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Media (Communications)
YouTube Video about the First Amendment  by Jeffrey Rosen of the National Constitution Center in conversation with Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute.
Pictured: Today's Media Alternatives

​Media (the singular form of which is medium) is the collective communication outlets or tools that are used to store and deliver information or data. It is either associated with communication media, or the specialized mass media communication businesses such as: print media and the press, photography, advertising, cinema, broadcasting (radio and television) and publishing.


Evolution:

The term "media" in its modern application relating to communication channels is traced back to its first use as such by Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, who stated in Counterblast (1954): "The media are not toys; they should not be in the hands of Mother Goose and Peter Pan executives. They can be entrusted only to new artists, because they are art forms."

By the mid-1960s, the term had spread to general use in North America and the United Kingdom. ("Mass media", in contrast, was, according to H.L. Mencken, used as early as 1923 in the United States.)


Electronic media

Main article: Electronic media

In the last century, a revolution in telecommunications has greatly altered communication by providing new media for long distance communication. The first transatlantic two-way radio broadcast occurred in 1906 and led to common communication via analogue and digital media:
The difference between analog and digital photography is that digital photography is easier to edit and have a lot of choices after taking photos, but analog photography is more simple and you have to accept the photo if you don’t like it. In digital photography you can edit the photo even before taking it, unlike analog which had limited settings.

Modern communication media now allow for intense long-distance exchanges between larger numbers of people (many-to-many communication via e-mail, Internet forums, and teleportation).

On the other hand, many traditional broadcast media and mass media favor one-to-many communication (television, cinema, radio, newspaper, magazines, and also social media).

Electronic media usage is growing, although concern has arisen that it distracts youth from face-to-face contact with friends and family. Research on the social engagement effect is mixed. One study by Wellman finding that “33% of Internet users said that the Internet had improved their connections to friends ‘a lot’, and 23% said it had increased the quality of their communication with family members by a similar amount.

Young people in particular took advantage of the social side of the Internet. Nearly half (49%) of the 18- to 29-year-olds said that the Internet had improved their connections to friends a lot. On the other hand, 19% of employed Internet users said that the Internet had increased the amount of time they spent working in home” (Lee, Leung, Lo, Xiong, & Wu p. 377 & 378).

Electronic media now comes in the forms tablets, laptops, desktops, cell phones, mp3 players, DVDs, game systems, radios, and television. Technology has spiked to record highs within the last decade, thus changing the dynamic of communication. The meaning of electronic media, as it is known in various spheres, has changed with the passage of time.

The term media has achieved a broader meaning nowadays as compared to that given it a decade ago. Earlier, there was multimedia, once only a piece of software (application software) used to play audio (sound) and video (visual object with or without sound). Following this, it was CD (Compact Disc) and DVD (Digital Versatile Disc), then camera of 3G (Third Generation) applications in the field.

In modern terms, the media includes all the software which are used in PC (Computer) or Laptop or Mobile Phone installed for normal or better performance of the system; today, however, hard discs (used to increase the installation capacity of data) of computer is an example of electronic media. This type of hard disc is becoming increasingly smaller in size.

The latest inclusion in the field is magnetic media (magnetic stripe) whose application is common, in the fastest growing Information Technology field.

Modern day IT media is commonly used in the banking sector and by the Income Tax Department for the purpose of providing the easiest and fastest possible services to the consumers. In this magnetic strip, account information linking to all the data relating to a particular consumer is stored. The main features of these types of media are prepared unrecorded (blank form), and data is normally stored at a later stage as per the requirement of its user or consumer.


Social impacts:

Media technology has made communicating increasingly easier as time has passed throughout history. Today, children are encouraged to use media tools in school and are expected to have a general understanding of the various technologies available.

The internet is arguably one of the most effective tools in media for communication tools such as e-mail, Skype, Facebook etc., have brought people closer together and created new online communities.

However, some may argue that certain types of media can hinder face-to-face communication and therefore can result in complications like identity fraud.

In a large consumer-driven society, electronic media (such as television) and print media (such as newspapers) are important for distributing advertisement media.

More technologically advanced societies have access to goods and services through newer media than less technologically advanced societies. In addition to this “advertising” role, media is nowadays a tool to share knowledge all around the world.

The internet is a sustainable solution to overcome the “gap” between developed and developing countries as both will get a chance to learn from each other.

Therefore, the internet can be a way to re-establish balance, by for instance enhance publication of newspaper, academic journal from developing countries.

Consequently, media is a modern form of communication aiming at spreading knowledge within the whole world, regardless any form of discrimination.

Media, through media and communications psychology, has helped to connect diverse people from far and near geographical location. It has also helped in the aspect of on-line or internet businesses and other activities that have an on-line version.

​All media intended to affect human behavior is initiated through communication and the intended behavior is couched in psychology. Therefore, understanding media and communications psychology is fundamental in understanding the social and individual effects of media. The expanding field of media and communications psychology combines these established disciplines in a new way.

Timing change based on innovation and efficiency may not have a direct is correlation with technology. The information revolution is based on modern advancements. During the 19th century, the information "boom" rapidly advanced because of postal systems, increase in newspaper accessibility, as well as schools "modernizing". These advancements were made due to the increase of people becoming literate and educated.

The methodology of communication although has changed and dispersed in numerous directions based on the source of its socio-cultural impact.

Biases in the media that affects religious or ethnic minorities takes the form of racism in the media.

See also:​






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Media in The United States including Freedom of Speech
YouTube Video: The many times Donald Trump has attacked the media
by The Guardian​ (8/16/2018)
Pictured below: Media and Politics in the Age of Trump ​Published by the History Departments at The Ohio State University and Miami University

Media of the United States consist of several different types of media:
  • television,
  • radio,
  • cinema,
  • newspapers,
  • magazines,
  • and Internet-based Web sites.

Many of the media are controlled by large for-profit corporations who reap revenue from advertising, subscriptions, and sale of copyrighted material. American media conglomerates tend to be leading global players, generating large revenues as well as large opposition in many parts of the world.

With the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, further deregulation and convergence are under way, leading to mega-mergers, further concentration of media ownership, and the emergence of multinational media conglomerates.

These mergers enable tighter control of information. Currently, five corporations control roughly 90% of the media. Critics allege that localism, local news and other content at the community level, media spending and coverage of news, and diversity of ownership and views have suffered as a result of these processes of media concentration.

Theories to explain the success of such companies include reliance on certain policies of the American federal government or a tendency to natural monopolies in the industry. See Media bias in the United States.

The organisation Reporters Without Borders compiles and publishes an annual ranking of countries based upon the organisation's assessment of their press freedom records. In 2013–14 United States was ranked 46th out of 180 countries, a drop of thirteen points from the preceding year.

Click on any of the following for more  about Media of the United States:









Media Conglomerates, including Media Cross-Ownership in the United States
YouTube Video: Sinclair Broadcast Group: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
Pictured below: “What happened to radio, happened to television, and then it happened to cable. If we are not diligent, then it will happen to the Internet [creating] a media plantation for the 21st Century dominated by the same corporate and ideological forces that have controlled the media for the last 50 years.” by Bill Moyers

A media conglomerate, media group, or media institution is a company that owns numerous companies involved in mass media enterprises, such as television, radio, publishing, motion pictures, theme parks, or the Internet. According to the magazine The Nation, "Media conglomerates strive for policies that facilitate their control of the markets around the world."

Terminology:

A conglomerate is a large company composed of a number of smaller companies (subsidiaries) engaged in generally unrelated businesses.

Starting in 2007, it has been questioned if media companies actually are related. Some media conglomerates use their access in multiple areas to share various kinds of content such as: news, video and music, between users.

The media sector's tendency to consolidate has caused formerly diversified companies to appear less diverse in comparison with similar companies. Therefore, the term media group may also be applied, however, it has not yet replaced the more traditional term.
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Media cross-ownership in the United States

Media cross-ownership is the ownership of multiple media businesses by a person or corporation. These businesses can include broadcast and cable television, film, radio, newspaper, magazine, book publishing, music, video games, and various online entities.

Much of the debate over concentration of media ownership in the United States has for many years focused specifically on the ownership of broadcast stations, cable stations, newspapers and websites.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Media Cross-ownership in the United States:







Media Proprietors
YouTube Video: Ted Turner: Take Care of the Planet 
Pictured below: Clockwise, from Upper Left: Rupert Murdoch (Fox); Brian L.Roberts (Comcast); Les Moonves (CBS); and Walt Disney

A media proprietor, media mogul or media tycoon refers to a successful entrepreneur or businessperson who controls, through personal ownership or via a dominant position in any media related company or enterprise, media consumed by a large number of individuals.

Those with significant control, ownership, and influence of a large company in the mass media may also be called a tycoon, baron, or business magnate. Social media creators and founders can also be considered media moguls, as such channels deliver media to a large consumer base.

History:

In the United States, newspaper proprietors first became prominent in the 19th century with the development of mass circulation newspapers.

In the 20th century, proprietorship expanded to include ownership of radio and television networks, as well as film studios, publishing houses, and more recently internet and other forms of multimedia companies.

Reflecting this, the term "press baron" was replaced by "media baron", and the term "media mogul" (or "Hollywood mogul" when applied to people specifically working in the motion picture industry, having actually spawned a similarly named computer game) was popularized in colloquial English.

In modern relevance, social media sites need to be taken into account such as Facebook in relation to Mark Zuckerberg who is an extremely important media proprietor. Media and technology play a significant role in mass media production.

Click on any of the following blue hperlinks for more about the following List of Notable Media Proprietors:









Media Bias including Media Bias in the United States
YouTube Video about Media Bias in the United States
Pictured below: Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election by Berkman Klein Center (Harvard University)

Media bias is the bias or perceived bias of journalists and news producers within the mass media in the selection of events and stories that are reported and how they are covered. The term "media bias" implies a pervasive or widespread bias contravening the standards of journalism, rather than the perspective of an individual journalist or article.

The direction and degree of media bias in various countries is widely disputed.

Practical limitations to media neutrality include the inability of journalists to report all available stories and facts, and the requirement that selected facts be linked into a coherent narrative.

Government influence, including overt and covert censorship, biases the media in some countries, for example China, North Korea and Myanmar. Market forces that result in a biased presentation include the ownership of the news source, concentration of media ownership, the selection of staff, the preferences of an intended audience, and pressure from advertisers.

There are a number of national and international watchdog groups that report on bias in the media.

Types of Media Bias Follow:

The most commonly discussed forms of bias occur when the (allegedly partisan) media support or attack a particular political party, candidate, or ideology.

D'Alessio and Allen list three forms of media bias as the most widely studied:
  • Coverage bias (also known as visibility bias), when actors or issues are more or less visible in the news.
  • Gatekeeping bias (also known as selectivity or selection bias), when stories are selected or deselected, sometimes on ideological grounds (see spike). It is sometimes also referred to as agenda bias, when the focus is on political actors and whether they are covered based on their preferred policy issues.
  • Statement bias (also known as tonality bias or presentation bias), when media coverage is slanted towards or against particular actors or issues.

Other common forms of political and non-political media bias include:
  • Advertising bias, when stories are selected or slanted to please advertisers.
  • Concision bias, a tendency to report views that can be summarized succinctly, crowding out more unconventional views that take time to explain.
  • Corporate bias, when stories are selected or slanted to please corporate owners of media.
  • Mainstream bias, a tendency to report what everyone else is reporting, and to avoid stories that will offend anyone.
  • Sensationalism, bias in favor of the exceptional over the ordinary, giving the impression that rare events, such as airplane crashes, are more common than common events, such as automobile crashes.
  • Structural bias, when an actor or issue receives more or less favorable coverage as a result of newsworthiness and media routines, not as the result of ideological decisions (e.g., incumbency bonus).
  • False balance, when an issue is presented as even sided, despite disproportionate amounts of evidence.

Other forms of bias include reporting that favors or attacks a particular race, religion, gender, age, sexual orientation, ethnic group, or even person.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Media Bias: ___________________________________________________________________________

Media Bias in the United States:
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Media bias in the United States occurs when the US media systematically skews reporting in a way that crosses standards of professional journalism. Claims of media bias in the United States include claims of conservative bias, corporate bias, liberal bias, and mainstream bias.

A variety of watchdog groups combat this by fact-checking both biased reporting and unfounded claims of bias. A variety of scholarly disciplines study media bias.  Many news outlets make no pretense of being unbiased, and give their readers or listeners the news they want, leading to what has been called post truth politics.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Media Bias in the United States:







Cable Providers  (including a List) and Satellite Providers in the United States,  as regulated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
YouTube Video: The FCC votes to end Net Neutrality by CBS News
Pictured: List of how many homes each cable network is in as of February 2015

Click here for a List of Broadband Providers in the United States

Cable television first became available in the United States in 1948, with subscription services following in 1949. Data by SNL Kagan shows that as of 2006 about 58.4% of all American homes subscribe to basic cable television services. Most cable viewers in the U.S. reside in the suburbs and tend to be middle class; cable television is less common in low income, urban, and rural areas.

According to reports released by the Federal Communications Commission (see below), traditional cable television subscriptions in the US peaked around the year 2000, at 68.5 million total subscriptions. Since then, cable subscriptions have been in slow decline, dropping to 54.4 million subscribers by December 2013. Some telephone service providers have started offering television, reaching to 11.3 million video subscribers as of December 2013.

Click here for more about Cable Television ___________________________________________________________________________

Satellite television in the United States

Currently, there are two primary satellite television providers of subscription based service available to United States consumers: DirecTV and Dish Network, which have 21 and 14 million subscribers respectively.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Satellite Television in the United States: ___________________________________________________________________________

​The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States government created by statute (47 U.S.C. § 151 and 47 U.S.C. § 154) to regulate interstate communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable.

The FCC works towards six goals in the areas of broadband, competition, the spectrum, the media, public safety and homeland security, and modernizing itself.

The FCC was formed by the Communications Act of 1934 to replace the radio regulation functions of the Federal Radio Commission. The FCC took over wire communication regulation from the Interstate Commerce Commission. The FCC's mandated jurisdiction covers the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the Territories of the United States.

The FCC also provides varied degrees of cooperation, oversight, and leadership for similar communications bodies in other countries of North America. The FCC is funded entirely by regulatory fees. It has an estimated fiscal-2016 budget of US $388 million. It has 1,688 federal employees, made up of 50% males and 50% females as of December, 2017.
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​Mission and strategy:

The FCC's mission, specified in Section One of the Communications Act of 1934 and amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (amendment to 47 U.S.C. §151) is to "make available so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, rapid, efficient, Nationwide, and world-wide wire and radio communication services with adequate facilities at reasonable charges."

