companies figured out ways to bypass the Trust, and a suit by Fox, a nickelodeon operator turned film distributor, resulted in the Trust's breakup due to restraint-of-trade violations in 1917. Responding to discerning audiences and competing against Edison's Trust, Adolph Zukor hired a number of popular actors and formed the Famous Players Company in 1912. His idea was to control movie production not through patents but through exclusive contracts with actors.

Who was Adolph Zukor? What did he own?

By the 1910s, movies had become a major industry. Among the first to try his hand at dominating the movie business and reaping its profits, Thomas Edison formed the Motion Picture Patents Company, known as the Trust, in 1908. A cartel of major U.S. and French film producers, the company pooled patents in an effort to control film's major technology, acquired most major film distributorships, and signed an exclusive deal with George Eastman, who agreed to supply movie film only to Trust-approved companies.

Who was Thomas Edison? What did he own?

Who was William Fox and what did he own?

The Trust (Thomas Edison), Paramount Pictures (Zukor), Fox Film Corporation (Twentieth Century Fox, William Fox)

Who were the major film studios?

Under the sway of objectivity, modern journalism had downplayed an early role of the partisan press: to offer analysis and opinion. But with the world becoming more complex, some papers began to revisit the analytical function of news. The result was the rise of interpretive journalism, which aims to explain key issues or events and place them in a broader historical or social context. This shift allowed journalism to take an analytic turn in a world grown more interconnected and complicated. By the 1920s, editor and columnist Walter Lippmann insisted that the press should do more. Noting that objectivity and factuality should serve as the foundation for journalism, Lippmann ranked three press responsibilities: (1) "to make a current record"; (2) "to make a running analysis of it"; and (3) "on the basis of both, to suggest plans."

Why did interpretive journalism develop?

As the consumer marketplace expanded during the Industrial Revolution, facts and news became marketable products. Throughout the mid-nineteenth century, the more a newspaper appeared not to take sides on its front pages, the more its readership base grew (although, as they are today, editorial pages were still often partisan). In addition, wire service organizations were serving a variety of newspaper clients in different regions of the country. To satisfy all clients, readers, and the wide range of political views, newspapers tried to appear more impartial. Partly as a marketing strategy, Ochs offered a distinct contrast to the more sensational Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers: an informational paper that provided stock and real estate reports to businesses, court reports to legal professionals, treaty summaries to political leaders, and theater and book reviews to educated general readers and intellectuals. Ochs's promotional gimmicks took direct aim at yellow journalism, advertising the Times under the motto "It does not soil the breakfast cloth." Ochs's strategy is similar to today's advertising tactic of targeting upscale viewers and readers, who control a disproportionate share of consumer dollars. With the Hearst and Pulitzer papers capturing the bulk of working- and middle-class readers, managers at the Times first tried to use their straightforward, "no frills" reporting to appeal to more affluent and educated readers. In 1898, however, Ochs lowered the paper's price to a penny. He believed that people bought the World and the Journal primarily because they were cheap, not because of their stories. The Times began attracting middle-class readers who gravitated to the now-affordable paper as a status marker for the educated and well informed. Between 1898 and 1899, its circulation rose from 25,000 to 75,000. By 1921, the Times had a daily circulation of 330,000, and 500,000 on Sunday.

Why did objective journalism develop after yellow journalism?

However, some independent producers refused to bow to the Trust's terms. They saw too much demand for films, too much money to be made, and too many ways to avoid the Trust's scrutiny. Some producers began to relocate from the centers of film production in New York and New Jersey to Cuba and Florida. Ultimately, though, Hollywood became the film capital of the world. Southern California offered cheap labor, diverse scenery for outdoor shooting, and a mild climate suitable for year-round production. Geographically far from the Trust's headquarters in New Jersey, independent producers in Hollywood could easily slip over the border into Mexico to escape legal prosecution brought by the Trust for patent violations.

Why did the studio system move from New York to Hollywood?

In 1927, Warner Brothers produced The Jazz Singer, a feature-length film starring Al Jolson, a charismatic and popular vaudeville singer who wore blackface makeup as part of his act. This further demonstrated, as did The Birth of a Nation, that racism in America carried into the film industry. An experiment, The Jazz Singer was basically a silent film interspersed with musical numbers and brief dialogue ("Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet"). At first there was only modest interest in the movie, which featured just 354 spoken words. But the film grew in popularity as it toured the Midwest, where audiences stood and cheered the short bursts of dialogue.

Why was the movie "Jazz Singer" important?

yellow journalism

a newspaper style or era that peaked in the 1890s, it emphasized high-interest stories, sensational crime news, large headlines, and serious reports that exposed corruption, particularly in business and government.

interpretive journalism

a type of journalism that involves analyzing and explaining key issues or events and placing them in a broader historical or social context.

right to privacy

addresses a person's right to be left alone, without his or her name, image, or daily activities becoming public property.

partisan press

an early dominant style of American journalism distinguished by opinion newspapers, which generally argued one political point of view or pushed the plan of the particular party that subsidized the paper.

studio system

an early film production system that constituted a sort of assembly-line process for moviemaking; major film studios controlled not only actors but also directors, editors, writers, and other employees, all of whom worked under exclusive contracts.

block booking

an early tactic of movie studios to control exhibition, involving pressuring theater operators to accept marginal films with no stars in order to get access to films with the most popular stars.

filter bubbles

are algorithms used on the internet to selectively guess what information a user would like to see based on information available about that use

In the 1950s, legal integration accompanied a cultural shift, and the music industry's race and pop charts blurred. White deejay Alan Freed had been playing black music for his young audiences in Cleveland and New York since the early 1950s, and such white performers as Johnnie Ray and Bill Haley had crossed over to the race charts to score R&B hits. Meanwhile, black artists like Chuck Berry were performing country songs, and for a time, Ray Charles even played in an otherwise all-white country band. Although continuing the work of breaking down racial borders was one of rock and roll's most important contributions, the genre also blurred other long-standing distinctions between high and low culture, masculinity and femininity, the country and the city, the North and the South, and the sacred and the secular.

conflicts within rock and roll

conflict of interest

considered unethical, a compromising situation in which a journalist stands to benefit personally from the news report he or she produces.

Since the 1730s, the best defense against libel in American courts has been the truth. In most cases, if libel defendants can demonstrate that they printed or broadcast statements that were essentially true, such evidence usually bars plaintiffs from recovering any damages—even if their reputations were harmed. In addition, there are other defenses against libel. Prosecutors, for example, who would otherwise be vulnerable to being accused of libel, are granted absolute privilege in a court of law so that they are not prevented from making accusatory statements toward defendants. The reporters who print or broadcast statements made in court are also protected against libel; they are granted conditional or qualified privilege, allowing them to report judicial or legislative proceedings even though the public statements being reported may be libelous. Another defense against libel is the rule of opinion and fair comment. Generally, libel applies only to intentional misstatements of factual information rather than opinion, and therefore opinions are protected from libel. However, because the line between fact and opinion is often hazy, lawyers advise journalists to first set forth the facts on which a viewpoint is based and then state their opinion based on those facts. In other words, journalists should make it clear that a statement of opinion is a criticism and not an allegation of fact. Libel laws also protect satire, comedy, and opinions expressed in reviews of books, plays, movies, and restaurants. Such laws may not, however, protect malicious statements in which plaintiffs can prove that defendants used their free-speech rights to mount a damaging personal attack.

defense against libel charges

An early effort to control movie distribution occurred around 1904, when movie companies provided vaudeville theaters with films and projectors on a film exchange system. In exchange for their short films, shown between live acts, movie producers received a small percentage of the vaudeville ticket-gate receipts. Gradually, as the number of production companies and the popularity of narrative films grew, demand for a distribution system serving national and international markets increased as well. One of the ways Edison's Trust sought to control distribution was by withholding equipment from companies not willing to pay the Trust's patent-use fees. However, as with the production of film, independent film companies looked for distribution strategies outside the Trust. Again, Adolph Zukor led the fight, developing block booking. Under this system, which was eventually outlawed as monopolistic, exhibitors had to agree to rent new or marginal films with no stars in order to gain access to popular films with big stars like Mary Pickford. Such contracts enabled the new studios to test-market new stars without taking much financial risk. Another distribution strategy involved the marketing of American films in Europe. When World War I disrupted the once-powerful European film production industry, only U.S. studios were able to meet the demand for films in Europe. The war marked a turning point and made the United States the leader in the commercial movie business worldwide. After the war, no other nation's film industry could compete economically with Hollywood. By the mid-1920s, foreign revenue from U.S. films totaled $100 million. Today, Hollywood continues to dominate the world market.

distribution

Obsenity

expression that is not protected as speech if these three legal tests are all met: (1) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the material as a whole appeals to prurient interest; (2) the material depicts or describes sexual conduct in a patently offensive way; (3) the material, as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

It is this cynicism that has drawn increasingly young audiences to so-called fake news shows like Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Trevor Noah; TBS's Full Frontal with Samantha Bee; HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and Seth Meyers's "A Closer Look" segments on NBC's Late Night program. Following in the tradition of Saturday Night Live (SNL), which began in 1975, news satires tell their audiences something that seems truthful about politicians and how they try to manipulate media and public opinion. But most important, these shows use humor and detailed research to critique the news media and our political system. SNL's sketches on GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in 2008, when Seth Meyers served as the show's head writer, drew large audiences and shaped the way younger viewers thought about the election. By the 2016 campaign, all the current news satires were aiming their sharp acerbic lenses at Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, as well as at CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. In reality, at their best, these programs, which employ numerous researchers and writers, do some of the best reporting on the state of our politics and provide some of the best criticism of the so-called non-news media.fake-

fake news

ust as nickelodeons, movie palaces, and drive-ins transformed movie exhibition in earlier times, the introduction of cable television and the videocassette in the 1970s transformed contemporary movie exhibition. Although the video market became a financial bonanza for the movie industry, Hollywood ironically tried to stall the arrival of the VCR in the 1970s—even filing lawsuits to prohibit customers from copying movies from television. The 1997 introduction of the DVD helped reinvigorate the flat sales of the home video market as people began to acquire new movie collections on DVD. Today, home movie exhibition is again in transition, this time from DVD to Internet streaming. As DVD purchases began to decline, Hollywood endorsed the high-definition format Blu-ray in 2008 to revive sales, but the format didn't grow quickly enough to help the video store business. The Movie Gallery-Hollywood Video chain shuttered its stores in 2010, and the biggest chain, Blockbuster, closed most of its stores by 2013. The only bright spot in DVD rentals has been at the low end of the market—automated kiosks like Redbox that rent movies for $1.50 to $2.00 a day—but even the kiosk rental business began to flatline by 2013. The future of the video business is in Internet distribution. Movie fans can rent or purchase from services like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Google Play, and the iTunes store and view on smart TVs or with devices like Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV Stick, Google Chromecast, TiVo Premiere, or video game consoles. As people invest in wide-screen TVs and sophisticated sound systems, home entertainment is getting bigger and keeping pace with the movie theater experience. Interestingly, home entertainment is also getting smaller—movies are becoming increasingly available to stream and download on portable devices like tablets, laptop computers, and smartphones.

how did the appearance of home entertainment impact Hollywood?

