Five Radios in Every Home.

Radio continued throughout the 1980s to be the most pervasive medium in America. Ninety-nine percent of American households owned radios in the 1980s (compared to 98 percent who owned televisions), and each household had an average of 5.5 radios. Those figures do not take into account automobile radios, which had become standard equipment in most of the 5.5 million passenger cars sold each year. The American radio audience tended to be younger, better educated, and wealthier than the television audience, though Multimedia Audiences, a sampling of media choices at specified times, indicated that 91.7 percent of Americans were likely to be watching television as compared to 85.3 percent who were listening to the radio.

Local Origins.

Radio and television differed significantly in the origin of their programming. The three major national television networks dominated primetime programming, and though FCC rules stipulated that a certain amount of the broadcast...