The American jeremiad long has been an established rhetorical form that operates as a corrective to conditions gone awry. In response to a falling away " the jeremiad issues a call to the community to return home to idealized foundational principles The American experience in Vietnam produced in the national community a crisis of faith in foundational principles precipitated a crisis of representation of national identity. This essay argues that the secular American jeremiad emerges prominently in Steven Spielberg's film Saving Private Ryan Through a close reading of the film contextualized by the preceding twenty years of popular cinematic lamentation following Vietnam I argue that the film operates in part as a rhetorically skillful response to the post-Vietnam crisis of national identity. I further argue that Spielberg both acknowledges appropriates the crisis offering viewing audiences a "way home" to mythic America. The essay concludes with a discussion of the tensions between the conservative mande in the jeremiadic form the possibilities for social transformation

The prevalence of verbal and physical aggression on daytime television talk shows has earned this genre the designation of `confrontainment." In recent times academics, politicians, clergy, and media critics have frequently and publicly expressed their concern about the violation of moral values featured on the "The Jerry Springer Show." On the other hand, sociologists in the functionalist tradition argue that commonly held moral values must be violated and the villains publicly punished for their transgressions to mark and reinforce moral boundaries. The goal of the study reported here was to assess the potential of "The Jerry Springer Show "for fu filling these social maintenance functions. A content analysis of 100 episodes of the show over an eight-month period revealed that deviance from traditional family values is frequently featured on the show but that the studio audience and Jerry Springer played active roles in the public degradation of these transgressions, casting the show in a morally conservative light

This essay examines television news treatments of stay-at-home dads (Mr. Moms) during the late 1990s and argues that these news accounts represent a challenge to more traditional masculine identities depicted in media. While offering a nominal challenge, however, these representations reinscribe significant aspects of patriarchal privilege within domestic space. Through a combination of discursive strategies compatible with the commercial needs of contemporary media organizations, television news programs' Mr. Moms operate ideologically to legitimate domesticity and nurturance as appropriately masculine. In so doing, they challenge some traditional notions about men while further solidifying a connection between these men and heterosexuality in the context of mainstream television news representations of middle-class family life in the contemporary United States. This process of legitimating nurturance and domesticity also and concurrently reverses the genders long articulated to particular advertising target segments within the commodity broadcast audience. This representational process reifies and naturalizes the class specificity of these Mr. Moms while it fuels television's continual need to produce and satisfy new audience niches in order to survive and compete in the media environment of today