ABSTRACT
France possesses a comprehensive, multilayered media system appropriate to its advanced level of socioeconomic development. During the second half of the twentieth century the structures and functioning of this system underwent significant change. Most obviously, from the 1960s onward television became the most widely used mass medium of information and entertainment, though without fully undermining the specific contributions of the press and radio as print and oral media. Economic liberalization of the broadcasting sector in the 1980s opened up the way for the establishment of new terrestrial television channels. At the same time technological innovation further expanded the potential reach of television through the emergence of additional systems of program delivery such as cable and satellite, which broke the technical straitjacket of television’s formative years. In the late 1990s, digitalization pushed the television system further in the direction of multichannel diversity and apparently infinite program choice, while also introducing an element of interactivity into audience usage of the medium. By the end of the century, therefore, the image of one state monopoly channel uniting a nationwide audience in a collective act of passive viewing already seemed a distant memory of a bygone age (Kuhn 1995).
