ABSTRACT
‘Radio is not to be considered merely as a business carried on for private gain, for private advertisement, or for the entertainment of the curious. It is to be considered as a public concern, impressed with a public trust, and to be considered primarily from the standpoint of public interest.’ Every week 400,000,000 people around the world watch the American western ‘Bonanza’. The enormous and diverse system of American television is based on an extreme version of the ideal of cultural freedom, but provides for the overwhelming mass of American viewers and listeners a stultifying sameness which appears to be far more the victim of a kind of censorship than the product of other television systems which are more overtly controlled by public authorities. This chapter concentrates only on the central core, there is a good deal else in the sheer profusion of American television. Prime time network broadcasting is the commanding height of American television.