With the major studios exerting such a profound influence on the worldwide production, distribution, and exhibition of movies, new alternatives have helped open and redefine the movie industry. The digital revolution in movie production is the most recent opportunity to wrest some power away from the Hollywood studios. Substantially cheaper and more accessible than standard film equipment, digital video is a shift from celluloid film; it allows filmmakers to replace expensive and bulky 16-mm and 35-mm film cameras with less expensive, lightweight digital video cameras. For moviemakers, digital video also means seeing camera work instantly, instead of waiting for film to be developed, and being able to capture additional footage without concern for the high cost of film stock and processing. Though digital video has become commonplace on big studio productions, the greatest impact of digital technology has been on independent filmmakers. Low-cost digital video opened up the creative process to countless new artists. With digital video camera equipment and computer-based desktop editors, movies can be made for a fraction of what the cost would be on film. Some feature films—Unsane (2018) and Tangerine (2015), for example—were actually shot on iPhones. Digital cameras are now the norm for independent filmmakers. Ironically, both independent and Hollywood filmmakers have to contend with issues of preserving digital content: Celluloid film stock can last a hundred years, whereas digital formats can be lost as storage formats fail and devices become obsolete.25 Because digital production puts movies in the same format as the Internet, independent filmmakers have new distribution venues beyond film festivals or the major studios. For example, Vimeo, YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon have grown into leading Internet sites for the screening and distribution of short films and film festival entries, providing filmmakers with their most valuable asset—an audience.

how did the digital age influence the movie industry?

Although United Artists represented a brief triumph of autonomy for a few powerful actors, by the 1920s the studio system firmly controlled creative talent in the industry. Pioneered by director Thomas Ince and his company, Triangle, the studio system constituted a sort of assembly-line process for moviemaking: actors, directors, editors, writers, and others all worked under exclusive contracts for the major studios. Ince also developed the notion of the studio head; he appointed producers to handle hiring, logistics, and finances so that he could more easily supervise many pictures at one time. The system was so efficient that each major studio was producing a feature film every week. Pooling talent, rather than patents, was a more ingenious approach for movie studios aiming to dominate film production.

how did the studio system work?

he rise of competitive dailies and the penny press triggered the next significant period in American journalism. In the late 1800s, yellow journalism emphasized profitable papers that carried exciting human-interest stories, crime news, large headlines, and more readable copy. Generally regarded as sensationalistic and the direct forerunner of today's tabloid papers, reality TV, and celebrity-centered shows like Access Hollywood, yellow journalism featured two major developments: the emphasis on sensational or overly dramatic stories and early in-depth "detective" stories—the legacy for twentieth-century investigative journalism (news reports that hunt out and expose corruption, particularly in business and government). Reporting during this yellow journalism period increasingly became a crusading force for common people, with the press assuming a watchdog role on their behalf. During this period, a newspaper circulation war pitted Joseph Pulitzer's New York World against William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. A key player in the war was the Yellow Kid, the main character in the first popular cartoon strip, Hogan's Alley, created in 1895 by artist R. F. Outcault, who once worked for Thomas Edison. The phrase yellow journalism has since become associated with the strip, which shuttled back and forth between the Hearst and Pulitzer papers during their furious battle for readers in the mid- to late 1890s.

how did yellow journalism arise?

With climbing film costs, creating revenue from a movie is a formidable task. Studios make money on movies from six major sources: First, the studios get a portion of the theater box-office revenue—about 40 percent of the box-office take (the theaters get the rest). More recently, studios have found that they can often reel in bigger box-office receipts for 3-D films and their higher ticket prices. For example, admission to the 2-D version of a film costs $16 at a New York City multiplex, while the 3-D version costs more than $20 at the same theater. As Hollywood makes more 3-D films (the latest form of product differentiation), the challenge for major studios has been to increase the number of digital 3-D screens across the country. By 2017, about 39 percent of U.S. theater screens were capable of showing digital 3-D. Second, about three to four months after the theatrical release comes the home video market, which includes subscription streaming, video-on-demand (VOD), and the remaining Blu-ray and DVD sales and rental business. This second release "window" generates more revenue than the domestic box-office income for major studios, but it has been in transition as VOD has replaced the Blu-ray and DVD formats. Video-on-demand includes services like iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Vudu, Hulu Plus, and Netflix, and the VOD services of cable companies like Comcast, Cox, AT&T, and Verizon, and satellite providers DirecTV and Dish. Depending on the agreement with the film distributer, movies may be purchased for instant viewing, rented for a limited time at a lower price, or instantly streamed as part of a monthly fee for access to a company's entire library of licensed offerings. (Netflix, the largest streaming service, has over fifty-six million subscribers in the United States.) Generally, discount rental kiosk companies like Redbox must wait twenty-eight days after films go on sale before they can rent them. Netflix has entered into a similar agreement with movie studios in exchange for more video-streaming content—a concession to Hollywood's preference to try to reap the greater profits from selling movies as digital downloads or as DVDs before renting them or licensing them to a streaming service. Independent films and documentaries often bypass the theatrical box-office release window entirely because of the necessary steep marketing expenses and instead go straight to home video for release. There is pressure from services like Netflix for Hollywood to release films simultaneously to the home video market and to theaters, but the theater industry and its major studio allies have fiercely protected the three- to four-month exclusive window that theaters have for movie releases, arguing that to lose exclusivity would destroy the movie theater business.20 Netflix and Amazon have begun to make their own films, which enables them to control the release dates at least on those films. Third are the next "windows" of release for a film: premium cable (such as HBO and Showtime), then network and basic cable showings, and finally the syndicated TV market. The price these cable and television outlets pay to the studios is negotiated on a film-by-film basis. Fourth, studios earn revenue from distributing films in foreign markets. In fact, at a record-breaking $39.9 billion in 2017, international box-office gross revenues are more than triple the U.S. and Canadian box-office receipts, and they continue to climb annually, even as other countries produce more of their own films. Fifth, studios make money by distributing the work of independent producers and filmmakers, who hire the studios to gain wider circulation. Independents pay the studios between 30 and 50 percent of the box-office and home video dollars they make from movies. Sixth, revenue is earned from merchandise licensing and product placements in movies. In the early days of television and film, characters generally used generic products, or product labels weren't highlighted in shots. But with soaring film production costs, product placements are adding extra revenue while lending an element of authenticity to the staging. Famous product placements in movies include Reese's Pieces in E.T. (1982), Pepsi-Cola in Back to the Future II (1989), and an entire line of toy products in The Lego Movie (2014).

how movies studios make money on movies?

Common sense might suggest that television alone precipitated the decline in post-World War II movie attendance, but the most dramatic drop actually occurred in the late 1940s—before most Americans even owned TV sets.16 The transformation from a wartime economy and a surge in consumer production had a significant impact on moviegoing. With industries turning from armaments to appliances, Americans started cashing in their wartime savings bonds for household goods and new cars. Discretionary income that formerly went to buying movie tickets now went to acquiring consumer products, and the biggest product of all was a new house far from the downtown movie theaters—in the suburbs, where tax bases were lower. Home ownership in the United States doubled between 1945 and 1950, while the moviegoing public decreased just as quickly. Additionally, after the war, the average age for couples entering marriage dropped from twenty-four to nineteen. Unlike their parents, many postwar couples had their first child before they turned twenty-one. The combination of social and economic changes meant there were significantly fewer couples dating at the movies. Then, when television exploded in the late 1950s, there was even less discretionary income—and less reason to go to the movies.

how suburbanization impacted Hollywood?

In the late 1940s, radio's popularity had a strong impact on film. Not only were 1948 and 1949 high points in radio listenership, but with the mass migration to the suburbs, radio offered Americans an inexpensive entertainment alternative to the movies (as it had during the Great Depression). As a result, many people stayed home and listened to radio programs—that is, until the mid-1950s, when both radio and movies were displaced by television as the medium of national entertainment. The movie industry responded to this change in a variety of ways. First, with growing legions of people gathering around their living room TV sets, movie content slowly shifted toward more serious subjects. At first, this shift was a response to the war and an acknowledgment of life's complexity, but later movies focused on subject matter that television did not encourage. This shift had begun with film noir in the 1940s but it continued into the 1950s, as commercial movies, for the first time, explored larger social problems, such as alcoholism (The Lost Weekend, 1945), anti-Semitism (Gentleman's Agreement, 1947), mental illness (The Snake Pit, 1948), racism (Pinky, 1949), adult-teen relationships (Rebel without a Cause, 1955), drug abuse (The Man with the Golden Arm, 1955), and—perhaps most controversial—sexuality (Peyton Place, 1957; Butterfield 8, 1960; Lolita, 1962). These and other films challenged the authority of the industry's own prohibitive Motion Picture Production Code. Hollywood adopted the Code in the early 1930s to restrict film depictions of violence, crime, drug use, and sexual behavior and to quiet public and political concerns that the movie business was lowering the moral standards of America. (For more on the Code, see Chapter 16.) In 1967, after the Code had been ignored by producers for several years, the Motion Picture Association of America initiated the current ratings system, which rated films for age appropriateness rather than censoring all adult content. Second, just as radio worked to improve sound to maintain an advantage over television in the 1950s, the film industry introduced a host of technological improvements to lure Americans away from their TV sets. Technicolor, invented by an MIT scientist in 1917, had improved and was being used in more movies to draw people away from their black-and-white TV sets. In addition, Cinerama, CinemaScope, and VistaVision all arrived in movie theaters, featuring striking wide-screen images, multiple synchronized projectors, and stereophonic sound. Then 3-D (three-dimensional) movies appeared, although they wore off quickly as a novelty. Finally, Panavision, which used special Eastman color film and camera lenses that decreased the fuzziness of images, became the wide-screen standard throughout the industry. These developments, however, generally failed to address the movies' primary problem: the middle-class flight to the suburbs, away from downtown theaters.

how television impacted Hollywood?

