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  • Teaching Television History: The Textbook
  • Aniko Bodroghkozy (bio)
Only Connect: A Cultural History of Broadcasting in the United States, 3rd ed. by Michele Hilmes. Wadsworth 2011. $125.95. 496 pages
The Columbia History of American Television by Gary R. Edgerton. Columbia University Press 2007. $27.50. 493 pages
Television and American Culture by Jason Mittell. Oxford University Press 2010. $49.95. 465 pages

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Glancing through the Media Studies job ads in the Chronicle of Higher Education, I have been struck again this year by the pre-ponderance of academic lines in “new media.” In these times of severely restricted budgets, academic departments clearly have to think long and hard about areas of expertise if they are lucky enough to gain authorization to run a job search. Media historians may smile ruefully at the term “new media” and point out, as Carolyn Marvin did back in the 1980s and as Lisa Gitelman did more recently, that all media technologies were once new. Today’s “shiny new things” will quickly become not so new and not so shiny.1 Media Studies has a [End Page 188] penchant for the new and the now, however, and nowhere is that more evident than in the field of Television Studies.

As the newest of the “old media” in Media Studies, television has a decidedly “presentist” orientation. Consider one of the foundational texts in the field: John Fiske’s Television Culture, recently re-released by Routledge along with a set of Fiske’s groundbreaking books.2 A group of Fiske’s former students (including me) came together to jointly write a new introduction to the book. One of the “problems” the group grappled with was the book’s “dated” examples. Fiske wrote it in the 1980s and used current and now largely forgotten TV series like Hart to Hart (ABC, 1979–1984) to explain the medium’s meaning-making mechanisms. As a theorist of contemporary popular culture, Fiske gravitated toward both the most ordinary examples of television culture and the most talked about ones. The quotidian stuff of television (Magnum, P.I. [CBS, 1980–1988]) as well as the consequential (The Cosby Show [NBC, 1984–1992]) were grist for Fiske’s mill. But always he was concerned with making sense of the now. While not hostile or oblivious to historical thinking by any means, this mode was not at the forefront of his approach to studying television and popular culture. Fiske’s approach was inevitably influenced by the Birmingham School, which, let’s remember, was a center for the study of contemporary popular culture. Historians and historically oriented scholars may have been associated with or influential on the school (Raymond Williams, Richard Johnson), but their historical work didn’t significantly affect the development of Television Studies as a field.

I use these musings as background to think about what it means to examine and teach about television within a historical context. The field’s “bias” may tilt us toward the present, but there is at least some push back from media historians, and even from nonhistorians with an understanding that considering the past is important. And if ever there was a time to insist on the need to consider television history, it may be now as the field of Media Studies moves ever more into the realms of the new, the digital, the convergent. Television may still be the most ubiquitous medium, but it may quickly become invisible. When television was still “new media,” it managed to consign radio, that other most ubiquitous of media, to invisibility. Radio was and is still everywhere in the socio-cultural-political environment. However, only in the past decade or so, thanks to the intellectual leadership of scholars like Susan J. Douglas and Michele Hilmes, has radio become a tad less invisible to academic inquiry. With the rush to study new media, Television Studies, which still carries markers of “the bad object,” could easily be consigned to academic irrelevance. I’ve argued elsewhere that one way to combat this problem is to promote rigorous historical work in Television Studies—work that would be recognized as historical...

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