Frank and Greenberg report the resuls of a four year survey of the American television audience, designed to determine who watches television -- and why. Rather than classify audiences by one variable, the authors group them by interests, attitudes, and behaviour, as well as more usual demographic attributes such as age and sex. The result is a unique segmentation scheme that gives a coherent picture of each audience's psychological needs, its interests and its relative use of other media.

Frank and Greenberg's book studies the audience for American public broadcasting. The authors segment this unique and frequently misunderstood audience into fourteen groups, each with its own interests and needs. This book is a companion volume to the authors' earlier The Public's Use of Television, also from SAGE, which studied the audience for commercial television, using the same methods. Students of media and communications, market researchers, and people within the European media interested in the kinds of people who watch quality television will find much of use to them in both the methodology and the description of the audiences.

A discussion of a truly international range of television programs, this title covers alternative modes of television such as digital and satellite.

This concise history of the news broadcasting industry will appeal to both students and general readers. Stretching from the "radio days" of the 1920s and 1930s and the early era of television after World War II through to the present, the book shows how commercial interests, regulatory matters, and financial considerations have long shaped the broadcasting business. The network dominance of the 1950s ushered in the new prominence of the "anchorman," a distinctly American development, and gave birth to the "golden age" of TV broadcasting, which featured hard-hitting news and documentaries epitomized by the reports by CBS's Edward R. Murrow. Financial pressures and advertising concerns in the 1960s led the networks to veer away from their commitment to serve the public interest, and "tabloid" television - celebrity, gossip-driven "soft news" - and news "magazines" became increasingly widespread. In the 1980s cable news further transformed broadcasting, igniting intense competition for viewers in the media marketplace. Focusing on both national and local news, this stimulating volume examines the evolution of broadcast journalism. It also considers how new electronic technologies will affect news delivery in the 21st century, and whether television news can still both serve the public interest and maintain an audience.

Television and its Viewers reviews 'cultivation' research, which investigates the relationship between exposure to television and beliefs about the world. James Shanahan and Michael Morgan, both distinguished researchers in this field, scrutinize cultivation through detailed theoretical and historical explication, critical assessments of methodology, and a comprehensive 'meta-analysis' of twenty years of empirical results. They present a sweeping historical view of television as a technology and as an institution. Shanahan and Morgan's study looks forward as well as back, to the development of cultivation research in a new media environment. They argue that cultivation theory offers a unique and valuable perspective on the role of television in twentieth-century social life. Television and its Viewers, the first book-length study of its type, will be of interest to students and scholars in communication, sociology, political science and psychology and contains an introduction by the seminal figure in this field, George Gerbner.

How do television broadcasters take account of the interests and needs of viewers? What are they required to do by laws and regulations? What do they do of their own initiative? How do they respond to the attitudes and opinions of individual consumers, and to growing pressure from viewer and consumer groups?