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This article analyzes how competition in television broadcasting influences diversity of program supply. We argue that competition in oligopolistic broadcasting markets can take different forms, depending on the strategies adopted by broadcasters. We distinguish between moderate and ruinous competition, and discuss under what conditions these types of competition will emerge. We hypothesize that moderate competition improves diversity, whereas ruinous competition produces excessive sameness. We test these hypotheses for the Dutch television market.

Charles E. Osgood and his colleagues developed a technique for content analysis called `Evaluative Assertion Analysis' (Osgood, 1956). An elaboration of the technique will be presented here. Sentences are split up into nuclear sentences, which are predicating something about the relation between meaning objects. Meaning objects might be political actors, empirical variables, attributes or abstract philosophical notions such as `the good' or `the world'. By uttering nuclear sentences, meaning objects are associated or disassociated. A computer program, CETA, has been developed which applies graph theory for combining these nuclear sentences in order to detect the structure of discourse.

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This article deals with the question of whether the so-called `information society' really will be an informed society. It is argued that there is empirical evidence to show that information supply in modern societies rises exponentially, whereas consumption and pragmatics of information lag far behind supply. Thus, the gulf between supply of information, on the one hand, and demand for and use of information on the other, is getting broader and broader. This phenomenon may be explained partly by an autonomous tendency in information services to fill-up available production capacity. In other words, the information society is subject to the law of diminishing returns from information. The article concludes with a sketch of some implications for education, public libraries and public administration, drawing on the experience of the Netherlands.