Communication

This article explores a series of media policy and political-economic issues created by the United States Federal tax deduction for advertising. Because American companies are allowed to deduct the entire cost of an advertisement for the year in which they purchase it, this tax deduction serves as a kind of government subsidy for advertising and the media more generally. By channeling tax money to commercial media outlets, this deduction creates a hidden public media system that distorts and inverts the presumed policy goals of government media funding. I begin by offering a brief history of this tax deduction, which was first implemented in the early 20th century, before moving on to discuss tax expenditures-a tax policy concept used to call attention to the hidden impact of tax deductions and other preferential tax treatments. Finally, I quantify the economic impact of the United States Federal tax deduction for advertising and demonstrate the upside-down nature of the hidden media system it supports. Treating this deduction as a tax expenditure would force greater transparency regarding the funding it provides and open up the hidden media system to greater analysis and critique. Is advertising an expense or an asset? This question may sound inconsequential to all but the accountants who record advertisements in their ledgers. However, this article seeks to demonstrate the central importance of the issues raised by this and related questions for the political economy of the American media system. In current accounting and tax law, advertising is treated as an "ordinary and necessary" expense. This allows American companies to deduct 100% of most advertising spending from their overall income. Coupled with the various other ways that American corporations avoid paying taxes, this can lead to significant reductions in tax money available to the public. While this deduction may not be significantly different from a host of others that corporations can claim, it has significant consequences for the broader media ecosystem. This essay's exploration of the tax deduction for advertising contributes to a growing discussion of the important role that taxes play-or could play-in our media system. In her discussion of how

The mid-to-late-19th-century Italian scientist Angelo Mosso took an autobiographical approach to physiology, employing a range of instruments to measure his own bodily changes. In one especially personal example, Mosso reported that “his own thermometer-measured rectal temperature changed with his spontaneously evoked emotion” (Dror, 1998, p. 173). As invasive as this approach might sound, it is indicative of a central trajectory within the transition from 19thto 20th-century social science, with important implications for the history of media studies. Mosso was situated between traditions of spiritualism—which saw self-reflection as an essential component of understanding—and an increasingly scientific psychology that used presumably objective technologies to extend, and in many cases critique, this personal approach. Mosso’s position between these two traditions likely explains his relative comfort utilizing scientific technologies on himself.

This article outlines two modes of publicity, a publicity of promotion and a publicity of openness, and then considers their implications for traditional broadcast versus online communications. Although the structure of the internet makes it particularly good at developing a publicity of openness, the economics, regulatory structure and technology of the traditional broadcast media make them far better at developing promotional publicity. I trace a series of examples that demonstrate this inequality and discuss the implications of this disparity for the economics of attention. Ultimately, I argue, discussions of the democratic possibilities of the internet must take account of the relative lack of promotional publicity online.

This article argues for the relevance of the work of Carl Seashore to the history of communication research in the United States. A psychologist at the University of Iowa in the early 20th century, Seashore's laboratory took up questions regarding the psychology of music and art with direct relevance to communication studies and influenced such important figures as Wilbur Schramm and Kurt Lewin. Exploring this history offers a more robust picture of the history of experimental communication research in the United States and provides an important corrective to contemporary histories of the field.

This article explores a fairly recent trend in cable programming: "drive-by programming." In response to the proliferation of channels and the potential for channel surfing that has accompanied the narrowcasting of contemporary cable television, some networks have regularly employed a programming scheme that directly targets the roving viewer. Looking at MTV, TNT, and CNN, this article examines the ways in which this new programming scheme has impacted both programming choices and program content, including MTV's movement to reality television and the repetitive story-telling practices of both TNT and CNN. These case studies demonstrate the consequences of drive-by programming for the contemporary media environment, illustrating the particularly detrimental effects of CNN's drive-by practices on the kinds of news stories the network tells. Media technologies both regulate and respond to the patterns of everyday life. The telegraph, in conjunction with the railroad, played a vital role in establishing a standard concept of time within the United States. Before the establishment of a uniform standard time, communities relied on the sun for their sense of temporality. As a result, each community had a particular sense of local time that differed in small but important ways from that of other communities. Around the mid-19th century, telegraphic transmissions of time signals were used to compare times at different points in space, establishing a sense of "true time" that helped maintain more consistent railroad schedules and avoid collisions between trains operating from different locales (Bartky, 2000;. Here, telegraphy helped to regulate people's experience of time and thus the temporal patterns through which they moved through their lives.

