Drug Narratives and Differences in Ideological Content across Varying Economic Models of Television

Abstract

This dissertation critically examines televised narratives that depict illicit drug use, the drug trade, and the war on drugs across three different economic models of television. The commercial television industry in the United States has historically relied on an audience commodity, airing programs that primarily serve as the "free lunch" to entice viewers to watch advertisements (Smythe, 1977/1997). However, premium subscription cable networks such as HBO produce programming in order to sell the programming itself, and hence rely on content as the commodity. The dissertation compares the ideological content of the illicit drug-related narratives found on three platforms of American television: broadcast television; premium subscription cable; and basic cable, with channels that rely on a hybrid audience/content commodity (with a dual revenue stream from advertisers and per-subscriber fees). Relying on critical cultural perspectives, narrative and critical discourse analysis, and a sample of roughly 400 hours of television programming, the research demonstrates how drug-related depictions and narratives on television most commonly support and occasionally challenge dominant ideological assumptions about drug use and the moral appropriateness of drug prohibition policies. Further, the research shows that there are patterned differences in the representations, narratives, and ideological content based on the commodity form of the network for which the programming was produced.