Despite the encroachment of cable and satellite, owners of terrestrial broadcast stations remain a powerful force in the radio and television industries. By 2000 almost 80 percent of households in the United States subscribed to cable or satellite television, but broadcast stations are still highly valued commodities in a media marketplace defined by station ownership groups and media conglomerates. As of 2002, there were 1,712 broadcast television stations and 13,296 radio stations in the United States. These stations have been the focus of intense rounds of merger and consolidation struggles since the mid-1980s. Broadcasting has arguably maintained an even more dominant role in the United Kingdom, where five national public-service and commercial channels are distributed by terrestrial broadcast, supplemented by a relatively weak cable television industry (with 30 percent penetration), a more robust satellite broadcast sector, and a growing presence for digital multichannel broadcasting.

In the U.S. and U.K. contexts alike, the continued strength of terrestrial broadcast is largely the result of its ability to attract a mass audience more effectively than other means. Federal policies have ensured this advantage by requiring all cable and satellite systems to carry local broadcast channels, thereby giving broadcast-based national networks a higher “cumulative,” or potential, audience than any single cable channel, which may not be featured on all cable systems. The cumulative audience for the NBC television network, for example, was 81 percent of U.S. television households in 2000; this large audience is an expression of NBC’s combined reach as a broadcast and cable network. By contrast, one of the highest-rated cable networks, TBS Superstation, could be seen in only 43 percent of U.S. households in that year. These differences in reach are one basis for the contemporary distinction between broadcasting and narrowcasting; still, since even a low-rated cable network attracts a national audience in the hundreds of thousands, the qualifiers “narrow” and “broad” should be taken as the relative terms they are. As a history of the term “broadcasting” further reveals, it is a complicated concept not fully explained by the generally accepted technological and industrial definitions.

Invention

Not long after Guglielmo Marconi developed his wireless telegraph system in 1896, the term “broadcasting” entered the language. The U.S. Navy, an early adopter of Marconi’s wireless, popularized the term as the method by which it sent instructions to ships at sea, “broadcasting” orders across miles of open ocean to the entire fleet at once. The expression was borrowed from agriculture, after a method of sowing seeds in which farmers walked their fields throwing—or casting—seed over a large area with wide sweeps of the arm. It neatly captured the nature of wireless signaling, wherein an antenna sends signals in all directions, enabling instantaneous communication over long distances.

The promiscuous nature of the broadcast signal was a problem, though, for those who wanted to use the wireless for its commercial, public safety, or military applications. Security, privacy, and reliability are highly valued by businesspeople, public safety officials, and military strategists, but wireless offered none of these in its early incarnations. These failings were exacerbated when a new group of wireless users emerged: the amateurs. Using cheaply made crystal set detectors, wireless hobbyists constructed transmitters and began communicating informally with each other, creating a social network of listeners and talkers that was the forerunner of today’s ham radio. Amateurs eavesdropped on official communications and some broadcast their own signals to “jam” the original senders’ messages and promulgate hoaxes. Although disorganized and only loosely institutionalized by wireless clubs and the like, this subculture prefigured radio and television in important ways by using broadcasting, as Susan Douglas has written, “not by necessity, but for fun.”

The need to reduce interference and establish rules for using “the ether” led to the first government regulation of wireless, the Radio Act of 1912. World War I (1917–19) interrupted the public uses of radio in the United States, but within a year of the end of hostilities a convergence of popular interest, cheap and readily available radio equipment, and institutional promotion led to the “broadcast boom” of 1920–22. Hundreds of radio stations went on the air with regular program schedules in this period. The most famous of these, KDKA, was funded by Westinghouse Corporation, an electric equipment manufacturer, and operated by Frank Conrad, a war veteran, Westinghouse engineer, and avid radio amateur.

