how the American television industry became fixated on commercial advertising and high ratings. As he explained: "Commercial television gradually stopped caring. In the late 1960s, Congress reluctantly created the Public Broadcasting Service. Over time, PBS relieved the networks of the cultural production attempted a decade earlier. It also marked the beginning of a segregation, cemented by the diffusion of cable television in the 1980s, of taste. The networks felt increasingly free to drop programming intended to please cultural and political elites." Reviewing the book in the April 30, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann observed: "As the television audience grew larger and took in people from small towns and the middle of the country, it became obvious that Americans wanted predictable, familiar entertainment, featuring, as Baughman astutely observes, stock situations and stars who had unusually expressive faces that lent themselves to cartoonish mugging shown in closeup. The results were often terrific, but never uplifting." But Baughman harbored no pretensions of cultural superiority. As he noted in the introduction to Same Time, Same Station, "I will confess to consuming much more ESPN than C-SPAN."<ref>Same Time, Same Station, p. xiii.</ref> In addition to his academic career, Baughman served as a member of the Wisconsin Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights from 1985 to 1992. James Baughman Day Baughman died of lung cancer on March 26, 2016. He was survived by his wife and best friend, Michele "Mickey" Michuda. He continued teaching until two weeks before he succumbed to cancer. Shortly before Baughman passed away, Madison Mayor Paul Soglin declared March 26 James Baughman Day for "the love and intellectual passion he has inspired in his current and former students, and for his contributions to scholarship, history, journalism and education." On the day Baughman died, the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism and Mass Communication announced: "The journalism school lost a lion this morning." Selected publications Television's Guardians: The FCC and the Politics of Programming, 1958-1967. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985. Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987. The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking, and Broadcasting in America since 1941. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Same Time, Same Station: Creating American Television, 1948-1961''. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. References 1952 births 2016 deaths University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty People from Warren, Ohio Columbia Graduate School of