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Cable television began in the 1940s with a very simple purpose: to bring television signals to those who could not receive them with rooftop antennas because of terrestrial interference. As broadcast television became an important part of American culture, people living in areas blocked by mountains or other geographic barriers were denied the opportunity to watch television. Cable television, wiring the signal into homes, offered people a chance to become television households. It is highly ironic that cable, the medium that would become so important in shrinking the broadcast audience, began as a medium that increased the strength and penetration of broadcast television.
Cable offered another hope: greater channel capacity. The number of over-the-air broadcasting channels had always been limited by the scarcity of the electromagnetic spectrum. Cable did not use the electromagnetic spectrum and, therefore, had no scarcity of channels. As the physical cable improved and eventually became a fiber optic, there were few limits to the number of potential cable channels.
Although cable possessed the promise of great channel capacity, it was a promise that was unrealized until the 1970s. This all changed with the advent of Home Box Office (HBO) in the 1970s. HBO was introduced to cable systems in 1972 as a channel offering uncut, uninterrupted movies available long before they would appear on broadcast television. HBO demonstrated that there was a large potential audience for this programming. In 1975, HBO gambled on a new and revolutionary technology and put its signal up on a satellite 22,300 miles above the Earth. This radically new distribution system allowed HBO to distribute its signal to a national audience.
Satellite distribution was the spark that introduced a whole new host of players with original programming to cable. HBO soon faced competition from another movie channel, Showtime, in presenting recent theatrical films. With so many available channels, cable networks were able to offer very specialized programming to a narrowly focused audience. By the late 1980s, there were channels programmed exclusively for news, music, religion, shopping, governmental affairs, weather and different ethnic groups.
Individual cable channels knew they could never compete head-to-head with broadcast television. Cable as a whole competes with broadcast, but the most successful cable channel could not gather more than a fraction of the network audience. Broadcast television was, and still is, the medium that can appeal to everyone at the same time. It is still the only delivery system that can offer the whole nation at once to advertisers. The largest cable channels are still not available in millions of homes whereas broadcasting is available in more than 99% of American households.
Cable challenges broadcast by offering content not available over the air. The first way it does this, as discussed, is through more specialized programming. But it can also offer programming that the networks, trying to appeal to everyone, can not offer. Many critics today are shocked at the "semi-nudity" on NYPD Blue, but cable has been offering full nudity for years. Words routinely used in movies and stand-up comedy on cable can not even be considered on broadcast networks. Films like Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street, which have never appeared on network television, are regularly shown on cable. If cable did nothing more than replicate broadcast television, it would not exist. Cable must offer different programming and it does.
This project examined programming on eight cable networks in comparison to programming on the broadcast networks. The goal was not to determine that the programming does or does not raise concerns in its native cable environment, but whether the programming would raise concerns if it aired on broadcast television. A determination about the appropriateness of programming on cable itself would have to consider the greater freedom from regulation, the smaller audiences, the pay cable universe and other contextual factors.
There are currently approximately 70 cable networks. Many of them have no relevance to a study about media violence, especially channels such as C-SPAN, QVC, the Home Shopping Network, the Weather Channel and the Nashville Network. Our study concentrated on eight cable networks that resemble broadcast networks, appeal to children or teenagers, or create significant amounts of original programming. This project examined media violence, and, therefore, issues surrounding sexuality, nudity and language did not affect the report's conclusions. The eight cable networks examined over a two-week period are as follows:
All of the monitored cable networks except TNT run children's programming on Saturday morning. TNT runs programs with an Old West theme.
Anyone who looks at the majority of these channels can see that they run much more explicit programming than is seen on the networks. They have more freedom and work within a completely different business and regulatory structure. The intent of this section of the report was to examine ways in which the content in cable and broadcast differed and to see whether that content would raise concerns if broadcast on the television networks. This is, we believe, the best way to compare the content of cable with that on broadcast television.
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