Introduction to the Special Issue: The Freedom to Televise: Regulating North American TV in the 20th Century

This essay introduces seven original papers that revisit and reflect on core issues in content regulation. We intend this special issue to build upon the groundwork laid by the strong body of work on content regulation in North American broadcasting and to foreground historical television research at a time when scholarship is trending away from it. The wide net we cast for this issue yielded a slate of case studies from the mid- to late-twentieth century that move between scripted and factual programing, commercial and non-commercial models, over-the-air and wired technologies, and private and state-run media. The authors reckon with regulation that is straightforward and circuitous, governmental and corporate, top-down and collaborative, flexible and unyielding. Each paper makes a generative contribution to the study of twentieth-century content regulation—an area that insists, through these articles, that it still holds questions that need answering.