Eventually, HUAC subpoenaed ten unwilling witnesses who were questioned about their memberships in various organizations. The so-called Hollywood Ten—nine screenwriters and one director—refused to discuss their memberships or to identify communist sympathizers. Charged with contempt of Congress in November 1947, they were eventually sent to prison. Although jailing the Hollywood Ten clearly violated their free-speech rights, in the atmosphere of the Cold War many people worried that "the American way" could be sabotaged via unpatriotic messages planted in films. Upon release from jail, the Hollywood Ten found themselves blacklisted, or boycotted, by the major studios, and their careers in the film industry were all but ruined. The national fervor over communism continued to plague Hollywood well into the 1950s.

how the Red Scare impacted Hollywood?

how were Hearst and Pulitzer involved in yellow journalism?

slander

in law, spoken language that defames a person's character.

After waves of punk, grunge, alternative, and hip-hop; the decline of Top 40 radio; and the demise of MTV's Total Request Live countdown show, it seemed as though pop music and the era of big pop stars were waning. But pop music has endured and even flourished in recent years, especially with the advent of iTunes. The era of digital downloads again made the single (as opposed to the album) the dominant unit of music, and this dominance has aided the reemergence of pop, since songs with catchy hooks generate the most digital sales. The reemergence of pop was allied with the rise of electronic dance music (EDM), as deejays/remixers/producers like David Guetta, Skrillex, Calvin Harris, and Avicii collaborated with a number of other pop stars. Similarly, streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, and Deezer have greatly expanded accessibility to music and new remixes. The digital formats in music have resulted in a leap in viability and market share for independent labels and have changed the cultural landscape of the music industry in the twenty-first century.

modern music civic engagement

Coinciding with the HUAC investigations, the government also increased its scrutiny of the movie industry's aggressive business practices. By the mid-1940s, the Justice Department had demanded that the five major film companies—Paramount, Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, MGM, and RKO—end vertical integration, which involved the simultaneous control over production, distribution, and exhibition. In 1948, after a series of court appeals, the Supreme Court ruled against the film industry in what is commonly known as the Paramount decision, forcing the studios to gradually divest themselves of their theaters. Although the government had hoped to increase competition, the Paramount case never really changed the oligopoly structure of the Hollywood film industry because it failed to challenge the industry's control over distribution. However, the 1948 decision did create opportunities in the exhibition part of the industry for those outside Hollywood. In addition to art houses showing documentaries or foreign films, thousands of drive-in theaters sprang up in farmers' fields, welcoming new suburbanites who embraced the automobile. Although drive-ins had been around since the 1930s, by the end of the 1950s, more than four thousand existed. The Paramount decision encouraged new indoor theater openings as well, but the major studios continued to dominate distribution.

the fall of the studio system

nickelodeons

the first makeshift movie theaters, which were often converted cigar stores, pawnshops, or restaurants redecorated to mimic vaudeville theaters.

prior restraint

the legal definition of censorship in the United States; it prohibits courts and governments from blocking any publication or speech before it actually occurs.

the legal right of authors and producers to own and control the use of their published or unpublished writing, music, and lyrics; TV programs and movies; or graphic art designs.

Hollywood Ten

the nine screenwriters and one film director subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) who were sent to prison in the late 1940s for refusing to disclose their memberships or to identify communist sympathizers.

Although many mainstream adults in the 1950s complained that rock and roll's sexuality and questioning of moral norms constituted an offense against God, many early rock figures actually had close ties to religion, often transforming gospel tunes into rock and roll. Still, many people did not appreciate the blurring of boundaries between the sacred and the secular. In the late 1950s, public outrage over rock and roll was so great that even Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, both sons of southern preachers, became convinced that they were playing the "devil's music." By 1959, Little Richard had left rock and roll to become a minister. Lewis had to be coerced into recording "Great Balls of Fire," a song by Otis Blackwell that turned an apocalyptic biblical phrase into a sexually charged teen love song. The boundaries between sacred and secular music have continued to blur in the years since, with some churches using rock and roll to appeal to youth, and some Christian-themed rock groups recording music as seemingly incongruous as heavy metal.

the sacred and the secular

Private individuals have to prove (1) that the public statement about them was false, (2) that damages or actual injury occurred (such as the loss of a job, harm to reputation, public humiliation, or mental anguish), and (3) that the publisher or broadcaster was negligent in failing to determine the truthfulness of the statement. Public officials also have to prove falsehood, damages, negligence, and actual malice on the part of the news medium; actual malice means that the reporter or editor knew that the statement was false and either printed (or broadcast) it anyway or acted with a reckless disregard for the truth.

what must be proven in a libel case?

In a surprising twist, the rise of broadcast radio in the 1930s also forced newspapers to become more analytical in their approach to news. At the time, the newspaper industry was upset that broadcasters took their news directly from papers and wire services. As a result, a battle developed between radio journalism and print news. Although mainstream newspapers tried to copyright the facts they reported and sued radio stations for routinely using newspapers as their main news sources, the papers lost many of these court battles. Editors and newspaper lobbyists argued that radio personalities should be permitted to broadcast only commentary. By conceding this interpretive role to radio, the print press tried to protect its dominion over "the facts." It was in this environment that radio analysis began to flourish as a form of interpretive news. Lowell Thomas delivered the first daily network analysis for CBS on September 29, 1930, attacking Hitler's rise to power in Germany. By 1941, twenty regular commentators—the forerunners of today's radio talk-show hosts, "talking heads" on cable, and political bloggers—were explaining their version of the world to millions of listeners. In this environment, some print journalists and editors came to believe that interpretive stories, rather than objective reports, could better compete with radio. They realized that interpretation was a way to counter radio's (and later television's) superior ability to report breaking news quickly—or even live. In 1933, the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) supported the idea of interpretive journalism. Most newspapers, however, did not embrace probing analysis during the 1930s. In most U.S. dailies, then, interpretation remained relegated to a few editorial and opinion pages. It wasn't until the 1950s—with the Korean War, the development of atomic power, tensions with the Soviet Union, and the anticommunist movement—that news analysis resurfaced on the newest medium: television. Interpretive journalism in newspapers grew at the same time, especially in such areas as the environment, science, agriculture, sports, health, politics, and business. Following the lead of the New York Times, many papers by the 1980s had developed an op-ed page—an opinion page opposite the traditional editorial page, which allowed a greater variety of columnists, news analyses, and letters to the editor.

what was happening in the world that caused the rise of interpretive journalism?

Many consider Hollywood's Golden Age as beginning in 1915 with innovations in feature-length narrative film in the silent era, peaking with the introduction of sound and the development of the classic Hollywood style, and ending with the transformation of the Hollywood studio system after World War II.

when was the Hollywood Golden Age?

Joseph Pulitzer, a Jewish-Hungarian immigrant, began his career in newspaper publishing in the early 1870s as part owner of the St. Louis Post. He then bought the bankrupt St. Louis Dispatch for $2,500 at an auction in 1878 and merged it with the Post. The Post-Dispatch became known for stories that highlighted "sex and sin" ("A Denver Maiden Taken from Disreputable House") and satires of the upper class ("St. Louis Swells"). Pulitzer also viewed the Post-Dispatch as a "national conscience" that promoted the public good. He carried on the legacies of James Gordon Bennett: making money and developing a "free and impartial" paper that would "serve no party but the people." Within five years, the Post-Dispatch had become one of the most influential newspapers in the Midwest. In 1883, Pulitzer bought the New York World for $346,000. He encouraged plain writing and the inclusion of maps and illustrations to help immigrant and working-class readers understand the written text. In addition to running sensational stories on crime and sex, Pulitzer instituted advice columns and women's pages. Like Bennett, Pulitzer treated advertising as a kind of news that displayed consumer products for readers. In fact, department stores became major advertisers during this period. This development contributed directly to the expansion of consumer culture and indirectly to the acknowledgment of women as newspaper readers. Eventually (because of pioneers like Nellie Bly—see Chapter 14), newspapers began employing women as reporters. The World reflected the contradictory spirit of the yellow press. It crusaded for improved urban housing, better conditions for women, and equal labor laws. It campaigned against monopoly practices by AT&T, Standard Oil, and Equitable Insurance. Such popular crusades helped lay the groundwork for tightening federal antitrust laws in the early 1910s. At the same time, Pulitzer's paper manufactured news events and staged stunts, such as sending star reporter Nellie Bly around the world in seventy-two days to beat the fictional "record" in the popular 1873 Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days. By 1887, the World's Sunday circulation had soared to more than 250,000, the largest anywhere. Pulitzer created a lasting legacy by leaving $2 million to start the graduate school of journalism at Columbia University in 1912. In 1917, part of Pulitzer's Columbia endowment established the Pulitzer Prizes, the prestigious awards given each year for achievements in journalism, literature, drama, and music.

who was Joseph Pulitzer?

William Randolph Hearst bought the New York Journal (a penny paper founded by Pulitzer's brother Albert). Before moving to New York, the twenty-four-year-old Hearst took control of the San Francisco Examiner when his father, George Hearst, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1887 (the younger Hearst had recently been expelled from Harvard for playing a practical joke on his professors). In 1895, with an inheritance from his father, Hearst bought the ailing Journal and then raided Joseph Pulitzer's paper for editors, writers, and cartoonists.

who was William Randolph Hearst?

