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According to William F. Baker and George Dessart, coauthors of Down the Tube: An Inside Account of the Failure of American Television, American television is a commercial enterprise that fails to enrich or educate American viewers. Baker and Dessart claim the initial mistake was that the FCC, gave radio broadcasters the first television frequencies. The FCC assumed that radio broadcasters would carry their knowledge of radio broadcast to television broadcast, and the broadcasters embraced the new medium as an opportunity to gain larger audiences and profits. Just as in radio, television programming would be funded by corporate sponsorship. Baker and Dessart blame this system of corporate funding for problems in American television today. Initially the sponsors simply lent their names to the programs, but