Showing papers in "Comparative Technology Transfer and Society in 1994"

Citizen Weyrich: NET's Conservative Media Empire

Abstract: National Empowerment Television (NET) is a satellite television station broadcast from Washington, D.C. and run by the Free Congress Foundation (FCF). NET is transmitted via the Hughes Communications satellite Galaxy 7 and is available free and unscrambled throughout the continental United States, Canada, and Mexico. Describing itself as "C-Span with an attitude,"(1) the station's programming presents contemporary political issues from the point of view of both the secular and Religious Right. The December 1993 launch of NET was not, as this invocation of "new technologies" suggests, the originary moment of a new television channel. Rather, NET represents the public component of a Conservative television service that had already been in existence for four years.(2) Since 1990 the FCF had been transmitting (via satellite) activist programs organized around specific lobbying concerns to small groups of subscribing affiliates nationwide. This subscription service was originally called National Empowerment Television. It changed its name to C-NET (Coalitions National Empowerment Television) when the free 24-hour public station was launched at the end of 1993 as NET. Originally transmitted on the non-commercial Ku band, C-NET produces four monthly shows tailored to specific constituencies: Family Forum Live addresses white middle-class "pro-family" activists; A Second Look Live is targeted at black Conservatives: Campus Connection is aimed at college students and Empowerment Outreach Live speaks to business people. These shows discuss specific legislative issues, usually pending state and federal legislation, and direct viewers to lobby appropriate politicians with letters and telephone calls.(3) This format is the television equivalent of direct mail (without requests for money) and has been used to organize Conservative activists around such issues as gays in the military, school choice, and health-are reform. In contrast to the public service rhetoric the FCF uses to characterize NET, Paul Weyrich described it as a "megaphone in the hands of the people:" C-NET represents a long-term commitment to covert political activism pioneered by the FCF as part of a wider strategy to intervene in the U.S electoral system in order to shift political representation further to the right. C-NET addresses a narrow, preselected audience and changes its broadcast coordinates regularly to prevent unauthorized reception by non-subscribers.(4) The FCF is an umbrella group and organizing center of the secular and Religious Right and functions as the ideological complement to the Heritage Foundation.(5) The two work together to produce, disseminate, and implement a coherent Conservative ideology. NET is a product of this collaboration: the Heritage Foundation has provided both programming and staff for the new station. Both institutions were rounded in the '70s by Weyrich with financial support from Conservative businessman Joseph Coors and philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife.(6) A former chief assistant to Coors told journalist Sara Diamond that the FCF, the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority were ostensibly secular organizations "intended to mobilize Conservative Christians and shift the political make-up of Congress."(7) Supplementing the Heritage Foundation's economic focus, the FCF undertakes the training and support of Conservative political candidates at all levels, and the development and promotion of an ideology of "Cultural Conservatism."(8) NET was launched on December 6, 1993 ostensibly as a new interactive channel that would provide Americans with long denied access to government in Washington. Although it is primarily distributed by satellite, the FCF hopes that NET will eventually get picked up by local cable services when the transfer from coaxial to fiberoptic cable increases available channel space. Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcast Network (CBN), has courted a similar audience as NET since its inception as a satellite station in 1977 and transition to cable. …

