Recently I've been thinking about Newcomb's cultural forum model of television, which I think remains a compelling, useful way to think about how television can work. The terms of how it works maybe re-theorized--and that's one of the things that my work has done tangentially. Here's
a great conversation between Horace Newcomb and Tara McPherson that deals with some of Newcomb's reservations about the model, though it really ranges much wider.
Example, on the Iraq War:
"I do think one reason there may not be a more organized antiwar effort is because we are not forced to watch one of three networks every night and that we can avoid so much by watching something else. There is no authoritative core, no cultural center as there was in the 1960s. I don't want to romanticize that, it was a very repressive core in so many ways, but now you can choose to avoid ever seeing much about the war or you can express your opinions in a very fragmented media sphere."
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