The Act furthermore provides that the FCC was created "for the purpose of the national defense" and "for the purpose of promoting safety of life and property through the use of wire and radio communications."

Consistent with the objectives of the Act as well as the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA), the FCC has identified six goals in its 2006–2011 Strategic Plan. These are:

Broadband:

"All Americans should have affordable access to robust and reliable broadband products and services. Regulatory policies must promote technological neutrality, competition, investment, and innovation to ensure that broadband service providers have sufficient incentives to develop and offer such products and services."

Competition:

"Competition in the provision of communication services, both domestically and overseas, supports the Nation's economy. The competitive framework for communications services should foster innovation and offer consumers reliable, meaningful choice in affordable services."

Spectrum:

"Efficient and effective use of non-federal spectrum domestically and internationally promotes the growth and rapid development of innovative and efficient communication technologies and services."

Media:

"The Nation's media regulations must promote competition and diversity and facilitate the transition to digital modes of delivery."

Public Safety and Homeland Security:

"Communications during emergencies and crisis must be available for public safety, health, defense, and emergency personnel, as well as all consumers in need. The Nation's critical communications infrastructure must be reliable, interoperable, redundant, and rapidly restorable."

Modernize the FCC:

​"The Commission shall strive to be highly productive, adaptive, and innovative organization that maximizes the benefits to stakeholders, staff, and management from effective systems, processes, resources, and organizational culture." (2008).

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Federal Communications Commission (FCC):







Mainstream Media
YouTube Video: Jake Tapper takes on Giuliani's 'alternate reality'
Mainstream media (MSM) is a term and abbreviation used to refer collectively to the various large mass news media that influence a large number of people, and both reflect and shape prevailing currents of thought. The term is used to contrast with alternative media which may contain content with more dissenting thought at variance with the prevailing views of mainstream sources.

The term is often used for large news conglomerates, including newspapers and broadcast media, that underwent successive mergers in many countries. The concentration of media ownership has raised concerns of a homogenization of viewpoints presented to news consumers.

Consequently, the term mainstream mediahas been widely used in conversation and the blogosphere, sometimes in oppositional, pejorative, or dismissive senses, in discussion of the mass media and media bias.

According to philosopher Noam Chomsky, media organizations with an elite audience such as CBS News and The New York Times are successful corporations with the assets necessary to set the tone for other smaller news organizations which lack comparable resources by creating conversations that cascade down to smaller news organizations using the Associated Press and other means of aggregation. An elite mainstream sets the agenda and smaller organizations parrot it.

Alternative Terms:

The advent of the Internet allowed the expression of a more diverse or alternative viewpoint which may contrast to mainstream media, to the point where the term mainstream media is seen in pejorative terms.

Lamestream media is a common pejorative alternative. Sarah Palin referred to "lamestream media," notably around 2009 during her participation in the Tea Party Express, in the context of what she perceived as media misrepresentation of the Tea Party movement.

Another term, originating on anonymous message boards, for the Mainstream Media is the acronym "MSM". The term is widely used by many on 4chan and Reddit, often as shorthand for the phrase "Mainstream Media".

United States:
Main article: Media cross-ownership in the United States

In the United States, movie production is known to have been dominated by major studios since the early 20th Century; before that, there was a period in which Edison's Trust monopolized the industry.

In the early twenty-first century the music and television industries was subject to media consolidation, with Sony Music Entertainment's parent company merging their music division with Bertelsmann AG's BMG to form Sony BMG and Tribune's The WB and CBS Corp.'s UPN merging to form The CW.

In the case of Sony BMG there existed a "Big Five", later "Big Four", of major record companies, while The CW's creation was an attempt to consolidate ratings and stand up to the "Big Four" of American network (terrestrial) television (although the CW was actually partially owned by one of the Big Four in CBS).

In television, the vast majority of broadcast and basic cable networks, over a hundred in all, are controlled by eight corporations: 
  1. News Corporation (the Fox family of channels), 
  2. The Walt Disney Company (which includes the ABC, ESPN and Disney brands), 
  3. National Amusements (which includes CBS Corporation and Viacom), 
  4. Comcast (which includes the NBC brands), 
  5. Time Warner, 
  6. Discovery Communications, 
  7. E. W. Scripps Company, 
  8. Cablevision, or some combination thereof.

​There may also be some large-scale owners in an industry that are not the causes of monopoly or oligopoly. Clear Channel Communications, especially since the Telecommunications Act of 1996, acquired many radio stations across the United States, and came to own more than 1,200 stations.

However, the radio broadcasting industry in the United States and elsewhere can be regarded as oligopolistic regardless of the existence of such a player. Because radio stations are local in reach, each licensed a specific part of spectrum by the FCC in a specific local area, any local market is served by a limited number of stations.

In most countries, this system of licensing makes many markets local oligopolies. The similar market structure exists for television broadcasting, cable systems and newspaper industries, all of which are characterized by the existence of large-scale owners. Concentration of ownership is often found in these industries.

In the United States, data on ownership and market share of media companies is not held in the public domain.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Mainstream Media:




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Outline of Journalism including an Index of Journalism Articles
YouTube Video: How The 21st Century Changed Journalism
Click here for an Index of Journalism Articles

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to journalism:
Journalism – investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Outline of Journalism:







Journalism, including Journalism Ethics and Standards
YouTube Video: Ethics 101: What is Journalism And Who Is A Journalist?​
YouTube Video: The 5 Core Values of Journalism

Journalism refers to the production and distribution of reports on recent events. The word journalism applies to the occupation, using methods of gathering information and utilizing literary techniques. Various forms of journalistic mediums include: print, television, radio, Internet and in the past: newsreels.

Concepts of the appropriate role for journalism vary between countries. In some nations, the news media is controlled by government intervention, and is not a fully independent body.

​In others, the news media is independent of the government but instead operates as private industry motivated by profit.

In addition to the varying nature of how media organizations are run and funded, countries may have differing implementations of laws handling the freedom of speech and libel cases.

The advent of the Internet and smartphones has brought significant changes to the media landscape in recent years. This has created a shift in the consumption of print media channels, as people increasingly consume news through e-readers, smartphones, and other personal electronic devices, as opposed to the more traditional formats of newspapers, magazines, or television news channels.

News organizations are challenged to fully monetize their digital wing, as well as improvise on the context in which they publish in print. Newspapers have seen print revenues sink at a faster pace than the rate of growth for digital revenues.

Production:

​Journalistic conventions vary by country. In the United States, journalism is produced by media organizations or by individuals. Bloggers are often, but not always, journalists.

The Federal Trade Commission requires that bloggers who write about products received as promotional gifts to disclose that they received the products for free. This is intended to eliminate conflicts of interest and protect consumers.

In the US, a credible news organization is an incorporated entity; has an editorial board; and exhibits separate editorial and advertising departments. Credible news organizations, or their employees, often belong to and abide by the ethics of professional organizations such as the American Society of News Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters, or the Online News Association.

Many news organizations also have their own codes of ethics that guide journalists' professional publications. For instance, The New York Times code of standards and ethics is considered particularly rigorous.
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When writing stories, objectivity and bias are issues of concern to journalists. Some stories are intended to represent the author's own opinion; others are more neutral or feature balanced points-of-view. In a print newspaper, information is organized into sections and the distinction between opinionated and neutral stories is often clear. Online, many of these distinctions break down.

Readers should pay careful attention to headings and other design elements to ensure that they understand the journalist's intent. Opinion pieces are generally written by regular columnists or appear in a section titled "Op-ed", while feature stories, breaking news, and hard news stories are usually not opinionated.

According to Robert McChesney, healthy journalism in a democratic country must provide an opinion of people in power and who wish to be in power, must include a range of opinions and must regard the informational needs of all people.

Many debates center on whether journalists are "supposed" to be "objective" and "neutral"; arguments include the fact that journalists produce news out of and as part of a particular social context, and that they are guided by professional codes of ethics and do their best to represent all legitimate points of view.

Forms of Journalism​
Main article: Journalism genres

There are several forms of journalism with diverse audiences. Thus, journalism is said to serve the role of a "fourth estate", acting as a watchdog on the workings of the government.

A single publication (such as a newspaper) contains many forms of journalism, each of which may be presented in different formats. Each section of a newspaper, magazine, or website may cater to a different audience.

Some forms include:
​Social Media:

The rise of social media has drastically changed the nature of journalistic reporting, giving rise to so-called citizen journalists. In a 2014 study of journalists in the United States, 40% of participants claimed they rely on social media as a source, with over 20% depending on microblogs to collect facts. 

From this, the conclusion can be drawn that breaking news nowadays often stems from user-generated content, including videos and pictures posted online in social media. However, though 69.2% of the surveyed journalists agreed that social media allowed them to connect to their audience, only 30% thought it had a positive influence on news credibility.

Consequently, this has resulted in arguments to reconsider journalism as a process distributed among many authors, including the socially mediating public, rather than as individual products and articles written by dedicated journalists.

Because of these changes, the credibility ratings of news outlets has reached an all-time low. A 2014 study revealed that only 22% of Americans reported a "great deal" or "quite a lot of confidence" in either television news or newspapers.

​Fake News:

"Fake news" is deliberately untruthful information which can often spread quickly on social media or by means of fake news websites. It is often published to intentionally mislead readers to ultimately benefit a cause, organization or an individual. A glaring example was the proliferation of fake news in social media during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and lies have been circulated under the guise of news reports to benefit specific candidates. One example is a fabricated report of Hillary Clinton's email which was published by a non-existent newspaper called The Denver Guardian.

Many critics blamed Facebook for the spread of these materials. Its news feed algorithm in particular was identified by Vox as the platform where the social media giant exercise billions of editorial decisions every day. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, has acknowledged the company's role in this problem: in a testimony before a combined Senate Judiciary and Commerce committee hearing on April 20, 2018, he said:
  • It's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy.

Readers can often evaluate credibility of news by examining the credibility of the underlying news organization.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Journalism: ___________________________________________________________________________


Journalism ethics and standards:

Journalism ethics and standards comprise principles of ethics and of good practice as applicable to the specific challenges faced by journalists. This subset of media ethics is widely known to journalists as their professional "code of ethics" or the "canons of journalism". The basic codes and canons commonly appear in statements drafted by both professional journalism associations and individual print, broadcast, and online news organizations.

While various existing codes have some differences, most share common elements including the principles of truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness, and public accountability, as these apply to the acquisition of newsworthy information and its subsequent dissemination to the public.

Like many broader ethical systems, journalism ethics include the principle of "limitation of harm". This often involves the withholding of certain details from reports such as the names of minor children, crime victims' names or information not materially related to particular news reports release of which might, for example, harm someone's reputation.

Some journalistic codes of ethics, notably the European ones, also include a concern with discriminatory references in news based on race, religion, sexual orientation, and physical or mental disabilities. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe approved in 1993 Resolution 1003 on the Ethics of Journalism, which recommends that journalists respect the presumption of innocence, in particular in cases that are still sub judice.

Evolution and Purpose of Codes of Journalism:

The principles of journalistic codes of ethics are designed as guides through numerous difficulties, such as conflicts of interest, to assist journalists in dealing with ethical dilemmas.

The codes and canons provide journalists with a framework for self-monitoring and self-correction. Journalism is guided by five important values:
  1. The first is honesty: a journalist should not make up news or share news that give off wrong impressions.
  2. The second is independence: a journalist should avoid topics they have an interest in.
  3. The third is fairness: a journalist should not tell the truth if it is with bad intentions.
  4. The fourth is productiveness: a journalist should work hard to try to gather all the facts.
  5. The last value is pride: a journalist needs to be able to accept all credit for their work, bad or good.

Codes of Practice:

While journalists in the United States and European countries have led the formulation and adoption of these standards, such codes can be found in news reporting organizations in most countries with freedom of the press.

The written codes and practical standards vary somewhat from country to country and organization to organization, but there is substantial overlap between mainstream publications and societies.

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) launched a global Ethical Journalism Initiative in 2008 aimed at strengthening awareness of these issues within professional bodies.

In 2013 the Ethical Journalism Network was founded by former IFJ General Secretary Aidan White. This coalition of international and regional media associations and journalism support groups campaigns for ethics, good governance and self-regulation across all platforms of media.

One of the leading voices in the U.S. on the subject of journalistic standards and ethics is the Society of Professional Journalists. The Preamble to its Code of Ethics states:
  • ...public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues. Conscientious journalists from all media and specialties strive to serve the public with thoroughness and honesty. Professional integrity is the cornerstone of a journalist's credibility.

The Radio Television Digital News Association, an organization exclusively centered on electronic journalism, maintains a code of ethics centering on public trust, truthfulness, fairness, integrity, independence, and accountability.

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Investigative Journalism
YouTube Video: Outstanding Investigative Journalism - Long Form
YouTube Video: Astroturf and manipulation of media messages | Sharyl Attkisson | TEDxUniversityofNevada
Pictured below: Investigative Journalists and Digital Security (PEW Research Center)

Investigative journalism is a form of journalism in which reporters deeply investigate a single topic of interest, such as serious crimes, political corruption, or corporate wrongdoing.

An investigative journalist may spend months or years researching and preparing a report. Investigative journalism is a primary source of information. Most investigative journalism is conducted by newspapers, wire services, and freelance journalists. Practitioners sometimes use the terms "watchdog reporting" or "accountability reporting".

An investigative reporter may make use of one or more of these tools, among others, on a single story:
  • Analysis of documents, such as lawsuits and other legal documents, tax records, government reports, regulatory reports, and corporate financial filings
  • Databases of public records
  • Investigation of technical issues, including scrutiny of government and business practices and their effects
  • Research into social and legal issues
  • Subscription research sources such as LexisNexis
  • Numerous interviews with on-the-record sources as well as, in some instances, interviews with anonymous sources (for example whistleblowers)
  • Federal or state Freedom of Information Acts to obtain documents and data from government agencies

Professional definitions:

University of Missouri journalism professor Steve Weinberg defined investigative journalism as: "Reporting, through one's own initiative and work product, matters of importance to readers, viewers, or listeners." 

In many cases, the subjects of the reporting wish the matters under scrutiny to remain undisclosed. There are currently university departments for teaching investigative journalism. Conferences are conducted presenting peer reviewed research into investigative journalism.

British media theorist Hugo de Burgh (2000) states that: "An investigative journalist is a man or woman whose profession is to discover the truth and to identify lapses from it in whatever media may be available. The act of doing this generally is called investigative journalism and is distinct from apparently similar work done by police, lawyers, auditors, and regulatory bodies in that it is not limited as to target, not legally founded and closely connected to publicity."

