Contextualizing the broadcast era: nation, commerce, and constraint

Programming scarcity that characterized the broadcast era, or what this article refers to as constraint, served very different goals. Often intertwined, these goals ranged from the formation of an ideologically coherent national public, to the protection of economic self-interest, to the explicit promotion of products and messages. They were deployed rather differently in the commercial American and state/public European spaces of television. The article explores a number of assumptions regarding the institution and medium of television that have persisted from the broadcast era into our own and that might well, given the very different structures of contemporary television, be repositioned. It outlines the contours of that repositioning, sketching the implications for some of our theoretical and methodological defaults. Keywords: broadcast era; scarcity; commercial and public service television; United States; Germany; audience metrics