Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in American Politics
Episode: Kathryn Cramer Brownell, "24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News" (Princeton UP, 2023)
Description: As television began to overtake the political landscape in the 1960s, network broadcast companies, bolstered by powerful lobbying interests, dominated screens across the nation. Yet over the next three decades, the expansion of a different technology, cable, changed all of this. 24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News (Princeton UP, 2023) tells the story of how the cable industry worked with political leaders to create an entirely new approach to television, one that tethered politics to profits and divided and distracted Americans by feeding their appetite for entertainment--frequently at the expense of fostering responsible ci...