Terminology:
Main article: Muckraker

American journalism textbooks point out that muckraking standards promoted by McClure's Magazine around 1902, "Have become integral to the character of modern investigative journalism." Furthermore, the successes of the early muckrakers continued to inspire journalists.

Examples:
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  • Julius Chambers of the New-York Tribune had himself committed to the Bloomingdale Asylum in 1872, and his account led to the release of twelve patients who were not mentally ill, a reorganization of the staff and administration, and eventually to a change in the lunacy laws; this later led to the publication of the book A Mad World and Its Inhabitants (1876).
  • Nellie Bly is known for her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days, in emulation of Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg, and an exposé for the New York World in which she faked insanity to study a mental institution from within.
  • Bill Dedman's 1988 investigation, The Color of Money, for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on racial discrimination by mortgage lenders in middle-income neighborhoods, received the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting and was an influential early example of computer-assisted reporting or database journalism.
  • Brian Deer's British press award-winning investigation for The Sunday Times of London into the worldwide MMR vaccine controversy which revealed that research, published by The Lancet, associating the children's vaccine with autism was fraudulent.
  • The Daily Telegraph investigated claims that various British Members of Parliament had been filing dubious and frivolous expenses claims, and had done for many years in secret. The House of Commons Authority initially tried to block the release of the information, but the expenses were leaked to the Telegraph. The newspaper then released pieces of information which dominated the news for weeks and caused considerable anger in the UK.
  • John M. Crewdson of the Chicago Tribune wrote a 1996 article proposing the installment of defibrillators on American airliners. Crewdson argued that based on his research and analysis, "Medical kits and defibrillators would be economically justified if they saved just 3 lives each year." Soon after the article's publication, airlines began installing defibrillators on planes, and the devices began to show up in airports and other public spaces. Ten years after installing defibrillators, American Airlines reported that 80 lives had been saved by the machines.
  • One of the largest teams of investigative journalists is the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) launched in 1997 by the Center for Public Integrity which includes 165 investigative reporters in over 65 countries working collaboratively on crime, corruption, and abuse of power at a global level, under Gerard Ryle as Director. Working with major media outlets globally, they have exposed organised crime, international tobacco companies, private military cartels, asbestos companies, climate change lobbyists, details of Iraq and Afghanistan war contracts, and most recently the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers.

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Broadcast Journalism
YouTube Video: Katie Couric* on how to conduct a good interview
* --  Katie Couric
YouTube Video: Soft Questions? Larry King* Explains His Interview Style
* -- Larry King
Pictured below: Clockwise from Upper Left:
Anderson Cooper, Diane Sawyer; Rachel Maddow; Brian Williams

Broadcast journalism is the field of news and journals which are "broadcast", that is, published by electrical methods instead of the older methods, such as printed newspapers and posters. Broadcast methods include radio (via air, cable, and Internet), television (via air, cable, and Internet) and the World Wide Web. Such media disperse pictures (static and moving), visual text and sounds.

Broadcast articles can be written as "packages", "readers", "voice-overs" (VO) and "sound on tape" (SOT).

A "sack" is an edited set of video clips for a news story and is common on television. It is typically narrated by a reporter. It is a story with audio, video, graphics and video effects.

The news anchor, or presenter, usually reads a "lead-in" (introduction) before the package is aired and may conclude the story with additional information, called a "tag".

A "reader" is an article read without accompanying video or sound. Sometimes an "over the shoulder digital on-screen graphic" is added.

A voice-over, or VO, is a video article narrated by the anchor.

Sound on tape, or SOT, is sound or video usually recorded in the field. It is usually an interview or soundbite.

Radio was the first medium for broadcast journalism. Many of the first radio stations were co-operative community radio ventures not making a profit. Later, radio advertising to pay for programs was pioneered in radio. Later still, television displaced radio and newspapers as the main news sources for most of the public in industrialized countries.

Some of the programming on radio is locally produced and some is broadcast by a radio network, for example, by syndication. The "talent" (professional voices) talk to the audience, including reading the news. People tune in to hear engaging radio personalities, music, and information. In radio news, stories include speech soundbites, the recorded sounds of events themselves, and the anchor or host.

Some radio news might run for just four minutes, but contain 12–15 stories. These new bulletins must balance the desire for a broad overview of current events with the audience's limited capacity to focus on a large number of different stories.

The radio industry has undergone a radical consolidation of ownership, with fewer companies owning the thousands of stations. Large media conglomerates such as Clear Channel Communications own most of the radio stations in the United States. That has resulted in more "niche" formats and the sharing of resources within clusters of stations, de-emphasizing local news and information.

There has been concern over whether this concentration serves the public. The opposition says that the range of political views expressed is greatly narrowed and that local concerns are neglected, including local emergencies, for which communication is critical. Automation has resulted in many stations broadcasting for many hours a day with no one on the station premises.

Television:

Television (TV) news is considered by many to be the most influential medium for journalism. For most of the American public, local news and national TV newscasts are the primary news sources.

Not only the numbers of audience viewers, but the effect on each viewer is considered more persuasive ("The medium is the message").

Television is dominated by attractive visuals (including beauty, action, and shock), with short soundbites and fast "cuts" (changes of camera angle). Television viewing numbers have become fragmented, with the introduction of cable news channels, such as Cable News Network (CNN), Fox News Channel and MSNBC.

Local television:

The industry divides local television in North America into media markets. These television markets are defined by viewing area and are ranked by the number of audience viewers. New broadcast journalists generally start in the smaller markets with fewer viewers and move up to larger television stations and television networks after gaining experience. The larger stations usually have more resources and better pay.

United States stations typically broadcast local news three or four times a day: around 4:30–6 am, 11:30 or noon, 5 or 6 pm, and 10 or 11 at night. Most of the nightly local newscasts are 30 minutes, and include sports television and weather.

News anchors are shown sitting at a desk in a television studio. The news anchors read teleprompters that contain local interest stories and breaking news. Reporters frequently tell their stories outside the formal television studio in the field, in a remote broadcast setting where Electronic news-gathering (ENG) techniques are used with production trucks. Daytime television or morning shows include more "soft" news and feature pieces, while the evening news emphasizes "hard" news.

News jobs:

News anchors (formerly "anchormen") serve as masters-of-ceremonies and are usually shown facing a professional video camera in a television studio while reading unseen teleprompters. The anchors are often in pairs (co-anchors), who sit side by side and often alternate their reading. Meteorologists stand in front of chroma key backgrounds to describe weather forecasting and show maps, charts and pictures. Reporters research and write the stories and sometimes use video editing to prepare the story for air into a "package".

Reporters are usually engaged in electronic field production (EFP) and are accompanied by a videographer at the scenes of the news; the latter holds the camera. the videographer or assistants manage the audio and lighting; they are in charge of setting up live television shots and might edit using a non-linear editing system (NLE). Segment producers choose, research and write stories, as well as deciding the timing and arrangement of the newscast. Associate producer, if any, specialize in other elements of the show such as graphics.

Production jobs:
Main article: Television crew

A newscast director is in charge of television show preparation, including assigning camera and talent (cast) positions on the set, as well as selecting the camera shots and other elements for either recorded or live television video production. The technical director (TD) operates the video switcher, which controls and mixes all the elements of the show. At smaller stations, the Director and Technical Director are the same person.

A graphics operator operates a character generator (CG) that produces the lower third on-screen titles and full-page digital on-screen graphics. The audio technician operates the audio mixing console. The technician is in charge of the microphones, music and audio tape. Often, production assistants operate the teleprompters and professional video cameras and serve as lighting and rigging technicians (grips).

Business Changes:

Broadcast journalism is changing rapidly, causing issues within the business as well. Many people can no longer find jobs in broadcast journalism because much more is online and does not even need to be broadcast by a person. Others are being laid off to invest more money into new technologies. Other changes include innovations allowing TV stations to better alert viewers in emergencies and have higher quality services. 

Online Convergence:

Convergence is the sharing and cross-promoting of content from a variety of media, all of which, in theory, converge and become one medium. In broadcast news, the internet is a key to convergence. Frequently, broadcast journalists also write text stories for the Web, usually accompanied by the graphics and sound of the original story.

​Websites offer the audience an interactive form where they can learn more about a story, can be referred to related articles, can offer comments for publication and can print stories at home. Technological convergence also lets newsrooms collaborate with other media, broadcast outlets sometimes have partnerships with their print counterparts.

Citizen Broadcast Journalism:

Citizen broadcast journalism is a new form of technology that has allowed regular civilians to post stories they see through outlets such as Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter. It has become a new trend that some allegedly fear will take over broadcast journalism as it is known. News companies, like Fox News, are employing citizen journalists, which is a new phenomenon among journalism. 

Fake News:
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The term "fake news" has taken over broadcast journalism throughout the past and current years. Its impact on broadcast journalism played a role in how news about the election was spread.

Fake news defines how viewers see news that may be misleading or false. Many of these false or misleading stories came out during the 2016 election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

See also:







Blogs including a List of Blogs and a Glossary of Blogging
YouTube Video: How to Make a Blog - Step by Step - 2015
YouTube Video by Andrew Sullivan* on quitting blogging: "It was killing me."
* -- Andrew Sullivan
For an alphanumerical List of Blogs, click here.

For a Glossary of Blogging Terms, click here.

A blog (a truncation of the expression weblog) is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries ("posts").

Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. Until 2009, blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic.

In the 2010s, "multi-author blogs" (MABs) have developed, with posts written by large numbers of authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

The emergence and growth of blogs in the late 1990s coincided with the advent of web publishing tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical users who did not have much experience with HTML or computer programming. Previously, a knowledge of such technologies as HTML and File Transfer Protocol had been required to publish content on the Web, and as such, early Web users tended to be hackers and computer enthusiasts.

In the 2010s, majority of blogs are interactive Web 2.0 websites, allowing visitors to leave online comments and even message each other via GUI widgets on the blogs, and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites.

In that sense, blogging can be seen as a form of social networking service. Indeed, bloggers do not only produce content to post on their blogs, but also build social relations with their readers and other bloggers.

However, there are high-readership blogs which do not allow comments.
Many blogs provide commentary on a particular subject or topic, ranging from politics to sports. Others function as more personal online diaries, and others function more as online brand advertising of a particular individual or company. A typical blog combines text, digital images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic.

The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important contribution to the popularity of many blogs. However, blog owners or authors need to moderate and filter online comments to remove hate speech or other offensive content. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (art blogs), photographs (photoblogs), videos (video blogs or "vlogs"), music (MP3 blogs), and audio (podcasts). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts.

In education, blogs can be used as instructional resources. These blogs are referred to as edublogs. On 16 February 2011, there were over 156 million public blogs in existence. On 20 February 2014, there were around 172 million Tumblr and 75.8 million WordPress blogs in existence worldwide.

According to critics and other bloggers, Blogger is the most popular blogging service used today. However, Blogger does not offer public statistics. Technorati has 1.3 million blogs as of February 22, 2014.

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Political Journalism * - Stephen Miller
Pictured below:
  • TOP: American Urban Radio's Washington bureau chief April Ryan asks questions during an exchange with President Trump at a news conference following Tuesday's midterm elections at the White House. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
  • BOTTOM: 12 Top D.C. Political Media Stars' Standout Moments (The Hollywood Reporter)
Political journalism is a broad branch of journalism that includes coverage of all aspects of politics and political science, although the term usually refers specifically to coverage of civil governments and political power.

Political journalism aims to provide voters with the information to formulate their own opinion and participate in community, local or national matters that will affect them. According to Edward Morrissey in an opinion article from theweek.com, political journalism frequently includes opinion journalism, as current political events can be biased in their reporting. The information provided includes facts, its perspective is subjective and leans towards one viewpoint.

Brendan Nyhan and John Sides argue that "Journalists who report on politics are frequently unfamiliar with political science research or question its relevance to their work". Journalists covering politics who are unfamiliar with information that would provide context to their stories can enable the story to take a different spin on what is being reported.

Political journalism is provided through different mediums, in print, broadcast, or online reporting. Digital media use has increased and it provides instant coverage of campaign, politics, event news and an accessible platform for the candidate.

Media outlets known for their political journalism like The New York Times and the Washington Post, have increased their use of this medium as well. Printed, online, and broadcast political humor presented as entertainment has been used to provide updates on aspects of government status, political news, campaign, and election updates.

According to Geoffrey Baym, the information provided may not be considered "fake news" but the lines between entertainment and factual news may seem blurred or biased while providing political updates.

This type of journalism is analyzed, interpreted, and discussed by news media pundits and editors. It can lack objectivity which can prevent the accuracy of the presented information. The reporting of news with a bias view point can also take away the audience's ability to form their own opinion or beliefs of what has been reported. This type of reporting is subjective with a possible social or political purpose.

Subsets of Political Journalism follow:

​Election journalism or electoral journalism is a sub-genre of political journalism which focuses upon and analyzes developments related to an approximate election and political campaigns. This type of journalism provides information to the electorate that can educate and help form opinion that empowers a specific vote.

This subgenre, like data journalism, makes use of numerical data, such as statistics, polls and historic data in regards to a candidate's chance of success for office, or a party's change in size in a legislature. It provides knowledge that may make the presented news hold more relevance. Information added to the reports are of campaign statuses and political events. A politician's strategy can be exaggerated or provided without context or historical perspective.

Trends on each party candidate are reported and at times compared to previous party candidates. The news on the status of the elections, like other political reporting's, are provided in different mediums. The election report coverage has taken full advantage of the digital era in providing instant access to news.

Defense journalism or military journalism is a subgenre which focuses upon the current status of a nation's military, intelligence and other defense-related faculties. Interest in defense journalism tends to increase during times of violent conflict, with military leaders being the primary actors. 

During the course of military journalism, news reporters are sometimes assigned to military units to report news taking place in areas of conflict. The term embedded journalism was used when the media was involved in the reporting of the war in Iraq. Embedded journalism can also be biased because it is one sided.

Information reported has been collected from the area the journalist has been stationed with the possibility to lean towards the agenda of the group they have been assigned to. This sub-genre of political journalism is also applied to media coming from journalists embedded in a particular campaign or candidate. Like military assignments, reports can be influenced by the message the campaign or candidate is trying to bring across.

See also:





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Disinformation including Fake News Pictured below: Infographic How to spot fake news published by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions
Disinformation is false information spread deliberately to deceive. This is a subset of misinformation, which also may be unintentional.The English word disinformation is a loan translation of the Russian dezinformatsiya, derived from the title of a KGB black propaganda department. Joseph Stalin coined the term, giving it a French-sounding name to claim it had a Western origin. Russian use began with a "special disinformation office" in 1923.