Within Hollywood's classic narratives, filmgoers find an amazing array of intriguing cultural variations. For example, familiar narrative conventions of heroes, villains, conflicts, and resolutions may be made more unique with inventions like computer-generated imagery (CGI) or digital remastering for an IMAX 3D Experience release. This combination of convention and invention—standardized Hollywood stories and differentiated special effects—provides a powerful economic package that satisfies most audiences' appetites for both the familiar and the distinctive.

why are narratives important?

During the early part of the twentieth century, movies rose in popularity among European immigrants and others from modest socioeconomic groups. This, in turn, spurred the formation of censorship groups, which believed that the movies would undermine morality. During this time, according to media historian Douglas Gomery, criticism of movies converged on four areas: "the effects on children, the potential health problems, the negative influences on morals and manners, and the lack of a proper role for educational and religious institutions in the development of movies."17 Public pressure on movies came both from conservatives, who saw them as a potential threat to the authority of traditional institutions, and from progressives, who worried that children and adults were more attracted to movie houses than to social organizations and urban education centers. As a result, civic leaders publicly escalated their pressure, organizing local review boards that screened movies for their communities. In 1907, the Chicago City Council created an ordinance that gave the police authority to issue permits for the exhibition of movies. By 1920, more than ninety cities in the United States had some type of movie censorship board made up of vice squad officers, politicians, and citizens. By 1923, twenty-two states had established such boards. Meanwhile, social pressure began to translate into law as politicians, wanting to please their constituencies, began to legislate against films. Support mounted for a federal censorship bill. When Jack Johnson won the heavyweight championship in 1908, boxing films became the target of the first federal censorship law aimed at the motion-picture industry. In 1912, the government outlawed the transportation of boxing movies across state lines. The laws against boxing films, however, had more to do with Johnson's race than with concern over violence in movies. The first black heavyweight champion, he was perceived as a threat to some in the white community. The first Supreme Court decision regarding film's protection under the First Amendment was handed down in 1915 and went against the movie industry. In Mutual v. Ohio, the Mutual Film Company of Detroit sued the state of Ohio, whose review board had censored a number of the distributor's films. On appeal, the case arrived at the Supreme Court, which unanimously ruled that motion pictures were not a form of speech but "a business pure and simple" and, like a circus, merely a "spectacle" for entertainment with "a special capacity for evil." This ruling would stand as a precedent for thirty-seven years, although a movement to create a national censorship board failed.

why did movie regulation start?

Sadly, with the loss of thirty-thousand reporters over the past two decades, the kind of daily newspaper journalism portrayed in Spotlight is the exception rather than the rule. Investigative journalism that holds the powerful accountable is time consuming and expensive and on the decline. In today's newspaper world, the bottom line is often about managing costs and explaining the value of newspapers to stockholders. Despite the decline of newspapers, some big investors have been buying them. Amazon's Jeff Bezos paid $250 million in 2013 for the Washington Post. Investment guru Warren Buffett bought more than sixty newspapers in 2012 and 2013—at a time when many traditional print companies, looking at the decline in newspaper readership, were trying to unload their papers. In 2018, a Los Angeles investment firm, owned by biotech billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, purchased the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and Spanish-language Hoy Los Angeles for a reported $500 million.

why is newspaper decline bad?

In the 1980s, to offset losses resulting from box-office failures, the movie industry began to diversify, expanding into other product lines and other mass media. This expansion included television programming, print media, sound recordings, and home videos/DVDs, as well as cable and computers, electronic hardware and software, retail stores, and theme parks such as Universal Studios. To maintain the industry's economic stability, management strategies today rely on both heavy advance promotion (which can double the cost of a commercial film) and synergy—the promotion and sale of a product throughout the various subsidiaries of the media conglomerate. Companies promote not only the new movie itself but also its book form, soundtrack, calendars, T-shirts, website, and toy action figures, as well as "the-making-of" story on television and the Internet. The Disney studio, in particular, has been successful with its multiple repackaging of youth-targeted movies, including comic books, toys, television specials, fast-food tie-ins, and theme-park attractions. Since the 1950s, this synergy has been a key characteristic of the film industry and an important element in the flood of corporate mergers that have made today's Big Six even bigger.

· How do movie studios make money even when ticket sales down?

Former New York Times columnist Tom Wicker argued that in the early 1960s, an objective approach to news remained the dominant model. According to Wicker, the "press had so wrapped itself in the paper chains of 'objective journalism' that it had little ability to report anything beyond the bare and undeniable facts."15 Eventually, the ideal of objectivity became suspect, along with the authority of experts and professionals in various fields. A number of reporters responded to the criticism by rethinking the framework of conventional journalism and adopting a variety of alternative techniques. One of these was advocacy journalism, in which the reporter actively promotes a particular cause or viewpoint. Precision journalism, another technique, attempts to make the news more scientifically accurate by using poll surveys and questionnaires. Today we call this "data journalism," and it has increased in importance as newspapers and other news organizations take advantage of the availability of Internet data and the lack of space and time constraints in online journalism.

· What modern journalistic style did objective journalism foreshadow?

The space epic changed the culture of the movie industry. Star Wars—produced, written, and directed by George Lucas—departed from the personal filmmaking of the early 1970s and spawned a blockbuster mentality that formed a new primary audience for Hollywood: teenagers. It had all of the now-typical blockbuster characteristics, including massive promotion and lucrative merchandising tie-ins. Repeat attendance and positive buzz among young people made the first Star Wars the most successful movie of its generation. What do the patterns mean? It's clear, economically, why Hollywood likes to have successful blockbuster movie franchises. But what kinds of films get left out of the mix? Hits like Forrest Gump (now bumped way out of the Top 30), which may have had big-budget releases but lack some of the other attributes of blockbusters, are clearly anomalies of the blockbuster mentality, although they illustrate that strong characters and compelling stories can carry a film to great commercial success. It is likely that we will continue to see an increase in youth-oriented, animated/action movie franchises that are heavily merchandised and intended for wide international distribution. Indeed, Hollywood does not have a lot of motivation to put out the kinds of movies that don't fit these categories. Is this a good thing? Can you think of a film that you thought was excellent and that would have probably been a bigger hit with better promotion and wider distribution? The digital turn creates two long-term paths for Hollywood. One path is that studios and theaters will lean even more heavily toward making and showing big-budget blockbuster film franchises with a lot of special effects, since people will want to watch those on the big screen (especially IMAX and 3-D) for the full effect—and they are easy to export for international audiences. The other path involves inexpensive digital distribution of lower-budget documentaries and independent films, which probably wouldn't get wide theatrical distribution anyway but could find an audience in those who watch at home. Because digital production puts movies in the same format as the Internet, independent filmmakers have new distribution venues beyond film festivals or the major studios. For example, Vimeo, YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon have grown into leading Internet sites for the screening and distribution of short films and film festival entries, providing filmmakers with their most valuable asset—an audience.

· Why are major studios more likely to have blockbusters than independent filmmakers?

. The six major studios account for about 86 percent of the revenue generated by commercial films. They also control more than half the movie market in Europe and Asia. (The Big Six may become the Big Five if Disney's plan to acquire 21st Century Fox is approved; Disney announced the plan in late 2017.) Independent studios that have maintained modest market share are sometimes called mini-majors.

Advantages of major film studios over independents?

By 1765, about thirty newspapers operated in the American colonies, with the first daily paper beginning in 1784. Newspapers were of two general types: political or commercial. Their development was shaped in large part by social, cultural, and political responses to British rule and by its eventual overthrow. Although the political and commercial papers carried both party news and business news, they had different agendas. Political papers, known as the partisan press, generally pushed the plan of the particular political group that subsidized the paper. The commercial press, by contrast, served business leaders, who were interested in economic issues. Both types of journalism left a legacy. The partisan press gave us the editorial pages, while the early commercial press was the forerunner of the business section. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, even the largest of these papers rarely reached a circulation of fifteen hundred. Readership was primarily confined to educated or wealthy men who controlled local politics and commerce. During this time, however, a few pioneering women operated newspapers, including Elizabeth Timothy, the first American woman newspaper publisher (and mother of eight children). After her husband died of smallpox in 1738, Timothy took over the South Carolina Gazette, established in 1734 by Benjamin Franklin and the Timothy family. In addition, Anna Maul Zenger ran the New-York Weekly Journal throughout her husband's 1734-35 incarceration and trial and after his death in 1746.8

Early journalism in the United States (1700s)

Edison's Trust attempted to monopolize exhibition by controlling the flow of films to theater owners. If theaters wanted to ensure they had films to show their patrons, they had to purchase a license from the Trust and pay whatever price it asked. Otherwise, they would be locked out of the Trust and have to try to find enough films from independent producers to show. Eventually, the flow of films from independents in Hollywood and foreign films enabled theater owners to resist the Trust's scheme. After the collapse of the Trust, emerging studios in Hollywood had their own ideas on how to control exhibition. When industrious theater owners began forming film cooperatives to compete with block-booking tactics, producers like Zukor conspired to dominate exhibition by buying up theaters. By 1921, Zukor's Paramount owned three hundred theaters, solidifying its ability to show the movies it produced. In 1925, a business merger between Paramount and Publix (then the country's largest theater chain, with more than five hundred screens) gave Zukor enormous influence over movie exhibition. Zukor and the heads of several major studios understood that they did not have to own all the theaters to ensure that their movies would be shown. Instead, the major studios (which would eventually include MGM, RKO, Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, and Paramount) only needed to own the first-run theaters (about 15% of the nation's theaters), which premiered new films in major downtown areas and generated 85 to 95 percent of all film revenue. The studios quickly realized that to earn revenue from these first-run theaters, they would have to draw the middle and upper-middle classes to the movies. To do so, they built movie palaces—full-time single-screen movie theaters that offered a more hospitable moviegoing environment, providing elegant décor usually reserved for high-society opera, ballet, symphony, and live theater. Another major innovation in exhibition was the development of mid-city movie theaters, built in convenient locations near urban mass-transit stations to attract the business of the urban and suburban middle class. This idea continues today, as multiplexes featuring multiple screens lure middle-class crowds to interstate highway crossroads. By the late 1920s, the major studios had clearly established vertical integration in the industry. What had been many small competitive firms in the early 1900s was now a few powerful studios, including the Big Five—Paramount, MGM, Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, and RKO—and the Little Three (which did not own theaters)—Columbia, Universal, and United Artists. Together, these eight companies formed a powerful oligopoly, which made it increasingly difficult for independent companies to make, distribute, and exhibit commercial films.

