Ebook: Television: Limits of Deregulation

Despite a broad political environment conducive to deregulation, television is one industry that consistently fails to loosen government's regulatory grip. To explain why, Lori Brainard explores the technological changes, industry structures, and political dynamics influencing this policy quagmire. Contradicting current scholarly and popular accounts, Brainard demonstrates that new technologies do not determine policy outcomes, nor does the television industry always get its own way in the policy arena—in fact, public interest groups have been unusually successful at influencing television policy over the last thirty years. She concludes that the multifaceted political and social contexts in which television exists have resulted in incremental and incomplete deregulation punctuated by numerous episodes of reregulation and institutional warfare—thwarting all attempts at dramatice and decisive reform.