Disinformation was defined in Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1952) as "false information with the intention to deceive public opinion". Operation INFEKTION was a Soviet disinformation campaign to influence opinion that the U.S. invented AIDS. The U.S. did not actively counter disinformation until 1980, when a fake document reported that the U.S. supported apartheid.

The word disinformation did not appear in English dictionaries until the late-1980s. English use increased in 1986, after revelations that the Reagan Administration engaged in disinformation against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. By 1990 it was pervasive in U.S. politics; and by 2001 referred generally to lying and propaganda.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Disinformation:​
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Fake news, also known as junk news or pseudo-news, is a type of yellow journalism or propaganda that consists of deliberate disinformation or hoaxes spread via traditional news media (print and broadcast) or online social media.

The false information is often caused by reporters paying sources for stories, an unethical practice called checkbook journalism. Digital news has brought back and increased the usage of fake news, or yellow journalism. The news is then often reverberated as misinformation in social media but occasionally finds its way to the mainstream media as well.

Fake news is written and published usually with the intent to mislead in order to damage an agency, entity, or person, and/or gain financially or politically, often using sensationalist, dishonest, or outright fabricated headlines to increase readership.

Similarly, clickbait stories and headlines earn advertising revenue from this activity.
The relevance of fake news has increased in post-truth politics. For media outlets, the ability to attract viewers to their websites is necessary to generate online advertising revenue. Publishing a story with false content that attracts users benefits advertisers and improves ratings.

Easy access to online advertisement revenue, increased political polarization, and the popularity of social media, primarily the Facebook News Feed, have all been implicated in the spread of fake news, which competes with legitimate news stories. Hostile government actors have also been implicated in generating and propagating fake news, particularly during elections.

Fake news undermines serious media coverage and makes it more difficult for journalists to cover significant news stories. An analysis by BuzzFeed found that the top 20 fake news stories about the 2016 U.S. presidential election received more engagement on Facebook than the top 20 election stories from 19 major media outlets. Anonymously-hosted fake news websites lacking known publishers have also been criticized, because they make it difficult to prosecute sources of fake news for libel.

​The term is also at times used to cast doubt upon legitimate news from an opposing political standpoint, a tactic known as the lying press. During and after his presidential campaign and election, Donald Trump popularized the term "fake news" in this sense when he used it to describe the negative press coverage of himself. 

In part as a result of Trump's use of the term, the term has come under increasing criticism, and in October 2018 the British government decided that it will no longer use the term because it is "a poorly-defined and misleading term that conflates a variety of false information, from genuine error through to foreign interference in democratic processes."

​​Fake news is a neologism often used to refer to fabricated news. This type of news, found in traditional news, social media or fake news websites, has no basis in fact, but is presented as being factually accurate.

Michael Radutzky, a producer of CBS 60 Minutes, said his show considers fake news to be "stories that are probably false, have enormous traction [popular appeal] in the culture, and are consumed by millions of people." These stories are not only found in politics, but also in areas like vaccination, stock values and nutrition. He did not include news that is "invoked by politicians against the media for stories that they don't like or for comments that they don't like" as fake news.

Guy Campanile, also a 60 Minutes producer said, "What we are talking about are stories that are fabricated out of thin air. By most measures, deliberately, and by any definition, that's a lie."

The intent and purpose of fake news is important. In some cases, what appears to be fake news may be news satire, which uses exaggeration and introduces non-factual elements that are intended to amuse or make a point, rather than to deceive. Propaganda can also be fake news. Some researchers have highlighted that "fake news" may be distinguished not just by the falsity of its content, but also the "character of [its] online circulation and reception".

Claire Wardle of First Draft News identifies seven types of fake news:
  1. satire or parody ("no intention to cause harm but has potential to fool")
  2. false connection ("when headlines, visuals or captions don't support the content")
  3. misleading content ("misleading use of information to frame an issue or an individual")
  4. false context ("when genuine content is shared with false contextual information")
  5. impostor content ("when genuine sources are impersonated" with false, made-up sources)
  6. manipulated content ("when genuine information or imagery is manipulated to deceive", as with a "doctored" photo)
  7. fabricated content ("new content is 100% false, designed to deceive and do harm")

In the context of the United States of America and its election processes in the 2010s, fake news generated considerable controversy and argument, with some commentators defining concern over it as moral panic or mass hysteria and others worried about damage done to public trust.

In January 2017, the United Kingdom House of Commons conducted a parliamentary inquiry into the "growing phenomenon of fake news".

Some, most notably United States President Donald Trump, have broadened the meaning of "fake news" to include news that was negative of his presidency.

In November 2017, Claire Wardle (mentioned above) announced she has rejected the phrase "fake news" and "censors it in conversation", finding it "woefully inadequate" to describe the issues. She now speaks of "information pollution" and distinguishes between three types of problems: 'mis-information', 'dis-information', and 'mal-information':
  1. Mis-information: false information disseminated without harmful intent.
  2. Dis-information: created and shared by people with harmful intent.
  3. Mal-information: the sharing of "genuine" information with the intent to cause harm.

Author Terry Pratchett, who had a background as a journalist and press officer, was among the first to be concerned about the spread of fake news on the Internet. In a 1995 interview with Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, he said "Let's say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the second world war and the Holocaust didn’t happen, and it goes out there on the Internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research which has undergone peer review and so on. There’s a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net. It’s all there: there’s no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up".

Gates was optimistic and disagreed, saying that authorities on the Net would index and check facts and reputations in a much more sophisticated way than in print. But it was Pratchett who had "accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimize fake news".

Types of Fake News:

Here are a few examples of fake news and how they are viewed:
  • Clickbait
  • Propaganda
  • Satire/parody
  • Sloppy journalism
  • Misleading headings
  • Biased or slanted news
These are features of fake news and may help to identify and avoid instances of fake news.

Identifying Fake News:
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The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) published a summary in diagram form (pictured at top of this article) to assist people in recognizing fake news. Its main points are:
  1. Consider the source (to understand its mission and purpose)
  2. Read beyond the headline (to understand the whole story)
  3. Check the authors (to see if they are real and credible)
  4. Assess the supporting sources (to ensure they support the claims)
  5. Check the date of publication (to see if the story is relevant and up to date)
  6. Ask if it is a joke (to determine if it is meant to be satire)
  7. Review your own biases (to see if they are affecting your judgement)
  8. Ask experts (to get confirmation from independent people with knowledge).

The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), launched in 2015, supports international collaborative efforts in fact-checking, provides training, and has published a code of principles.

In 2017 it introduced an application and vetting process for journalistic organisations. One of IFCN's verified signatories, the independent, not-for-profit media journal The Conversation, created a short animation explaining its fact checking process, which involves "extra checks and balances, including blind peer review by a second academic expert, additional scrutiny and editorial oversight".

Beginning in the 2017 school year, children in Taiwan study a new curriculum designed to teach critical reading of propaganda and the evaluation of sources. Called "media literacy", the course provides training in journalism in the new information society.

​Detecting fake news online:

Fake news has become increasingly prevalent over the last few years, with over 100 incorrect articles and rumors spread incessantly just with regard to the 2016 United States presidential election. These fake news articles tend to come from satirical news websites or individual websites with an incentive to propagate false information, either as clickbait or to serve a purpose. Since they typically hope to intentionally promote incorrect information, such articles are quite difficult to detect. 

When identifying a source of information, one must look at many attributes, including but not limited to the content of the email and social media engagements. specifically, the language is typically more inflammatory in fake news than real articles, in part because the purpose is to confuse and generate clicks.

Furthermore, modeling techniques such as n-gram encodings and bag of words have served as other linguistic techniques to determine the legitimacy of a news source. On top of that, researchers have determined that visual-based cues also play a factor in categorizing an article, specifically some features can be designed to assess if a picture was legitimate, and provides more clarity on the news.

There is also many social context features that can play a role, as well as the model of spreading the news. Websites such as “Snopes” try to detect this information manually, while certain universities are trying to build mathematical models to do this themselves.

Fake News in the United States:
​
Fake news became a global subject and was widely introduced to billions as a prominent issue, especially due to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Numerous political commentators and journalists wrote and stated in media that 2016 was the year of fake news and as a result nothing will ever be the same in politics and cyber security.

Due to the increase in fake news in 2016, it became much harder to distinguish what was real and what was fake in 2017. Donald Trump tweeted or retweeted posts about "fake news" or "fake media" 176 times as of Dec. 20, 2017, according to an online archive of all of Trump's tweets. Governmental bodies in the U.S. and Europe started looking at contingencies and regulations to combat fake news specially when as part of a coordinated intelligence campaign by hostile foreign governments.

Online tech giants Facebook and Google started putting in place means to combat fake news in 2016 as a result of the phenomenon becoming globally known. Google Trends shows that the term "fake news" gained traction in online searches in October 2016.

Professor Philip N. Howard of the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford studied web traffic in the United States prior to the election. He found that about one half of all news on Twitter directed at Michigan was junk or fake, and the other half came from actual professional news sources.

According to BuzzFeed, during the last three months of the presidential campaign, of the top twenty fake election-related articles on Facebook, seventeen were anti-Clinton or pro-Trump. Facebook users interacted with them more often than with stories from genuine news outlets.

Debate over the impact of fake news in the election, and whether or not it significantly impacted the election of the Republican candidate Donald Trump, whom the most shared fake stories favored, led researchers from Stanford to study the impact of fake news shared on social media, where 62% of U.S. adults get their news from.

They assessed that 8% of readers of fake news recalled and believed in the content they were reading, though the same share of readers also recalled and believed in "placebos" — stories they did not actually read, but that were produced by the authors of the study. In comparison, over 50% of the participants recalled reading and believed in true news stories.

The authors do not assess the final impact of these numbers on the election, but seek to "offer theoretical and empirical background" for the debate.

​In the United States in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, fake news was particularly prevalent and spread rapidly over social media "bots", according to researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute.
​
In a speech shortly after the election, former Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton warned of the "real-world consequences" of fake news. Shortly thereafter, in the early weeks of his presidency, U.S. President Donald Trump frequently used the term "fake news" to refer to traditional news media, singling out CNN. 

Linguist George Lakoff says this creates confusion about the phrase's meaning. According to CBS 60 Minutes, President Trump may use the term fake news to describe any news, however legitimate or responsible, with which he may disagree.

After Republican Colorado State Senator Ray Scott used the term as a reference to a column in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, the newspaper's publisher threatened a defamation lawsuit.

In December 2016, an armed North Carolina man, Edgar Maddison Welch, traveled to Washington, D.C., and opened fire at the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria, driven by a fake online news story known as the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which accused the pizzeria of hosting a pedophile ring run by Democratic Party leaders. These stories tend to go viral quickly.

Social media systems, such as Facebook, play a large role in the broadcasting of fake news. These systems show users content that reflects their interests and history, leading to fake and misleading news. Following a plea agreement with prosecutors, Welch pleaded guilty to the federal charge of interstate transport of firearms and a District of Columbia charge of assault with a dangerous weapon. Welch was sentenced to four years in prison on June 22, 2017 and agreed to pay $5,744.33 for damages to the restaurant.

A situation study by The New York Times shows how a tweet by a person with no more than 40 followers went viral and was shared 16,000 times on Twitter. The tweet concluded that protesters were paid to be bussed to Trump demonstrations and protest. A Twitter user then posted a photograph of two buses outside a building, claiming that those were the Anti-Trump protesters.

The tweet immediately went viral on both Twitter and Facebook. Fake news can easily spread due to the speed and accessibility of modern communications technology.

​A CNN investigation examined exactly how fake news can start to trend. There are "bots" used by fake news publishers that make their articles appear more popular than they are. This makes it more likely for people to discover them.

"Bots are fake social media accounts that are programmed to automatically 'like' or retweet a particular message."

Fraudulent stories during the 2016 U.S. presidential election included a viral post popularized on Facebook that Pope Francis had endorsed Trump, and another that actor Denzel Washington "backs Trump in the most epic way possible". Trump's son and campaign surrogate Eric Trump, top national security adviser Michael Flynn, and then-campaign managers Kellyanne Conway and Corey Lewandowski shared fake news stories during the campaign.

​Starting in July 2017, President Trump's 2020 presidential campaign launched Real News Update, an online news program posted on Facebook. The series reports on Trump's accomplishments as president of the United States and claims to highlight "real news" as opposed to alleged "fake news". Lara Trump introduced one video by saying "If you are tired of all the fake news out there...we are going to bring you nothing but the facts" and "I bet you haven't heard about all the accomplishments the president had this week, because there's so much fake news out there". The show has been labelled as "propaganda".

In January 2018, it was reported that a Gallup-Knight Foundation survey found that 17% of Democrats and 42% of Republicans "consider accurate news stories that cast a politician or political group in a negative light to always be 'fake news.'" A June 2018 poll by Axios and Survey Monkey found that 72% of Americans believe "traditional news outlets knowingly report false or misleading stories at least sometimes," with 92% of Republican and Republican-leaning independents and 53% of Democrats believing this.

A series of fabricated stories in Europe’s largest weekly magazine, Der Spiegel, prompted U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell to call for an independent investigation. Grenell wrote that "These fake news stories largely focus on U.S. policies and certain segments of the American people."

See also:






​
Media Franchises, including List of Multimedia Franchises  and List of Highest-grossing Media Franchises Pictured below are Examples of Media Franchises:
TOP ROW (L-R) Aladdin Multimedia Franchise; Mickey Mouse Universe Franchise
BOTTOM ROW: Pokémon Media Franchise
A media franchise, also known as multimedia franchise, is a collection of related media in which several derivative works have been produced from an original creative work of fiction, such as a film, a work of literature, a television program or a video game.

The intellectual property from the work can be licensed to other parties or partners for further derivative works and commercial exploitation across a range of media and by a variety of industries for merchandising purposes.

Transmedia Franchise:
​See also: Media mix

A media franchise often consists of cross-marketing across more than one medium. For the owners, the goal of increasing profit through diversity can extend the commercial profitability of the franchise and create strong feelings of identity and ownership in its consumers (fandom). 

Aarseth describes the financial logic of cost-recovery for expensive productions by identifying that a single medium launch is a lost opportunity, the timeliness of the production and release is more important than its integrity, the releases should raise brand awareness and the cross-ability of the work is critical for its success.

American Idol was a transmedia franchise from its beginnings, with the first season winner Kelly Clarkson signing with RCA Records and having the release of A Moment Like This becoming a #1 hit on Billboard Hot 100.The success resulted in a nationwide concert tour, an American Idol book that made the bestseller list and the film From Justin to Kelly.