Exhibition

Since rock and roll's inception, one of the uphill battles the genre faced was the perception that it was a cause of juvenile delinquency, which was statistically on the rise in the 1950s. Looking for an easy culprit rather than considering contributing factors such as neglect, the rising consumer culture, or the growing youth population, many people assigned blame to rock and roll. The view that rock and roll corrupted youth was widely accepted by social authorities, and rock-and-roll music was often censored, eventually even by the industry itself. By late 1959, many key figures in rock and roll had been tamed. Jerry Lee Lewis was exiled from the industry, labeled southern "white trash" for marrying his thirteen-year-old third cousin; Elvis Presley, having already been censored on television, was drafted into the army; Chuck Berry was run out of Mississippi and eventually jailed for gun possession and transporting a minor across state lines; and Little Richard felt forced to tone down his image and left rock and roll to sing gospel music. A tragic accident led to the final taming of rock and roll's first front line. In February 1959, Buddy Holly ("Peggy Sue"), Ritchie Valens ("La Bamba"), and the Big Bopper ("Chantilly Lace") all died in an Iowa plane crash—a tragedy mourned in Don McLean's 1971 hit "American Pie" as "the day the music died." Although rock and roll did not die in the late 1950s, the U.S. recording industry decided that it needed a makeover. To protect the enormous profits the new music had been generating, record companies began to discipline some of rock and roll's rebellious impulses. In the early 1960s, the industry introduced a new generation of clean-cut white singers, like Frankie Avalon, Connie Francis, Ricky Nelson, Lesley Gore, and Fabian. Rock and roll's explosive violations of racial, class, and other boundaries were transformed into simpler generation-gap problems, and the music developed a milder reputation.

Fears of Rock and Roll as a Corrupting Influence Lead to Censorship

The biggest challenge the movie industry faces today is the Internet. As broadband Internet service connects more households, movie fans are increasingly getting movies from the web. After witnessing the difficulties that illegal file-sharing brought on the music labels (some of which share the same corporate parent as the Big Six), the movie industry has more quickly embraced the Internet for movie distribution. Apple's iTunes store began selling digital downloads of a limited selection of movies in 2006, and in 2008, iTunes began renting new movies from all the major studios for just $3.99. In the same year, online DVD rental service Netflix began streaming some movies and television shows to customers' computer screens and televisions. The popularity of Netflix's streaming service opened the door to other similar services. Hulu, a joint venture by NBC Universal (Universal Studios), 21st Century Fox, and Disney, was created as the studios' attempt to divert attention from YouTube and get viewers to either watch free, ad-supported streaming movies and television shows online or subscribe to Hulu Plus, Hulu's premium service. Comcast operates a similar website, called Xfinity. Google's YouTube, the most popular online video service, began offering commercial films in 2010 by redesigning its interface to be more film-friendly and offering online rentals. Amazon and Vudu (owned by Walmart) also operate digital movie stores. The year 2012 marked a turning point: For the first time, movie fans accessed more movies through digital online media than through physical copies, like DVDs and Blu-ray discs.22 For the movie industry, this shift to Internet distribution has mixed consequences. On the one hand, the industry needs to offer movies where people want to access them, and digital distribution is a growing market. "We're agnostic about where the money comes from," says Eamonn Bowles, president of the independent distributor Magnolia Pictures. "We don't care. Basically, our philosophy is we want to make the film available for however the customer wants to purchase it."23 On the other hand, although providing streaming is less expensive than producing physical DVDs, the revenue is still much lower compared to DVD sales; this shift has had a larger impact on the major studios, which had grown reliant on healthy DVD revenue. The digital turn creates two long-term paths for Hollywood. One path is that studios and theaters will lean even more heavily toward making and showing big-budget blockbuster film franchises with a lot of special effects, since people will want to watch those on the big screen (especially IMAX and 3-D) for the full effect—and they are easy to export for international audiences. The other path involves inexpensive digital distribution of lower-budget documentaries and independent films, which probably wouldn't get wide theatrical distribution anyway but could find an audience in those who watch at home. The Internet has also become an essential tool for movie marketing, and one that studios are finding less expensive than traditional methods, like television ads or billboards. Films regularly have web pages, but many studios now also use a full menu of social media to promote films in advance of their release. For example, the marketing plan for Lionsgate's 2012 movie The Hunger Games, which launched an enormously successful movie franchise, employed "near-constant use of Facebook and Twitter, a YouTube channel, a Tumblr blog, iPhone games and live Yahoo streaming from the premiere" to build interest that would make it into a hit film.

How did movies adapt to the digital age?

Today, online journalism has completely changed the news industry. First, rather than subscribing to a traditional paper, most readers now begin their day on their iPads, smartphones, or computers, scanning a wide variety of news websites—including those of print papers, cable news channels, newsmagazines, bloggers, and online-only news organizations. Increasingly, news consumers use their Facebook friends and Twitter posts to direct them to key news stories on any particular day. Such resources and digital sites are taking over the role of more traditional forms of news, helping set the nation's cultural, social, and political agendas. One of the biggest changes is that digital news has sped up the news cycle to a constant stream of information and has challenged traditional news services to keep up. In an early example, Matt Drudge, the conservative Internet gossip and news source behind the Drudge Report, hijacked the traditional news agenda in January 1998 and launched a scandal when he posted a report that Newsweek had delayed the story about President Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Another change is the way nontraditional sources and even newer digital technology help drive news stories. For example, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings, began in September 2011 when a group of protesters gathered in Zuccotti Park in New York's financial district to express discontentment with overpaid CEOs, big banks, and Wall Street, all of which helped cause the 2008-09 financial collapse but still enjoyed a government bailout. In the digital age, newsrooms are integrating their digital and print operations and asking their journalists to tweet breaking news that links back to newspapers' websites. At first, there was resistance to the digital turn, with executive editors trying to get older reporters and editors to embrace what news executives regard as a reporter's online responsibilities. Back in 2011, for example, then executive editor of the New York Times Jill Abramson noted that although the Times had fully integrated its online and print operations, some sub-editors still tried to hold back on publishing a timely story online, hoping that it would make the front page of the print paper instead. "That's a culture I'd like to break down, without diminishing the [reporters'] thrill of having their story on the front page of the paper," said Abramson.16 As a younger generation of journalists—raised on social media and digital technology—move into newsrooms, this resistance to online innovations has largely fallen away.

How has cable news and the Internet impacted traditional journalism/journalists' work?

popular music has always been a product of its time, so the social upheavals of the Civil Rights movement, the women's movement, the environmental movement, and the Vietnam War naturally brought social concerns into the music of the 1960s and early 1970s. By the late 1960s, the Beatles had transformed from a relatively lightweight pop band to one that spoke for the social and political concerns of its generation, and many other groups followed the same trajectory. The musical genre that most clearly responded to the political happenings of the time was folk music, which had long been the sound of social activism. In its broadest sense, folk music in any culture refers to songs performed by untrained musicians and passed down mainly through oral traditions, from the banjo and fiddle tunes of Appalachia to the accordion-led zydeco of Louisiana and the folk-blues of the legendary Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter). During the 1930s, folk was defined by the music of Woody Guthrie ("This Land Is Your Land"), who not only brought folk to the city but also was extremely active in social reform. Groups such as the Weavers, featuring labor activist and songwriter Pete Seeger, carried on Guthrie's legacy and inspired a new generation of singer-songwriters, including Joan Baez; Arlo Guthrie; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Phil Ochs; and—perhaps the most influential—Bob Dylan. Significantly influenced by the blues, Dylan identified folk as "finger-pointing" music that addressed current social circumstances. At a key moment in popular music's history, Dylan walked onstage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival fronting a full electric rock band. He was booed and cursed by traditional "folkies," who saw amplified music as a sellout to the commercial recording industry. However, Dylan's change inspired the formation of folk-rock artists like the Byrds, who had a No. 1 hit with a cover of Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man," and led millions to protest during the turbulent 1960s. Punk rock rose in the late 1970s to challenge the orthodoxy and commercialism of the record business. By this time, the glory days of rock's competitive independent labels had ended, and rock music was controlled by just a half-dozen major companies. By avoiding rock's consumer popularity, punk attempted to return to the basics of rock and roll: simple chord structures, catchy melodies, and politically or socially challenging lyrics. In the same way that punk opposed commercial rock, hip-hop stood in direct opposition to the polished, professional, and often less political world of soul. Its combination of social politics, swagger, and confrontational lyrics carried forward long-standing traditions in blues, R&B, soul, and rock and roll Although hip-hop encompasses many different styles, including various Latin and Asian offshoots, its most controversial subgenre is probably gangster rap, which, in seeking to tell the truth about gang violence in American culture, has been accused of creating violence.

How has music been used for civic engagement/protest in each decade since the 60's?

In the United States in the 1950s, the phenomenal popularity of Elvis Presley set the stage for many of today's debates over hip-hop lyrics and television's influence, especially on young people. In 1956 and 1957, Presley made three appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show. The public outcry against Presley's "lascivious" hip movements was so great that by the third show, the camera operators were instructed to shoot the singer only from the waist up. In some communities, objections to Presley and rock and roll were motivated by class bias and racism. Many white adults believed that this "poor white trash" singer from Mississippi was spreading rhythm and blues, a "dangerous" form of black popular culture.

History of rock and roll; racism and censorship

The Miracle Case

In 1952, the Supreme Court heard—officially Burstyn v. Wilson—named after Roberto Rossellini's film Il Miracolo (The Miracle). The movie's distributor sued the head of the New York Film Licensing Board for banning the film. A few New York City religious and political leaders considered the 1948 Italian film sacrilegious and pressured the film board for the ban. In the film, an unmarried peasant girl is impregnated by a scheming vagrant who tells her that he is St. Joseph and she has conceived the baby Jesus. The importers of the film argued that censoring it constituted illegal prior restraint under the First Amendment. Because such an action could not be imposed on a print version of the same story, the film's distributor argued that the same freedom should apply to the film. The Supreme Court agreed, declaring movies "a significant medium for the communication of ideas." The decision granted films the same constitutional protections as those enjoyed by the print media and other forms of speech. Even more important, the decision rendered most activities of film review boards unconstitutional because these boards had been engaged in prior restraint. Although a few local boards survived into the 1990s to handle complaints about obscenity, most of them had disbanded by the early 1970s.

