Socialist TV/TV under socialism; not the hottest topic of speculation, but I was asked about it the other day and ad libbed an answer. This, below, is something more precise.
First of all, how does the medium affect the message? TV is, relative to other media, low definition, requiring high levels of involvement. The building block of a TV broadcast is the pixel, red, green or blue light. Compare this with the printed word, which is built out of the letter, well-defined, A = A, B = B. TV demands time and effort out of its audience. You can't absorb TV into other routines in the way you can with radio. TV is much more suited to education and in-depth documentary than current affairs, where it'd be prone to misunderstanding and/or manipulation, and this is what TV news is used for today.
Secondly, we cannot extend from our current conditions to this point. We will deal for a long time in printed media (off and on-line). While the cost of printing and publishing is decreasing (although not the cost of owning and running the means of printing and producing, hence the current crisis of profit in both industries) TV broadcasting is labour and resource intensive. We can only give a very general answer to this question.
In the meantime however TV has had and will have a continuing effect on our society, bringing the periphery into the centre. This allows people to have a much more international perspective, a greater degree of solidarity across borders, all borders. For example: how much easier it is now to rouse people in support of the Palestinian cause because you can see what the Israeli state does to them.
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