ABSTRACT
The artifacts of media culture are thus not innocent entertainment, but are thoroughly ideological artifacts bound up with political rhetoric, struggles, agendas, and policies. Given their political significance and effects, it is important to learn to read media culture politically in order to decode its ideological messages and effects. As I have argued so far, reading media culture politically requires expanding ideological criticism to include the intersection of gender, sexuality, race, and class, and to see that ideology is presented in the forms of images, figures, generic codes, myth, and the technical apparatus of film, television, music, and other media forms, as well as in ideas or theoretical positions.
