Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion

Bodroghkozy was also a student of John Fiske, and it is his particular brand of cultural populism that shapes her accounts of the ideological struggles around the production and reception of these television programs. While she is to be applauded for her insistence on producing multiple, conjunctural readings of the shows according to viewing positions, the sources informing some of her "countercultural" readings are, at times, problematic because of the status she attributes to them. In her introduction, Bodroghkozy writes that a central question the book asks is, "[H]ow did insurgent young people respond to the texts produced" (p. 5)? Subsequently, she stresses that "One of the key issues this book explores is audience-reception practices. I want to reconstruct how countercultural and radical sixties youth struggled with, and attended to, their popular cultural representations in prime-time television" (p. 10). Rejecting oral histories as unreliable, she turns to the underground press that flourished in the period, noting that publications such as the L.A. Free Press had a circulation approaching 100,000 readers. She views this material as superior to that used in Lynn Spigel's (1992) study of the introduction of TV into domestic space (which drew on articles and ads in popular women's magazines). Bodroghkozy points out, correctly in my opinion, that "the knowledge provided by such documents is partial and mediated because we have no access to the everyday lives of the women who grappled with the social and familial changes wrought by television" (p. 12). However, she claims that her use of the underground press as "informant" means that "the documents I use bear a closer relationship to their potential readership. If the underground press endorsed readers' points of view, it was not because the papers were trying to sell a product (beyond the paper itself) but because the generators of these documents did, in fact, share that viewpoint" (p. 12). This is highly contentious, and to me an unnecessary assertion. Rather than claiming to reconstruct how "real" youth audiences "actually" responded, why not simply point out that the historical traces we have take the form of discourse, and be content to conduct the discussion at that level? I think the recent overemphasis on ethnography as the final answer to any and all questions in media studies can lead to an overeagerness to mistake a thorough reconstruction of a discursive context and a horizon of possible