One Way or Another: The Havana Film Festival and Contemporary Cuban Film

Abstract: In December of 1993, Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberries and Chocolate, 1993) swept the awards at the Havana Film Festival (officially Festival del Nuevo Cine Latino-Americana 15, or the 15th New Latin American Film Festival). The film won the top overall prize (the Coral), the Popular Choice prize, best director, best actor, and the international critics' award, among others. That this film, directed by Tomas Gutierrez Alea and the highly respected young director Juan Carlos Tabio was completed and screened at all is astonishing, considering that discrimination against homosexuals is the central narrative theme of the film. It is all the more remarkable for a state that only as recently as the mid-1980s officially decriminalized homosexuality.(1) Fresa y Chocolate is not a film by an exile seeking to undermine the Revolution. Rather, it is the premiere film of a national Festival designed to show off the Cuban film achievement to the world. Alea is arguably the most accomplished and esteemed film director in Cuba, and the film was produced under the stewardship of the founding director of Cuba's National Film Institute, Alfredo Guevara, who is also a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Also significant, this taboo-breaking film appears at the time of greatest economic crisis in Cuban history since the 1959 Revolution, one of only two films Cuba had the resources to produce in 1993. This "special period," the term leader Fidel Castro has given for the current economic and political crisis in Cuba, is the result of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and subsequent loss of financial support from that area and Eastern Europe; the intensification of the United States blockade; and internal conflicts regarding the economic and political direction of the country. Resources in Cuba for film production are so scarce that Fresa y Chocolate was made possible only as a co-production of Cuba, Mexico and Spain. Moreover, as a result of this new period of economic scarcity, for the first time, monies for feature production must be generated by the commercial revenues of the films themselves rather than from state subsidy. In this sense, Cuba has already accepted the inevitability of an increasingly market-oriented economy, in which the film industry as well as other sectors of Cuban society must learn to compete. The convergence of these new, and in some ways seemingly contradictory, factors in Cuba is particularly striking because of the special role Cuban film has played in the society. Film has been, since its inception, the preeminent cultural project of the Cuban Revolution, and Fresa y Chocolate represents a freeze-frame portrait, posing questions about the historic and evolving relationship of film and the film industry to the goals of the Cuban Revolution and acts as an expression of the current period of crisis. The Film: Fresa y Chocolate Fresa y Chocolate concerns the growing friendship of a gay artist and a young student in the late 1970s. They are introduced through a fairly transparent plot device: Diego, the artist, approaches David, the student and young communist, telling him he has pictures of David and the girlfriend who has just rejected him to marry an older, more financially secure man. In this scene, which takes place in the famous Copellia ice cream restaurant in Havana, Diego exaggerates stereotypically gay mannerisms, at one point lasciviously rolling a strawberry in his mouth to David's disgust and amusement. Diego gradually captivates David despite the latter's discomfort, partly because of Diego's charm, more because of his complete immersion in and passion for Cuban art and culture. Diego introduces and sensitizes David to literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. One critic, Frank Padron, called Diego "an authentic animator of culture."(2) The images and soundtrack of the film are filled with cultural references, from the baroque to graffiti. …

Public Audit: An Interview with Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock, and David Avalos

Abstract: The current economic recession has been debilitating for many artists regardless of the content of their work. Since this climate is characterized by a particular hostility toward controversial art, it is especially significant that Elizabeth Sisco. Louis Hock. and David Avalos have maintained a reputation for causing trouble in San Diego. Their collaborative public art projects receive scandalous reports in local and national news media and are often used as examples of the National Endowment for the Art' inadequate standards of quality. Their most current collaborative project Art Rebate (1993) refunded $10 bills to 450 undocumented workers along the San Diego, California/Mexico border. It was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and Centro Cultural de la Raza as part of the "La Frontera/The Border" exhibition. In response to recent attention to border relations due to NAFTA and other government policies, the artists wished to refute the popular misconception that undocumented Mexican workers do not pay taxes as well as demonstrate. albeit with a small symbolic gesture, their appreciation of the undocumented as valued members of Western states, communities. Furthermore, I believe their work has significant implications for undocumented workers from other nations, residing in other regions of the United States - Caribbean workers in Florida and New York City, for example. If the communities in which the undocumented workers from these areas work and reside could also acknowledge their common contributions, in the form of taxes among other things, then perhaps we as a society could also begin to address the crimes inflicted upon these groups and apply our democratic notions of human rights to those within our national borders. The term "community" proliferates in today's political rhetoric and has infiltrated the rhetoric of many professions including the alternative arts field. Yet, in the various contexts in which it is used, it is difficult to determine what is being referred to or how it is defined by the individuals or groups using it. Often "community" is unscrupulously repeated and reiterated without any acknowledgement of its ambiguity or its several, sometimes contradictory, working definitions. Sisco, Hock, and Avalos grapple with their own layered definitions and attempt to avoid the gross generalizations of community that occurs particularly in public art endeavors. As they state the artists are not seeking to create communities, they are seeking to create public forums that involve diverse participation. They do not profess nor attempt to "empower" anyone, but instead try to reveal public policies that are implemented without public debate. The first of their collaborative projects was Welcome to America's Finest Tourist Plantation (1988). This project consisted of a bus poster depicting a pair of hands Washing dirty dishes, a pair of hands being hand-cuffed, and a pair of hands delivering clean towels to a hotel room. These images were displayed on the back panel of 100 public buses in San Diego whose routes stopped in the restaurant and hotel districts. The piece, executed in time for the 1988 Super Bowl held in San Diego, attempted to reveal the presence of undocumented workers in he tourist industry of the city. In between these projects Sisco, Hock, and Avalos have been involved in several other collaborative works with other artists and scholars. Red Emma Returns (1989) was a street performance staging a return of anarchist political activist Emma Goldman to San Diego after her first and only visit in 1912 to assist the fight against the Anti-free Speech Ordinance; participating artists were Carla Kirkwood, Deborah Small, Bartlet Sher, William Weeks, and Scott Kessler in addition to Hock, Sisco, and Avalos. Americas Finest? (1990) were bus benches that appeared throughout the city for one month critiquing the increasing use of deadly force by San Diego police officers and the city government's refusal to hold the department accountable for their actions; artists involved included Small, Kessler, Sisco, and Hock. …