A transmedia franchise however is often referred to by the simpler term "media franchise." The term media franchise is often used to describe the popular adaptation of a work into films, like the popular Twilight book series that was adapted into the five films of The Twilight Saga.

Other neologisms exist to describe various franchise types including metaseries, which can be used to describe works such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.

Multimedia franchises usually develop through a character or fictional world becoming popular in one medium, and then expanding to others through licensing agreements, with respect to intellectual property in the franchise's characters and settings.

As one author explains, "[f]or the studios, a home-run is a film from which a multimedia 'franchise' can be generated; the colossally expensive creation of cross-media conglomerates predicated on synergistic rewards provides an obvious imperative to develop such products." The trend later developed wherein franchises would be launched in multiple forms of media simultaneously:

In one of the most celebrated ventures in media convergence, Larry and Andy Wachowski, creators of The Matrix trilogy, produced the game Enter the Matrix (2003) simultaneously with the last two films of the trilogy, shooting scenes for the game on the movie's sets with the movie's actors, and releasing the game on the same day as The Matrix Reloaded.

Likewise, on September 21, 2004, Lucasfilm jointly released a new DVD box set of the original Star Wars trilogy with Star Wars: Battlefront, a combat game in which players can reenact battles from all six Star Wars films. In 2005,

Peter Jackson likewise produced his blockbuster film King Kong (2005) in tandem with a successful King Kong game designed by Michel Ancel and published by Ubisoft. In the last several years, numerous licensed videogame adaptations of major summer and holiday blockbusters were released a few days before or a few days after their respective films, including:
These multimedia franchises have made it more difficult to distinguish the production of films and videogames as separate enterprises
— Harry Brown, Videogames and Education.

Development to Other Forms:

​Fiction:

Long-running film franchises were common in the early studio era, when Hollywood studios had actors and directors under long-term contract. Examples include Andy Hardy, Ma and Pa Kettle, Bulldog Drummond, Superman, Tarzan, and Batman.

The longest-running modern film franchises include: 
In such cases, even lead actors are often replaced as they age, lose interest, or their characters are killed.

Media franchises tend to cross over from their original media to other forms. Literary franchises are often transported to film, such as Nancy Drew, Miss Marple, and other popular detectives, as well as popular comic book superheroes.

Television and film franchises are often expanded upon in novels, particularly those in the fantasy and science fiction genres, such as The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Doctor Who and Star Wars.

Similarly, fantasy, science fiction films and television shows are frequently adapted into animated television series, video games, or both.

A media franchise does not have to include the same characters or theme, as the brand identity can be the franchise, like Square Enix's Final Fantasy or the National Lampoon series, and can suffer from critical failures even if the media fictional material is unrelated.

Non-fiction:

Non-fiction literary franchises include the ...For Dummies and The Complete Idiot's Guide to... reference books.

An enduring and comprehensive example of a media franchise is Playboy Enterprises, which began expanding well beyond its successful magazine, Playboy, within a few years after its first publication, into such enterprises as a modeling agency, several television shows (Playboy's Penthouse, in 1959), and even its own television channel.

Twenty-five years later, Playboy released the following:
  • private clubs and restaurants,
  • movie theaters, 
  • a radio show, 
  • direct to video films,
  • music and book publishing (including original works in addition to its anthologies of cartoons,
  • photographs,
  • recipes,
  • advice,
  • articles or fiction that had originally appeared in the magazine),
  • footwear, clothing of every kind, jewelry, housewares (lamps, clocks, bedding, glassware),
  • guitars
  • cards and gambling,
  • playing cards,
  • pinball machines,
  • pet accessories,
  • billiard balls,
  • bedroom appurtenances,
  • enhancements,
  • plus countless other items of merchandise.
See also: ___________________________________________________________________________

A multimedia franchise (or a transmedia franchise) is a media franchise for which installments exist in multiple forms of media, such as: 
Multimedia franchises usually develop due to the popularization of an original creative work, and then its expansion to other media through licensing agreements, with respect to intellectual property in the franchise's characters and settings, although the trend later developed wherein franchises would be launched in multiple forms of media simultaneously.

In order to qualify for this list, a franchise must have works in at least three forms of media, and must have two or more separate works in at least two of those forms of media (a television series or comic book series is considered a single work for purposes of this list; multiple spin-off series or reboots of a previously ended series are considered multiple works).

For example, a television series that spawned one film and one novelization would not qualify; a television series that had a spin-off series, or was remade as a new series, and which spawned two films and one novelization does qualify.

This list does not include public domain works from which adaptations have been made in multiple media, but which do not involve licensing or other means by which an author or owner controls the franchise. A franchise may be included if it obtained multimedia franchise status prior to works within the collection entering the public domain.

Note: In the following table, the initial media through which the franchise characters or settings became known is shown in boldface. Only works of fiction are only considered part of the series; a book or a documentary film about the franchise is not itself an installment in the franchise.

Click here for List of Multimedia Franchises.

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This is a list of the highest-grossing media franchises. This includes media franchises that started as a book, film, video game, comic book, animation, cartoon or television series and have expanded to other forms of media.

This list covers every aspect of a particular franchise, such as box office, sales from merchandise, home entertainment, and revenue from video games, among other things, if such information is available.

​The list includes the total estimated revenue figure and the revenue breakdown. Estimates are based on combined revenue from different media and merchandise, based on publicly available data.

Click here for a List of highest-grossing media franchises.

See also:







Fox Corporation (was 21st Century Fox, Now Owned by Disney) Pictured below: ​In an official announcement, Walt Disney and 21st Century Fox shareholders have agreed to a $71.3 billion deal, as Disney will acquire 20th Century Fox film and TV studios, Fox's entertainment cable networks, and its international assets.
Fox Corporation is an American mass media company operated and owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch and headquartered at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in New York City.

The company was formed in 2019 as a result of the acquisition of 21st Century Fox by The Walt Disney Company (see next topic); the assets that were not acquired by Disney were spun off from 21st Century Fox as the new Fox Corp., and its stock began trading on January 1, 2019. The company is incorporated in Delaware.

It is owned by the Murdoch family via a family trust with 39.6% ownership share; Rupert Murdoch is chairman, while his son Lachlan Murdoch is executive chairman and CEO.

Fox Corp. deals primarily in the television broadcast, news, and sports broadcasting industries. They include the following:
Its sister company under Murdoch's control, the present-day News Corp, holds his print interests and other media assets.

Click here for more  about Fox Corporation.
___________________________________________________________________________

Acquisition of 21st Century Fox by Disney

The acquisition of 21st Century Fox by Disney was held from December 14, 2017 to March 20, 2019. Among other key assets, the acquisition of 21st Century Fox by Disney included:
​Immediately preceding the acquisition, 21st Century Fox spun off the following:
Click here for more about the Acquisition of 21st Century Fox:
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21st Century Fox:

Twenty-First Century Fox, Inc., doing business as 21st Century Fox (21CF), was an American multinational mass media corporation that was based in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. It was one of the two companies formed from the 2013 spin-off of the publishing assets of News Corporation, as founded by Rupert Murdoch in 1980.

21st Century Fox was the legal successor to News Corporation dealing primarily in the film and television industries. It was the United States' fourth-largest media conglomerate until its acquisition by The Walt Disney Company in 2019. (see above)

The other company, the present-day News Corporation (above), holds Murdoch's print interests and other media assets in Australia (both owned by him and his family via a family trust with 39% interest in each).

Murdoch was co-executive chairman, while his sons Lachlan Murdoch and James Murdoch were co-executive chairman and CEO, respectively.

21st Century Fox's assets included the Fox Entertainment Group—owners of the 20th Century Fox film studio (the company's partial namesake), the Fox television network, and a majority stake in National Geographic Partners—the commercial media arm of the National Geographic Society, among other assets. It also had significant foreign operations, including the prominent Indian television channel operator Star India. The company ranked No. 109 in the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.

On July 27, 2018, 21st Century Fox shareholders agreed to sell the majority of its assets to Disney for $71.3 billion. The sale covered the majority of 21CF's entertainment assets, including 20th Century Fox, FX Networks, and National Geographic Partners among others.

Following a bidding war with Fox, Sky plc (a British media group which Fox held a stake in) was acquired separately by Comcast, while Fox's FSN regional sports networks were sold to Sinclair Broadcast Group to comply with antitrust rulings. 

The remainder, consisting primarily of the Fox and MyNetworkTV networks, and Fox's national Broadcasting, Television Stations, news and sports operations, were spun out into a new company, Fox Corporation, which began trading on March 19, 2019. Disney's acquisition of 21CF was closed on March 20 after which the remaining 21CF's assets were scattered across the divisions of Disney.

Click here for more about (the former) 21st Century Fox.







​
Magazines including a List of U.S. Magazines by Circulation Pictured below: The 30 Hottest Magazine Launches of the Past 30 Years
A magazine is a periodical publication, generally published on a regular schedule (often weekly or monthly), containing a variety of content. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by prepaid subscriptions, or by a combination of the three.

In the technical sense a journal has continuous pagination throughout a volume.

Thus Business Week, which starts each issue anew with page one, is a magazine, but the Journal of Business Communication, which continues the same sequence of pagination throughout the coterminous year, is a journal.

Some professional or trade publications are also peer-reviewed, for example the Journal of Accountancy. Non-peer-reviewed academic or professional publications are generally professional magazines. That a publication calls itself a journal does not make it a journal in the technical sense; The Wall Street Journal is actually a newspaper.

The word "magazine" derives from Middle French magasin meaning "warehouse, depot, store", from Italian magazzino, from Arabic makhazin, the plural of makhzan meaning "storehouse". In its original sense, the word "magazine" referred to a storage space or device. In the case of written publication, it refers to a collection of written articles. This explains why magazine publications share the word with gunpowder magazines, artillery magazines, firearm magazines, and in French and Russian (adopted from French as магазин), retailers such as department stores.

Distribution:
​
Print magazines can be distributed through the mail, through sales by newsstands, bookstores, or other vendors, or through free distribution at selected pick-up locations. 

Electronic distribution methods can include social media, email, news aggregators, and visibility of a publication's website and search engine results. The traditional subscription business models for distribution fall into the following three main categories:

Paid circulation:

In this model, the magazine is sold to readers for a price, either on a per-issue basis or by subscription, where an annual fee or monthly price is paid and issues are sent by post to readers. Paid circulation allows for defined readership statistics.

Non-paid circulation:

This means that there is no cover price and issues are given away, for example in street dispensers, airline, or included with other products or publications. Because this model involves giving issues away to unspecific populations, the statistics only entail the number of issues distributed, and not who reads them.

Controlled circulation:

This is the model used by many trade magazines (industry-based periodicals) distributed only to qualifying readers, often for free and determined by some form of survey.

Because of costs (e.g., printing and postage) associated with the medium of print, publishers may not distribute free copies to everyone who requests one (unqualified leads); instead, they operate under controlled circulation, deciding who may receive free subscriptions based on each person's qualification as a member of the trade (and likelihood of buying, for example, likelihood of having corporate purchasing authority, as determined from job title).

This allows a high level of certainty that advertisements will be received by the advertiser's target audience, and it avoids wasted printing and distribution expenses. This latter model was widely used before the rise of the World Wide Web and is still employed by some titles.

For example, in the United Kingdom, a number of computer-industry magazines use this model, including Computer Weekly and Computing, and in finance, Waters Magazine. For the global media industry, an example would be VideoAge International.

​History:
​
The earliest example of magazines was Erbauliche Monaths Unterredungen, a literary and philosophy magazine, which was launched in 1663 in Germany. The Gentleman's Magazine, first published in 1731 in London was the first general-interest magazine. Edward Cave, who edited The Gentleman's Magazine under the pen name "Sylvanus Urban", was the first to use the term "magazine", on the analogy of a military storehouse. 

Founded by Herbert Ingram in 1842, The Illustrated London News was the first illustrated weekly news magazine.

Britain:

The oldest consumer magazine still in print is The Scots Magazine, which was first published in 1739, though multiple changes in ownership and gaps in publication totaling over 90 years weaken that claim. Lloyd's List was founded in Edward Lloyd's England coffee shop in 1734; and though its online platform is still updated daily it has not been published as a magazine since 2013 after 274 years.

France:
Main articles: History of French journalism and History of journalism
​
Under the ancient regime, the most prominent magazines were Mercure de France, Journal des sçavans, founded in 1665 for scientists, and Gazette de France, founded in 1631. Jean Loret was one of France's first journalists. He disseminated the weekly news of music, dance and Parisian society from 1650 until 1665 in verse, in what he called a gazette burlesque, assembled in three volumes of La Muse historique (1650, 1660, 1665).

The French press lagged a generation behind the British, for they catered to the needs of the aristocracy, while the newer British counterparts were oriented toward the middle and working classes.

Periodicals were censored by the central government in Paris. They were not totally quiescent politically—often they criticized Church abuses and bureaucratic ineptitude. They supported the monarchy and they played at most a small role in stimulating the revolution. 

During the Revolution, new periodicals played central roles as propaganda organs for various factions. Jean-Paul Marat (1743–1793) was the most prominent editor. His L'Ami du peuple advocated vigorously for the rights of the lower classes against the enemies of the people Marat hated; it closed when he was assassinated. After 1800 Napoleon reimposed strict censorship.

Magazines flourished after Napoleon left in 1815. Most were based in Paris and most emphasized literature, poetry and stories. They served religious, cultural and political communities. In times of political crisis they expressed and helped shape the views of their readership and thereby were major elements in the changing political culture. 

For example, there were eight Catholic periodicals in 1830 in Paris. None were officially owned or sponsored by the Church and they reflected a range of opinion among educated Catholics about current issues, such as the 1830 July Revolution that overthrew the Bourbon monarchy.

Several were strong supporters of the Bourbon kings, but all eight ultimately urged support for the new government, putting their appeals in terms of preserving civil order. They often discussed the relationship between church and state. Generally, they urged priests to focus on spiritual matters and not engage in politics.

Historian M. Patricia Dougherty says this process created a distance between the Church and the new monarch and enabled Catholics to develop a new understanding of church-state relationships and the source of political authority.

Turkey:

General: The Moniteur Ottoman was a gazette written in French and first published in 1831 on the order of Mahmud II. It was the first official gazette of the Ottoman Empire, edited by Alexandre Blacque at the expense of the Sublime Porte. Its name perhaps referred to the French newspaper Le Moniteur Universel. It was issued weekly. Takvim-i vekayi was published a few months later, intended as a translation of the Moniteur into Ottoman Turkish.

