homes had access to cable systems that typically provided up to a dozen channels. Just three
national networks dominated television prime time, attracting 90% of the audience. A typi-
cal home might also choose from among perhaps 10 or 15 radio stations, see movies at a few
surviving downtown and newer suburban movie theaters, read one daily newspaper (or pos-
sibly two in the biggest markets), and visit an odd assortment of mostly small newsstands and
bookstores. There was virtually no home video (although introduced in 1975, few homes
could afford the equipment), only a handful of pay cable or cable networks (CNN was a year
away; the Weather Channel and MTV two), no multiscreen cinema theaters, no CDs, and of
course, no home computers (save in a few California garages), let alone World Wide Web ser-
vices (an "unk-unk" back then, as defined in Chapter 7). We lived in what today seems like a
benighted era.

Now young people react with amazement at the dearth of media choices we enjoyed back
then (there were even fewer earlier). They cannot imagine a world without home video,
video rental/sales stores, more than 100 satellite-delivered cable (or DBS) networks,
multi-megascreen cinema complexes, CD players (and the "Walkman," which appeared just
as the first edition of this volume was published), personal computers with ready Web access,
huge book and music stores either in malls or on the Internet, or laptops and cellphones, for
that matter. We had none of these two decades ago. A few of us could tune to one service that
today's youth never knew -- a limited over-the-air subscription television (STV) industry
that has since disappeared.

Over the same period, the face of American business generally has also changed dramat-
ically as manufacturing's primacy has given way in the information age. Whereas in 1979
we compared the media to what were then the nation's largest firms -- industrial giants such
as General Electric and Exxon -- today Compaine and Gomery use Microsoft and other
software firms that often did not exist two decades ago to draw comparative measures of
size and scope.

The story of these two decades is not, of course, totally one of change, for some long-term
trends have continued or even accelerated. The number of daily newspapers continues to de-
cline making the one-newspaper town even more the national norm (the end of daily news-
paper competition in San Francisco was announced as these words were being written).
Television and radio station numbers grow steadily larger despite fears of further audience
splintering. And magazines, which seem to rise and fall with the seasons and continually re-
define what niche media are all about, also continued to grow in total numbers.

The hugely more complex media ownership patterns and dwindling ownership regulation of
today are described and assessed in the text and many tables and charts that follow. Where
two decades ago we could write discrete chapters about well-defined separate industries (in-
cluding newspapers, books, magazines, movies, broadcasting, and cable), those industry
terms are today melding as both technology and economics drives a process of convergence.
Indeed, one whole chapter (7) describes and assesses Internet Web services that were totally
unforseen in the first two editions of this book.

Overall expansion of most media industries in recent years has come about in part because
of a distinct change in the relation of media and government. Compaine and Gomery make
clear just how much government's role has substantially declined since this book first ap-
peared. Where the FCC once had stringent ownership controls concerning radio and televi-
sion stations, most are gone and the rest have been liberalized. One entity can now operate

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