Television during the 1950s and 1960's

Television struggled to become a national mass media in the 1950s, and became a cultural force – for better or worse – in the 60s. Before these two decades were over the three national networks were offering programs that were alternately earth shaking, sublime and ridiculous. In the 1940s, the three networks – NBC, CBS and ABC – were "networks" in name only. All of the programming originated, live, in New York. The only way the networks had to distribute the shows to the rest of the nation was to point a film camera at a television screen and convert video to film. These 16mm films, known as kinescopes, were then duplicated and shipped to the few affiliated stations for broadcast later. By necessity, most programming was local, and cooking shows, wrestling and cartoons took up most of the broadcast day. --written by Bill Ganzel

Out of the three networks in your opinion which network has been the most influential in today's society?