? Throughout its history, public broadcasting in America has been a medium in search of a mission. It was born during the early 1950s as an attempt to harness the educational potential of the "electronic blackboard." It was revamped during the '60s as an institution designed to preserve and foster America's (and, cynics would add, Britain's) "cultural heritage." Over the course of three decades, public broadcasting has received lavish praise, pointed criticism, and more than $...
One of the more memorable images from the movies of the 1970s was that of anchorman Howard Beale in "Network" urg- ing his TV audience to open up their windows and shout: "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore." Unlike Beale's frustrated viewers, Americans during the 1980s will acquire a powerful tool with which to register their dissatisfaction with traditional TV programming-one that will allow them, in effect, to vote with their pocketbooks. The tool is new v...
Historian Daniel Boorstin, the Librarian of Congress, has called television "the next great crisis in human consciousness." Such crises attend the birth of every new form of mass commu- nication. Even the written word did not emerge unchallenged. Plato warned that disciples of writing would "generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the shadow of wisdom without the reality." The printing press, too, had its critics. It bred heresy and dissent, some said, a...
TELEVISION Television has replaced the popular novel-and the movies-as Ameri-ca's chief medium of entertainment, and scores of scholars and journalists have attempted to explain this phenomenon. The Library of Con- gress card catalog contains entries for more than 6,000 works on televi- sion. Yet, among them, truly il- luminating studies are few. The best one-volume history is Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television (Oxford, 1975, cloth; 1977, paper) Erik Barnouw, a former Columbia...
About the time that the first McDonald's fast-food stand started selling hamburgers outside Chicago in 1955, a potential competitor named Hubie's opened in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Hubie's was a fully automated "hamburger machine." At one end, attendants fed in ground beef, rolls, cheese, pickles, and ketchup; at the other end, hot hamburgers emerged to slide onto the plates of waiting stand-up diners. But even the best-laid plans go awry, and Hubie's plans were flawed: The meat patties w...