Commercial Television and the Crises of the 1960s and ’70s

“Commercial Television and the Crises of the 1960s and ’70s” explores the challenges of television broadcasting in changing technological, urban, and political landscapes. In particular, we study the relationship between commercial television broadcasting and the uniquely modern problems of radioactivity, urban signal interference, and decolonization. Stamm’s paper examines American anxiety over the radioactive output of media devices during the Cold War. As news outlets and the Nixon administration clamored for more research into the health effects of the new media technology, Americans came to view broadcasting as a source of harm they could not see with the naked eye. Lingering distrust over the safety of omnipresent media technology would filter down to present-day concerns over 5G technology and the safety of cell phone usage. Where Stamm explores an unseen problem, Popp’s paper explores a problem that was all too visible to American consumers: broadcasting signal interference in 1960’s Manhattan. Popp explores how television broadcasters in New York City responded to the density of the built environment, and its resultant effects on broadcast picture quality, by campaigning for the adoption of cable television. This campaign would lay the ground for the future expansion of pay television services and streaming in the twenty-first century. Swenson’s paper examines not a physical crisis but a political one: the rise of Commonwealth nationalism in Australia. Australian television stations responded to the new political pressure to be “national” by investing in domestic news, documentary, and drama, importing cheap, prolific comedies from Britain. Australian television broadcasters unintentionally reinforced that British comedies, and the British sense of humor, were the standard for their “new national” viewership, culturally linking Australians to the cultural life of their “mother” country even in the late twentieth century. Taken together, these three studies explore how the rhetoric of these television crises and their commercial solutions had long-term social and cultural consequences.