24/7 Politics: Cable Television and the Fragmenting of America from Watergate to Fox News

How cable television upended American political life in
the pursuit of profits and influence 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 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
citizenship. In this timely and provocative book, Kathryn Cramer
Brownell argues that cable television itself is not to blame for
today’s rampant polarization and scandal politics-the intentional
restructuring of television as a political institution is. She
describes how cable innovations-from C-SPAN coverage of
congressional debates in the 1980s to MTV’s foray into presidential
politics in the 1990s-took on network broadcasting using market
forces, giving rise to a more decentralized media world. Brownell
shows how cable became an unstoppable medium for political
communication that prioritized cult followings and loyalty to
individual brands, fundamentally reshaped party politics, and, in
the process, sowed the seeds of democratic upheaval. 24/7
Politics reveals how cable TV created new possibilities for
antiestablishment voices and opened a pathway to political
prominence for seemingly unlikely figures like Donald Trump by
playing to narrow audiences and cultivating division instead of
common ground.