ABSTRACT
On an analytical continuum, with art and commerce posed as polar opposites, American television producers and executives have long told us this medium is organized as a business. Indeed, American television is less “distracted” than any other mass medium by loyalties to such noneconomic goals as editorial policy and standards, generations of family ownership, or idiosyncratic decisions based on personal taste. It is an economic institution, first and foremost, responsive to market forces, and concerned only incidentally with questions about its broader cultural role or possible effects on a nation of viewers.
