SOURCE: Crook, David. “The Public Images of Private Doubts.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (23 October 1983): 1, 9.

In the following review of Inside Prime Time, Crook asserts that Gitlin's book contains powerful insights regarding the corporate culture of the major television networks.

Like the Kremlin, the Big Three commercial television networks are closed, secretive, often paranoid fortresses. They are places where truth shifts cynically, where power, prestige and ideology filter through descending layers of evermore insecure bureaucracies.

They are places consumed by internal politics—who's in and who's out, who's standing next to the chairman and who isn't—where curious outsiders, especially journalists and writers, are subversives.

This is a book by one of them. Todd Gitlin's Inside Prime Time is perhaps the best book ever written about the thinking of the insulated men and women in the executive suites of Century City, Burbank and Television City.

Gitlin has listened...