The Los Angeles dream factory shaped world power in the second half of the 20th century by leading the form and content of mass communications.  Pursuing corporate profits, studios and networks recast the shape of political, as well as cultural, power.  "In our society, writes Manuel Castells, "politics is primarily media politics. The workings of the political system are staged for the media so as to obtain the support, or at least the lesser hostility, of citizens who become the consumers in the political market."  Media-centered politics have created new vertical and horizontal shapes of power: Corporate media dominance now competes with a horizontal mass self-communication" in the Internet age.

Amid the seeming place-less virtuality of electronic media, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that media power grew from specific urban places: New York City and Los Angeles.  This shape of contemporary power is a distinctive product of the two great global metropolises that produced it: New York City and Los Angeles.  These essays contribute to contemporary media and power studies by localizing the networks of production and distribution, asking, how did the shape of social power in the media-producing cities shape the "real virtuality" of the new mediascapes? Stated bluntly, these essays seek to answer the question:  What do mass media owe to the places of media ownership and production?


Few cities have ever claimed so much cultural and political power as LA did in the decades after the Second World War. Hollywood's motion picture industry had already, by the 1930s, revolutionized and dominated mass communications worldwide.  In many ways the LA movie industry seemed to be at the height of its power in the late 1940s, especially because the rest of the world's movie industries had been devastated by World War II. 

The sudden emergence of television in 1948, however, with mass audiences of millions daily by 1952, coincided exactly with the onset of the Cold War and with the political career of Angeleno Richard Nixon.  It also coincided with the sudden break-up of Hollywood's "Big Eight" movie studios, with the 1948 Paramount Decision.  Moviegoing (and newspaper sales) dropped rapidly in proportion to television's rise, as millions began to stay home for their evening news and entertainment.

Censorship also fell, beginning in the 1950s and completely by the 1960s and 1970s. The freedom to make uncensored movies led to the New Hollywood, by the late 1960s.  Already in the 1970s-80s, new electronic and digital media had sprung up with cable and the Internet.  Vast new markets for news, entertainment, and commerce began to reach millions, hundreds of millions, and now billions of eyes and ears.

Hollywood, meaning the cinematic industries in the LA region, has always been at the eye of these storms.  LA is a place that has been central to the vast growth and displacements of the global media universe.  The urban history of Los Angeles must also therefore be a history of this vast media landscape, anchored so deeply to the shapes of power in the place of Los Angeles.

Exactly how did LA's Hollywood motion picture and television industries shape world power?  Power lay in the programming. Together, at first, in the 1950s and early 1960s, movies and television served as propaganda for the segregated National Security State, but the fall of censorship and the success of the Civil Rights movement opened new opportunities for free expression and diverse programming.

LA-based mass media, along with New York-based broadcast news, proved that the television could be an engine for socio-political change, as well as reaction.  Movies and TV, in the age of Nixon and Reagan, through the Uprising of 1992, became mixed political mass media, carrying both reactionary and rebellious programming, but always playing a key and crucial role in the shifting fortunes of power politics.  Following the LA Uprising of 1992, the bathos of Cinema-TV in the 1950s had been reborn, fully emancipated, as a bloodbath.

The tragedy of Hollywood is that its emancipation from censorship limits on free expression produced a most terrible outcome: a global  "carnography" in which the public order of ruling regimes consumes bodies visually as carnage in the reproduction of social power. ​Leaders leverage bloody images to build power on fear; and cinematic industries feed on violated bodies to turn profits in the market for fear.  The rise of "terrorism" in geopolitics is the result of carnographic power.