Somewhat by chance, I recently picked up two books to read that were awfully similar in topic, thesis, and format. They are oral histories on, respectively, the MTV and ESPN cable TV networks. Both are quite fat and loaded with testimony from all manner of folks involved with the two enterprises (managers, production folks, on-air personalities, athletes, musicians, critics, etc.), each of which can claim considerable impact on American culture over the past thirty years or so. What was kind of funny was that I was looking forward to reading the ESPN book, but thought I'd only scan the MTV story, and it turned out to be the other way around. I found the story of music television much more compelling and consequential than the story of sports television. To start with the latter, the best parts there were about the creation of the so-called Big Show starring Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann in the nineties (of which I was a big fan), and the various ways that Olbermann ticked everybody off. I found myself skipping long sections about negotiations for NFL broadcasting rights, the NBA, and NASCAR. Some of my antipathy for the book is because I was a big-time viewer of ESPN back in the nineties and early oughts, and remember reading about or actually seeing a lot of what is described here. It was a lot of old news. On the other hand, I was never really a big MTV consumer-- I think the only thing I ever watched with some regularity was Beavis and Butthead, also in the nineties, so much of this material was new to me. I'm also inclined to think that while ESPN has had a huge impact on society, it's influence is more superficial than that of MTV. In fact, while it's easy to see how MTV has shaped even sports in recent years, I don't think that there's much reciprocity there. Certainly a lot of the visual style of contemporary sports on TV owes something to music videos, and clearly the influence of hip hop style on sports (especially basketball) would be unimaginable in a non-MTV universe. I guess you really need both sides of this story to understand how television (and especially cable television) has evolved and effected the broader society since the 1980s, so both books are worth a look, but I certainly enjoyed the MTV story more.
Somewhat by chance, I recently picked up two books to read that were awfully similar in topic, thesis, and format. They are oral histories on, respectively, the MTV and ESPN cable TV networks. Both are quite fat and loaded with testimony from all manner of folks involved with the two enterprises (managers, production folks, on-air personalities, athletes, musicians, critics, etc.), each of which can claim considerable impact on American culture over the past thirty years or so. What was kind of funny was that I was looking forward to reading the ESPN book, but thought I'd only scan the MTV story, and it turned out to be the other way around. I found the story of music television much more compelling and consequential than the story of sports television. To start with the latter, the best parts there were about the creation of the so-called Big Show starring Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann in the nineties (of which I was a big fan), and the various ways that Olbermann ticked everybody off. I found myself skipping long sections about negotiations for NFL broadcasting rights, the NBA, and NASCAR. Some of my antipathy for the book is because I was a big-time viewer of ESPN back in the nineties and early oughts, and remember reading about or actually seeing a lot of what is described here. It was a lot of old news. On the other hand, I was never really a big MTV consumer-- I think the only thing I ever watched with some regularity was Beavis and Butthead, also in the nineties, so much of this material was new to me. I'm also inclined to think that while ESPN has had a huge impact on society, it's influence is more superficial than that of MTV. In fact, while it's easy to see how MTV has shaped even sports in recent years, I don't think that there's much reciprocity there. Certainly a lot of the visual style of contemporary sports on TV owes something to music videos, and clearly the influence of hip hop style on sports (especially basketball) would be unimaginable in a non-MTV universe. I guess you really need both sides of this story to understand how television (and especially cable television) has evolved and effected the broader society since the 1980s, so both books are worth a look, but I certainly enjoyed the MTV story more. 
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