The increasing exposure of private lives to public scrutiny on British television is often regarded as an effect of North American commercialism on an indigenous tradition of public service broadcasting. As Thompson (2000) explains, more generally this cross­Atlantic influence is seen as the consequence of the tradition of greater ‘openness to scrutiny’ in the USA, […]

For the majority of the 1990s the news agenda in the UK and USA was dominated at frequent intervals by politically significant sex scandals that produced widespread media coverage. In the UK, in the first half of the 1990s, a seemingly endless stream of sex scandals buffeted the Conservative Government. Unwisely, the Prime Minister, John […]

In 1998 the ‘hottest’ story on prime time television news was the scandal of US President Bill Clinton’s sexual exploits with a young intern in the White House, Monica Lewinsky. Commentary on the scandal appeared on the network news at the family dinner hour, provoking concerns about how parents should handle the ensuing questions from […]

The historical formation of taste means that generic conventions constrain the pro­duction and consumption of sexual representations in ways that cannot quickly be undone. Nevertheless, I would argue that we do need to recognize, and challenge, the limitations in what is currently legitimate for circulating on television. ‘Soft core’ restrictions such as the exclusion of […]

Jane Juffer’s (1998) book At Home with Pornography: Women, Sex and Everyday Life considers the democratizing effects of the commodification of sexually explicit materials, especially as it relates to women’s access to and engagement with erotic genres. Where she differs from McNair is in the way that she demonstrates the con­tinuing influence of ‘quality’ and […]

Mark Jankovich (2001) locates the emergence of Playboy in the 1950s in relation to a middle-brow culture of a new post-war petit bourgeoisie, which is defined against the transgressive excesses of an elite avant-garde on the one hand, and the puritanism of traditional forms of middle-brow culture on the other. In doing so, he emphasizes, […]

It has been argued that these distinctions in taste between high and low culture are no longer relevant as a result of the democratizing effects of the mass media. Brian McNair, for example, in his book Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratisa — tion of Desire (2002), has argued that in postmodern consumer culture […]

Pornography is central to the regulation of all forms of sexual representation on television because it is their distinction from pornography, as it has been historically defined, that legitimizes the circulation and consumption of erotic texts in the main­stream media. In this way pornography acts as a boundary marker arising from its cultural status as […]

Their ability and willingness to buy the goods on offer in a market define viewers as consumers rather than citizens. This allows us to conceive of the market itself as a form of regulation, in the Foucauldian sense, as companies adapt their production output in response to the values and tastes of its potential viewers […]

The structure of the industry in Europe is changing in order to maximize competitive economic pressures and to reduce state regulation of content. At the same time, ratings and market research have become the legitimizing technologies through which to evaluate the ‘quality’ of programming, just as they have been in the USA from the start. […]