Starr's account ends in 1941, with an implied promise of a further volume to discuss what's happened since. The decisions he describes are striking to the modern reader not so much because they turned out a certain way, but because they were made at all. They suggest a belief that societies and their governments can affect the path that technologies and markets take, rather than an acceptance of whatever the path turned out to be as inevitable. This concept seems utterly missing from current discussions of the media. Regulators and the public feel there is little they can do to steer the content or quality of the media (with the feeble exception of the F.C.C.'s punishing broadcasters for vulgarities that would barely be noticed on cable). Members of the media feel they have no choice but to give, immediately, what the market demands.

At a recent forum on media coverage of the Iraq war at the University of California, Berkeley, a network television producer finally tired of the torrent of criticism. If you don't like what you see, stop watching, he said. That was the way consumers could exercise ''choice.'' Paul Starr's original and compelling book shows that it's not the only sort of choice available to the public. Exactly: we can choose to choose, which is what the public's strong reaction to the Jackson exposure and its aftermath is really all about.

It wasn't the actual exposure that caused the reaction, it was that this clearly transgressive incident acted as the straw that broke the camel's back, the catalyst for the public to say, "Wait a minute, we don't have to put up with this if we don't want to, and we don't want to."