Local TV: Histories, Communities, and Aesthetics

Local TV offers critical analyses of an expansive range of practices, policies, and debates in local television histories from the United States. Television is typically perceived as a commercial and/or national form of communication with the potential to reach millions of viewers. Yet from the earliest years of television through the present, communities have participated in the production of television, creating media relevant to their needs and concerns. This collection broadens our notion of what this medium can achieve, allowing for innovative representation and community use that disrupts the political, economic, national, and social norms of mainstream offerings. Lauren Herold and Annie Laurie Sullivan have gathered methodologically distinctive chapters that assess the possibilities and limitations of television’s mission to serve local publics. In doing so, they are attentive to the diverse histories, technologies, and functions of local television that have emerged in different cities over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Collectively, this book amplifies the use of television by marginalized groups—whose perspectives are too often sidelined or distorted in mainstream fare—as a site for community formation, cultural expression, civic engagement, and political action.