For the purposes of our narrative, the conclusion is clear: an open medium has much to recommend it, but not the power to unify the country. For a fully united national community, nothing succeeds like centralized mass media, a fact not lost on the Fascist and Communist totalitarians. With an open medium, one has diversity or fragmentation of content, and with it, differences among groups and individuals are accentuated rather than elided or repressed. None of this divisive power was plain to cable’s early visionaries, who saw only good in a proliferation of diverse subjects and points of view
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