Following the “broadcast boom,” broadcasters struggled to find a means to finance regular radio service. Early broadcasting was characterized by the diversity of its practitioners, which included churches, municipalities, educational institutions, small businesses, large industrial concerns, and many others. Within a few years, though, many found the high costs of maintaining radio equipment, hiring a staff, and paying for radio content to be prohibitive. American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) found an early solution in “toll broadcasting,” charging all comers for time on its stations, and this scheme quickly demonstrated radio’s potential as a mass marketer. Soon the expanding advertising and marketing industry, led by firms such as J. Walter Thompson and N.W. Ayer, joined emerging broadcasters in exploiting the AT&T solution. This marked the beginning of the so-called “American model” of broadcasting, an advertiser-supported system in which networks and stations provided listeners with free content while selling commercial time to advertising agencies and sponsors. In other nations broadcasting was typically organized to allow a larger role for government agencies. Many European nations adopted the “public service model” wherein semi-independent or independent broadcasting agencies (such as the British Broadcasting Corporation) were funded by fees or taxes paid by the public. In contrast with the U.S. and public service models, nations with authoritarian governments often took firm control of broadcasting in this era, in some cases discouraging broadcasting within their borders entirely.

In the United States, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), General Electric, and the Westing-house Corporation created two advertiser-supported radio networks in 1926 and 1927 under the banner of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC-Red and NBC-Blue). A competing network, the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) was formed in 1927. The Radio Act of 1927 and its successor, the Communications Act of 1934, codified the American model of broadcasting and created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the government agency that still regulates broadcasting. The FCC forced RCA to sell NBC-Blue in 1943, and the network was renamed the American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Each of these radio networks would successfully make the transition to television after World War II.

Television Broadcasting

Inventors and corporate laboratories pursued a method of television broadcasting through the 1920s and 1930s, resulting in numerous competing and incompatible systems. In 1938 inventor Allen B. DuMont founded the DuMont network to compete with NBC’s and CBS’s nascent television operations. The DuMont television network had difficulty competing with the better established networks and went out of business in 1955. NBC unveiled its system with a historic telecast of President Franklin D. Roosevelt opening the New York World’s Fair in 1939. World War II interrupted the networks’ plans for the introduction of television, but 1940 to 1952 was nonetheless a crucial period in the technological and institutional development of broadcast television. The National Television System Committee (1940) was founded to resolve competing technological standards, and the FCC produced numerous decisions that shaped the future television industry. For instance, the FCC suddenly stopped issuing television licenses from 1948 to 1952 to resolve persistent signal interference problems, among other issues. At the time of the so-called television freeze, 106 television stations had been licensed around the country and, although impeded considerably, the industry did not halt its development. Indeed, television underwent what Erik Barnouw called a crucial “laboratory period” in the freeze years, during which NBC and CBS solidified their advantage in the field of broadcasting and networks and stations experimented with adapting radio’s staple genres—variety, situation comedy, and drama—to the new medium.

Rise of the Network Era

When the FCC’s Sixth Report and Order lifted the freeze in 1952, television quickly became a phenomenal success. The percentage of U.S. households with televisions rose from less than 1 percent in 1948, to 9 percent in 1950, to 87 percent by 1960, and in the process created what William Boddy has called “the world’s largest advertising medium.” By the end of the 1950s, the three broadcast networks dominated the television industry and, arguably, reshaped the economics and aesthetics of the film, radio, and music industries as well. The networks commanded about half of television’s total revenues after 1953, using their profitability and powerful influence on popular culture to assume a commanding position in American culture and the entertainment economy for the next three decades.

For critics, programming in the network era represented the best and worst of television. Critics hailed live and telefilm dramas, public affairs programming, and comedies such as I Love Lucy and All in the Family. However, they assailed game shows, soap operas, and violent action thrillers such as The Untouchables and sensational made-for-TV movies. The astonishing omnipresence of the medium troubled many, and the critics asked, as they had with radio before: Does television reflect society, or does society reflect television? As network programmers converged on the “Least Objectionable Programming” strategies of the 1960s, Newton Minow famously called the television schedule a “vast wasteland.” Minow and others cited Edward R. Murrow’s unflinching social critiques on CBS Reports as the model for quality television. Yet this was also the period of inspired weirdness in the Twilight Zone, crime dramas with the trashy glamour of 77 Sunset Strip and the downtown cool of Peter Gunn, peripatetic Americana along Route 66, and law and order melodrama on Gunsmoke. A great deal of television programming was uninteresting, or worse. Still, as many critics have noted, the relentless invention and reinvention of television programming through the years of network dominance in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s only underscored the medium’s seeming imperviousness to definitive conclusions about its social significance.

