A closer look
Post-war America was starving for television content, but the FCC managed to completely stall the cultural revolution by freezing all new station licenses from 1948 to 1952. Realizing their original channel allocation plan was causing a chaotic mess of signal interference, the government just pulled the plug on growth to figure it out. This bureaucratic nightmare meant cities lucky enough to already have a TV station got four years of cultural dominance, while vast swaths of the country were trapped in the radio age.
