PART ONE: MASS COMMUNICATION AND SOCIETY Public Communication and Public Interest Contested Territory Media Performance Traditions of Enquiry The `Public Interest' in Communication PART TWO: MEDIA PERFORMANCE NORMS Performance Norms in Media Policy Discourse The Newspaper Press Performance Norms in Media Policy Discourse Broadcasting A Framework of Principle for Media Assessment PART THREE: RESEARCH MODELS AND METHODS Media Organizational Performance Models and Research Options PART FOUR: MEDIA FREEDOM Concepts and Models of Media Freedom Media Freedom From Structure to Performance Media Freedom The Organizational Environment PART FIVE: DIVERSITY Varieties and Processes of Diversity Taking the Measure of Diversity Media Reflection Media Access and Audience Choice PART SIX: OBJECTIVITY Concepts of Objectivity A Framework for Objectivity Research Measuring Objectivity News as Information Measuring Objectivity The Evaluative Dimension of News PART SEVEN: MASS MEDIA, ORDER AND SOCIAL CONTROL Media and the Maintenance of Public Order Policing the Symbolic Environment Solidarity and Social Identity PART EIGHT: MEDIA AND CULTURE Questions of Culture and Mass Communication Cultural Identity and Autonomy Whose Media Culture? PART NINE: IN CONCLUSION Changing Media, Changing Mores Implications for Assessment

Media performance : mass communication and the public interest / Denis Mcquail

Media Regulation: Governance and the Interests of Citizens and Consumers

Decoding Advertisements Ideology And Meaning In Advertising

* SEX in Advertising: Perspectives on the Erotic Appeal. Tom Reichert and Jacqueline Lambiase, eds. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003.294 pp. $65 hbk. $29.95 pbk. Reichert and Lambiase have assembled a collection that offers a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches to understanding the broad issues of sex in advertising and marketing, arguing that while sexuality may be prevalent in the contemporary communication marketplace, research seeking to bolster understandings of if and how it affects marketers' interactions with consumers and the culture is not. This text seeks to address that scarcity through this diverse overview of the research that has been done and suggestions of areas for further research and theory development The book is divided into four sections dealing with research approaches, consumer responses, cultural impacts, and advertising audiences and contexts. In particular, Part I offers a valuable review of the consumer-behavior, social-science, historical, and psychological research analyzing sex in advertising. Chapters in Part II offer excellent models of the types of research approaches to studying consumer interactions with sexually laden advertisements. LaTour and Henthorne's review of their research dealing with arousal and brand awareness, "Nudity and Sexual Appeals: Understanding the Arousal Process and Advertising Response," and Lang, Wise, Lee, and Cai's details of their experimental research involving sexual images on billboard advertising, "The Effects of Sexual Appeals on Physiological, Cognitive, Emotional, and Attitudinal Responses for Product and Alcohol Billboard Advertising," would be most useful for advanced undergraduate or graduate students who are seeking methodological models of empirical research as well as information on sex-related advertising. Other chapters offer interesting examples of more qualitative approaches; for example, see Gould's work with advertising lovemaps, "Toward A Theory of Advertising Lovemaps in Marketing Communications," and Schroeder and Borgerson's critical and cultural-studies analysis of the fetishism present in the Absolut Vodka campaign, "Dark Desires: Fetishism, Ontology, and Representation in Contemporary Advertising." The book's primary strength lies in its inclusiveness. Readers of the text will be reminded that research involving sex and advertising may involve far more than a content analysis of female body displays or textual innuendos in magazine spreads or TV commercials. Apart from the varieties of methodological approaches noted above, the book includes overviews of issues of advertising and sexuality that study the presentation of males as well as females and heterosexuality and homosexuality. Traditional and emerging media of advertising and marketing, such as online and Internet advertising, are addressed. …

Sex in Advertising: Perspectives on the Erotic Appeal

This article tries to justify restrictions on racial and gender stereotypes in advertisements from the perspective of liberal theory. The typical modern advertisement does not present arguments and information. Rather, it presents visual images of desirable life-styles and appeals to the emotional. Stereotype images of gender and race give certain connotations to belonging to a given gender or ethnic group. In the past several decades the conceptions of many people regarding race and gender have become more egalitarian, but no significant signs of this change can be traced in advertisements. Contemporary advertisements are filled with traditional stereotype images. This gap between advertisements and the principled commitment of many to equality results from the fact that stereotypes are deeply entrenched in the emotional world of many people. By bringing their audiences into repeated contact with stereotypes, advertisements prevent people from internalizing at the emotional level their commitment at the cognitive level to equality. We argue that in order to maintain the autonomy of the audience, restrictions on stereotypes in advertisements should be imposed. The ideal of autonomy demands that individuals will shape their perceptions and beliefs through a rational process. Whereas rationality requires a cognitive process of receiving and processing data, this does not occur in an optimal manner in the context of advertisements. People who are exposed to advertisements are in a state of reduced rationality. Because the messages in advertisements are transmitted indirectly, repetitively, and at a fast pace, the audience cannot contend with them on the cognitive level and is not aware of the changes the advertisement produces in their preferences and opinions.

Advertisements, Stereotypes, and Freedom of Expression

This thesis has two broad aims: 1) to explore the history and regulatory structure surrounding television advertising, particularly in relation to issues of ‘harm and offence’; and 2) to examine the regulatory discourses featured in adjudications responding to complaints of (alleged) offensive and/or harmful gender and sexuality portrayals in television advertising. 
Advertising has been a primary focus for a feminist criticism since, at least, the 1970s, arguing that it features and promotes sexist portrayals of women. However, little academic attention has been paid to the regulation of sexism in advertising, despite its long history. My work seeks to address the lack of research in this area.

Using archival research I explore the historical trajectory of regulatory approaches to issues of harm and offence in British television advertising since the establishment of commercial television to present day. I argue that these have, historically, taken a paternalistic, moral stance, whilst issues of sexism have been largely overlooked or misinterpreted as issues of sexual morality. Moreover, through a discourse analysis of adjudications featuring complaints concerning gender and sexuality portrayals – published between 1990 and 2012 – I examine the regulatory discourses constructed in response to public claims of sexist advertising.
Here, I make two separate, albeit interlinked, arguments. Firstly, that the regulatory discourse on the sexualisation of women in advertising lacks critical engagement with the meaning of sexual speech, particularly concerning issues of gender. Secondly, I explore, drawing on speech act theory, how regulatory discourse contribute to an ‘undoing’ of sexism, emphasizing a postfeminist reading of sexism as an ironic ‘fantasy’ of a distant past. In this way, I argue that sexist speech comes to be understood as a ‘failed performative’, no longer enacting that which it speaks in the wake of feminist success.

Joelin Quigley Berg

Papers

Issues of harm and offence : the regulation of gender and sexuality portrayals in British television advertisiting