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claims made against our work are as silly as were critiques of those developments. For example, Hoggart’s dismissiveness is ill- informed. Two minutes’ research would have told him that Harvard long- hosted a journal of media studies (the ungainly- titled Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, now thankfully free of its oxymoronic Yanqui moniker and its retro housing) and a New Approaches to International Law colloquium that engaged with cultural studies, while MIT held major conferences called “Media In Transition” to trope its acronym. Foucault proposes that we think of the media on a continuum with universities, journals of tendency, and books – all are media, and it is strange to treat one or the other as more or less significant or powerful as a venue or topic (2001: 928).

Where did TV studies come from? In the United States, it derives from university participation in the emergence of radio. The discipline of speech communication had been formed in the early- twentieth-century US to help white non- English-speaking migrants assimilate into the workforce. It became the first home of media education, because the engineering professors who founded radio stations in colleges during the 1920s needed program content, and drew volunteers from that area after being rebuffed by literature mavens. These stations doubled as laboratories, with research undertaken into technology, content, and reception. At the same time, schools of journalism were forming to produce newspaper workers (Kittross 1999). This was also a period of massively complex urbanization and the spread of adult literacy, democratic rights, labor organization, and socialist ideas. First radio then TV were prized and feared for their demagogic qualities. In the twentieth century, with the standardization of social- science method and its uptake and export by US military, commercial, and governmen-

tal interests, audiences came to be conceived as empirical entities that could be known via research instruments derived from communication, sociology, demography, the psy- function, and market- ing. Such concerns were coupled with a secondary concentration on content. Texts, too, were conceived as empirical entities that could be known, via research instruments derived from sociology, communication, and literary criticism. Universities across the US began preparing students to work in the media. As they grew in size and opened up both to highly instrumental, conservatory- style

32 TELEVISION STUDIES: THE BASICS training and to more critical tendencies within the human sciences,

influenced by oppositional social movements, so TV studies was simultaneously deemed by many traditionalists to be overly applied and overly progressive. In Britain, a research position into TV was first endowed by Granada TV at Leeds University in 1959. Then the Society for Education in Film and Television and the British Film Institute began sometimes separate, sometimes overlapping, forms of stimulus in the 1960s and 1970s, from teaching posts to publishing, which ultimately fed into major formations of media studies influenced by continental Marxism and feminism and social movements. Classes grew as the subject developed from film appre- ciation to media critique and media training, in concert with shift- ing research agendas, a changing cultural economy, and the latter’s applied, conservatory approach (Bignell et al. 2000a: 81; Bolas 2009; Fox 2003).

Today, major engagements with TV come from the psy- function, other social sciences (sociology, economics, communication studies, anthropology, and law), and the humanities (literature, cinema studies, media studies, and cultural studies). There are seven principal forms of inquiry, which:

•฀ borrow ethnography from sociology and anthropology to inves- tigate the experiences of audiences; •฀ use experimentation and testing methods from psychology to establish cause- and-effect relations between media consumption and subsequent conduct;

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