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The Image of Business on Prime Time Television
Gitlin, Todd
26/2  (Winter 1984): 64-73 *

Television entertainment, beneath its consensus on uplift and the well-appointed life, has become a contested zone. The bedrock of television politics, a steady politics that can't be fended off, that doesn't disappear from decade to decade, is the politics of business, of the advertisers who underwrite living-room entertainment and who now, in the early eighties, were anxiously worrying about their look. The networks weren't panicked by the business offensive, but coming at a time of shrinking market shares and severe economic pressures, the business attack underscored the essential power relations in what is, after all, show business. It opened a window into Hollywood's deepest politics. As television became prey to all manner of criticisms from the right, none on the face of it seemed more intriguing and astounding than the charge, by neoconservative critics and business alike, that this glittering medium decked out with bulletins about splendors of the capitalist way of life undermines the image of capitalism.

 

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