... and it all comes through in the Coda.

Thanks, first, to Dave for making me read the Coda: I realize we weren't actually instructed to read the Coda to Paul Starr's Creation of the Media, but I think it warrants particular relevance to our cultural studies mindset, and to our previously expressed anxieties about Starr's position in this work.

Starr's rather telling use of scare quotes on page 400 with reference to "critical theorists" (apparently a label worthy of some dispute) helps to illuminate his own "liberal" (itself a more vastly disputatious term) position. His generalizations in this section -- highlights include "Critical theory is a cartoon of culture" and "The Frankfurt School critics, of course, ... objected to the conversion of the public into 'mere media markets'" -- solidify a feeling I've had all along: that Starr's position in The Creation of the Media is not only uninformed by cultural theory, it is in fact anti-theoretical. He caps this section off with a terse appreciation of the pure perfection that is American capitalocracy: "Our public life is a hybrid of capitalism and democracy, and we are better off for it" (402).

Clearly. We are clearly "better off" as the result of all that this marriage has wielded in American society, including (but not limited to) the still-persistent lunacy of Comstock laws, a democratic belief in censorship by members of moral marginalia, commercial competition for the benefit of the corporate sphere and at the continued expense of the consumer, and the suspension of First Amendment rights when the function of such speech is deemed "mere entertainment".

And, one more thing: he's totally wrong about Adorno. Adorno did hate jazz, but the object of this hate was the mechanized "swing" jazz of the 30's and 40's, built on the back of the African American musical tradition and popularized by the likes of Paul Whiteman. He wasn't talking no Charlie Parker. And anyone who doesn't see me eye-to-eye on this can go ask Dan Markowicz.