ABSTRACT
Almost everybody else in this business, however, seems to think that it is in the nature of popular texts to allow for multiple readings. One way to understand this is that certain genres, mostly on television, are organized as loosely structured collages open to different constructional logics. While it is correct to say that both the aesthetic and the ideological address the constructional aspect of the text, concentrating on an awareness of either the syntax or the values from which the text is constructed, it seems incorrect to toss out the difference between them in the scramble to label both as metalinguistic or critical or constructional. The active role assigned to the reader in this kind of engagement is thus conducting exposes of the evils of characters and producers. Confronting characters through gossiping about their immorality as if they were real often affirms the viewer in his or her own moral values.
