ABSTRACT
Watching television continues to dominate a large part of our waking hours and yet it occupies a bafflingly small part of the media policy agenda in places like the United Kingdom and the United States. Why might this be the case? Perhaps because it represents a declining passion and a fading industry that has been overtaken by digital pursuits? Not according to the data presented in this chapter that suggests the opposite: that television is stubbornly popular and set to play a decisive role in the new online media ecology. Perhaps then because of a reluctance to get involved in questions of “content” for fear of undermining First Amendment and media freedom principles. This might be more persuasive if it were not for the very decisive interventions curbing freedom of expression that we have seen in recent years from the use of the Espionage Act by the Obama administration to intimidate journalists (CPJ 2013) to prime minister David Cameron’s warning to British journalists to show “social responsibility” in the reporting of state secrets (Watt 2013). When pressed, few administrations show that much fear in calling for content controls.
