Standing on unstable grounds: A reexamination of the WLBT‐TV case¹

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1993 meeting of the Society for Cinema Studies. I gratefully acknowledge the consistent encouragement and insights of John Fiske and Lynn Spigel, and thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable critiques.

During the 1960s, disparate discourses of consumerism intersected with concerns regarding race and civil rights in the realm of broadcast law and regulation. This reexamination of the social and legal struggles surrounding WLBT‐TV in Jackson, Mississippi (1964–69), shows how conflicting consumerisms were mediated by legal institutions in an attempt to address social tensions, and reveals how the dominant discourses of liberal consumerism often displaced issues of race.

Notes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1993 meeting of the Society for Cinema Studies. I gratefully acknowledge the consistent encouragement and insights of John Fiske and Lynn Spigel, and thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable critiques.