After having been edited by former Consul for Denmark "M. Franceschi", and later on by "Hassuna de Ghiez", it was last edited by Lucien Rouet. However, facing the hostility of embassies, it was closed in the 1840s.

Satire: Satirical magazines of Turkey have a long tradition. One of the earliest satirical magazines was Diyojen which was launched in 1869. There are around 20 satirical magazines; the leading ones are Penguen (70,000 weekly circulation), LeMan (50,000) and Uykusuz. Historical examples include Oğuz Aral's magazine Gırgır (which reached a circulation of 500,000 in the 1970s) and Marko Paşa (launched 1946). Others include L-Manyak and Lombak.

United States:
Further information: History of American journalism and Mass media and American politics

Colonial America:

Publishing was a very expensive industry in colonial times. Paper and printer's ink were taxed imported goods and their quality was inconsistent. Interstate tariffs and a poor road system hindered distribution, even on a regional scale. Many magazines were launched, most failing within a few editions, but publishers kept trying. 

Benjamin Franklin is said to have envisioned one of the first magazines of the American colonies in 1741, the General Magazine and Historical Chronicle. The Pennsylvania Magazine, edited by Thomas Paine, ran only for a short time but was a very influential publication during the Revolutionary War. The final issue containing the text of the Declaration of Independence was published in 1776.

Late 19th century:

In the mid-1800s, monthly magazines gained popularity. They were general interest to begin, containing some news, vignettes, poems, history, political events, and social discussion. Unlike newspapers, they were more of a monthly record of current events along with entertaining stories, poems, and pictures.

The first periodicals to branch out from news were Harper's and The Atlantic, which focused on fostering the arts. Both Harper's and The Atlantic persist to this day, with Harper's being a cultural magazine and The Atlantic focusing mainly on world events.

Early publications of Harper's even held famous works such as early publications of Moby Dick or famous events such as the laying of the world's first transatlantic telegraph cable; however, the majority of early content was trickle down from British events.

The development of the magazines stimulated an increase in literary criticism and political debate, moving towards more opinionated pieces from the objective newspapers.[19] The increased time between prints and the greater amount of space to write provided a forum for public arguments by scholars and critical observers.

The early periodical predecessors to magazines started to evolve to modern definition in the late 1800s.

Works slowly became more specialized and the general discussion or cultural periodicals were forced to adapt to a consumer market which yearned for more localization of issues and events.

Progressive Era: 1890s–1920s:
Further information: Muckrakers and Mass media and American politics

Mass circulation magazines became much more common after 1900, some with circulations in the hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Some passed the million-mark in the 1920s. It was an age of mass media.

Because of the rapid expansion of national advertising, the cover price fell sharply to about 10 cents. One cause was the heavy coverage of corruption in politics, local government and big business, especially by Muckrakers. They were journalists who wrote for popular magazines to expose social and political sins and shortcomings. They relied on their own investigative journalism reporting; muckrakers often worked to expose social ills and corporate and political corruption.

Muckraking magazines–notably McClure's–took on corporate monopolies and crooked political machines while raising public awareness of chronic urban poverty, unsafe working conditions, and social issues like child labor.

The journalists who specialized in exposing waste, corruption, and scandal operated at the state and local level, like Ray Stannard Baker, George Creel, and Brand Whitlock. Others like Lincoln Steffens exposed political corruption in many large cities; Ida Tarbell went after John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company. 

Samuel Hopkins Adams in 1905 showed the fraud involved in many patent medicines, Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle gave a horrid portrayal of how meat was packed, and, also in 1906, David Graham Phillips unleashed a blistering indictment of the U.S. Senate.

Roosevelt gave these journalists their nickname when he complained that they were not being helpful by raking up all the muck.

21st century:

According to the Research Department of Statista, closures of magazines outnumbered launches in North America during 2009. Although both figures declined during 2010–2015, launches outnumbered closures in each of those years, sometimes by a 3:1 ratio.

Focusing more narrowly, MediaFinder.com found that 93 new magazines launched during the first six months of 2014 while only 30 closed in that time frame. The category which produced the most new publications was "Regional interest", of which six new magazines were launched, including 12th & Broad and Craft Beer & Brewing. 

​However, two magazines had to change their print schedules. Johnson Publishing's Jet stopped printing regular issues making the transition to digital format, however still print an annual print edition. Ladies' Home Journal stopped their monthly schedule and home delivery for subscribers to become a quarterly newsstand-only special interest publication.

According to statistics from the end of 2013, subscription levels for 22 of the top 25 magazines declined from 2012 to 2013, with just Time, Glamour and ESPN The Magazine gaining numbers.

Women's magazines:

The "seven sisters" of American women's magazines are: 
Some magazines like Godey's Lady's Book and Harper's Bazaar were intended exclusively for a female audience, emphasizing the traditional gender roles of the 19th century. Harper's Bazaar was the first to focus exclusively on couture fashion, fashion accessories and textiles.

​The inclusion of didactic content about housekeeping may have increased the appeal of the magazine for a broader audience of women and men concerned about the frivolity of a fashion magazine.

Types of Magazines:

​Targeting women:

Fashion: In the 1920s, new magazines appealed to young German women with a sensuous image and advertisements for the appropriate clothes and accessories they would want to purchase. The glossy pages of Die Dame and Das Blatt der Hausfrau displayed the "Neue Frauen", "New Girl" – what Americans called the flapper.

This ideal young woman was chic, financially independent, and an eager consumer of the latest fashions. Magazines kept her up to date on fashion, arts, sports, and modern technology such as automobiles and telephones.

Parenting: The first women's magazine targeted toward wives and mothers was published in 1852. Through the use of advice columns, advertisements, and various publications related to parenting, women's magazines have influenced views of motherhood and child-rearing. Mass-marketed women's magazines have shaped and transformed cultural values related to parenting practices. As such, magazines targeting women and parenthood have exerted power and influence over ideas about motherhood and child-rearing.

Religion: 

​Religious groups have used magazines for spreading and communicating religious doctrine for over 100 years. The Friend was founded in Philadelphia in 1827 at the time of a major Quaker schism; it has been continually published and was renamed Friends Journal when the rival Quaker groups formally reconciled in the mid-1950s.

Several Catholic magazines launched at the turn of the 20th century that still remain in circulation including: 
There are over 100 Catholic magazines published in the United States, and thousands globally which range in scope from inspirational messages to specific religious orders, faithful family life, to global issues facing the worldwide Church.

Jehovah's Witnesses' primary magazine, The Watchtower, was started by Charles Taze Russell in July 1879 under the title Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence. The public edition of the magazine is one of the most widely distributed magazines in the world, with an average printing of approximately 36 million per issue.

Celebrity, human interest, and gossip: Magazines publishing stories and photos of high-profile individuals and celebrities have long been a popular format in the United States. In 2019, People Magazine ranked second behind ESPN Magazine in total reach with a reported reach of 98.51 million.

Professional: Professional magazines, also called trade magazines, or business-to-business magazines are targeted to readers employed in particular industries. These magazines typically cover industry trends and news of interest to professionals in the industry. Subscriptions often come with membership in a professional association.

Professional magazines may derive revenue from advertisement placements or advertorials by companies selling products and services to a specific professional audience. Examples include Advertising Age and Automotive News.

See also:
Lists:
​Categories:







Social Media Pictured: Images of Logos for Some of the Most Popular Social Media Websites
Social media are interactive digital channels that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. 

While challenges to the definition of social media arise due to the variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available, there are some common features:
  1. Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.
  2. User-generated content—such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions—is the lifeblood of social media.
  3. Users create service-specific profiles for the website or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.
  4. Social media helps the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.

The term "social" in regard to media suggests that platforms are user-centric and enable communal activity. As such, social media can be viewed as online facilitators or enhancers of human networks—webs of individuals who enhance social connectivity.

Users usually access social media services through web-based apps on desktops or download services that offer social media functionality to their mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets).

As users engage with these electronic services, they create highly interactive platforms which individuals, communities, and organizations can share, co-create, discuss, participate, and modify user-generated or self-curated content posted online. 

Additionally, social media are used to document memories, learn about and explore things, advertise oneself, and form friendships along with the growth of ideas from the creation of blogs, podcasts, videos, and gaming sites. This changing relationship between humans and technology is the focus of the emerging field of technological self-studies. 

Some of the most popular social media websites, with more than 100 million registered users, include:
Depending on interpretation, other popular platforms that are sometimes referred to as social media services include: ​​
Wikis are examples of collaborative content creation.

Social media outlets differ from traditional media (e.g., print magazines and newspapers, TV, and radio broadcasting) in many ways, including quality, reach, frequency, usability, relevancy, and permanence. 

Additionally, social media outlets operate in a dialogic transmission system, i.e., many sources to many receivers, while traditional media outlets operate under a monologic transmission model (i.e., one source to many receivers).

For instance, a newspaper is delivered to many subscribers, and a radio station broadcasts the same programs to an entire city. Since the dramatic expansion of the Internet, digital media or digital rhetoric can be used to represent or identify a culture. Studying how the rhetoric that exists in the digital environment has become a crucial new process for many scholars.

Observers have noted a wide range of positive and negative impacts when it comes to the use of social media. Social media can help to improve an individual's sense of connectedness with real or online communities and can be an effective communication (or marketing) tool for corporations, entrepreneurs, non-profit organizations, advocacy groups, political parties, and governments.

Observers have also seen that there has been a rise in social movements using social media as a tool for communicating and organizing in times of political unrest.

History of social media:
See also: Timeline of social media

Early computing:
​
The PLATO system was launched in 1960, after being developed at the University of Illinois and subsequently commercially marketed by Control Data Corporation. It offered early forms of social media features with 1973-era innovations such as:
  • Notes, PLATO's message-forum application;
  • TERM-talk, its instant-messaging feature; 
  • Talkomatic, perhaps the first online chat room;
  • News Report, a crowdsourced online newspaper, and blog and Access Lists, enabling the owner of a note file or other application to limit access to a certain set of users, for example, only friends, classmates, or co-workers.

ARPANET, which first came online in 1967, had by the late-1970s developed a rich cultural exchange of non-government/business ideas and communication, as evidenced by the network etiquette (or 'netiquette') described in a 1982 handbook on computing at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. 

ARPANET evolved into the Internet following the publication of the first Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) specification, RFC 675 (Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program), written by Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine in 1974. 

This became the foundation of Usenet, conceived by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University, and established in 1980.

A precursor of the electronic bulletin board system (BBS), known as Community Memory, appeared by 1973. True electronic BBSs arrived with the Computer Bulletin Board System in Chicago, which first came online on February 16, 1978.

Before long, most major cities had more than one BBS running on TRS-80, Apple II, Atari, IBM PC, Commodore 64, Sinclair, and similar personal computers.

The IBM PC was introduced in 1981, and subsequent models of both Mac computers and PCs were used throughout the 1980s. Multiple modems, followed by specialized telecommunication hardware, allowed many users to be online simultaneously. 

Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL were three of the largest BBS companies and were the first to migrate to the Internet in the 1990s. Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, BBSes numbered in the tens of thousands in North America alone. 

Message forums (a specific structure of social media) arose with the BBS phenomenon throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.

When the World Wide Web (WWW, or 'the web') was added to the Internet in the mid-1990s, message forums migrated to the web, becoming Internet forums, primarily due to cheaper per-person access as well as the ability to handle far more people simultaneously than telco modem banks.

Digital imaging and semiconductor image sensor technology facilitated the development and rise of social media. Advances in metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) semiconductor device fabrication, reaching smaller micron and then sub-micron levels during the 1980s–1990s, led to the development of the NMOS (n-type MOS) active-pixel sensor (APS) at Olympus in 1985, and then the complementary MOS (CMOS) active-pixel sensor (CMOS sensor) at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1993.

CMOS sensors enabled the mass proliferation of digital cameras and camera phones, which bolstered the rise of social media.

Development of social-media platforms:

​​When Tim Berners-Lee connected hypertext software to the Internet in 1991, he developed the World Wide Web, which created the modern era of networked communication. Weblogs, list servers, and e-mail services all aided in the formation of online communities and the support of offline groups. Online services evolved from providing conduits for networked communication to being interactive, two-way vehicles for networked sociality with the introduction of Web 2.0. 

The development of social media began with simple platforms. GeoCities was one of the earliest social networking services, launched in November 1994, followed by Classmates.com in December 1995 and SixDegrees.com in May 1997. 

Unlike instant-messaging clients (e.g., ICQ and AOL's AIM) or chat clients (e.g., IRC, iChat, or Chat Television), SixDegrees was the first online business that was created for real people, using their real names. As such, according to CBS News, SixDegrees is "widely considered to be the very first social networking site," as it included "profiles, friends lists, and school affiliations" that could be used by registered users. 

The name references to the "six degrees of separation" concept, which posits that "everyone on the planet is only six degrees apart from everyone else." It was the first website to provide users the option of creating a profile. 

Research from 2015 shows that the world spent 22% of their online time on social networks, thus suggesting the popularity of social media platforms. It is speculated that the increase in social media's popularity is due to the widespread daily use of smartphones.

As many as 4.08 billion social media users worldwide were found active on smartphones as of October 2020.

Definition and features:

The idea that social media are defined simply by their ability to bring people together has been seen as too broad, as this would suggest that fundamentally different technologies like the telegraph and telephone are also social media. 

The terminology is unclear, with some early researchers referring to social media as social networks or social networking services in the mid 2000s. A more recent paper from 2015 reviewed the prominent literature in the area and identified four common features unique to then-current social media services:
  1. Social media are Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.
  2. User-generated content (UGC) is the lifeblood of the social media organism.
  3. Users create service-specific profiles for the site or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.
  4. Social media facilitate the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.

In 2019, Merriam-Webster defined social media as "forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos)."

While the variety of evolving stand-alone and built-in social media services makes it challenging to define them, marketing and social media experts broadly agree that social media includes the following 13 types:
  1. Blogs (ex. Huffington Post, Boing Boing)
  2. Business networks (ex. LinkedIn, XING)
  3. Collaborative projects (ex. Wikipedia, Mozilla)
  4. Enterprise social networks (ex. Yammer, Socialcast)
  5. Forums (ex. Gaia Online, IGN Boards)
  6. Microblogs (ex. Twitter, Tumblr)
  7. Photo sharing (ex. Flickr, Photobucket)
  8. Products/services review (ex. Amazon, Elance)
  9. Social bookmarking (ex. Delicious, Pinterest)
  10. Social gaming (ex. Mafia Wars)
  11. Social network sites (ex. Facebook, Google+)
  12. Video sharing (ex. YouTube, Vimeo)
  13. Virtual worlds (ex. Second Life, Twinity)

Mobile social media:

Mobile social media refers to the use of social media on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers. Mobile social media are useful applications of mobile marketing because the creation, exchange, and circulation of user-generated content can assist companies with marketing research, communication, and relationship development.

