Heartland TV: Prime Time Television and the Struggle for U.S. Identity

Heartland TV: Prime Time Television and the Struggle for U.S. Identity Review

Winner of the 2009 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award

The Midwest of popular imagination is a "Heartland" characterized by traditional cultural values and mass market dispositions. Whether cast positively —; as authentic, pastoral, populist, hardworking, and all-American—or negatively—as backward, narrow–minded, unsophisticated, conservative, and out-of-touch—the myth of the Heartland endures.

Heartland TV examines the centrality of this myth to television's promotion and development, programming and marketing appeals, and public debates over the medium's and its audience's cultural worth. Victoria E. Johnson investigates how the "square" image of the heartland has been ritually recuperated on prime time television, from The Lawrence Welk Show in the 1950s, to documentary specials in the 1960s, to The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the 1970s, to Ellen in the 1990s. She also examines news specials on the Oklahoma City bombing to reveal how that city has been inscribed as the epitome of a timeless, pastoral heartland, and concludes with an analysis of network branding practices and appeals to an imagined "red state" audience.

Johnson argues that non-white, queer, and urban culture is consistently erased from depictions of the Midwest in order to reinforce its "reassuring" image as white and straight. Through analyses of policy, industry discourse, and case studies of specific shows, Heartland TV exposes the cultural function of the Midwest as a site of national transference and disavowal with regard to race, sexuality, and citizenship ideals.

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White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century

White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century Review

Ten years in the making, this book is the sequel to Jared Taylor's seminal Paved With Good Intentions. In White Identity, Taylor systematically marshals the data to show that:

People of all races pay lip service to the ideal of integration but generally prefer to remain apart.

Study after scientific study suggests that racial identity is an inherent part of human nature.

Diversity of race, language, religion, etc. is not a strength for America but a source of chronic tension and conflict.

Non-whites--especially blacks and Hispanics but now even Asians--openly take pride in their race and put group interests ahead of those of the country as a whole.

Only whites continue to believe that it is possible or even desirable to transcend race and try to make the United States a nation in which race does not matter.

Taylor argues that America must reassess dated assumptions, and that we need policies based on a realistic understanding of race, not on fantasies.

Most provocatively, Taylor argues that whites must exercise the same rights as other groups--that they must be unafraid of considering their own legitimate interests. He concludes by warning whites that if they do not defend their interests they will be marginalized by groups that do not hesitate to assert themselves, numerically and culturally.

The culmination of 25 years of writing about race, immigration, and America's future, this is Jared Taylor's best and most complete statement of why it is vitally important for whites to defend their legitimate group interests. Read more...

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