Underground Cable: A Survey of Public Access Programming

Abstract: The Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of l H@ includes a clause that would allow cable television operators - who by law have no say in access programming decisions - to ban "indecent" or "obscene" material, or " material soliciting or promoting unlawful conduct." Many access providers fear that cable operators - who have often considered access a thorn in their side - could use this clause to meddle with and possibly even shut down access centers. There has been little publicized evidence of what First Amendment freedoms are presently at risk. For the following survey, access center directors were questioned as to what kinds of programming, and by implication what kinds of public service and public debate, were threatened b the clause. Petitioners led by the Alliance for Community Media's (ACM, a national organization that represents the interests of cable access) impressive, dedicated pro bono lawyers won a dimension, or stay. of the rules. while an appeal of the federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules went forward.(1) This survey was filed as an affidavit in the access centers, brief. On November 23, 1993, a panel only the only three Democrats in what was then an appeals court of 10 judges decided the case in favor of access centers.(2) The court found that the clause effectively makes he government a censor, because by permitting cablers to censor programming, it suggests that they should do so, and is therefore unconstitutional. The FCC and tne Department of Justice promptly petitioned the appeals court to convene as a whole to rehear the case, and in an unusual move, the court granted the request. On October 19, 1994, the case will be reopened, this time before 11 judges. only four of whom are Democrats. Since the issue involves free and particularly political speech fan issue that crosses ideological lines), and since a Republican judge was among those granting a stay of the FCC rules, access center lawyers remain optimistic. Access center directors insist that the clause is in abeyance because the stay is still in effect. At least one cable operator (a Viacom system in San Francisco) has argued that the law is presently in effect. ACCESS IN CONTEXT Access cable - the channels variously known as public, educational and governmental (PEG) and offered to consumers as part of basic cable packages wherever they have been mandated in franchise agreements - is that rare site on cable television where public interest comes before profit. But the past of access cable has been embattled. it was created through struggles by local community activists, and has survived only where constantly defended - in perhaps 15%. of cable systems nationwide. The Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984 further reduced access, protection. The Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992 did nothing to repair earlier damage and added language that may complicate access, function further. One provision of the act, in fact, could challenge the fundamental purpose of public access and rob it of its unique function within cable television: to permit speakers open access to the community of viewers without censorship. The provision states that a cable operator may prohibit on PEG channels obscene material, sexually explicit conduct, or material soliciting or promoting unlawful conduct." It also appears to create liability for cable operators in the case of obscene material although the 1984 act's provision explicitly denying cable operators editorial control over access cable remains in place. Congress had intended public access cable to serve a unique free speech function on cable systems otherwise editorially controlled by the operator, or by the operator,s lessee in the case of leased access. It was designed to be "the video equivalent of the speaker,s soap box or the electronic parallel to the printed leaflet."(3) Public access, mandate is thus linked to the implications of the First Amendment: if it works, it is a public forum, a facilitator of public discussion and action. …

