Ah, but it's precisely their different flavors of horribleness—and the kinds of non-horrible things they're able to convey regardless—that are the message. These differ even for things as similar as broadcast TV and modern streaming services—the way the message is conveyed, the medium, shapes the kinds of messages that tend to get through, or which are amplified and which are suppressed. An early example of this would be the role of the rising popularity of the codex, versus trunks full of scrolls, in driving the creation of a fixed "canon" in Christianity. The message of a pile of scrolls is flexibility—the message of codices is fixedness. Something's in, or it's out, and everything that's in is physically connected and difficult to separate. There's a decision to make, where there wasn't before.