popular culture

In this way the news becomes part of popular culture in general, and the newsreaders become part of the pantheon of national 'super-subjects'.

In this essay I discuss the transformation of television journalism into popular culture, and the ideological effect of this transformation.

A clearly polarised basic drama between good and evil takes place in the news just as in the classic melodramatic texts of popular culture.

The heritage of this cultural support may be discerned in the proliferation of specialized, popular-scientific and instructive publications for parents and mothers.

The connection between politics and popular culture is evident through the transformation of aesthetic into ethical, in a moral judgement that is also an aesthetic judgement at the same time.

But the central factor in the transformation of the news from a particular, realistic political discourse into a segment of local popular culture lies in the changed role of the newsreader.

Television journalism is part of local popular culture and the news should be understood as representations, and not as 'the reflection of today's events', or presentation.

In short, various forms of popular culture are important for what they are and because of the ways people use them - they have implications for the ordinary lives of people.

Foremost among the most important elements of this phenomenon is the promotion of the currently valid standards of the body and beauty, whereby the products of poplar culture are associated with happiness, success and love.

The same conclusion could be applied to the criticism of popular culture or analysis of the models of femininity in women's magazines, a category to which the study of Cosmopolitan presented in this paper also belongs.

Since politics cannot be discussed separately from popular culture, the change in format means not only formal or aesthetic modifications, but also a change that plays the central role in the constitution of the meaning of the news.

Our starting point is that the products of mass culture must be taken seriously, both from the viewpoint of ideology and content (to which the major part of this analysis will be dedicated), as well as economics (which is not the subject of interest in this study).

In this way the news - at the beginning of the nineties still formally strictly separated from the 'entertainment' part of the programme - is becoming a part of popular culture, and newspresenters are becoming national 'super-subjects' and important topics of other media.

Whatever the case, the clarity of the situation is obscured by one key question - how and why do women subject themselves, apparently of their own free will, to all those methods of cultivating the body advertised in women's magazines and some other areas of popular culture?

Although social scientists treat femininity and masculinity as culturally variable categories, social roles within the popular gender schema applied in everyday life are still understood as closely connected with biological sex.

At any rate we should not be deluded into thinking that the men who sit on the management boards of the companies that publish such 'products' of popular culture are omniscient and fully aware of the nature and effects of their creations, or know where mystification ends and the truth begins.

Since the creation of personality is the basis for the construction of reality (and control) in the news, we shall consider whether the creation of a personality from a newsreader also takes place outside television, and we will thus need to read television in the context of national popular culture in general.

Thus, the popular news is not political only because it favours certain views more than others, and certain spheres of reality more than others, but also because it constructs some cultural constellations as natural while placing others outside the common-sense.

The 1990s also brought the commercialization of homosexuality. Gays' and lesbians' entry into the mainstream (the latter through lesbian chic) obscured the borders, so popular mainstream culture (music, fashion, movies) has become in a way more gay than the gay community itself.

She focuses her attention on the image of femininity and some basic contradictions that underlie Cosmopolitan (and similar magazines). She argues that these products of mass culture establish a variant of the world for which they offer orientation and socialization techniques and that they have concrete, though not necessarily direct, effects.

The television newspresenters circulate between fashion competitions, openings and parties (The Slovene Woman of the Year Contest, On the Sunny Side of the Alps, Fashion Jana Selects the Best-dressed Man in Slovenia; Fashion Thoughts of the Best-dressed Men and Women in Slovenia, etc.), and mix with celebrities from other spheres of the local popular culture.

The basic conclusion of our study, which proves the presence of discursive mechanisms that consistently obscure the boundary between advertisements and editorial content, is that women's magazines represent an attractive format for the promotion of commercialized popular culture which is based on 'the cycle of publishing profit, advertising and women's role as the primary purchasers of consumer goods.'

Criticism of mass culture can be boring, says Tania Modleski in the conclusion to her famous analysis of mass fantasies for women entitled Loving with a Vengeance, in which she focuses on some fictional genres in mass entertainment, or to be more precise, on the three forms of poplar culture intended primarily for women.

These products of popular culture frame our representations of the world and co-shape them, in this particular case, our understanding of the role and image of woman, gender relations, products that a woman 'must' possess if she wants to be desired, loved and happy. Altogether this amounts to the opening of the door to consumer culture and establishing the basis for a common-sense perception of ordinary life.

Today - when newspresenters appear on hoarding posters; when they are turning into commercial objects, trademarks, and local celebrities; when they live their secondary lives in the social chronicles of tabloids; when they compete for best-dressed local celebrity; when they expose minor secrets about the private lives of the local showbiz in their articles; and when the news has finally become part of local popular culture - this is more true than ever.

When the news represents an event in terms of a clearly polarised drama about the struggle between good and evil, when it offers a moral judgement on the world, when the aesthetic visualisation of the television news can create a sense of familiarity and trust between the newsreader and the audience in their living rooms, and when the news is read in an intimate and chatting manner by a man/woman who can be trusted, since he/she investigates, seeks out and exposes the truth on our behalf, the news plays the same role as other pseudo-therapeutic discourses within popular media culture.