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This epilogue provides an update on MSNBC and NBC News's footprint in the distribution of online television news since their acquisition by Comcast, with particular emphasis on the restructuring of MSNBC.com into an expanded NBC News Digital and the creation of an entirely new website for the MSNBC cable news channel. It discusses other changes at MSNBC, including the rebranding of the Blue Site as NBCNews.com, the creation of a new MSNBC.com based on the open source content management system Drupal, and the use of the “Newsvine 3.0” commenting system as the basis for all the community features on the new site. Despite some changes that seem to show the influence of a centralized management and hierarchy, complex assemblages of system builders remain both inside and outside the MSNBC organization. Heterarchy is alive and well within MSNBC's constellation of companies and teams.

This chapter focuses on the construction of MSNBC.com's web video player, the primary means by which NBC's cable news and broadcast news programs were made available to users and audiences online. More specifically, it examines the video player's interface and other features in order to elucidate the complex relationships, interests, and motivations devoted to the design of the everyday objects used in online distribution. It also considers the importance of syndication to MSNBC's web presence and how MSNBC.com was able to dramatically expand the reach of its online video by pushing clips to other web properties in Microsoft's online services division, including Bing and MSN.

This chapter examines the history of public participation in election broadcasting since the 1950s, asking where the public fits in the complicated and often fraught relationship between politicians and broadcasters. It examines whether broadcasters lived up to the ideals of promoting accessibility and accountability in British politics, and championing public movement in the political process; whether television really evolved to perform the democratic role once assigned to the public meeting; and whether broadcasters have done enough to facilitate the interrogation of politicians by members of the public. On the vital question about the future of democracy, this chapter argues that it is the British broadcasters, rather than the politicians, who are the masters now.

The passage of the 1934 Communications Act was a decisive but qualified defeat for the radio reformers who favored alternatives to commercial radio (and often admired the BBC). Public interest regulation had effects, and there was far more high cultural, educational and civic programming on American radio after 1934 than the commercial broadcasters left alone would have provided. In a comparative broadcasting history perspective, the American network broadcasters (NBC, CBS) can be seen as struggling to combine public service broadcasting functions with the profitable sale of entertainment. James Rowland Angell's public service broadcasting work at NBC exemplified these tensions. The broadcasters portrayed national choices about broadcasting policy as between two stark alternatives – free radio or complete state control. That obscured the many effective hybrids and compromises that other nations found satisfactory, but also the distinguished history of government broadcasting in the US – exemplified by the Department of Agriculture's radio activities.

This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the social media activity surrounding the London 2012 Olympic & Paralympic Games, widely discussed as the first social-media Olympics. It examines how social media platforms were instrumental in generating news content during these Games – not just distributors of the news of others - while also discussing how the organizing committee, stakeholders, and audiences contributed to generating the record breaking volume of social-media content that came out around these Games.

This chapter focuses on Mann’s beginnings as a stage director, beginning with his 1933 staging of Thunder on the Left, based on a Christopher Morley novel. Mann (still known professionally as Anton Bundsmann) subsequently directed Hollywood-bound James Stewart in a summer stock play and was soon directing on Broadway (the revue New Faces of 1936, the controversial So Proudly We Hail) and for the Federal Theatre (The Cherokee Night, Haiti, Big Blow). Mann’s freelance work as screen test director for film producer David O. Selznick enabled him to accept more daring theater projects. During 1939-40, Mann became one of the world’s first television directors when he worked at NBC’s experimental TV station W2XBS, directing everything from commercials to live plays. After NBC ended the experiment, Mann freelanced until early 1941, when he accepted an apprenticeship offer from Paramount Pictures in Hollywood to shadow Preston Sturges during production of Sullivan’s Travels.

This chapter sketches the history of U.S–French electronic communications prior to the rise of U.S.–French radio broadcasting. Focusing primarily on France, it analyzes the anticipatory and reactive discourses to live interwar transatlantic broadcast connectivity with the United States. The period saw two contrasting, nationally inflected techno-aesthetics take shape in America and France that defined excellence in radio. In America, technological power, abundance, and high-speed execution demonstrated professional competence and efficiency. The French emphasized quality, accepted scarcity, and valued deliberate speed. More than extensions of preexisting differences in U.S. and French cultural conventions these broadcast paradigms emerged relationally and cross-nationally to shape the future of U.S.–French broadcast interaction and the character of an evolving international medium.

This chapter follows the establishment of the first permanent U.S. network radio bureaus in Europe, and the work of the National Broadcasting Company’s (NBC) European Representative, Fred Bate, and his colleagues, including César Saerchinger and Edward R. Murrow, as they developed transatlantic radio broadcast journalism. Throughout the 1930s, Bate and others surmounted obstacles of techno-aesthetic difference in radio production, continental political upheaval, ideological differences, censorship, and resource scarcity, to transform transatlantic broadcasts from shaky experiments into a reliable information conduit for listeners following global events. Such struggles made it possible for transatlantic broadcasting to report the February riots of 1934, the Anschluss, Munich crisis, and the Battle of Britain.

This chapter examines an informal variant of a sponsorship strategy. It focuses on the case of the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), a global campaign designed to combat the smuggling of nuclear, biological and chemical materials and related component parts. The chapter begins with an vignette involving the interception of a North Korean vessel on the high seas suspected of carrying missile technology by a member of the US’ Seventh Fleet – and the vessel’s return to its home port. The chapter then describes and explains the military importance of the PSI, the informal coalition’s (numbering 130 states) rejection of American leadership, and yet the pivotal role nonetheless played by the US Navy in collaboration with a variety of countries.

