ABSTRACT
United Nations’ figures showing sets in use in the five major regions in the world illustrate the differences between current have and have-not areas and nations. In North America, however, there were over 2000 radios and 800 TV sets per thousand people. Telecommunications systems in North America are plentiful and sophisticated. The United States dominates communications on the continent as, indeed, it does on the entire globe. In the United States, by 1990 virtually 100 percent of all households had radios and 99 percent had television sets. US influence on the rest of North America, especially its neighbors to the north and south, Canada and Mexico, is great. Music, shopping, weather, gardening, religious, public affairs, news, education, feature films, and specialized kinds of formats are the sole or principal orientation of many cable networks, and many others concentrate on a particular genre, such as adventure entertainment, sitcoms, cartoons, or women’s issues.
