However, the ways her programmes are framed very often allow or reproduce the intolerant underbelly of tolerance.
This sentence points out a contradiction in the Oprah Winfrey Show’s approach, indicating that despite its intentions, the show sometimes perpetuates the very intolerance it seeks to dismantle, revealing the complexity of addressing discrimination in media.
One is not “tolerant” of one’s equals; that is, their existence is not a problem that needs to be, as Chambers Dictionary would have it, “endured with patience.”
This sentence critiques the inherent power imbalance in the concept of tolerance, suggesting that true equality negates the need for tolerance, as it implies a hierarchy where some must ‘endure’ others.
At one level, the Oprah Winfrey Show seems intended to promote the latter definition; certainly the cultivation of openmindedness is part of the show’s explicit agenda.
This sentence suggests that the show aims to foster a spirit of acceptance and open-mindedness, aligning with a more progressive definition of tolerance that goes beyond endurance.
Moreover, the show gives a platform for those voices, stories, and feelings that are rarely heard: women, survivors of physical and sexual abuse, African Americans, lesbians and gay men, and children
This highlights the show’s role in amplifying marginalized voices, providing a space for diverse experiences to be heard and acknowledged, thus contributing to a more inclusive public conversation.
Not only does personal testimony appear as the central method of the show’s inquiry into particular issues, but personal revelation and feelings are taken both seriously and as “true” in a way that is rarely validated in dominant public discourses.
This sentence emphasizes the show's unique approach to storytelling, where personal experiences are not only shared but also given legitimacy, challenging the traditional dismissal of such narratives in mainstream discourse.
Indeed by 1974, despite these restrictions, 11.7 percent of all American homes were cabled. (For comparison, note that this level of penetration by BSkyB in the UK in the early 1990s was generally considered to be a massive success.)
This sentence underscores the rapid growth and adoption of cable services among American households, reaching a significant penetration rate despite regulatory restrictions, reflecting the strong consumer demand and potential for further expansion in the cable industry.
For the whole of the previous decade cable firms had been consolidating themselves into MSOs (Multiple system operators).
This sentence highlights the trend of consolidation in the cable industry. where smaller cable firms where merging to form larger, more powerful entities known as Multiple System Operators, indicating a shift towards a more centralized and organized structure within the industry.
In 1961 it was held that television stations could not restrict the use of their signals after transmission unless economic harm could be proved.
This sentence highlights a pivotal legal ruling from 1961 which set a precedent for the cable industry, allowing it to retransmit broadcast signals without paying broadcasters, provided that no economic harm to the broadcasters could be demonstrated. This decision underpinned the early growth of cable TV by sidestepping copyright restrictions and emphasizing the need for tangible economic impact as a criterion for legal protection.
The Commission slowly allocated further licences in the UHF band to supplement this but by the early 1970s even with these new UHF stations, 18 percent of all homes could receive only four or fewer signals and 3 percent none at all
This sentence underscores the limitations of VHF coverage across the country and the FCC's efforts to address this by licensing additional UHF stations, although coverage gaps persisted into the early 1970s, affecting a significant minority of homes.
San Diego received three network VHF stations until in the 1960s it became the largest cable market when all seven Los Angeles stations (including the same three networks’ LA affiliates) were imported
This sentence highlights the growth of cable television in San Diego during the 1960s, marking a significant shift in content availability as it began importing channels from Los Angeles, thus expanding viewer options beyond local VHF stations.
Television branding, then, became about more than selling advertisements, programming, and audiences; indeed, cable branding honed in on the ways they could relate to people’s sense of status, class, and identity formation.
The evolution of television branding extended beyond commercial goals. Cable channels strategically connected with viewers’ social identities, emphasizing lifestyle and demographic nuances. This approach allowed them to resonate with specific audience segments.
Emerging out of the social activism of the 1960s and 1970s, he argues that the United States began to experience a deep shift in its social fabric.
Turow highlights the impact of social activism during the 1960s and 1970s, leading to significant changes in American society. This context influenced television marketing strategies.
“Lifetime struck on elements of liberal feminist subculture that resonated with upscale women measured in the Nielsen rating,”
Lifetime’s success lay in aligning with liberal feminist values, resonating with its upscale female audience. By co-opting these elements, I believe the channel fostered strong connections and engagement among viewers and feminist organizations.
Thus, cable channels concentrated on smaller segments of the audience, often programming for under‐represented minorities who were ignored, marginalized, and/or negatively stereotyped on broadcast television’s efforts at achieving “least offensive programming.”
