Customer Reviews

The Image Empire: A History of Broadcasting in the United States, Vol. 3: From 1953

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This book is the first book in a three book series that covers the US broadcasting business from its formative years up through the present at the time that the author wrote the series (which is now almost 40 years ago).

The first two volumes are outstanding both as a history of the business, but also for their insight into the political and cultural environment in which radio broadcasting took shape in the US. The third book also contains some interesting insight, especially into the role of television in first enabling the communist witchhunts, and then in bringing down the chief instigators of the witchhunts. Unfortunately, as the book moves into the sixties, it gets bogged down in the ideological battles that were still going on when this book was written (publication date is 1970). Consequently, this book has less to offer than the first two in the series did.

I first encountered these volumes while taking a graduate level broadcasting class. Barnouw packs a stunning amount of information into these books. If you are doing research on broadcasting history in the United States these are a great resource.