This had happened at a time of relatively homogeneous national sensibilities following the great collective effort of winning the Second World War. But as we've seen, broadcasters used their monopoly over the most powerful attention capture technology yet invented to mold that relative sameness into a single, national consumer mass, unified in schedule, attentional habits, and information diet. At the time, nothing could have been better for their business or American business generally.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 618