Television under construction: American television and the problem of distribution, 1926-62

Abstract

This article constructs a history of the wiring of the USA for live, simultaneous broadcasting. Though infrastructure is an important issue in television history, few writers have considered it at any length. By examining the growth of television infrastructure, this article denaturalizes the technological and institutional form of broadcast television distribution and considers it instead as a product of liberal ideology, corporate strategy, postwar economics and audience desires. Through an examination of industry discourses, maps, congressional hearings and critical appraisals, the author combines economic, geographic and cultural approaches to argue for a critical-historical attention to the spatial organization of media. This attention to spatiality helps denaturalize the shape of communications media by foregrounding power relationships, epistemologies and histories underlying their organization that are often taken for granted.