However, the ways her programmes are framed very often allow or reproduce the intolerant underbelly of tolerance.

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.”

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.

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

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.

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.)

For the whole of the previous decade cable firms had been consolidating themselves into MSOs (Multiple system operators).

In 1961 it was held that television stations could not restrict the use of their signals after transmission unless economic harm could be proved.

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

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

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.

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.

“Lifetime struck on elements of liberal feminist subculture that resonated with upscale women measured in the Nielsen rating,”

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.”

Under this ideology, the free market was viewed as the ultimate determinant of success and government regulation was unquestionably bad.

But, if the Big Three were the only game in town, how would they differentiate themselves from each other?

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.