For Thursday's class: 1. Students should review the Exam Study Guide and come ready to discuss Exam #3. 2. The professor will return Exam #2. 3. If students do not need an in-class review, they do not have to attend. But if they have specific questions, they should come to class.

1. For Thursday:
Review Exam Study Guide
Come to class ready to talk about Exam #3
I will return Exam #2
If you feel you do not need an in-class review, you do not
have to come to class.
If, however, you do feel like you need review, come to class
with specific questions

2. “Quality” Television
“From the Frankfurt School theorists’ concerns about the
linkage between commercialized mass culture and
fascism to the more recent arguments of such thinkers
as Neil Postman, commercial culture, mass media, and
the public’s investment in them have been seen as
detrimental to children’s development, to critical
inquiry, to artistic expression, and to the very health of
democracy” (15).

3. “Quality” Television
“This infantalization and feminization is applied not only
to the actual children and women to whom it most
obviously refers, but also to the elderly, the disabled, the
unemployed and under-employed, all those that do not
fit the model of sophisticated taste and robust
productivity expected of contemporary western cultural
and social privilege” (16).
Mass culture (“low” culture) and audience

4. “Quality” Television
Taste
Television NOT better over time
Focus of popular, industrial, scholarly elite
Legitimation as exercise/preservation of privilege
Pierre Bourdieu
“Taste” is a marker of class
“Taste” reproduces identity through common points
of reference
“Taste” erects and maintains boundaries

5. “Quality” Television
Elites
The upper class
Utilize “taste” to affirm superiority over lower
classes (the “mass” in “mass culture”)
These categories are also gendered
“Quality” and hierarchy