An Emerging Influence
The media's role in government dates back to the colonial era, when daily newspapers were the sole source of political as well as other news for the colonists. Newspaper publishing was an expensive and time-consuming process at that time. The fastest printing presses could only produce 250 newspapers an hour. The reporting of “breaking” news was a matter of weeks, not days. Sometimes it took months for information to travel through the colonies.
Around the time of the American Revolution, twenty-five weekly newspapers served the colonies. Some were vocal supporters of the cause of independence, while others adamantly opposed it. Just about all of them lost money, because publishing costs far exceeded the demand for daily papers.
The mass media has undergone an incremental transformation over the past 200 years. Much of that change has occurred since the mid-1990s, with the advent of the Internet and all-news cable television channels. As those and other communication technologies continue to evolve at lightning speed, the role of the media in government will also continue to change.
It wasn't long after the creation of political parties that the Federalists and antifederalists began publishing their own newspapers. These papers were little more than crude party organs that advocated the party platform, promoted their candidates, and relentlessly attacked the opposition. These party-affiliated papers had small audiences, and relied heavily on their respective parties for financial support. In light of this, each newspaper aggressively championed the views of its political party, even if the publisher had reservations about doing so. The primary audience was the party faithful, not the general public.
The Golden Era of Newspapers
With the advent of the steam-powered printing press in the 1830s, the situation began to change. Able to produce a greater number of newspapers at a cheaper cost, newspaper publishers began to forgo support from the political parties — and stopped advancing their partisan causes — in order to attract larger audiences. In the mid-1830s, the New York Herald ushered in the era of the penny press when it dropped its price to a penny and expanded its news coverage to include human-interest stories, crime, business news, and social events. Its readership soared, and imitators followed suit almost immediately.
The intense competition for mass readership led to a rapid expansion in the number of daily newspapers and in their circulation. Between 1870 and 1900, newspaper circulation grew from 3 million to 15 million — a 600 percent increase. It was around this time that successful publishers began creating chains of newspapers across America. The Scripps brothers were among the first to build a chain of newspapers, owning twenty-two by 1910. Not one to be outdone, William Randolph Hearst operated close to forty newspapers by 1935, and could boast that one in four Americans read one of his newspapers.
The period of 1880 to 1925 is considered the golden era of newspapers, as daily papers wielded enormous influence with politicians, business leaders, and the public. Publishers and editors used this power to influence public opinion, shape policy decisions, and highlight social injustices.
Newspapers were so influential during the late nineteenth century that the Hearst and Pulitzer chains virtually forced Congress to declare war on Spain over the Cuban government's policy of forcing rural people to move to towns where groups of soldiers were stationed. One critic of the war effort dubbed it “Mr. Hearst's” war, while the Spanish prime minister lamented that American newspapers had more power than did the American government.
Radio and Television
In 1920 the Westinghouse Corporation's KDKA in Pittsburgh became the nation's first commercial radio station, but it took a decade for the new medium to catch on with the public. By 1930, however, almost 40 percent of the households in America owned radios, and that number would double again before the end of the decade. President Roosevelt helped to popularize the new medium during the Great Depression with his weekly “fireside chats.” With its ability to deliver breaking news instantly, radio replaced newspapers as the primary source of news for most Americans.
As advertising dollars began to move from newspapers to radio, one newspaper association organized a boycott of the radio industry. During the boycott, radio stations were prohibited from using newspapers and wire services as a source of information for their news stories. The boycott quickly failed, however, and the newspaper industry resigned itself to competing with the new medium.
Television enjoyed an even faster rise to prominence. In 1939, fewer than 5 percent of the households in America owned a television. In 1950, that number had grown to 90 percent. One survey revealed that by the mid-1960s, a majority of Americans received their news information from television. As the Vietnam War dragged on, Americans increasingly turned to television for a “firsthand” account of the war. Coverage of other big events, including President Kennedy's assassination, Watergate, and the Apollo 13 crisis, also helped cement television's primacy as the predominant source of news and information in America. A 1994 poll revealed that 74 percent of Americans received their news from television — the high-water mark of the medium's dominance. Since that time, the Internet has begun to erode television's news monopoly.
