TELEVISION IN THE UNITED STATES
The United States has a decentralized, market-oriented television system. A national
public broadcast service known as Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is there in the United
States. Local media markets have their own television stations, which may be affiliated with
or owned and operated by a TV network. Except in very small markets with few stations,
affiliation agreements are usually exclusive. If a station is an NBC affiliate, the station would
not air programs from ABC, CBS or other networks. Local stations, till 1970’s and 1980’s,
supplemented network programming with their own produced shows. However many stations
today produce only local news shows. The rest of their schedule is filled with syndicated
shows, or material produced independently and sold to individual stations in each local
market.
Perhaps no phenomenon shaped American life in the 1950’s more than TELEVISION.
Television existed only in few thousand wealthy American houses at the end of World War II.
Just 10 years later, roughly two-thirds of American households had a television. The biggest-
selling periodical of the decade was TV GUIDE. In a nation once marked by strong regional
differences, network television programming blurred these distinctions and helped forge a
national popular culture. Television forever changed politics. The first president to be
televised was Harry Truman. When Estes Kefauver prosecuted mob boss Frank Costello on
television, the Tennessee senator became a national hero and a vice presidential candidate.
Electronic television was successfully first demonstrated in San Francisco on
September 7, 1927. This system was designed by a 21 year old inventor, Philo Taylor
Farnsworth. Till the age of 14 he lived in a house without electricity. The invention of
Farnsworth which scanned images with a beam of electrons is the direct founder of modern
television. The first image that was transmitted on it was a simple line. After some time
Farnsworth aimed his primitive camera at a dollar sign. Early television was quite primitive.
The CBS depicted newscasts like ‘chalk talks’ which showed a newsman who stood moving a
pointer over the map of Europe. The quality of the picture was poor in those days and
because of which it was difficult to make out the salesman and only the map was visible.
There was a slow growth in the development of television during World War II because
companies focussed on military production at that time. With a battle over government
regulation, the development of television further slowed down. There was a ruling passed by
the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) which stated that the National
Broadcasting Company (NBC) had to sell one of its two radio networks. The Supreme Court
had upheld this ruling in 1943. The second network became the new American Broadcasting
Company (ABC). On the air, during World War II six television stations were there one each
in Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Schenectady and two in New York City. But in the
