The Daily Planet: A Critic on the Capitalist Culture Beat (review)

The Daily Planet: A Critic on the Capitalist Culture Beat. By Patricia Aufderheide. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000; pp. xv + 347. $19.95.

While the label of "public intellectual" has been justifiably applied to figures as politically diverse as Barbara Ehrenreich and George F. Will, rarely has it been as aptly attached as it has to professor, journalist, and activist Patricia Aufderheide. In the introduction to The Daily Planet, her collected essays on media, public policy, and society (which originally appeared in a range of publications, from The Progressive to the Journal of Communication), Aufderheide proudly embraces the term, finding in it a fitting connection between her critical scholarship and her commitment to public activism. As a representation of Aufderheide's career to date, The Daily Planet is a valuable volume, both for the information and analyses included within its pages and for its example of intellectual intervention in public affairs.

Though the essays in The Daily Planet span a range of topics, from syndicated children's television programs in the United States to the New Latin American Cinema movement, all of Aufderheide's work seeks "to explore the culture of daily life under capitalism," as well as to assess the role of the media in establishing or impeding the development of an open and diverse public sphere (x). Her commitment to a true public sphere, one distinct from the market and the government, open to all and rife with debate and dissension, is the running theme of the book, and the media's often unfulfilled potential to provide the forum for such public activity is the book's running argument. Aufderheide recognizes and describes those moments when the media do provide opportunities for public activism: for example, in marginalized groups' use of access cable television. But she also recognizes and analyzes those moments when the media fail to fulfill this promise, such as in U.S. public television's inability to define itself beyond the category of "non-commercial." Whether turning her critical eye to independent, social-issue documentaries or to the teen-targeted Hollywood films of the 1980s, Aufderheide keeps in mind her public goals and assesses the media's ability to fulfill those goals.

Aufderheide's work is divided into four thematically organized sections. The first, "Popular Culture in Context," features essays analyzing mainstream U.S. film, radio, and television. Although each offers specific insights into the ideologies of the media products under analysis, some, such as the discussion of radio commentator Paul Harvey, incisively pinpoint the political ramifications of contemporary cultural trends, in this case the perpetuation of consumer choice as a substitute for any kind of publicly responsive (or responsible) act. But the most valuable contribution in this section is the opening essay, in which Aufderheide reflects on the challenges of explaining "popular culture's popularity" by revealing the constructedness of consumer culture without "simply pointing fingers and decrying the hand of capitalism at work" (8). While the essays in this section do indeed move beyond the simple decrying of capitalism that Aufderheide hopes to avoid, they are not always successful in explaining what people find so compelling about popular culture, as, ultimately, it is not Aufderheide's most pressing research question.

The questions she does find most pressing surface in the second section, "Communication and the Public Interest." This is the strongest of the four sections, in that it specifically addresses the media's role in perpetuating a democratic public sphere and does so through both passionate arguments and incisive analyses. Taking on the state of public broadcasting in the United States, the role of public access channels on cable and satellite television, and the place of journalism in changing regulatory and technological environments, this section most clearly delineates Aufderheide's public interest agenda. Many of the essays were initially written as contributions to media policy debates (such as those surrounding the 1992 Cable Act) and later reworked...