The X-Ray Files: Alien-Ated Bodies in Contemporary Art

Abstract: ... He contemplated this fact with pleasure; he enjoyed the reflection that his relation to the femur, or to organic nature generally was now threefold: it was lyrical, it was medical, it was technological ... --Thomas Mann(1) Among the recipients of the 1994 Nobel Prize in science were two physicists, Clifford G. Shull and Bertram N. Brockhouse, who had, in the words of New York Times writer Malcolm W. Brown, succeeded in developing "neutron probes [that] gave scientists a set of tools more powerful than X-rays and other forms of radiation used for exploring the atomic structure of matter."(2) X-rays, which were discovered by Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen in 1895, then, may have been superseded, perhaps rendered obsolete, on the eve of the centennial of their discovery. Yet the impression of the x-ray on the consciousness of the twentieth century remains indelible. Rontgen, who was himself the recipient of the first Nobel Prize in science in 1901, and his work constitute an emblematic moment in the development of the x-ray and its attendant technologies. The x-ray produced the greatest impact of any technological discovery of the twentieth century: "Like the explosion of the first atomic bomb in 1945," writes Linda Dalrymple Henderson, "the discovery of x rays produced a sense that the world had changed irrevocably."(3) Although x-ray technology is currently associated with the scientific and medical disciplines, its history reveals a restless migration across numerous fields: in the hands of psychoanalysts, occultists, entrepreneurs, and artists, x-ray images have been reterritorialized in a variety of contexts. Otto Glasser documents the barrage of applications suggested by those who believed that with x-rays, "base metals could be changed into gold, vivisection outmoded, temperance promoted by showing drunkards the steady deterioration of their systems, and the human soul photographed."(4) At its inception, then, the proper use of the x-ray--so named because the nature of the rays was unknown at the time of their discovery--remained unresolved. Almost immediately, however, the press linked the x-ray to the medium through which it was documented, photography. Complaining of the publicity that surrounded his x-ray images, Rontgen writes: "For me photography was the means to the end, but they [the mass media] made it the most important thing."(5) By capturing the otherwise invisible trace of the x-ray on film, Rontgen inadvertently challenged former hierarchies of knowledge based on subject/object relations. Rontgen's glimpse of radical interiority excited the public imagination. The x-ray introduced a new, albeit uncomfortable, perspective: by exhibiting the contours of an object as well as its interiority, x-ray images presented the viewing subject with a disturbing spectacle. Lazlo Moholy-Nagy explains: "[X-rays] give simultaneously the inside and outside, the view of an opaque solid, its outline, but also its inner structure."(6) The superimposition of inside and outside creates in the x-ray image a decentered site of spectatorship. For example, Rontgen's most notorious x-ray photograph, perhaps the first x-ray image of a human being, depicts his wife Berthe's hand. In the image, one sees Berthe's skeletal structure, the bones that constitute her hand but also the wedding ring that hovers on the surface. The implications of this uncanny view were not lost on Berthe. Glasser writes: When he showed the picture to her, she could hardly believe that this bony hand was her own and shuddered at the thought that she was seeing her skeleton. To Mrs. Rontgen, as to many others later, this experience gave a vague premonition of death? The death that Berthe glimpsed, however, was not that of her flesh but rather of a unified self. Berthe expressed that instinctive knowledge in the gesture of her shudder. Given the combined internal and external views of an object made possible in an x-ray image, the viewer is forced to occupy an impossible vantage point--at once inside and outside. …