This article explores a series of media policy and political-economic issues created by the United States Federal tax deduction for advertising. Because American companies are allowed to deduct the entire cost of an advertisement for the year in which they purchase it, this tax deduction serves as a kind of government subsidy for advertising and the media more generally. By channeling tax money to commercial media outlets, this deduction creates a hidden public media system that distorts and inverts the presumed policy goals of government media funding. I begin by offering a brief history of this tax deduction, which was first implemented in the early 20th century, before moving on to discuss tax expenditures—a tax policy concept used to call attention to the hidden impact of tax deductions and other preferential tax treatments. Finally, I quantify the economic impact of the United States Federal tax deduction for advertising and demonstrate the upside-down nature of the hidden medi...

This essay examines how public memory is visualized in the statue to Canada's ''gay pioneer,'' Alexander Wood. By analyzing three viewing positions of the statue*the official democratic memory, traditionalist countermemory, and camp countermemory* I argue each position enacts a distinct form of remembering Wood with implications for both materializing queer memories and how space and identity are understood in the city. Based upon these visualizations, I extend arguments for how rhetoricians critique memory texts and contribute to defining ''queer public memory'' in light of this statue.

LGBT discourse. This discourse has been used to defy heteronormative characterizations of violence, confirm gay and lesbian identity, and to "queer" rigid notions of community. Tracing Shepard's memory through three contested memory frames, I argue for an expanded perspective of queer counterpublic memories and the strategic use of public memories by counterpublics. M inutes after midnight October 7, 2008, marked the ten-year anniversary of the brutal beating and murder of Matthew Shepard, an openly gay college student in Laramie, Wyoming. Targeted for his sexual orientation, robbed, verbally abused, and tortured, the young gay man lashed to a cow fence left an indelible mark in the minds of many Americans. Shepard-unconscious, cold, beaten, and bleeding-would be found the next morning by a passing biker still hanging from the fence, his hands tied behind his back. He would die five days later without ever waking THOMAS R. DUNN is a doctoral student in Communication at the University of Pittsburgh. The author would like to thank Kendall Phillips, Lester Qlson, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments in developing this essay. 611 612 RHETORIC »PUBLIC AFFAIRS from his coma. News of the murder by two local men, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, was a transformative moment in the ongoing discourse over the status of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people within American society. Initial reports of his attack, vigils during his slow death, protests by antigay forces, and an unprecedented media circus all shaped a debate about what it meant to be gay in America and formed a moment in the public consciousness that transformed Matthew Shepard into an icon of unmatched appeal.'

Oscar Wilde is perhaps the most well-known historical homosexual in the public imagination. However, for a new generation of queers less connected to “gay” labels, Wilde appears other and forgettable. To reanimate Wilde’s memory for twenty-first century queers and ensure his legacy going forward, I read the 1997 Oscar Wilde monument in Dublin, Ireland. Through discursive, visual, and material analyses, I
argue the monument first complicates Wilde’s sexuality, casting doubt on his gay label. Second, the monument reframes Wilde as the practitioner of a proto-queer sensibility. In doing so, the monument marks historical anachronisms and renders Wilde a more resonant figure for contemporary queer audiences.

This essay examines memory strategies of the Obama Administration in the days immediately after the President’s gaffe-laden 2009 oath of office. Inaugurals are significant
legal and symbolic moments in American memory. However, Obama’s gaffe troubled the legal and symbolic memories of the first oath, forcing Obama to retake the oath a second time. In an attempt to modify these rhetorical challenges, I argue
the Obama administration sought to minimize the second oath by refiguring it as a technical memory that concerned only a narrow group of legal experts. In doing so, the administration was able to preserve the symbolic power of the first inaugural oath, while muting questions of presidential investiture.

