This book examines the multiple ways that popular media mainstream and reinforce neoliberal ideology, exposing how they promote neoliberalism’s underlying ideas, values and beliefs so as to naturalize inequality, undercut democracy and contribute to the collapse of social notions of community and the common good.
Covering a wide range of media and genres, and adopting a variety of qualitative textual methodologies and theoretical frameworks, the chapters examine diverse topics, from news coverage of the 2016 U.S. presidential election to the NBC show Superstore (an atypical instance in which a TV show, for one brief season, challenged the central tenets of neoliberalism) to "kitchen porn." The book also takes an intersectional approach, as contributors explore how gender, race, class and other aspects of social identity are inextricably tied to each other within media representation. At once innovative and distinctive in its illustration of how the media is complicit in perpetuating neoliberal ideology, Neoliberalism and the Media offers students and scholars alike an incisive portrait of the intersection between media and ideology today.
Acknowledgments
Preface
Notes on Contributors
PART I Where We Are and How We Got Here
- Neoliberalism and the Media: History and Context
- Reality TV "Gets Real": Hypercommercialism and Post-truth in CNN’s Coverage of the 2016 Election Campaign
- The Girl Effect: Philanthrocapitalism and the Branded Marketplace of Philanthropic Governance
- Neoliberalism and Women’s Right to Communicate: The Politics of Ownership and Voice in Media
- Numinous Fortune and Holy Money: Dave Ramsey’s Cruel Optimism
- From Homo Economicus to Homo Sacer: Neoliberalism and the Thanatopolitics of The Meth Project
- As American as Capitalist Exploitation: Neoliberalism in The Men Who Built America
- Affirmative Advertising and the Mediated Feeling Rules of Neoliberalism
- Kitchen Porn: Of Consumerist Fantasies and Desires
- "I Deserved to Get Knocked Up": Sex, Class and Latinidad in Jane the Virgin
- An Intersectional Analysis of Controlling Images and Neoliberal Meritocracy on
- Doing Whiteness "Right": Playing by the Rules of Neoliberalism for Television’s Working Class
- Negotiating Identity and Working Class Struggles in NBC’s Superstore
Marian Meyers
PART II Corporations and Markets
Liane Tanguay
Dana Schowalter
Carolyn M. Byerly
PART III Responsibility and Choice
John Sewell
Michael F. Walker
Christopher M. Duerringer
PART IV: Consumers and Advertising
Rosalind Gill & Akane Kanai
C. Wesley Buerkle
PART V: Identity and Representation
John S. Quinn-Puerta
Scandal and Empire
Cheryl Thompson
Holly Holladay
Lauren Bratslavsky
Biography
Marian Meyers is a professor in the Department of Communication and an affiliate of the Institute of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University. Her research interests are in the areas of feminist media studies and neoliberalism and the media. Her publications have focused on intersectionality within the representation of women, including the role of neoliberalism within that representation, as well as women in higher education. This is her sixth book.
Marian Meyers has put together an insightful, timely, highly teachable collection. Neoliberalism and the Media is a gift for media studies scholars and students who want to understand our political context and the decisive yet multi-faceted ways that media participate in maintaining the neoliberal status quo. – Julie Wilson, Allegheny College