Contemporary Television

Prior to 1980 the television sets that had come to occupy 98 percent of U.S. households could be seen as mere extensions of the broadcast networks. The “big three” distributed nearly all of the programming, news, and commercial announcements seen on television. In the late 1970s, television began a profound transformation. Cable networks offered original programming and drew more subscribers. Independent television stations proliferated. People began to use their televisions differently, as monitors for video game consoles and videocassette recorders (VCRs). In 1986 Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch launched FOX, a fourth broadcast television network. The WB and United Paramount Network followed in 1995. As new sources of programming and new uses for the television set multiplied, the economic power of broadcast networks eroded and they were swept up in the waves of consolidation that dramatically reconfigured the media industries between 1985 and 2000.

The multiplication of channels and networks has resulted in a new conception of the television audience. Cable networks such as Lifetime, Nickelodeon, and Spike increasingly attempt to create brand identities to better market themselves to niche audiences, and appeals to particular demographics have become a key element in programming strategies. For some observers, the fragmentation of the audience resulting from these changes is an alarming development that threatens to exacerbate social conflict in populations already divided by race, class, gender, and generational difference. Others see the multiplication of stories and characters on television as a fitting expression of modern, pluralistic society, one long-denied by the technological and economic limitations of the three-channel broadcast universe. Still other critics are more equivocal about the effects of such fragmentation, suggesting that television, even as it splinters, will do no better or worse than it ever has at reflecting the concerns and controversies of its national audiences.

Terrestrial broadcast may no longer be the dominant technological means of distributing television, but the advertiser-supported economic basis of television has remained largely the same. Cable and satellite companies have benefited from their ability to collect revenue through both subscription and advertising, and other business models have emerged over the years, such as those that underlie premium cable and pay-per-view events. New business models will develop to account for technologies such as personal video recorders and video-on-demand. Nonetheless, the advertiser-supported model continues to finance the vast majority of television in the United States, whether it is seen on broadcast, cable, or satellite. Since the Independent Television Authority (ITV) was established in the United Kingdom in 1955, commercial television has become increasingly prominent in that nation, and has been adopted in many other nations as well.

The continued presence of the commercial model links the early days of broadcasting with today’s multi-channel universe. Today, even as programming and the audience seemingly fragment into hundreds of niches, most channels still interrupt programming periodically to hail the audience from the marketplace. Advertising on television generated $54 billion in revenue in the United States alone in 2002, compared with $44 billion in newspaper advertising and $18 billion in radio. The consumerist “evangelism” of television, as David Marc has called it, is neither the whole of television’s message nor an insignificant aspect of that message. However, it may represent our best contemporary definition of broadcasting, one that avoids the simplicities of the technological definition. That is, the broadcast media today are any that cast a signal for maximum dispersion to permit sponsors to better sell their wares and spread their ideas.

From terrestrial broadcast’s heyday as the dominant entertainment medium, to the complex mix of broadcast, cable, and satellite in today’s industry, broadcast television has remained the most widely viewed form of television. The persistence of broadcasting helps explain programmer’s continuing search, in an age of supposed specialization, for television programs with broad popular appeal such as Survivor, Law and Order, and Friends. Even in nations where the public service model remains influential, the significance of reaching a broad audience still plays a role in programming decisions, due, at least in part, to institutional mandates to represent the public and its diversity of perspectives rather than, as in the U.S. model, responding to the marketplace and a range of consumer products. Audiences may never again rival the masses assembled by programs such as I Love Lucy or Gunsmoke, but in many ways the creators and managers of television still imagine it as a broadcast medium and its viewers as a mass audience.