From Fringe to Mainstream.

American media, like most aspects of American culture in the 1970s, was dramatically affected by the social changes of the 1960s. While American culture proved fundamentally resistant to many aspects of 1960s radicalism — rejecting, for example, Black Power, Maoism, and revolutionary violence, or only partially accepting aspects of feminism and civil rights — the media almost wholly assimilated the countercultural preoccupations of the 1960s. Self-expression, sexual liberation, recreational drug use, and rock music — major characteristics of the so-called counterculture — all found a place in 1970s media. Magazines, radio, and television had, to some extent, been instrumental in creating the counterculture by publicizing the preoccupations of counter cultural centers such as San Francisco, or that of counter cultural events such as Woodstock, to the rest of the country. The radical implications...