MPAA Rating System (the Motion Picture Association of America)

In 1966, the movie industry hired Jack Valenti to run__________ and in 1968 he established an industry board to rate movies. Eventually, G, PG, R, and X ratings emerged as guideposts for the suitability of films for various age groups. In 1984, prompted by the releases of Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the _________ added the PG-13 rating and sandwiched it between PG and R to distinguish slightly higher levels of violence or adult themes in movies that might otherwise qualify as PG-rated films.

The novelty and entrepreneurial stages of print-media development first happened in Europe with the rise of the printing press. In North America, the first newspaper, Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestick, was published on September 25, 1690, by Boston printer Benjamin Harris. The colonial government objected to Harris's negative tone regarding British rule, and local ministers were offended by his published report that the king of France had once had an affair with his son's wife. The newspaper was banned after one issue. Because European news took weeks to travel by ship, early colonial papers were not very timely. In their more spirited sections, however, the papers did report local illnesses, public floggings, and even suicides. In 1704, the first regularly published newspaper appeared in the American colonies—the Boston News-Letter, published by John Campbell. In 1721, also in Boston, James Franklin, the older brother of Benjamin Franklin, started the New England Courant. The Courant established a tradition of running stories that interested ordinary readers rather than printing articles that appealed primarily to business and colonial leaders. In 1729, Benjamin Franklin, at age twenty-four, took over the Pennsylvania Gazette and created, according to historians, the best of the colonial papers. Although a number of colonial papers operated solely on subsidies from political parties, the Gazette also made money by advertising products. Another important colonial paper, the New-York Weekly Journal, appeared in 1733. John Peter Zenger had been installed as the printer of the Journal by the Popular Party, a political group that opposed British rule and ran articles that criticized the royal governor of New York. After a Popular Party judge was dismissed from office, the Journal escalated its attack on the governor. When Zenger shielded the writers of the critical articles, he was arrested in 1734 for seditious libel—defaming a public official's character in print. Championed by famed Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton, Zenger ultimately won his case in 1735. A sympathetic jury, in revolt against the colonial government, decided that newspapers had the right to criticize government leaders as long as the reports were true. After the Zenger case, the British never prosecuted another colonial printer. The Zenger decision would later provide a key foundation—the right of a democratic press to criticize public officials—for the First Amendment to the Constitution, adopted as part of the Bill of Rights in 1791.

Journalism in the colonies?

The decline in daily newspaper readership actually began during the Great Depression with the rise of radio. Between 1931 and 1939, six hundred newspapers ceased operation. Another circulation crisis occurred from the late 1960s through the 1970s with the rise in network television viewing and greater competition from suburban weeklies. In addition, with an increasing number of women working full-time outside the home, newspapers could no longer consistently count on one of their core readership groups. Throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, U.S. newspaper circulation dropped again, this time by more than 25 percent.47 Yet despite such steep circulation and print readership declines, overall audiences in 2018 are growing again thanks to online readers.

Newspaper readership decline in the United States

In the early days of film, producers and distributors had not yet recognized that fans would seek not only particular film stories—like dramas, westerns, and romances—but also particular film actors. Responding to discerning audiences and competing against Edison's Trust, Adolph Zukor hired a number of popular actors and formed the Famous Players Company in 1912. His idea was to control movie production not through patents but through exclusive contracts with actors. One Famous Players performer was Mary Pickford. Known as "America's Sweetheart" for her portrayal of spunky and innocent heroines, Pickford was "unspoiled" by a theater background and better suited to the more subtle and intimate new medium. She became so popular that audiences waited in line to see her movies, and producers were forced to pay her increasingly higher salaries.

Production

Taking his cue from Bennett and Pulitzer, Hearst focused on lurid, sensational stories and appealed to immigrant readers by using large headlines and bold layout designs. To boost circulation, the Journal invented interviews, faked pictures, and encouraged conflicts that might result in a story. In promoting journalism as mere dramatic storytelling, Hearst reportedly said, "The modern editor of the popular journal does not care for facts. The editor wants novelty. The editor has no objection to facts if they are also novel. But he would prefer a novelty that is not a fact to a fact that is not a novelty."9 Hearst is remembered as an unscrupulous publisher who once hired gangsters to distribute his newspapers. He was also, however, considered a champion of the underdog, and his paper's readership soared among the working and middle classes. In 1896, the Journal's daily circulation reached 450,000, and by 1897, the Sunday edition of the paper rivaled the 600,000 circulation of the World. By the 1930s, Hearst's holdings included more than forty daily and Sunday papers, thirteen magazines (including Good Housekeeping and Cosmopolitan), eight radio stations, and two film companies. In addition, he controlled King Features Syndicate, which sold and distributed articles, comics, and features to many of the nation's dailies. Hearst—the model for Charles Foster Kane, the ruthless publisher in Orson Welles's classic 1940 film Citizen Kane—operated the largest media business in the world, comparable to today's Disney or Google.

Pulitzer vs Hearst

By late 1959, many key figures in rock and roll had been tamed. Jerry Lee Lewis was exiled from the industry, labeled southern "white trash" for marrying his thirteen-year-old third cousin; Elvis Presley, having already been censored on television, was drafted into the army; Chuck Berry was run out of Mississippi and eventually jailed for gun possession and transporting a minor across state lines; and Little Richard felt forced to tone down his image and left roll's first front line. In February 1959, Buddy Holly ("Peggy Sue"), Ritchie Valens ("La Bamba"), and the Big Bopper ("Chantilly Lace") all died in an Iowa plane crash—a tragedy mourned in Don McLean's 1971 hit "American Pie" as "the day the music died."roll to sing gospel music. A tragic accident led to the final taming of and and rockrock

The Day the Music Died

seditious expression

The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

Among the changing conditions facing the film industry were the communist witch-hunts in Hollywood, the end of the industry's vertical integration, suburbanization, the arrival of television, and the appearance of home entertainment.

What political and cultural changes account for the changes in the Hollywood system and the downfall of the Golden Age and Studio System?

As it cracked down on digital theft, the music industry—realizing that it would have to somehow adapt its business to the digital format—embraced services like iTunes (launched by Apple in 2003 to accompany the iPod), which had become the model for legal online distribution. In 2008, iTunes became the top music retailer in the United States. But by the time iTunes surpassed the twenty-five-billion-song milestone in 2013, global digital download sales had fallen for the first time.12 What happened? The next big digital format had arrived.

What role has the Internet played in the music business? Internet Radio?

Seditious expression, copyright infringement, libel, obscenity, the right to privacy

What types of speech are not protected by the First Amendment?

The breakthrough film, however, was Warner Brothers' 1928 release The Singing Fool, which also starred Jolson. Costing $200,000 to make, the film took in $5 million and "proved to all doubters that talkies were here to stay."

Why was the movie "Singing Fool" important?

objective journalism

a modern style of journalism that distinguishes factual reports from opinion columns; reporters strive to remain neutral toward the issue or event they cover, searching out competing points of view among the sources for a story.

The blurring of racial lines and the breakdown of other conventional boundaries meant that performers and producers were forced to play a tricky game to get rock and roll accepted by the masses. Two prominent white disc jockeys had different methods for achieving this end. Cleveland deejay Alan Freed, credited with popularizing the term rock and roll, played original R&B recordings from the race charts and black versions of early rock and roll on his program. In contrast, Philadelphia deejay Dick Clark believed that making black music acceptable to white audiences required cover versions by white artists. By the mid-1950s, rock and roll was gaining acceptance among the masses, but rock-and-roll artists and promoters faced further obstacles: Black artists found that their music was often undermined by white cover versions, the payola scandals portrayed rock and roll as a corrupt industry, and fears of rock and roll as a contributing factor in juvenile delinquency resulted in censorship.

battles with rock and roll

Journalism's code of ethics also warns reporters and editors not to place themselves in positions that produce a conflict of interest—that is, any situation in which journalists may stand to benefit personally from stories they produce. "Gifts, favors, free travel, special treatment or privileges," the code states, "can compromise the integrity of journalists and their employers. Nothing of value should be accepted."17 Although small newspapers with limited resources and poorly paid reporters might accept such "freebies" as game tickets for their sportswriters and free meals for their restaurant critics, this practice does increase the likelihood of a conflict of interest that produces favorable or uncritical coverage. On a broader level, ethical guidelines at many news outlets attempt to protect journalists from compromising positions. For instance, in most cities, U.S. journalists do not actively participate in politics or support social causes. Some journalists will not reveal their political affiliations, and some even decline to vote. For these journalists, the rationale behind their decision is straightforward: Journalists should not place themselves in a situation in which they might have to report on the misdeeds of an organization or a political party to which they belong. If a journalist has a tie to any group, and that group is later suspected of involvement in shady or criminal activity, the reporter's ability to report on that group would be compromised—along with the credibility of the news outlet for which he or she works. Conversely, other journalists believe that not actively participating in politics or social causes means abandoning their civic obligations. They believe that fairness in their reporting, not total detachment from civic life, is their primary obligation.

conflict of interest

HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee)

congressional committee that investigated communist influence in the US in government agencies and the hollywood movie industry the 1940s and 1950s

In terms of ethics, there are at least two major positions and multiple variations. At one end of the spectrum, absolutist ethics suggests that a moral society has laws and codes, including honesty, that everyone must live by. This means citizens, including members of the news media, should tell the truth at all times and in all cases. In other words, the ends (exposing a phony clinic) never justify the means (using deception to get the story). An editor who is an absolutist would cover this story by asking a reporter to find victims who have been ripped off by the clinic and then telling the story through their eyes. At the other end of the spectrum is situational ethics, which promotes ethical decisions on a case-by-case basis. If a greater public good could be served by using deceit, journalists and editors who believe in situational ethics would sanction deception as a practice. Ever since Nellie Bly faked insanity to get inside an asylum in the 1880s, investigative journalists have used deception to get stories. Today, journalists continue to use disguises and assume false identities to gather information on social transgressions.

deception

Although the government had hoped to increase competition, the Paramount case never really changed the oligopoly structure of the Hollywood film industry because it failed to challenge the industry's control over distribution. However, the 1948 decision did create opportunities in the exhibition part of the industry for those outside Hollywood. In addition to art houses showing documentaries or foreign films, thousands of drive-in theaters sprang up in farmers' fields, welcoming new suburbanites who embraced the automobile. Although drive-ins had been around since the 1930s, by the end of the 1950s, more than four thousand existed. The Paramount decision encouraged new indoor theater openings as well, but the major studios continued to dominate distribution.

how the Paramount Decision impacted Hollywood?

