cover image On Television

On Television

Pierre Bourdieu. New Press, $18.95 (104pp) ISBN 978-1-56584-407-0

Bourdieu's withering critique of television created a furor in France that lasted several months after airing of the two televised lectures that this broadside comprises. The author, a sociology professor in Paris, damns television as an enemy of critical discourse and a tool of social control that reinforces the status quo by decontextualizing events and fostering ignorance and passivity. For American readers, his acid appraisal will provide shudders of recognition, as when he writes: ""Our news anchors, our talk show hosts, and our sports announcers have turned into two-bit spiritual guides, representatives of middle-class morality. They are always telling us what we `should think.' "" Tabloid TV journalism, endless trivia and ""human-interest"" stories, programs pandering to mass audiences, telejournalists' defining of a narrow agenda of acceptable issues are served up with Gallic intellectualism and a dollop of structuralist analysis. (Apr.)