Temporal anxieties are pervasive in the 21st century, particularly within the context of the American family. Although scholars apply Kenneth Burke's “symbolic medicine” to explain how audiences manage these anxieties through consumption of popular media, I argue that representations of queer-inclusive families are a common form of symbolic medicine used to ameliorate time panics within the traditional family unit. Drawing upon the concept of “queer temporality” and the ABC television dramaBrothers & Sisters, I explain how these texts function as “equipment for living,” arguing for the acceptance of queer-inclusive families, not as a moral necessity, but because such acceptance can return stability to a conservative family time currently under threat. As such, queer experiences of time are drained of their radical potential, and queer lives function to serve the very heteronormative structures they seek to resist.

This essay argues that marriage equality discourses have
successfully been used not only to advance GLBTQ rights but as
a vehicle for re-securing neoliberalism after the 2008 Great
Recession. Specifically, this essay analyzes how Macklemore and
Ryan Lewis’s “Same Love” (featuring Mary Lambert) supports
neoliberalism by forwarding antiblackness and circumscribed
political subjectivities while urging support for marriage equality.
Through appeals to minimization, multiracialism, and inverting
oppression, “Same Love” demonstrates how avowedly progressive
texts can simultaneously impede the freer and fairer world the
text supposedly promotes.

This dissertation explores a turn toward strategic public memories in the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer (GLBTQ) community. While GLBTQ people have long used memories to influence and persuade heterosexual audiences, these memories have largely been what Michel de Certeau labels tactical - fleeting, ephemeral texts built upon the detritus of dominant culture. In contrast, GLBTQ people increasingly deploy strategic memories that endure heterosexual forgetting, persist through time, and exert greater control in spaces of power. In four case studies, I examine the possibilities and pitfalls of the strategic turn for securing greater GLBTQ rights. The first case study examines the Alexander Wood statue and how gays and lesbians have used material rhetorics like commemorative sites to make their memories durable and to resist heteronormative forgetting. While highlighting Wood's "official" meaning, I also demonstrate how both traditionalist and camp viewers ...

Despite increasing box office returns, North American theater ticket sales have been in steady decline since 2002 (The Numbers, n.d.). While hits such as The Hunger Games, The Avengers, and The Dark Knight have generated lucrative and record-breaking grosses, the number of people in attendance has trended down. It is fair to conclude that theater attendance and ticket sales will continue a downward trajectory. This problem is relevant to our culture, society, and to communication practitioners in several ways. First, and most obvious, it is widely agreed that the experience of attending movie theaters has become not only an enjoyable custom for people across the globe, but also an important one for cultures exchanging and communicating ideas. Second, and more importantly, movies continue to be an economic driver. The theatrical exhibition of those movies a key component to that fact. The theatrical run of a film, according to Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, leads to a "stream of monetization" (McClintock, 2022). This means that films tend to do better financially on home video such as DVD, VOD (video on demand), streaming, if they are first exhibited in a theater. In many ways, theatrical exhibition is the backbone of the film industry, and therefore a cornerstone of media technologies. Without theatrical, without its secondary-marketing effects, without its aura, the major studios may no longer be compelled to, or find sense in, making large-budgeted films-or smaller ones for that matter. Yes, Netflix and Amazon may take the studio's place with streaming on demand. However, streaming may also rely on the theatrical experience. Amazon, after several experiments, discovered that a theatrical run for a film generated greater streaming viewership (Fritz, 2018). Third, recent box office hits like Oppenheimer and Barbie show there is still a very lucrative and viable life to be found within the box office. Fourth, increased box office returns would demand more production of a diverse range of pictures, and possibly end the recent trend of studios relying on branded franchises, reboots, and sequels to attract audiences. This paper is aimed at identifying and reversing the declining theatrical fortunes of top-grossing distributors from 1995 to 2023 such as Walt Disney, Warner Bros., Sony Pictures, Universal, Paramount Pictures, 20 th Century, and Lionsgate. Ultimately, this paper will highlight a solution on how to dramatically increase box office results. These solutions will not involve making "better movies." The film industry will not solve its theatrical problems through content itself. Rather, it will solve its problem through better and more effective marketing. This paper will argue that, instead of using mass marketing (the kind of marketing the film industry currently relies on), it should instead utilize direct marketing that centralizes around customer relationships, retention of those customers (rather than acquiring new ones), and granular end-user data.