Cable networks strategically targeted specific audience niches, including marginalized groups overlooked by mainstream broadcast television. This approach allowed them to address underserved viewers and more importantly, challenge traditional programming norms.
Under this ideology, the free market was viewed as the ultimate determinant of success and government regulation was unquestionably bad.
This statement encapsulates why there is much pushback towards the United States government trying to ban TikTok present day.
But, if the Big Three were the only game in town, how would they differentiate themselves from each other?
The situation that the Big Three were in is very similar to the situation we have today with social media, where there are only a handful of apps that the vast majority of people use. However, instead of relying on brand differentiation, I feel that a lot of social media apps today just copy other features from eachother, with some examples inlcuding YouTube copying TikTok's short form content with YouTube shorts.
Particularly in the realm of civil rights and social justice struggles as well as in coverage of the Vietnam War, network TV represented a new potential instrument of the revolution reflecting epochal social and demographic shifts of the 1960s and 1970s. Daniel Hallin in The “Uncensored War”: the Media and Vietnam has cautioned, however, that while television news was newly explicit in its visual content during this era, in the end, “the most important source of news for most of the American public” would, by commercial imperative, often claw back or recontextualize its own potential power (1986: 106).
While the Vietnam war was America's first televised war, the media would take a similar approach with the war in Iraq as television evolved, making it the most televised war in America's history so far.
Indeed, though news and documentary specials and prime‐time series may not have garnered huge ratings in the classic era, news programming itself expanded significantly and assumed an unprecedented new role as spotlight and watchdog. Particularly in the realm of civil rights and social justice struggles as well as in coverage of the Vietnam War, network TV represented a new potential instrument of the revolution reflecting epochal social and demographic shifts of the 1960s and 1970s.
This sentences sheds light on the beginning of news programming and how it would eventually lead to news being consumed from television to social media.
Christopher Anderson’s Hollywood TV: the Studio System in the Fifties (1994) offers an in‐depth study of ABC’s partnerships with Disney and Warner Bros. studios through which the network began to establish competitive viability by counter‐programming NBC and CBS with series that would expressly appeal to the new postwar baby boom families often in more rural and far‐flung markets.
This sentence highlights some of the earlier examples of counter programming, which would continue to evolve in many different ways across media from then to present day.
Indeed, though the classic network era is defined by NBC’s, CBS’s and ABC’s unprecedented stability and control of the medium, the history of this era has been most productively written through examinations of the unevenness, struggles, tensions, and fissures that consistently troubled this veneer. Take, for instance, the “national”‐ness of the Big Three networks.
It's very interesting to see that back there were really only 3 networks, all of which are still very large and popular present day.
By the early 1950s—just as radio had done to vaudeville before it—television possessed a markedly devastating, cannibalistic effect on its own precursor. Although the transmission -- of pictures by wireless had originated in the late 1920s only a short time after radio got its foothold, it took two more decades to make TV viable. Technology had to be developed, radio had to earn the huge bucks required to support the spiraling costs of its development and the country had to be open to it. That propitious moment came during a booming postwar economy as the middle class was once again flush with steady jobs and dependable incomes. As radio sponsors abandoned the hand that fed them—turning to the more stimulating prospects of video—mass communications’ initial form of amusement and information was defenseless. Radio thereafter had to limp along without the big budgets of the advertisers, now focused on the tube. TV rapidly siphoned off audio’s top talent, programs and audiences as well as its revenues, all of its lifelines to a profitable existence. It was too much. “In radio’s last days,” obsessed one wag, “some of its favorite shows suddenly found themselves sponsor-less, padded with pallid public-service announcements that rubbed salt in an open wound.”
Radio started to fall off in the early 1950s because of the uprising of television, which had come partly due to the booming postwar economy, allowing more people to be able to afford televisions. Radio sponsors had also started to abandon the scene and turn to television.
Rather than taking the approach that unsponsored time should be dealt with as easily and cheaply as possible, in radio’s golden age (for our purposes, from the mid–1920s to the early 1960s) the four national webs frequently filled the unsold time at their disposal with programs of quality and even daring. During his declining days, one of the aural medium’s most creative and talented geniuses, actor-director Orson Welles, insisted: “The reason that radio was often very good, and better than television is, is because there were many sustaining shows. That meant shows without sponsors, paid for by the networks, and given prime time. There is no such equivalent in television.” In that arena, the theater of the mind ran rings around the one-eyed monster that encroached upon its turf and then devoured it.
Part of the reason radio's had it's golden age from the mid 1920's to the earl 1960's was the fact that it had many sustaining shows without sponsors, paid for by networks. At the time, there was no equivalent to this in television.