Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi INTRODUCTION 1 The Vicissitudes of the Stereotype 1 Issues and Some Answers 4 Television and Conservative Racial Projects after the '60s 8 CHAPTER ONE "In a crisis we must have a sense of drama": Civil Rights and Televisual Information 13 The Burden of Liveness 13 "Pictures are the point of television news" 15 "We have shut ourselves off from the rest of the world" 20 "That cycle of violence and publicity" 23 "The vehemence of a dream" 33 CHAPTER TWO The Double Life of "Sit-In" 36 "Sit-In"'s Industrial Context 36 "Sit-In" Flashes Back 39 "Sit-In" as a Movement Text 41 "Sit-In" and Black Idiom 44 CHAPTER THREE King TV 48 Rodney King Live 48 Liveness: An Ideology of Television and Race 49 L.A. Law and Televisual Justice 52 Doogie Howser, M.D., and Televisual Instruction 60 Rodney King Dead 68 CHAPTER FOUR Giuliani Time: Urban Policing and Brooklyn South 70 Cops and Cop Shows 70 Giuliani Time 71 How to Identify with the Cops 77 Good Cop, Bad Cop 83 CHAPTER FIVE Civil Rights, Done and Undone 86 "A virtual whitewash in programming" 86 Malcom X on TV 91 The Nick Styles Show 97 Video Surveillance and Counterspectatorship 103 NOTES 109 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 131 INDEX 137

Promotional Information

Lucid and accessible in both argument and style, this book offers perhaps the most theoretically sophisticated treatment to date of the historical relationship between the civil rights movement and network television, as well as of the complexities of representations of race in contemporary television. It embraces a wide academic audience, opening a conversation across disciplines that too often fail to take each other's accomplishments into account. -- Sharon Willis, University of Rochester This book is distinguished by a rare combination of critical acumen and historical insight. Torres is characteristically incisive, presenting an argument that appears both incontrovertibly correct and wholly original. -- Phillip Brian Harper, New York University

About the Author

Sasha Torres is Associate Professor of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario and the editor of Living Color: Race and Television in the United States.

Reviews

"Lucid and accessible in both argument and style, this book offers perhaps the most theoretically sophisticated treatment to date of the historical relationship between the civil rights movement and network television, as well as of the complexities of representations of race in contemporary television. It embraces a wide academic audience, opening a conversation across disciplines that too often fail to take each other's accomplishments into account."—Sharon Willis, University of Rochester

"This book is distinguished by a rare combination of critical acumen and historical insight. Torres is characteristically incisive, presenting an argument that appears both incontrovertibly correct and wholly original."—Phillip Brian Harper, New York University