The media in the USA
Mass communication has revolutionized the modern world. In the United States, it has given rise to what social observers sometimes call a media state, a society in which access to power is through the media. The term media, understood broadly, includes any channel of information through which information can pass. Since a democracy largely depends on public opinion, all those involved in communicating information inevitably have an important role to play. The print and broadcasting media not only convey information to the public, but also influence public opinion. Television, with access to virtually every American household, which typically tunes in about six hours a day, is a powerful influence. The broadcast media, capable of mass-producing messages and images instantaneously, have been largely responsible for homogenizing cultural and regional diversities across the country. Beyond this cultural significance, the power of the media is important to politicians, who use the media to influence voters; and to businessmen and women, who use the media to encourage consumption of their products. The relationship works in the other direction as well. The audience's opinions influence the media industry. Most newspapers, magazines, radio and television networks in the United States are private commercial enterprises and must be responsive to their audience's demands, especially for entertainment, if they are to stay in business. Newspapers and magazines have long been major lines of communication and have always reached large audiences. Today, more than 11,000 different periodicals are published as either weekly, monthly, bimonthly, quarterly, or semiannual editions. In 1986, a total of 9,144 newspapers were published in the United States. More than 62 million copies of daily newspapers are printed every day and over 58 million copies of Sunday papers are published every week. Readership levels, however, are not as high as they once were. Newspapers have had to cope with competition from radio and television. They have suffered a decline in circulation from the peak years around the turn of the century largely because of the trend of urban populations moving to the suburbs. Studies show that most suburban readers prefer to get "serious" news from television and tend to read newspapers primarily for comics, sports, fashions, crime reports, and local news. Nowadays, Americans consider television their most important source of news, and a majority ranks television as the most believable news source. Accordingly, newspapers have made changes to increase their readership levels. Some established metropolitan newspapers are now published in "zoned" editions for different regional audiences. In some cases, they have lost their readership to new weekly suburban newspapers that resemble magazines in format. To meet the public demand for more feature material, some publishers have started adding "lifestyle" and "home living" sections to their papers to make them more like magazines. Another trend which has accompanied the decline in readership and number of publications is the dramatic decline in competition. Variety at local and national levels has been reduced as media operations have become concentrated in the hands of just a few publishers and corporations. New York City is a good example. In the 1920s people in Manhattan could choose from fourteen different morning and evening dailies. Thirty years later, the choice was reduced by half, and today New York has only two morning papers, the Times and the News, plus one afternoon daily. In other areas around the country, the percentages of cities with competing newspapers have decreased dramatically as publishers are driven out of business by larger competitors. In 1926 there were more than 500 cities with competing newspapers. Today there are under 40 and the number is falling. At this point, 97 percent of the cities carrying daily papers have but a single publisher. They are called "one-owner-towns." Moreover, more and more of the remaining newspapers are under chain or group control. Chain publishers own newspapers all over the country. With a total circulation of over 22 million, chains comprise more than one third of the total daily newspaper circulation in the United States. The U.S. has never had a national press or newspaper with a mass national circulation like The Times and The Daily Telegraph in Britain or the leading papers in other countries. However, the influence of a few large metropolitan newspapers, most notably the New York Times and the Washington Post, has increased so that these papers come close to constituting a national press. Both papers syndicate their staff-written stories to regional newspapers all over the country. Most newspapers rely heavily on wire copy from the two major news services, the Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI), which gather national and international news stories and sell them to subscribing newspapers. The stories reported in major papers often influence other news media. Newspapers around the country and, significantly, television news programs take a lead from the Times in deciding what is and is not a big story. When the Times ceased publication for several weeks in 1978, there was clear evidence of television news programs' lack of direction. The trend toward concentration of ownership is defended on the ground
And New YORK Times published the “Pentagon Papers”, a classified U.S. Defence document about the origins of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam conflict, the Supreme court ruled that the newspapers were within their rights to publish the material. The Washington Post’s role in uncovering the Watergate scandal is another example of the media’s involvement in national events. The story started a sequence of events that led to the resignation of President Nixon.
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