This piece of research belongs to a tradition in media and cultural studies which treats television as text. The goal is to understand how our experience of the media and particularly of television is produced in meaning. Making sense of media texts primarily involves treating television talk and images as practices of representation, situated in specific political and cultural contexts. Earlier interpretative projects involved a preoccupation with the gap between the real world and the meanings disseminated through the media as well as with the ideological effects that media have on contemporary culture. More recently, post-structuralist theories of meaning have shifted the emphasis away from "hidden" meanings towards the articulations of meaning and power in television texts, which themselves produce specific "reality effects' — rather than reflecting or distorting a reality "out there".¹