In the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike, one of the areas in dispute was the question of residual payments for online material. On the picket line, Buffy creator Joss Whedon discussed new ways online media production could be financed. After the strike, Whedon self-funded a web media production, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Whedon and his collaborators positioned Dr. Horrible as an experiment, investigating whether original online media content created outside of studio funding could be financially viable. Dr. Horrible was a bigger hit than expected, with a paid version topping the iTunes charts and a DVD release hitting the number two position on Amazon. This article explores which factors most obviously contributed to Dr. Horrible's success, whether these factors are replicable by other media creators, the incorporation of fan labor into web media projects, and how web-specific content creation relates to more traditional forms of media production.

This article examines the media speculation and discussion surrounding the sexuality of 2009 American Idol contestant Adam Lambert. Introducing the concept of a “lens of detection,” it argues that the media coverage portrayed Lambert as a closeted gay man and encouraged viewers to watch his onscreen performances for clues that supposedly confirmed this identity. As Lambert remained queerly ambiguous in the series' broadcasts, the media's insistence on his gayness functioned to close off the disruption that he posed to the gay/straight binary as a gender-nonconforming performer who refused to disclose his sexuality. This media-imposed lens of detection has significant implications for how audiences may be positioned to understand queer representations in media texts: by pushing viewers to make sense of nonnormative performances of self through hegemonic gender norms, it limits the possibilities for representations to challenge—and discourages viewers from thinking outside of—dominant understandings of sexuality.

Like many presidents before him, Bill Clinton is a complex and varied repository of meaning. Operating alongside conventional historical treatments, popular culture presents visions of presidents, and Clinton in particular, that are in many ways more intimate and more multifaceted than those found in traditional biography. This analysis considers three such popular culture texts that all feature Clinton as a main character—the 1996 novel Primary Colors, the 2003 novel The X President, and the 2010 HBO film The Special Relationship. Specifically, I explore how each of these texts enliven an understanding of Clinton through their constructions of him as a chronotope—a character firmly defined by his placement within a particular temporal-spatial nexus. Ultimately, this analysis considers how the chronotopic Clinton offers ideological visions of Clinton's political character, of Clinton as president of the United States, and of the American presidency as an institution.

This article offers an overview of the key characteristics of “fake” news in the Australian national context. Focusing on two television shows, The Norman Gunston Show and Newstopia, it historicizes “fake” news within Australian television culture, situating it as part of a broader tradition of what Turner (1989) calls “Transgressive TV.” After analyzing the core comedic themes, styles, and intertextual relationships of both shows, the article concludes that, although news parody in Australia has tended to be highly fictionalized, it may nevertheless play a vital role in helping viewers better understand generic devices that frame and govern “real” television news.

In African Studies, political cartoons and comic strips have frequently been analyzed in relation to concepts of power and resistance and considered as ways in which those subject to power challenge the rulers (Mason, 2002; Mbembe, 2001; Nyamnjoh, 2009). To a certain extent, these studies have reflected the wider debate on the role of humor in the relation between rulers and ruled in the postcolony. In media and cultural studies, scholars have analyzed comics primarily as ideological texts which offer a particular framing of reality. Drawing on the Zimbabwean comic strip Chikwama, which was published in the Zimbabwean privately owned newspaper The Daily News in the early 2000s, this article argues that postcolonial laughter does not always address those in power, but humor may also point fingers at those subject to power in an attempt to make readers cope with the tragic events unfolding around them. Laughter frequently adopts a self-reflexive mode through which those subject to power mock their own powerlessness and lack of agency in the face of a system that they perceive as immutable. Furthermore, the strip Chikwama also highlights how media discourse came to reflect the way in which politics slowly invaded the lives of ordinary Zimbabweans, hereby reinforcing the importance of treating media texts as embedded in broader social discourses. The comic strip Chikwama did not only replicate the particular institutional ideology of The Daily News but also mirrored the way in which ordinary Zimbabweans negotiated the social and economic impact of the crisis on an everyday basis.

Products claiming to contain Hoodia gordonii have, over the 2000s, flooded the American marketplace; advertisements for dozens of brands promise to convert millions of ordinary American bodies into leaner, more desirable bodies. These products promise to erase cravings leading to overconsumption and aid the consumer in shedding the baggage of modernity. The marketplace success, evidenced by the proliferation of products claiming to contain Hoodia, is not because these products claim to accomplish what all diet programs and products do; if Hoodia assisted simple weight loss, it would not have as powerful a place in the American imaginary: all other diet aids claim the same thing. Hoodia's mythic status is achieved because the narrative surrounding the Southern African succulent touches something deeper in the American psyche: marketing strategies connect themselves with the powerful desire to return, at least symbolically and temporarily, to prelapsarian, Edenic locations, where magical consumables promising to erase the malaises of postindustrial societies still exist in museumized perpetuity. Furthermore, the claim that Hoodia can actually divest the consumer of the desire to consume is, in the American landscape of overabundancy and food-bombardment, almost as powerful as an antidote to death. It promises to safeguard the consumer and make the body and psyche “impenetrable” to the daily warfare within the consumer state.

Humanists seem to have a deeply ambivalent relationship with digital media. Call it the curse of double articulation. As means of human expression, digital media lie, undoubtedly, within our field ...

In and of itself, the global recession that took hold at the end of the first decade of the 21st century did not have nearly the direct impact on the US television industry that many others experie...