James L. Baughman offers a lively analysis of the impact that the advent of television has had on America's media industries. He contends that because television had captured the largest share of the mass audience by the late 1950s, rival media were forced to target smaller, "sub-group" markets with novel content that ranged from rock 'n' roll for teenage radio listeners in the 1950s to the more sexually explicit films that began to appear in the 1960s.

For this updated edition, Baughman includes in his discussion the effects of the new competitive realities of the 1990s on journalism, filmmaking, and broadcasting. The dominance of the marketplace values, he argues, has further fragmented the mass audience, encouraged record-breaking mergers between media companies, and precipitated a steady and alarming decline in the quality of and public interest in journalism, a trend that may ultimately threaten American democracy.