Abstract
The April issue of Journal of Communication Inquiry examines cultural myths in multiple forms, ranging from media representations of individuals to how technological practices can impact memory.
“President, Wrestler, Spectacle: An Examination of Donald Trump’s Firing Tweets and the Celebrity Appresident as Response to Trump’s Media Landscape” by Christina M. Blankenship opens the April issue by dissecting the connections between Donald Trump’s Twitter usage and its satirical response. The authors examine how Trump used Twitter to publicize cabinet turnover from January to April 2017 and how satirists responded to his Twitter usage. By framing Trump’s twitter usage through French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes’ conception of the wrestler, Blankenship offers a reconceptualization of the relationships between technology and media culture, where spectacle plays a primary role in the myths perpetuated from both Trump and his satirists.
The second article, “Primetime Television’s First White, Female U.S. President: Gender and Race Discourses of a Feminist Media Artifact,” addresses how the primetime television drama Commander in Chief employs race and gender in its first-of-its-kind narrative about a white woman president. Authors Shane T. Moreman and Alexandria Joy Aiello employ transversal discourse analysis to question how race and gender intersect in both the discussion surrounding Commander in Chief and the show’s narrative. The authors argue that the show insufficiently provides intersectional representation by framing the show’s President Allen through a third-wave feminist account of womanhood. Despite this, they note that the show deserves a special place in feminist media history because of its important representational work done in being the first show to prominently place a woman in the role of president.
Ron Bishop interrogates how newspaper coverage of the Oscar-winning film Spotlight frames investigative journalism in “‘Not an Ounce of Hollywood Bullshit’: A Narrative Analysis of News Media Coverage of Spotlight’s Oscar Win.” Bishop examines how the myth of the “hero journalist” that emerged during Watergate contrasts with narrative threads that journalists and critics frequently mentioned in their reviews, including the field’s financial difficulties during the time of the film and the grunt work required of journalists during investigative processes. Because of this, Bishop notes a disconnect between journalists’ enthusiastic response and the public’s conception of the field of journalism.
“Repertoires of Remembering: A Conceptual Approach for Studying Memory Practices in the Digital Ecosystem” by Brant Burkey places memory studies in conversation with digital media studies to propose a conceptual approach to how collective remembering occurs in digital environments through specific practices. Instead of focusing on particular sites of collective memory, Burkey argues for the use of multimodal sites of practices, like networks of memory that emerge from participatory culture through practices like tagging, hashtagging, and favoriting. This calls for researchers to not only pay attention to the sites of remembrance but also the discursive meanings behind the practices occurring within and across sites.
April’s issue concludes with Kate Prendella’s book review of Elizabeth Ellcessor’s Restricted Access: Media, Disability, and the Politics of Participation. Through Ellcessor’s blend of archival, popular, interview, and ethnographic methods, Ellcessor’s work is based in the diverse experiences of people with disabilities, who each experience access differently. Prendella notes that Ellcessor unpacks access through a sociocultural lens that sees questions of access existing at the discursive and material intersections of regulation, uses, forms, content, and experiences. Through this, Ellcessor provides a critique of the political systems that continue to view disabilities as a problem to fix.
Thank you to the many people that helped complete this issue, including our authors, reviewers, advisory board members, executive editor, and SAGE production staff.