Taste

Morality and Taste in Media Content

Tensions and contradictions abound in claims about media content and its relationship to popular taste and public morality. Media, especially mainstream media, reinforce prevailing norms of taste and morality by catering to them, but they also legitimize new and different standards of good and bad by circulating provocative and unorthodox material. Media coverage of scandals

Taste Culture

The idea that popular culture consists of distinct “taste cultures” was developed by Herbert Gans (1974) as an alternative to the then dominant theory of mass culture. Mass culture theorists (Horkheimer & Adorno 2001) viewed popular culture as a commercial enterprise that represented a debased form of high culture. They claimed that mass culture targeted

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