By the 1830s, however, the Industrial Revolution made possible the replacement of expensive handmade paper with cheaper machine-made paper. During this time, the rise of the middle class spurred the growth of literacy, setting the stage for a more popular and inclusive press. In addition, breakthroughs in technology, particularly the replacement of mechanical presses with steam-powered presses, permitted publishers to produce as many as four thousand newspapers an hour, which lowered the cost of newspapers. Penny papers soon began competing with six-cent papers. In 1833, printer Benjamin Day founded the New York Sun with no subscriptions and the price set at one penny. The Sun—whose slogan was "It shines for all"—highlighted local events, scandals, police reports, and serialized stories. The penny press era also featured James Gordon Bennett's New York Morning Herald, founded in 1835. In 1848, six New York newspapers formed a cooperative arrangement and founded the Associated Press (AP), the first major news wire service. Wire services began as commercial organizations that relayed news stories and information around the country and the world using telegraph lines and, later, radio waves and digital transmissions. The rise of competitive dailies and the penny press triggered the next significant period in American journalism. In the late 1800s, yellow journalism emphasized profitable papers that carried exciting human-interest stories, crime news, large headlines, and more readable copy.

early journalism in the United States (1800s)

In 1956, Chuck Berry's "Roll Over Beethoven" merged rock and roll, considered low culture by many, with high culture, forever blurring the traditional boundary between these cultural forms with lyrics like "You know my temperature's risin' / the jukebox is blowin' a fuse . . . / Roll over Beethoven / and tell Tchaikovsky the news." Although such early rock-and-roll lyrics seem tame by today's standards, at the time they sounded like sacrilege. Rock and rollers also challenged musical decorum and the rules governing how musicians should behave or misbehave: Berry's "duck walk" across the stage, Elvis Presley's pegged pants and gyrating hips, and Bo Diddley's use of the guitar as a phallic symbol were an affront to the norms of well-behaved, culturally elite audiences.

high and low culture

As the film industry expanded after World War I, the influence of public pressure and review boards began to affect movie studios and executives who wanted to ensure control over their economic well-being. In the early 1920s, a series of scandals rocked Hollywood: actress Mary Pickford's divorce and quick marriage to actor Douglas Fairbanks, director William Desmond Taylor's unsolved murder, and actor Wallace Reid's death from a drug overdose. But the most sensational scandal involved aspiring actress Virginia Rappe, who died a few days after a wild party in a San Francisco hotel hosted by popular silent-film comedian Fatty Arbuckle. After Rappe's death, the comedian was indicted for rape and manslaughter in a case that was sensationalized in the press. Although two hung juries could not reach a verdict, Arbuckle's career was ruined. Censorship boards across the country banned his films. And even though Arbuckle was acquitted at his third trial in 1922, the movie industry chose to send a signal about the kinds of values and lifestyles it would tolerate: Arbuckle was banned from acting in Hollywood. He later resurfaced to direct several films under the name Will B. Goode. In response to the scandals, particularly the first Arbuckle trial, the movie industry formed the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) and hired as its president Will Hays, a former Republican National Committee chair. Also known as the Hays Office, the MPPDA attempted to smooth out problems between the public and the industry. Hays blacklisted promising actors or movie extras with even minor police records. He also developed an MPPDA public relations division, which stopped a national movement for a federal law censoring movies.

history of movie regulation after World War One

libel

in media law, the defamation of character in written expression.

In response to the challenges newspapers face, a number of journalists, economists, and citizens are calling for new business models—with more potential than paywalls—for combating newspapers' decline. One avenue is developing new business ventures, such as the online-only papers begun by former print reporters, such as Politico. Another idea is for wealthy universities like Harvard and Yale to buy and support papers, thereby better insulating their public service and watchdog operations from the high profit expectations of the marketplace. Another possibility might be to get Internet companies involved. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's purchase of the Washington Post in 2013 is one example. Earlier, Google—worried that a decline in the quality of journalism would mean fewer sites on which to post ads and earn online revenue—pledged $5 million to news foundations and companies to encourage innovation in digital journalism. As mentioned earlier, Google in 2017 began supporting Report for America, which hopes to employ a thousand early career reporters over the next few years. Back in 2010, Yahoo! began hiring reporters to increase the presence of its online news site. The company has since been hiring reporters from Politico, Businessweek, the New York Observer, the Washington Post, and Talking Points Memo, among others. Additional ideas are coming from universities (where journalism school enrollments are actually increasing). For example, the dean of Columbia University's Journalism School (started once upon a time with money bequeathed by nineteenth-century newspaper mogul Joseph Pulitzer) commissioned a study from Leonard Downie, former executive editor of the Washington Post, and Michael Schudson, Columbia journalism professor and media scholar. Their report, "The Reconstruction of American Journalism," focuses on lost circulation, advertising revenue, and news jobs, and aims to create a strategy for reporting that would hold public and government officials accountable.58 After all, citizens in democracies require basic access to reports, data, and documentation in order to be well informed. Here is an overview of their recommendations, some of which have already been implemented: News organizations "substantially devoted to reporting on public affairs" should be allowed to operate as nonprofit entities in order to take in tax-deductible contributions while still collecting ad and subscription revenues. For example, the Poynter Institute owns and operates the Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times), Florida's largest newspaper. As a nonprofit, the Times is protected from the unrealistic 16 to 20 percent profit margins that publicly held newspapers had been expected to earn in the 1980s and 1990s. Public radio and TV, through federal reforms in the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, should reorient their focus to "significant local news reporting in every community served by public stations and their Web sites." Operating their own news services or supporting regional news organizations, public and private universities "should become ongoing sources of local, state, specialized subject and accountability news reporting as part of their educational mission." News services, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies should use the Internet to "increase the accessibility and usefulness of public information collected by federal, state, and local governments." As the newspaper industry continues to reinvent itself and tries new avenues to ensure its future, not every "great" idea will work out. Some of the immediate backlash to Downie and Schudson's report raised questions about the government's becoming involved with traditionally independent news media. The RFA model, launched after the 2016 election, seeks to avoid government funding by supporting partnerships between existing newsrooms and philanthropy. Whether government-funded models like NPR or private enterprises like RFA, the important thing is that newspapers continue to experiment with new ideas and business models so that they can adapt and even thrive in the Internet age. (For more on the challenges facing journalism, see Chapter 14.)

how can newspapers combat this decline?

crusading for social reform on behalf of the public good, sensationalized journalism

how does yellow journalism exist today?

To achieve "the truth" or to "get the facts," journalists routinely straddle a line between "the public's right to know" and a person's right to privacy. One infamous example is the phone hacking scandal involving News Corp.'s now-shuttered U.K. newspaper, News of the World. In 2011, the Guardian reported that News of the World reporters had hired a private investigator to hack into the voice mail of thirteen-year-old murder victim Milly Dowler and had deleted some messages. Although there had been past allegations that reporters from News of the World had hacked into the private voice mails of the British royal family, government officials, and celebrities, this revelation on the extent of News of the World's phone hacking activities caused a huge scandal and led to the arrests and resignations of several senior executives. Today, in the digital age, when reporters can gain access to private e-mail messages, Twitter accounts, and Facebook pages, as well as voice mail, such practices raise serious questions about how far a reporter should go to get information. In the case of privacy issues, media companies and journalists should always ask these ethical questions: What public good is being served here? What significant public knowledge will be gained through the exploitation of a tragic private moment? Although journalism's code of ethics says, "The news media must guard against invading a person's right to privacy," this clashes with another part of the code: "The public's right to know of events of public importance and interest is the overriding mission of the mass media."16 When these two ethical standards collide, should journalists err on the side of the public's right to know?

invasion of privacy

Rock and roll was the first popular music genre to overtly confuse issues of sexual identity and orientation. Although early rock and roll largely attracted males as performers, the most fascinating feature of Elvis Presley, according to the Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger, was his androgynous appearance.17 During this early period, though, the most sexually outrageous rock-and-roll performer was Little Richard (Penniman). Little Richard has said that given the reality of American racism, he blurred lines between masculinity and femininity because he feared the consequences of becoming a sex symbol for white girls: "I decided that my image should be crazy and way out so that adults would think I was harmless. I'd appear in one show dressed as the Queen of England and in the next as the pope."18 Little Richard's playful blurring of gender identity and sexual orientation paved the way for performers like David Bowie, Elton John, Boy George, Annie Lennox, Prince, Grace Jones, Marilyn Manson, Lady Gaga, and Adam Lambert.

masculinity and femininity

high and low culture, masculinity and femininity, the country and the city, the north and the south, the sacred and the secular

types of Clashes of Integration Music in the 50's

literary journalism

news reports that adapt fictional storytelling techniques to nonfictional material; sometimes called new journalism.