Human Rights Watch International Film Festival

Abstract: Loews Village Theater, New York City April 29-May 12 Inevitably, following one of the screenings at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, an audience member will stand up, deeply moved, and say, "I think everybody everywhere should see this film." These responses reflect the belief, fostered by the hortatory address of conventional documentary, that the films represent universal values. Yet when it is possible for individuals to identify themselves as part of a "universal" audience, the sources of that solidarity are worth interrogating. This year's festival bears witness to the imperfect intersection of audiences for and addresses of political filmmaking. The topic of human rights would seem to be well served by the discourse of sobriety (to use Bill Nichols's term) that characterizes conventional documentary film: claiming a direct relation to the real and the ability to prescribe action. But festival programmer Bruni Burres diverts this agenda by including works that question their own relation to the real and works that encourage reflection, pleasurable or not, as well as action. The reception of two films about female genital mutilation, less well-known than Pratibha Parmar's Warrior Marks (1993) illustrates the sobriety debate: Messin' Up God's Glory (1993) by Avril Johnson and Afua Namiley-Vlana for Black Audio Film Collective, and Fire Eyes (1993) by Soraya Mire. The two screen together well: both are sensitive to issues such as the supposed betrayal of Afrocentric politics by African women's-rights activists. Both insist upon distinguishing cruel, patriarchal custom from culture. But where Fire Eyes is expository, the briefer Messin' Up God's Glory is poetic and indirect. For this reason one audience member (in an otherwise receptive audience) castigated filmmaker Johnson and producer Lina Gopaul for using poetry to represent an abomination; he preferred the sober discourse of a film like Fire Eyes that prompts a cathartic and outraged response. The three advertised highlights of the festival were Sa-Life, a series of films shot in Sarajevo by Sarajevo Group of Authors (SAGA); a retrospective of the work of Margarethe von Trotta; and a profile of London's Black Audio Film Collective. Each program brought a different agenda to the theme of human rights. The SAGA films testify to atrocities, in a way perhaps most expected of a festival like this, but using the rawest of verite styles. The von Trotta retrospective pays homage to the German director's feminist understanding of they workings of power and injustice, expressed in fiction narrative. Black Audio uses a "difficult" form of self-reflexive documentary to give shape to the rights issues of the African diaspora. Attendance at the programs varied. The von Trotta screenings were sold out and packed with adoring crowds, mostly women. SAGA films were attended less well, but with earnest attention. The Black Audio screenings were generally sparsely attended and their audiences were at least half African Americans. Numbers at other screenings were also weighted in terms of cultural group: a large audience including many Irish Americans at The Fourth Green Field (1993) by Margaret Bruen, a smallish group, predominantly Chinese Americans, at Discussions Caused by a Film's Filming Being Stopped (1994) by Ning Dai. Why the difference in numbers among these rather segregated audiences? I trace it to the historical constituency of human rights activism in North America. Activists for organizations like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty international still tend to be drawn from the traditional Left. They are white, middle-class, and in a position to take a slightly abstract stance toward the issue of human rights; to see human rights more in the general terms of the United Nations Charter than in terms of particular sites of violence. They are also a bastion of traditional documentary viewership. Now the festival's constituency is in flux, as the organizers seek to reach more publics for these films. …

Documents and Counter-Documents: AIDS Activist Video at the Crossroads

Abstract: Two recent works--one, an accomplished videomaker's first film; the other, an artist's first videotape--are compelling documents of the firsthand experience of living with AIDS As perhaps the two major independent works on AIDS to make the rounds of film and video festivals during the last year, they suggest the crossroads at which AIDS activist video finds itself, 10 years since it first emerged as a genre While the works share some similarities--both makers appear on-camera and organize their works around autobiographical material, and the impact of both works is harrowing--their intentions and approaches to their subject could not be more contrasting Juan Botas's One Foot on a Banana Peel, the Other Foot in the Grave (Secrets from the Dolly Madison Room) (1993) is a portrait of a group of HIV-positive men who visit a dcctor's office for daily treatments A compelling project that may best serve an audience of people who still don't know anything about AIDS (though with a million people estimated to be HIV-positive in the US alone, that is becoming harder and harder to imagine), it perpetuates many conventions of documentaries of its type Gregg Bordowitz's Fast Trip, Long Drop (1994), an experimental work, breaks new ground in exposing these conventions, deconstructing them, and often rejecting them outright Bordowitz is known for his independently-produced videotapes including Some Aspect of a Shared Lifestyle (1986), and as an original member of the collective Testing the Limits Also a writer, his essays have appeared in critical journals and in anthologies including AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (1988), edited by Douglas Crimp, and Uncontrollable Bodies: Testimonies of Identity and Culture (1994), edited by Rodney Sappington and Tyler Stallings As Assistant Coordinator of the Audio-Visual Department at Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), he produced and directed a documentary on AIDS for teens called It Is What It Is (1992), and the series "Portraits of People Living with HIV" (1992-94) Also at GMHC, he co-produced with Jean Carlomusto The Safer Sex Shorts (1989) and various episodes of the ongoing series "Living With AIDS" Bordowitz's latest work, Fast Trip, Long Drop, is an extremely personal experimental film that never shies away from the complexities and contradictions of its subject Basically, it is an autobiographical work examining the multiple identities of a man with AIDS who is gay but who has also had relationships with women; who is a political activist and a videomaker; and who espouses secular beliefs but is also exploring his Jewish roots At the same time, it is a brazen philosophical inquiry into the body of work known as AIDS activist video by one of its most experienced practitioners Far from a feel-good portrait of a heroic survivor, Fast Trip is often darkly satirical and unsettling Its tone is set in its opening dramatic sequence, in which actor Bob Huff appears as a newscaster whose reports begins: "The World Health Organization estimates there are 40 million people infected with HIV, the virus thought to cause AIDS If you are one of them, panic That's right, panic There's not a thing to be done for you"(1) Originally conceived as a video but transferred to film in hopes of securing a larger audience, Fast Trip has surfaced in contexts where videotapes are generally unwelcome, despite the fact that its form is far more relevant to independent video and television than to cinematic conventions It was screened at the Sundance Film Festival, reviewed in the film industry's trade rag Variety,(2) and at this writing is scheduled to open theatrically at New York's Cinema Village in January 1995(3) Juan Botas's One Foot on a Banana Peel, the Other Foot in the Grave embodies an altogether different approach to its subject It captures conversations among patients under daily treatment in a doctor's office with an unusual degree of intimacy, whether the subject is mundane or philosophical …

