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Gomery, Douglas. A History of Broadcasting in the United States. Maiden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. 357 pp. $37.95.
Three decades ago, ABC, NBC, and CBS lost their grip on radio and television when Americans switched to the multichannel universe that defines radio and TV today. A question is: when will historians also make this change? In the latest broadcast history, Douglas Gomery answers with a "not yet." This is a marvelous and thoughtprovoking account of broadcasting's big pillar heyday, but readers will need another source to grasp what happened after that.
A resident scholar at the Library of American Broadcasting at the University of Maryland, Gomery follows the original networks from the first chapter to literally the last page. It is not unusual to find survey history inattentive to other seminal and...