This chapter examines how entertainment television addressed color-blind equality through an analysis of NBC's Julia, considered the most significant entertainment show of the civil rights years. Created by writer-director Hal Kanter and starring Diahann Carroll, Julia presented viewers with whites only as supporting characters. However, the image Julia provided could only clash uncomfortably with dominant news imagery of exploding ghettos, Black Panthers and other non-nonviolent militants, as well as the generalized chaos and upheaval characterizing the period. This chapter argues that Julia was a fictional vision of the “black and white together” utopia promised in the networks' March on Washington coverage. It also considers how black and white audiences as well as mainstream press critics all made sense of the show in notably different and, at times, contradictory ways. Finally, it discusses the concerns of black viewers and some white critics about Julia, including its depiction of the black family.

Jennifer Gillan’s chapter looks at how television sitcoms have become another promotional arm by which parent companies prop up their franchises. She considers how sitcoms can play a part in what she calls ‘transmedia marketing circuits,’ looking specifically at the content-as-promotion strategies connected to Black-ish (ABC, 2014-Present) and Parks and Recreation (NBC, 2009-2015). The essay demonstrates that, with the rapid spread of subscription video on demand services that are either directly owned by or are supplied with content from the studios, television content is but one group of repurposable and reusable assets in massive, integrated platforms.

Soon after he arrived in California, Bruno Walter opened the Los Angeles Philharmonic's season with five concerts. It marked his return to conducting since the death of his daughter Gretel. Over the next few years, he would travel back and forth across the United States, stopping in the middle of the country in places like Kansas City to thrill audiences that had not heard him before. He also agreed to give a benefit recital with Lotte Lehmann for the French and American Red Cross, but the Nazis captured France before the money could even be donated. Walter sought refuge once again in his work as a conductor in America, performing with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the NBC Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, among others. In addition, he signed a contract with the Metropolitan Opera for a series of performances. With the end of World War II, Walter decided to return to Europe to conduct beginning in 1947.

Chapter 6 discusses the TV series Heroes as more optimistic in its depiction of the social consequences of posthuman evolution than the other texts analyzed. The show's premise of posthumanity as a result of evolutionary mutation reflects radical changes in subjectivity not onto an elite few, as in classic superhero narratives, but onto the everyday man. The series consequently emphasizes the potential of the posthuman condition as a catalyst for global social and political change – a solution to the 'big issues' that elude the current institutions of power. The posthuman becomes the site of struggle over the potential changes to the future, in effect over the concept of utopia. In contrasting dystopian futures with the present possibility of change through posthumanity, the show allows a utopian space to emerge, in which global issues such as the war on terror can be solved and attacks such as those on 9/11 could be prevented. In this, Heroes returns to humanist notions and concepts of history as events shaped by exceptional individuals, while at the same time complicating them with communal images of a cooperative and interconnected posthuman subjectivity.

This chapter begins the story of 1970's “grand press blitz,” when a barrage of print stories on the movement set the stage for network news' first reports on women's liberation. It couples a discussion of all three networks' first, brief, hard news reports on feminist protest in January—the disruption of the Senate birth control pill hearings by a women's liberation group—with an extensive analysis of two series of lengthy soft feature stories on women's liberation broadcast by CBS and NBC in March and April. On one level, both network series created a sort of moderate middle ground of acceptable feminism anchored by their legitimation of liberal feminist issues related to workplace discrimination, but they diverged sharply in other ways that indicated key differences in their purposes and their imagined audiences. The CBS and NBC series provide a sort of baseline for national television representations of the movement in 1970; between them, they display the wide range of rhetorical strategies contained in early network reports. The CBS stories offered a generally dismissive and visually sensationalized narrative about the movement, particularly its radical contingent, displaying the gender anxiety assumed to afflict its male target audience. In contrast, the NBC series presented a generally sympathetic narrative about the movement's issues that unified radical and liberal concerns rather than using the latter to marginalize the former.

This chapter analyzes NBC's prime-time drama Parenthood, a remake of the popular film released in 1989. From its casting and inclusion of more people of African descent, Parenthood is clearly a different text racially than its movie ancestor. However, the portrayal of those African American characters is not necessarily an unambiguous step forward. While well-meaning in its attempt to engage with social issues and portray the multicultural realities of California, the intergenerational drama continues to draw upon some of the oldest tropes of black/white romantic relationships and sexual interaction. The chapter also turns to the intersections of race, class, and gender in representations of families on television in general, examining how “post-racial” and “post-feminist” discourses and sensibilities that have been prominent in politics.

This chapter discusses Roxy's career from 1928–1931. Topics covered include the tremendous success of Roxy Theatre, which had sold six and a half million tickets and had cumulative grosses over $5.5 million by its first anniversary on March 11, 1928; Roxy and his musical director Erno Rapee's scoring of Fox feature films throughout 1928; and Roxy's departure from the Roxy Theatre on January 1, 1931 to work for RCA-NBC-RKO on their new theater-radio project at Rockefeller Center. For the remainder of his career, radio and the stage would capture Roxy's imagination and attention. He would not abandon feature-length films, but he could no longer score, edit, or enhance their assembly.

This chapter demonstrates how Judson's management empire began to plateau in the 1940s. The Depression had rattled music's funding structures. Technology had spawned greater competition for live musical experiences. Jazz had supplanted classical music on the pages of many newspapers and trade magazines. But particularly relevant for Judson was an emerging concern about the connection between music and big business. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) first raised this issue in 1938, when it launched an investigation into the chain-broadcasting practices of the NBC, CBS, and mutual radio networks. The commission also became concerned about the possibility of monopolistic behavior, specifically in the practice of networks representing artists and also buying artists for their radio programs.