Television swept across American society as rapidly as the Internet is sweeping across it nowâ??and with even greater immediate effects. At the midpoint of the twentieth century, radio was the dominant broadcast medium, newspapers were the dominant news medium, and movies were the most popular form of visual entertainment. Within ten years, television had taken over. Vast wasteland though it may have been (Newton Minow, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, called it that in 1961), television had become the basic forum of American culture.
So itâ??s easy to forget that everything about it was once up for grabs. There was a lot of earnest debate about what form it ought to take, and people in the business stumbled around trying to figure out how to make money at it. In â??Same Time, Same Station: Creating American Television, 1948-1961â? (Johns Hopkins; $35), James L. Baughman performs the basic historianâ??s function of taking a story whose conclusion we all know and showing that it didnâ??t necessarily have to turn out that way.