ABSTRACT
This chapter details the process by which commercial imperatives structured the form, content, and effects of broadcasting in the United States. The author sees how the network system of television evolved from the corporate and technological structures of radio broadcasting, and how television came to play an indispensable role in economic, political, social, and cultural life. The story of broadcasting is one in which ever-more powerful corporations attempt to control leisure, entertainment, information, and mass communication in the interests of corporate profit and social control. These broadcasting corporations produced cultural industries that became an indispensable feature of corporate capitalism. Consequently, television networks are now entrenched as a central force within the transnational corporate power structure and have served capitalist interests even more directly during the 1980s. The commercial system also established the hegemony of national networks over local outlets.
