| The critical literature on cable television identifies the mid 1970s as the period in which cable emerged as an alternative programming medium to broadcast television. This is when satellite distribution transformed cable television from a local business that used hilltop antennas and cable wires to distribute broadcast television signals to areas that lacked adequate broadcast reception into a competitor to broadcast television that originated nationally distributed news, entertainment, youth and sports programming. While satellite technology facilitated this, according to this prevailing scholarship, so too did neo-liberal deregulatory trends which finally lifted broadcast-projectionist restrictions on pay-television in 1977 and which culminated with the pro-industry Cable Act of 1984.;This dissertation complicates this account through considering the cultural and historical contexts of cable television in the postwar, pre-satellite period. Cable television emerged just as broadcast television began to expand in the late 1940s, thus its history is intertwined with developments in early television policy and culture in particular, and with postwar political, economic and cultural currents more broadly. While scholarly histories of television in the 1950s and 1960s give little attention to the emergence of cable television, this dissertation argues that cable television in the postwar period served as a focal point for registering a variety of cultural anxieties over the impact of television on postwar culture and exposed the political roots for television deregulation in the years that followed.;Through examining Congressional hearings, think tank reports, foundation studies, industry trade magazines and the popular press, this dissertation traces how post-war political liberals and educators campaigned to deregulate cable television, and other forms of pay-television, for its potential to uplift a broadcast television culture that they believed had lowered the standards of American culture. Other citizen groups such as veteran's associations, women's clubs, labor unions, senior citizen organizations and local city officials opposed cable and pay-television for privatizing television. Drawing from theoretical work in critical cultural policy studies, this dissertation traces how advocates for cable television reconceived broadcast ideals of television citizenship based on universal access and collective public deliberation to pay-television ideals based on consumer sovereignty and individual free choice. |