Not only did rock and roll muddy the urban and rural terrain, but it also combined northern and southern influences. In fact, with so much blues, R&B, and rock and roll rising from the South in the 1950s, this region regained some of its cultural flavor, which (along with a sizable portion of the population) had migrated to the North after the Civil War and during the early twentieth century. Meanwhile, musicians and audiences in the North had absorbed blues music as their own, eliminating the understanding of blues as a specifically southern style. Like the many white teens today who are fascinated by hip-hop, musicians such as Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, and Buddy Holly—all from the rural South—were fascinated with and influenced by the black urban styles they had heard on the radio or seen in nightclubs. These artists in turn brought southern culture to northern listeners. But the key to record sales and the spread of rock and roll, according to famed record producer Sam Phillips of Sun Records, was to find a white man who sounded black. Phillips found that man in Elvis Presley. Commenting on Presley's cultural importance, one critic wrote: "White rockabillies like Elvis took poor white southern mannerisms of speech and behavior deeper into mainstream culture than they had ever been taken."20

the north and the south

Film exhibition is controlled by a handful of theater chains; the leading five companies operate more than 50 percent of U.S. screens. The major chains—AMC Entertainment, Regal Entertainment Group, Cinemark USA, Cineplex Entertainment, and Marcus Theatres—own thousands of screens in suburban malls and at highway crossroads, and most have expanded into international markets as well. Because distributors require access to movie screens, they do business with the chains that control the most screens. In a multiplex, an exhibitor can project a potential hit on two or three screens at the same time; films that do not debut well are relegated to the smallest theaters or bumped quickly for a new release. The strategy of the leading theater chains during the mid-1990s was to build more megaplexes (facilities with fourteen or more screens), featuring upscale concession services and luxurious screening rooms equipped with stadium-style seating and digital sound to make moviegoing a special event. By 2017, the movie exhibition business growth had leveled off at 39,651 indoor screens, most of them at megaplex locations. To further combat the home theater market, movie theater chains were experimenting with bigger screens (the ultrawide 270-degree views of ScreenX, for example), responsive 4-D seating (with "sway" and "twist" motions to further immerse viewers of action movies), and virtual reality (VR) experiences in which viewers wear VR headsets and sit in special full-motion chairs. IMAX is also testing "VR Centres," with small 12-by-12-foot "pods" where individuals or small groups have 5- to 15-minute VR experiences that cost from $7 to $25.21

other ways that movie studios make money when ticket sales are down

Popular music has always been a product of its time, so the social upheavals of the Civil Rights movement, the women's movement, the environmental movement, and the Vietnam War naturally brought social concerns into the music of the 1960s and early 1970s. By the late 1960s, the Beatles had transformed from a relatively lightweight pop band to one that spoke for the social and political concerns of its generation, and many other groups followed the same trajectory. (To explore how the times and personal taste influence music choices

protest music themes

Penny Press

refers to newspapers that, because of technological innovations in printing, were able to drop their price to one cent beginning in the 1830s, thereby making papers affordable to the working and emerging middle classes and enabling newspapers to become a genuine mass medium.

Feature films became the standard throughout the 1920s and introduced many of the film genres we continue to see today. The most popular films during the silent era were historical and religious epics, including Napoleon (1927), Ben-Hur (1925), and The Ten Commandments (1923), but the silent era also produced pioneering social dramas, mysteries, comedies, horror films, science-fiction films, war films, crime dramas, westerns, and spy films. The silent era also introduced numerous technical innovations, established the Hollywood star system, and cemented the reputation of movies as a viable art form, when they had previously been seen as nothing more than novelty entertainment.

silent films history

Paramount Decision

the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court decision that ended vertical integration in the film industry by forcing the studios to divest themselves of their theaters.

Rock and roll also blurred geographic borders between country and city, between the white country & western music of Nashville and the black urban rhythms of Memphis. Early white rockers such as Buddy Holly and Carl Perkins combined country (or hillbilly) music, southern gospel, and Mississippi delta blues to create a sound called rockabilly. At the same time, an urban R&B influence on early rock came from Fats Domino ("Blueberry Hill"), Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton ("Hound Dog"), and Big Joe Turner ("Shake, Rattle, and Roll"). Soaring record sales and the crossover appeal of the music represented an enormous threat to long-standing racial and class boundaries. In 1956, the secretary of the North Alabama White Citizens Council bluntly spelled out the racism and white fear concerning the new blending of urban-black and rural-white culture: "Rock and roll is a means of pulling the white man down to the level of the Negro. It is part of a plot to undermine the morals of the youth of our nation."19 Distinctions between traditionally rural and urban music have continued to blur, with older hybrids such as country rock (think of the Eagles) and newer forms like alternative country—performed by artists such as Ryan Adams, Steve Earle, the Avett Brothers, and Kings of Leon.

the country and the city

The story form for packaging and presenting this kind of reporting has been traditionally labeled the inverted-pyramid style. According to some historians, Civil War correspondents developed this style by imitating the terse, compact press releases (summarizing or imitating telegrams to generals) that came from President Abraham Lincoln and his secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton.11 Often stripped of adverbs and adjectives, inverted-pyramid reports began—as they do today—with the most dramatic or newsworthy information. They answered who, what, where, when (and, less frequently, why or how) questions at the top of the story and then narrowed down the information to presumably less significant details. If wars or natural disasters disrupted the telegraph transmission of these dispatches, the information the reporter led with had the best chance of getting through. For much of the twentieth century, the inverted-pyramid style served as an efficient way to arrange a timely story. It also had the advantage of appearing to present news as straightforward factual information, thereby not offending readers of differing political affiliations. Among other things, the importance of seeming objective and the reliance on the inverted pyramid signaled journalism's break from the partisan tradition. Although impossible to achieve (journalism is, after all, a literary practice, not a science), objectivity nonetheless became a guiding ideal of the modern press.

what did objective journalism entail?

production, distribution, and exhibition

what did the studio system control?

deception, invasion of privacy, conflict of interest

what three ethical predicaments do journalists face?

By the mid-1960s, black and white artists routinely recorded and performed one another's original tunes. For example, established black R&B artist Otis Redding covered the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction," Jimi Hendrix covered Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower," and just about every white rock-and-roll band—including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—established its career by covering R&B classics. Although today we take such rerecordings for granted, in the 1950s the covering of black artists' songs by white musicians was almost always an attempt to capitalize on popular songs from the R&B "race" charts by transforming them into hits on the white pop charts. Often, not only would white producers give cowriting credit to white performers for the tunes they merely covered, but the producers would also buy the rights to potential hits from black songwriters, who seldom saw a penny in royalties or received songwriting credit. During this period, black R&B artists, working for small record labels, saw many of their popular songs being covered by white artists working for major labels. These cover records, boosted by better marketing and ties to white deejays, usually outsold the original black versions. For instance, the 1954 R&B song "Sh-Boom," by the Chords on Atlantic's Cat label, was immediately covered by a white group, the Crew Cuts, for the major Mercury label. Record sales declined for the Chords, although jukebox and R&B radio play remained strong for the original version. By 1955, R&B hits regularly crossed over to the pop charts, but inevitably the white cover versions were more successful. Pat Boone's cover of Fats Domino's "Ain't That a Shame" went to No. 1 and stayed on the Top 40 pop chart for twenty weeks, whereas Domino's original made it only to No. 10. Slowly, however, the cover situation changed. After watching Boone outsell his song "Tutti Frutti" in 1956, Little Richard wrote "Long Tall Sally," which included lyrics written and delivered in such a way that he believed Boone would not be able to adequately replicate them. "Long Tall Sally" went to No. 6 for Little Richard and charted for twelve weeks; Boone's version got to No. 8 and stayed there for nine weeks. Overt racism lingered in the music business well into the 1960s. A turning point, however, came in 1962, the last year that Pat Boone, then aged twenty-eight, ever had a Top 40 rock-and-roll hit. That year, Ray Charles covered "I Can't Stop Loving You," a 1958 country song by the Grand Ole Opry's Don Gibson. This marked the first time that a black artist, covering a white artist's song, had notched a No. 1 pop hit. With Charles's cover, the rock-and-roll merger between gospel and R&B, on the one hand, and white country and pop, on the other, was complete. In fact, the relative acceptance of black crossover music provided a more favorable cultural context for the political activism that spurred important Civil Rights legislation in the mid-1960s.

white music undermines black artists

One of the business mistakes that most newspaper executives made near the beginning of the Internet age was giving away online content for free. Whereas their print versions always had two revenue streams—ads and subscriptions—newspaper executives weren't convinced that online revenue would amount to much, so they used their online version as an advertisement for the printed paper. Since those early years, most newspapers are now trying to establish a paywall—charging a fee for online access to news content—but customers used to getting online content for free have shunned most online subscriptions. One paper that did charge early for online content was the Wall Street Journal, which pioneered one of the few successful paywalls in the digital era. In fact, the Journal, helped by the public's interest in the economic crisis and 400,000 paid subscriptions to its online service, replaced USA Today as the nation's most widely circulated newspaper in 2009. In early 2011, a University of Missouri study found that 46 percent of papers with circulations under 25,000 charged for some online content, while only 24 percent of papers with more than 25,000 in circulation charged for content.55 An interesting case in the paywall experiments is the New York Times. In 2005, the paper began charging online readers for access to its editorials and columns, but the rest of the site was free. This system lasted only until 2007. But starting in March 2011, the paper added a paywall—a metered system that was mostly aimed at getting the New York Times' most loyal online readers, rather than the casual online reader, to pay for online access. Under this paywall system, print subscribers would continue to get free web access. Online-only subscribers could opt for one of three plans: $15 per month for web and smartphone access; $20 per month for web and tablet access; or $35 per month for an "all-you-can-eat" plan, which would allow access to all the Times platforms. In its first few weeks of operation, the paper gained more than 100,000 new subscribers and lost only about 15 percent of traffic from the days of free web access—a more positive scenario than the 50 percent loss in online traffic some observers had predicted. And in October 2015, the Times reported surpassing 1 million paid subscribers to all its digital-only options and adding another 1.1 million subscribers to its combined print-plus-online services.56 In recent years, over two hundred newspapers, including many small ones, launched various paywalls—many of them based on the New York Times' metered model—in an attempt to reverse years of giving away their print content online for free. Larger metro dailies, including the Boston Globe, the Dallas Morning News, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Los Angeles Times, have also started their own paywalls and metered models. But back in 2014, the Nieman Journalism Lab reported on a number of studies and a report on Gannett's experiments with various paywalls and concluded, "When you announce a paywall, you get a one-time boost from people who are willing to pay. But it plateaus. And maybe some of those subscribers eventually drop off. It's not a growth model that does anything like replace the ongoing decline in print advertising revenue—which continues to decline somewhere in the high single digits every year."57

Introduction to Media Studies Test Two

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