Mobile social media differ from others because they incorporate the current location of the user (location-sensitivity) or the time delay between sending and receiving messages.

Social media promotes users to share content with others and display content in order to enhance a particular brand or product. Social media allows people to be creative and share interesting ideas with their followers or fans.

Certain social media applications such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are places where users share specific political or sports content. Many reporters and journalists produce updates and information on sports and political news. It can truly give users pertinent and necessary information to stay up to date on relevant news stories and topics.

However, there is a down side to it. Users are advised to exercise due diligence when they are using social media platforms.

According to Andreas Kaplan, mobile social media applications can be differentiated among four types:
  1. Space-timers (location and time-sensitive): Exchange of messages with relevance mostly for one specific location at one specific point in time (e.g. Facebook Places, WhatsApp, Foursquare)
  2. Space-locators (only location sensitive): Exchange of messages with relevance for one specific location, which is tagged to a certain place and read later by others (e.g. Yelp, Qype, Tumblr, Fishbrain)
  3. Quick-timers (only time sensitive): Transfer of traditional social media mobile apps to increase immediacy (e.g. posting on Twitter or status updates on Facebook)
  4. Slow-timers (neither location nor time sensitive): Transfer of traditional social media applications to mobile devices (e.g. watching a YouTube video or reading/editing a Wikipedia article)

Elements and function:

Viral content:
Main article: Viral phenomenon

Some social media sites have the potential for content posted there to spread virally over social networks. The term is an analogy to the concept of viral infections, which can spread rapidly from individual to individual.

In a social media context, content or websites that are 'viral' (or which 'go viral') are those with a greater likelihood that users will re-share content posted (by another user) to their social network, leading to further sharing. In some cases, posts containing popular content or fast-breaking news have been rapidly shared and re-shared by a huge number of users.

Businesses have a particular interest in viral marketing tactics because a viral campaign can achieve widespread advertising coverage (particularly if the viral reposting itself makes the news) for a fraction of the cost of a traditional marketing campaign, which typically uses printed materials, like newspapers, magazines, mailings, and billboards, and television and radio commercials. 

Nonprofit organizations and activists may have similar interests in posting content on social media sites with the aim of it going viral.

​Many social media sites provide specific functionality to help users re-share (also known as re-blogging) content, such as Twitter's 'retweet' button, Pinterest's 'pin' function, Facebook's 'share' option, or Tumblr's 're-blog' function.

Re-sharing (or, in this case, retweeting) is an especially popular component and feature of Twitter, allowing its users to keep up with important events and stay connected with their peers, as well as contributing in various ways throughout social media. When certain posts become popular, they start to get retweeted over and over again, becoming viral. Hashtags can be used in tweets, and can also be used to take count of how many people have used that hashtag.

Bots:
Main article: Internet bot

Bots are automated programs that operate on the Internet, which have grown in demand, due to their ability to automate many communication tasks, leading to the creation of a new industry of bot providers.

Chatbots and social bots are programmed to mimic natural human interactions such as liking, commenting, following, and unfollowing on social media platforms. As companies aim for greater market shares and increased audiences, internet bots have also been developed to facilitate social media marketing. 

With the existence of social bots and chatbots, however, the marketing industry has also met an analytical crisis, as these bots make it difficult to differentiate between human interactions and automated bot interactions. For instance, marketing data has been negatively affected by some bots, causing "digital cannibalism" in social media marketing.

Additionally, some bots violate the terms of use on many social media platforms such as Instagram, which can result in profiles being taken down and banned.

'Cyborgs'—either bot-assisted humans or human-assisted bots—are used for a number of different purposes both legitimate and illegitimate, from spreading fake news to creating marketing buzz.

A common legitimate use includes using automated programs to post on social media at a specific time. In these cases, often, the human writes the post content and the bot schedules the time of posting.

In other cases, the cyborgs are more nefarious, e.g., contributing to the spread of fake news and misinformation. Often these accounts blend human and bot activity in a strategic way, so that when an automated account is publicly identified, the human half of the cyborg is able to take over and could protest that the account has been used manually all along.

In many cases, these accounts that are being used in a more illegitimate fashion try to pose as real people; in particular, the number of their friends or followers resemble that of a real person. Cyborgs are also related to sock puppet accounts, where one human pretends to be someone else, but can also include one human operating multiple cyborg accounts.

New social media technology:
Main article: Software patent

There has been rapid growth in the number of U.S. patent applications that cover new technologies that are related to social media, and the number of them that are published has been growing rapidly over the past five years.

As of 2020, there are over 5000 published patent applications in the United States. As many as 7000 applications may be currently on file including those that have not been published yet; however, only slightly over 100 of these applications have issued as patents, largely due to the multi-year backlog in examination of business method patents, i.e., patents that outline and claim new methods of doing business.

Platform convergence:

As an instance of technological convergence, various social media platforms of different kinds adapted functionality beyond their original scope, increasingly overlapping with each other over time, albeit usually not implemented as completely as on dedicated platforms.

​Examples are the social hub site Facebook launching an integrated video platform in May 2007, and Instagram, whose original scope was low-resolution photo sharing, introducing the ability to share quarter-minute 640×640 pixel videos in 2013 (later extended to a minute with increased resolution), acting like a minimal video platform without video seek bar.

Instagram later implemented stories (short videos self-destructing after 24 hours), a concept popularized by Snapchat, as well as IGTV, for seekable videos of up to ten minutes or one hour depending on account status. Stories have been later adapted by the dedicated video platform YouTube in 2018, although access is restricted to the mobile apps, excluding mobile and desktop websites.

Twitter, whose original scope was text-based microblogging, later adapted photo sharing functionality (deprecating third-party services such as TwitPic), later video sharing with 140-second time limit and view counter but no manual quality selection or subtitles like on dedicated video platforms, and originally only available to mobile app users but later implemented in their website front ends. Then a media studio feature for business users, which resembles YouTube's Creator Studio.

The discussion platform Reddit added an integrated image hoster in June 2016 after Reddit users commonly relied on the external standalone image sharing platform Imgur, and an internal video hoster around a year later. 

In July 2020, the ability to share multiple images in a single post (image galleries), a feature known from Imgur, was implemented. Imgur itself implemented sharing videos of up to 30 seconds in May 2018, later extended to one minute.

Starting in 2018, the dedicated video platform YouTube rolled out a Community feature accessible through a channel tab (which usurps the previous Discussion channel tab), where text-only posts, as well as polls can be shared. To be enabled, channels have to pass a subscriber count threshold which has been lowered over time.

Statistics on usage and membership:

According to Statista, it is estimated that, in 2022, there are around 3.96 billion people using social media around the globe; up from 3.6 billion in 2020. This number is expected to increase to 4.41 billion in 2025.

​Most popular social networking services:

The following is a list of the most popular social networking services based on the number of active users as of January 2022 per Statista.

___________________________________________________________________________

​Usage: Before the COVID-19 pandemic:

A study from 2009 suggests that there may be individual differences that help explain who uses social media and who does not: extraversion and openness have a positive relationship with social media, while emotional stability has a negative sloping relationship with social media. 

A separate study from 2015 found that people with a higher social comparison orientation appear to use social media more heavily than people with low social comparison orientation.

Data from Common Sense Media has suggested that children under the age of 13 in the United States use social networking services despite the fact that many social media sites have policies that state one must be at least 13-years old or older to join. 

In 2017, Common Sense Media conducted a nationally representative survey of parents of children from birth to age 8 and found that 4% of children at this age used social media sites such as Instagram, Snapchat, or (now-defunct) Musical.ly “often” or “sometimes.” 

A different nationally representative survey by Common Sense in 2019 surveyed young Americans ages 8–16 and found that about 31% of children ages 8–12 ever use social media such as Snapchat, Instagram, or Facebook. 

In that same survey, when American teens ages 16–18 were asked when they started using social media, 28% said they started to use it before they were 13-years-old. However, the median age of starting to use social media was 14-years-old.

Usage: During the COVID-19 pandemic:

Amount of usage by minors: In June 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, a nationally representative survey by Cartoon Network and the Cyberbullying Research Center surveyed Americans tweens (ages 9–12) found that the most popular overall application in the past year was YouTube (67%). (In general, as age increased, the tweens were more likely to have used major social media apps and games.)

Similarly, a nationally representative survey by Common Sense Media conducted in 2020 of Americans ages 13–18 found that YouTube was also the most popular social media service (used by 86% of 13- to 18-year-old Americans in the past year). As children grow older, they utilize certain social media services on a frequent basis and often use the application YouTube to consume content.

The use of social media certainly increases as people grow older and it has become a customary thing to have an Instagram and Twitter account.
___________________________________________________________________________

​Reasons for use by adults:

While adults were already using social media before the COVID-19 pandemic, more started using it to stay socially connected and to get updates on the pandemic.

"Social media have become popularly use to seek for medical information and have fascinated the general public to collect information regarding corona virus pandemics in various perspectives. During these days, people are forced to stay at home and the social media have connected and supported awareness and pandemic updates."

This also made healthcare workers and systems more aware of social media as a place people were getting health information about the pandemic: "During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media use has accelerated to the point of becoming a ubiquitous part of modern healthcare systems."

Though this also led to the spread of disinformation, indeed, on December 11, 2020, the CDC put out a "Call to Action: Managing the Infodemic". Some healthcare organizations even used hashtags as interventions and published articles on their Twitter data:
"Promotion of the joint usage of #PedsICU and #COVID19 throughout the international pediatric critical care community in tweets relevant to the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic and pediatric critical care."
​
However others in the medical community were concerned about social media addiction, due to it as an increasingly important context and therefore "source of social validation and reinforcement" and are unsure if increased social media use is a coping mechanism or harmful.
___________________________________________________________________________

Timeline of Social Media (1973-2021):
_______________________________________________________________________


​Use at the organizational level:

Governments:

Governments may use social media to (for example):
  • inform their opinions to public
  • interact with citizens
  • foster citizen participation
  • further open government
  • analyze/monitor public opinion and activities
  • educate the public about risks and public health.

Law enforcement and investigations:

Social media has been used extensively in civil and criminal investigations. It has also been used to assist in searches for missing persons. Police departments often make use of official social media accounts to engage with the public, publicize police activity, and burnish law enforcement's image; conversely, video footage of citizen-documented police brutality and other misconduct has sometimes been posted to social media.

In the United States U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement identifies and track individuals via social media, and also has apprehended some people via social media based sting operations. 

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (also known as CPB) and the United States Department of Homeland Security use social media data as influencing factors during the visa process, and continue to monitor individuals after they have entered the country. 

CPB officers have also been documented performing searches of electronics and social media behavior at the border, searching both citizens and non-citizens without first obtaining a warrant.

Government reputation management:

As social media gained momentum among the younger generations, governments began using it to improve their image, especially among the youth. In January 2021, Egyptian authorities were found to be using Instagram influencers as part of its media ambassadors program. The program was designed to revamp Egypt’s image and to counter the bad press Egypt had received because of the country's human rights record.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates participated in similar programs. Similarly, Dubai has also extensively relied on social media and influencers to promote tourism.

However, the restrictive laws of Dubai have always kept these influencers within the limits to not offend the authorities, or to criticize the city, politics or religion. The content of these foreign influencers is controlled to make sure that nothing portrays Dubai in a negative light.

Businesses:
Main article: Social media use by businesses

Businesses can use social media tools for marketing research, communication, sales promotions/discounts, informal employee-learning/organizational development, relationship development/loyalty programs, and e-Commerce.

Companies are increasingly using social-media monitoring tools to monitor, track, and analyze online conversations on the Web about their brand or products or about related topics of interest. This can prove useful in public relations management and advertising-campaign tracking, allowing analysts to measure return on investment for their social media ad spending, competitor-auditing, and for public engagement.

Tools range from free, basic applications to subscription-based, more in-depth tools. Often social media can become a good source of information and/or explanation of industry trends for a business to embrace change.

Within the financial industry, companies can utilize the power of social media as a tool for analyzing the sentiment of financial markets. These range from the marketing of financial products, gaining insights into market sentiment, future market predictions, and as a tool to identify insider trading.

To properly take advantage of these benefits, businesses need to have a set of guidelines that they can use on different social media platforms. 

Social media can enhance a brand through a process called "building social authority". However, this process can be difficult, because one of the foundational concepts in social media is that one cannot completely control one's message through social media but rather one can simply begin to participate in the "conversation" expecting that one can achieve a significant influence in that conversation. 

Because of the wide use of social media by consumers and their own employees, companies use social media on a customer-organizational level; and an intra-organizational level.

Social media, by connecting individuals to new ties via the social network can increase entrepreneurship and innovation, especially for those individuals who lack conventional information channels due to their lower socioeconomic background.

​Social media marketing:
Main article: Social media marketing

Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service and also to establish a connection with its customers. Social media marketing has increased due to the growing active user rates on social media sites. Though these numbers are not exponential.

For example, as of 2018 Facebook had 2.2 billion users, Twitter had 330 million active users and Instagram had 800 million users. Then in 2021 Facebook had 2.89 billion users and Twitter had 206 million users. 

Similar to traditional advertising, all of social media marketing can be divided into three types:
  1. paid media,
  2. earned media,
  3. owned media. 

Paid social media is when a firm directly buys advertising on a social media platform.

Earned social media is when the firms does something that impresses its consumers or other stakeholders and they spontaneously post their own content about it on social media.

Owned social media is when the firm itself owns the social media channel and creates content for its followers.

One of the main uses is to interact with audiences to create awareness of the company or organization, with the main idea of creating a two-way communication system where the audience and/or customers can interact; e.g., customers can provide feedback on the firm's products. 

However, since social media allows consumers to spread opinions and share experiences in a peer-to-peer fashion, this has shifted some of the power from the organization to consumers, since these messages can be transparent and honest. Or at least appear so (more on this at influencers).

Social media can also be used to directly advertise; placing an advert on Facebook's Newsfeed, for example, can provide exposure of the brand to a large number of people.

Social media platforms also enable targeting specific audiences with advertising. Users of social media are then able to like, share, and comment on the advert; this turns the passive advertising consumers into active advertising producers since they can pass the advert's message on to their friends. 

Companies using social media marketing have to keep up with the different social media platforms and stay on top of ongoing trends. Since the different platforms and trends attract different audiences, firms must be strategic about their use of social media to attract the right audience. 

