number of stations that could be owned by a single
person. However, when President Ronald Reagan
appointed Mark S. Fowler and Dennis R. Patrick as
FCC chairmen, the situation drastically changed for
the television industry. Both men rejected the idea
that broadcasters were trustees using the medium
as a way to serve the public good. They believed in
Reagan’s conservative economic policies that rein-
forced consumerism and market forces. The gen-
eral public should be the ultimate consumer, unfet-
tered by government rules for viewing choices. Thus,
deregulation of the communications industry be-
gan to take place in the early 1980’s.
Shareholders now considered television as a com-
modity, a profitable endeavor that could be bought
and sold at will. Major corporations began to buy
the floundering networks—Capital Cities took over
ABC, and General Electric took over CBS and NBC.
Entrepreneurs flocked to the airwaves as profits
soured and emerged as media moguls. In 1980, Ted
Turner unveiled the Cable News Network (CNN),
and he spearheaded the movement with several sat-
ellite services (WTBS, CNN, and TNT). Eventually,
Turner bought the television rights to the MGM li-
brary of motion pictures for rebroadcasting on his
channels. Native Australian Rupert Murdoch first
bought Metromedia television stations that served
New York and Washington. Murdoch then acquired
Twentieth Century-Fox and formed the FOX net-
work to compete with the three mainstream net-
works.
New Technologies and Piracy Issues New technol-
ogies—including the videocassette recorder (VCR),
video games, and remote control devices—caused
a significant revolution in home recordings of pro-
grams. Warner-Amex in Columbus, Ohio, intro-
duced interactive two-way technology television with
Qube in 1980. Subscribers could respond with a
handheld device to answer multiple choice ques-
tions or order merchandise, and the system was even
used by local universities to offer classes. However,
by 1984, with mounting costs and rising subscriber
concerns over privacy issues about what information
was being stored in the company’s databases, Qube
was discontinued. The camcorder, a video and re-
corder, enabled people to watch home movies on
their television sets. The remote control changed
the way viewers watched television, allowing them to
flip channels and see snippets of several shows at one
time. Videocassette tape replaced bulky reel-to-reel
machines; the tape could be reused and recorded
over, and soon companies developed handheld video
cameras that enabled faster production in the field
in television journalism.
Consumers could now record their favorite televi-
sion programs, avoiding network schedules to ac-
commodate their own lifestyles. In 1982, only 4 per-
cent of households owned a VCR, but by 1988, with
the costs of production going down, the number
rose to 60 percent. Viewers became their own inde-
pendent programmers, but the downside was that
the VCR caused a boom in film piracy by some for-
eign countries and violations of copyright. In a 1984
lawsuit brought by Disney and Universal against
Sony, the leading manufacturer of VHS recorders,
the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that taping a copy-
righted program off the air for one’s own personal
viewing was not an illegal act. The decision caused
the movie and television industry to move into mar-
keting home video releases once the program was in
syndication so that viewers would buy or rent the
video before taping it directly off the air. By the mid-
1980’s, HBO began to scramble transmissions to
stop nonpaying viewers who had satellite dishes but
did not receive regular cable service. In order to re-
ceive clear reception, viewers had to pay for the ser-
vice and get decoders for their television sets. The
Cable Communications Policy Act of 1984 also
banned the illegal sharing or wiring of cable televi-
sion and telephone systems.Programs and Reaganism Mergers, deregulation,
and new technologies would have a dramatic effect
on the type of shows the American public would
watch on their television screens. During this de-
cade, the decline of musical variety shows and West-
erns occurred because of a lack of viewer interest. In-
novation did not appear as hoped; instead, by the
mid-1980’s, the cable networks relied on the reruns
of classic programs such asBewitched,Rifleman,Father
Knows Best,Lassie, andDragnet.Prime-time program-
mers increasingly used segmented scheduling to tar-
get specific demographic groups. For example, the
first hour of prime time was devoted to family shows
such as theHead of the Class,The Cosby Show,The Facts
of Life, andGrowing Pains. There was an attempt to
appeal to older Americans in such series asThe
Golden Girls, in which three self-confident, mature
women deal with retirement in Florida, whileMur-952 Television The Eighties in America