ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with ‘political economy’ and ‘ideology’, which are often connected but start out from different academic positions. The press has been unable to expose the crimes of the powerful. Living in an era where powerful nations no longer seek more power by, in general, reaching out across the world through military force, they manage this through the ‘spread’ of culture, which, ‘trojan horse’-like, invades our ideologies. The Australian ‘tycoon’ Rupert Murdoch started owning media institutions in the early 1950s and since then he has come to acquire for his News Corporation a vast array of newspapers, TV channels, radio stations, film companies and websites. The chapter examines the relationship between democracy, interaction and reality TV. It considers the power of key players, those who create and profit from the shows and their legacies, and it asks media students to make sense of the connections between media and democracy and issues of representation and accountability.