Orgy of Looking: The Construction of the L.A. Rebellion in the British Press

Abstract: This analysis is about the reporting of the L.A. Rebellion of 1992 in Great Britain and in particular one photograph of it that was widely circulated in the European press. I have never been to Los Angeles, but I feel as though I know it. From its future, glimpsed in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), to its present on T.V. in the series L.A. Law, to its past in detective stories, from Dashiell Hammett's novels to Starsky and Hutch in the '70s--Los Angeles is a place that I know, but do not know at all. L.A. is a repetitive multiplicity of overlapping, conflicting, and contradictory representations that each contribute to a conglomerate image. As Mike Davis succinctly describes it: "The ultimate world-historical significance and oddity of Los Angeles is that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism."(1) Across the wealth of images, stories, and legends Los Angeles is a representation that is over-determined. By over-determined I mean--in the psychoanalytic sense--that a representation is always a compromise, a result of a layering of meaning that cannot be reduced to a single content. Thus the analysis of any image ought to open up that sedimented and congealed layering of overdetermined cultural meanings. In the same way, no doubt, the L.A. Rebellion--the instigation of which was attributed to the unjust acquittal of four white police officers on trial for the beating of Rodney King in 1992--was an over-determined event. On the afternoon of April 30, 1992 the image of L.A. erupted on the media highways of Britain's TV., radio, and regional evening newspapers as a dystopia. London's regional newspaper, the Evening Standard featured a front-page headline, "TORCHING OF LOS ANGELES," with a half-page color photograph below it. The photograph, "wired" from L.A. through Reuters to the newspaper's London office, showed a row of five police officers standing in front of several burning buildings. That same evening the national daily newspapers were busy preparing their issues for the following early morning editions. The next morning, May 1, their front pages were dominated by news of the "riots." The image that was preferred by most of these newspapers was the same photograph used the previous night by the Evening Standard. Significantly all but one of the "Tory papers" (those more or less politically affiliated with the governing Conservative Party) chose to use this image on the front page. Inside the newspapers further coverage was given, with The Sun even abandoning its "page three" habit of showing naked-breasted "pin-up" photos of women for three subsequent issues to make way for more photos of the L.A. riots. Interestingly, the two liberal newspapers (non-party affiliated) The Independent and The Guardian both used the same rather indistinct black and white photograph, while the "labour" tabloid The Mirror, in isolation, considered an incident about Princess Di to be noteworthy front page news. But it was the picture of a row of police standing firm in front of burning buildings that confronted most newspaper shop and kiosk customers that morning with the usual row of (Tory) newspapers, The Star, The Sun, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Express and The Times announcing the same event using the same photograph. From the plethora of representations available of L.A., this one photograph demands an analysis as the picture that gave the U.K.'s newspaper readers their first impression of the riots. More than seven million people bought newspapers that morning with that photograph staring back at them, and the actual readership of newspapers is estimated at double or triple the circulation figures. Here, the common assertion that newspapers compete with one another in the content of their pages to maximize profitability and circulation figures is given a practical test. On May 1, 1992 the front page editorial stance among the Tory papers was virtually unanimous. …