Television Careers Background
Modern television developed from experiments with electricity and vacuum tubes in the mid-1800s, but it was not until 1939, when President Franklin Roosevelt used television to open the New York World’s Fair, that the public realized the power of television as a means of communication. Several television stations went on the air shortly after this demonstration and successfully televised professional baseball games, college football games, and the Republican and Democratic conventions of 1940. The onset of World War II limited the further development of television until after the war was over.
Since television’s strength is the immediacy with which it can present information, news programs became the foundation of regular programming. Meet the Press premiered in 1947, followed by nightly newscasts in 1948. People who bought early TV sets just for the novelty of it, or to gather everyone around the tiny, snowy screen to see a favorite niece sing on a locally broadcast talent show, were soon rewarded by the rapid expansion of the industry in the 1950s. The Federal Communications Commission lifted a freeze on the processing of station applications, and the number of commercial stations grew steadily, from 120 in 1953 to more than 1,700 stations in 2004.
It was in the 1960s that television’s power became most apparent: Together the country mourned the death of President Kennedy; witnessed the murder of his alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, by Jack Ruby; and formed opinions on the Vietnam War based on live TV news footage. The successes and failures of NASA programs brought viewers together, from the first steps on the moon to the famous, near-fatal mission of Apollo 13 and from the first space shuttle launch to the tragic explosions of the Challenger and Columbia. On September 11, 2001, television broadcast live images of the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center around the globe, and nearly every channel in the U.S. preempted regular programming to provide coverage of the story. Today, there are an estimated 110.2 million TV households in the United States. According to the National Association of Broadcasters, 98.2 percent of U.S. households own TV receivers.
The big three networks (NBC, ABC, and CBS), which, along with PBS, reigned for many years as primary sources of information and entertainment for millions of people in the United States, have consistently lost viewers to cable, satellite TV, the Internet, computer games, and video rentals. Network TV viewership drops every year, but this trend hasn’t stopped new networks, such as FOX and CW, from developing and competing. And although more and more people are looking to the World Wide Web as a source of information, its possible effect on TV viewing is still uncertain. Some reports find that personal computer and Web use may actually increase the number of TV viewers, while others indicate that Internet use causes people to watch less television. A 2004 report on Internet and other media use by Arbitron/Edison Media Research found that among the general U.S. population television remains more popular than the Internet and radio.