ABSTRACT
Research on television has, during the last decade, put special emphasis on the competence of the audience. The viewer is no longer seen as passive but, instead, active, free to choose what he/she wants to see, and competent to read televisual texts and construct his/her own meanings. This optimism has marked a clear shift in critical communication studies. Whereas the ‘old’ critical tradition of the 1960s and 1970s seemed to emphasize the topdown power of media institutions, or ‘culture industries’, the ‘new’ flagship of the critical school, cultural studies of the 1980s, has preached a new doctrine of bottomup resistance by the audience.1