Moreover, the tone of the content can affect the efficacy of social media marketing. Companies such as fast food franchise Wendy's have used humor (such as shitposting) to advertise their products by poking fun at competitors such as McDonald's and Burger King. This particular example spawned a lot of fanart of the Wendy's mascot which circulated widely online, (particularly on sites like DeviantArt increasing the effect of the marketing campaign.

Other companies such as Juul have used hashtags (such as #ejuice and #eliquid) to promote themselves and their products.

Social media personalities, often referred to as "influencers", who are internet celebrities who have been employed and/or sponsored by marketers to promote products online. Research shows that digital endorsements seem to be successfully attracting social media users, especially younger consumers who have grown up in the digital age. 

In 2013, the United Kingdom Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) began to advise celebrities and sports stars to make it clear if they had been paid to tweet about a product or service by using the hashtag #spon or #ad within tweets containing endorsements, and the US Federal Trade Commission has issued similar guidelines. 

The practice of harnessing social media personalities to market or promote a product or service to their following is commonly referred to as Influencer Marketing.

In 2019 The Cambridge Dictionary defines an "influencer" as any person (personality, blogger, journalist, celebrity) who has the ability to affect the opinions, behaviors, or purchases of others through the use of social media.

Marketing efforts can also take advantage of the peer effects in social media. Consumers tend to treat content on social media differently from traditional advertising (such as print ads), but these messages may be part of an interactive marketing strategy involving modeling, reinforcement, and social interaction mechanisms.

A 2012 study focused on this communication described how communication between peers through social media can affect purchase intentions: a direct impact through conformity, and an indirect impact by stressing product engagement. This study indicated that social media communication between peers about a product had a positive relationship with product engagement.

Politics:
Main article: Social media use in politics
See also: 
​Social media have a range of uses in political processes and activities. Social media have been championed as allowing anyone with access to an Internet connection to become a content creator and as empowering users. 

The role of social media in democratizing media participation, which proponents herald as ushering in a new era of participatory democracy, with all users able to contribute news and comments, may fall short of the ideals, given that many often follow like-minded individuals, as noted by Philip Pond and Jeff Lewis. 

Online-media audience-members are largely passive consumers, while content creation is dominated by a small number of users who post comments and write new content.

Online engagement does not always translate into real-world action, and Howard, Busch and Sheets have argued that there is a digital divide in North America because of the continent's history, culture, and geography.

Younger generations are becoming more involved in politics due to the increase of political news posted on social media. Political campaigns are targeting millennials online via social-media posts in hope that they will increase their political engagement. 

Social media was influential in the widespread attention given to the revolutionary outbreaks in the Middle East and North Africa during 2011. 

During the Tunisian revolution in 2011, people used Facebook to organize meetings and protests. However, debate persists about the extent to which social media facilitated this kind of political change.

Social-media footprints of candidates for political office have grown during the last decade - the 2016 United States presidential election provided good examples. Dounoucos et al. noted that Twitter use by candidates was unprecedented during that election cycle. Most candidates in the United States have a Twitter account. The public has also increased their reliance on social-media sites for political information. In the European Union, social media have amplified political messages.

Militant groups have begun to see social media as a major organizing and recruiting tool. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (also known as ISIL, ISIS, and Daesh) has used social media to promote its cause. In 2014, #AllEyesonISIS went viral on Arabic Twitter. 

ISIS produces an online magazine named the Islamic State Report to recruit more fighters. State-sponsored cyber-groups have weaponized social-media platforms to attack governments in the United States, the European Union, and the Middle East. 

Although phishing attacks via email are the most commonly used tactic to breach government networks, phishing attacks on social media rose 500% in 2016.

Increasing political influence on social media saw several campaigns running from one political side against another. Often, foreign-originated social-media campaigns have sought to influence political opinion in another country. For example, a Twitter campaign run in Saudi Arabia produced thousands of tweets about Hillary Clinton's trending on #HillaryEmails by supporters of Mohammed bin Salman.

It also involved Riyadh's social-marketing firm, SMAAT, which had a history of running such campaigns on Twitter. Politicians themselves use social media to their advantage - and to spread their campaign messages and to influence voters.

Due to the growing abuse of human rights in Bahrain, activists have used social media to report acts of violence and injustice. They publicized the brutality of government authorities and police, who were detaining, torturing and threatening many individuals.

On the other hand, Bahrain's government was using social media to track and target rights activists and individuals who were critical of the authorities; the government has stripped citizenship from over 1,000 activists as punishment.

Hiring:
Main article: Social media use in hiring

Some employers examine job applicants' social media profiles as part of the hiring assessment. This issue raises many ethical questions that some consider an employer's right and others consider discrimination. Many Western-European countries have already implemented laws that restrict the regulation of social media in the workplace.

States including Arkansas, California, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin have passed legislation that protects potential employees and current employees from employers that demand that they provide their usernames and/or passwords for any social media accounts. 

Use of social media by young people has caused significant problems for some applicants who are active on social media when they try to enter the job market. A survey of 17,000 young people in six countries in 2013 found that 1 in 10 people aged 16 to 34 have been rejected for a job because of online comments they made on social media websites.

For potential employees, Social media services such as LinkedIn have shown to affect deception in resumes. While these services do not affect how often deception happens, they affect the types of deception that occur. LinkedIn resumes are less deceptive about prior work experience but more deceptive about interests and hobbies. 

Science:

The use of social media in science communications offers extensive opportunities for exchanging scientific information, ideas, opinions and publications. Scientists use social media to share their scientific knowledge and new findings on platforms such as ResearchGate, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Academia.edu. 

Among these the most common type of social media that scientists use is Twitter and blogs. It has been found that Twitter increased the scientific impact in the community. The use of social media has improved and elevated the interaction between scientists, reporters, and the general public.

Over 495,000 opinions were shared on Twitter related to science in one year (between September 1, 2010, and August 31, 2011), which was an increase compared with past years. Science related blogs motivate public interest in learning, following, and discussing science. Blogs use textual depth and graphical videos that provide the reader with a dynamic way to interact with scientific information.

Both Twitter and blogs can be written quickly and allow the reader to interact in real time with the authors. However, the popularity of social media platforms changes quickly and scientists need to keep pace with changes in social media. In terms of organized uses of scientific social media, one study in the context of climate change has shown that climate scientist and scientific institutions played a minimal role in online debate, while nongovernmental organizations played a larger role.

Academia:

Signals from social media are used to assess academic publications, as well as for different scientific approaches. Another study found that most of the health science students acquiring academic materials from others through social media.

School admissions:

It is not only an issue in the workplace but an issue in post-secondary school admissions as well. There have been situations where students have been forced to give up their social media passwords to school administrators. There are inadequate laws to protect a student's social media privacy, and organizations such as the ACLU are pushing for more privacy protection, as it is an invasion.

They urge students who are pressured to give up their account information to tell the administrators to contact a parent or lawyer before they take the matter any further. Although they are students, they still have the right to keep their password-protected information private.

According to a 2007 journal, before social media admissions officials in the United States used SAT and other standardized test scores, extra-curricular activities, letters of recommendation, and high school report cards to determine whether to accept or deny an applicant.

In the 2010s, while colleges and universities still used these traditional methods to evaluate applicants, these institutions were increasingly accessing applicants' social media profiles to learn about their character and activities. According to Kaplan, Inc, a corporation that provides higher education preparation, in 2012 27% of admissions officers used Google to learn more about an applicant, with 26% checking Facebook. 

Students whose social media pages include offensive jokes or photos, racist or homophobic comments, photos depicting the applicant engaging in illegal drug use or drunkenness, and so on, may be screened out from admission processes.

"One survey in July 2017, by the American Association of College Registrars and Admissions Officers, found that 11 percent of respondents said they had refused to admit an applicant based on social media content. This includes 8 percent of public institutions, where the First Amendment applies. The survey found that 30 percent of institutions acknowledged reviewing the personal social media accounts of applicants at least some of the time."

Court cases:

Social media comments and images are being used in a range of court cases including employment law, child custody/child support and insurance disability claims. After an Apple employee criticized his employer on Facebook, he was fired. When the former employee sued Apple for unfair dismissal, the court, after seeing the man's Facebook posts, found in favor of Apple, as the man's social media comments breached Apple's policies. 

After a heterosexual couple broke up, the man posted "violent rap lyrics from a song that talked about fantasies of killing the rapper's ex-wife" and made threats against him. The court found him guilty and he was sentenced to jail. 

In a disability claims case, a woman who fell at work claimed that she was permanently injured; the employer used the social media posts of her travels and activities to counter her claims.

Courts do not always admit social media evidence, in part, because screenshots can be faked or tampered with. Judges are taking emojis into account to assess statements made on social media; in one Michigan case where a person alleged that another person had defamed them in an online comment, the judge disagreed, noting that there was an emoji after the comment which indicated that it was a joke. 

In a 2014 case in Ontario against a police officer regarding alleged assault of a protester during the G20 summit, the court rejected the Crown's application to use a digital photo of the protest that was anonymously posted online, because there was no metadata proving when the photo was taken and it could have been digitally altered.

​Use by individuals:

As a news source:
Main article: Social media as a news source

As of March 2010, in the United States, 81% of users look online for news of the weather, first and foremost, with the percentage seeking national news at 73%, 52% for sports news, and 41% for entertainment or celebrity news.

According to CNN, in 2010 75% of people got their news forwarded through e-mail or social media posts, whereas 37% of people shared a news item via Facebook or Twitter. Facebook and Twitter make news a more participatory experience than before as people share news articles and comment on other people's posts.

Rainie and Wellman (2012) have argued that media making now has become a participation work, which changes communication systems. However, 27% of respondents worry about the accuracy of a story on a blog. From a 2019 poll, Pew Research Center found that Americans are wary about the ways that social media sites share news and certain content. 

This wariness of accuracy is on the rise as social media sites are increasingly exploited by aggregated new sources which stitch together multiple feeds to develop plausible correlations. Hemsley and colleagues (2018) refer to this phenomenon as "pseudoknowledge" which develop false narratives and fake news that are supported through general analysis and ideology rather than facts. 

Social media as a news source was further questioned as spikes in evidence surround major news events such as was captured in the United States 2016 presidential election and again during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

As a social tool:

Social media are used to fulfill perceived social needs such as socializing with friends and family as well as romance and flirting, but not all needs can be fulfilled by social media. For example, a 2003 article found that lonely individuals are more likely to use the Internet for emotional support than those who are not lonely. 

A nationally representative survey from Common Sense Media in 2018 found that 40% of American teens ages 13–17 thought that social media was “extremely” or “very” important for them to keep up with their friends on a day-to-basis. The same survey found that 33% of teens said social media was extremely or very important to have meaningful conversations with close friends, and 23% of teens said social media was extremely or very important to document and share highlights from their lives. 

Recently, a Gallup poll from May 2020 showed that 53% of adult social media users in the United States thought that social media was a very or moderately important way to keep in touch with those they cannot otherwise see in-person due to social distancing measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sherry Turkle explores this topic in her book Alone Together as she discusses how people confuse social media usage with authentic communication. She posits that people tend to act differently online and are less afraid to hurt each other's feelings.

Additionally, some online behaviors can cause stress and anxiety, due to the permanence of online posts, the fear of being hacked, or of universities and employers exploring social media pages. Turkle also speculates that people are beginning to prefer texting to face-to-face communication, which can contribute to feelings of loneliness. 

Nationally representative surveys from 2019 have found this to be the case with teens in the United States and Mexico. Some researchers have also found that exchanges that involved direct communication and reciprocation of messages correlated with fewer feelings of loneliness. 

However, that same study showed that passively using social media without sending or receiving messages does not make people feel less lonely unless they were lonely to begin with.

The term social media "stalking" or "creeping" have been popularized over the years, and this refers to looking at the person's "timeline, status updates, tweets, and online bios" to find information about them and their activities. 

While social media creeping is common, it is considered to be poor form to admit to a new acquaintance or new date that you have looked through his or her social media posts, particularly older posts, as this will indicate that you were going through their old history. 

A sub-category of creeping is creeping ex-partners' social media posts after a breakup to investigate if there is a new partner or new dating; this can lead to preoccupation with the ex, rumination, and negative feelings, all of which postpone recovery and increase feelings of loss.

Catfishing has become more prevalent since the advent of social media. Relationships formed with catfish can lead to actions such as supporting them with money and catfish will typically make excuses as to why they cannot meet up or be viewed on camera.

As a self-presentational tool:

The more time people spend on Facebook, the less satisfied they feel about their life. Self-presentation theory explains that people will consciously manage their self-image or identity related information in social contexts. 

In fact, a critical aspect of social networking sites is the time invested in customizing a personal profile, and encourage a sort of social currency based on likes, followers, and comments. Users also tend to segment their audiences based on the image they want to present, pseudonymity and use of multiple accounts across the same platform remain popular ways to negotiate platform expectations and segment audiences.

However, users may feel pressure to gain their peers' acceptance of their self-presentation.

For example, in a 2016 peer-reviewed article by Trudy Hui Hui Chua and Leanne Chang, the authors found that teenage girls manipulate their self-presentation on social media to achieve a sense of beauty that is projected by their peers. 

These authors also discovered that teenage girls compare themselves to their peers on social media and present themselves in certain ways in an effort to earn regard and acceptance. However, when users do not feel like they reached this regard and acceptance, this can actually lead to problems with self-confidence and self-satisfaction. 

A nationally representative survey of American teens ages 13–17 by Common Sense Media found that 45% said getting “likes” on posts is at least somewhat important, and 26% at least somewhat agreed that they feel bad about themselves if nobody comments on or “likes” their photos. 

Some evidence suggests that perceived rejection may lead to feeling emotional pain, and some may partake in online retaliation such as online bullying. Conversely, according to research from UCLA, users' reward circuits in their brains are more active when their own photos are liked by more peers.

Literature suggests that social media can breed a negative feedback loop of viewing and uploading photos, self-comparison, feelings of disappointment when perceived social success is not achieved, and disordered body perception. 

In fact, one study shows that the microblogging platform, Pinterest is directly associated with disordered dieting behavior, indicating that for those who frequently look at exercise or dieting "pins" there is a greater chance that they will engage in extreme weight-loss and dieting behavior.

As a health behavior change and reinforcement tool:

Social media can also function as a supportive system for adolescents' health, because by using social media, adolescents are able to mobilize around health issues that they themselves deem relevant. For example, in a clinical study among adolescent patients undergoing treatment for obesity, the participants' expressed that through social media, they could find personalized weight-loss content as well as social support among other adolescents with obesity. 

While, social media can provide such information there are a considerable amount of uninformed and incorrect sources which promote unhealthy and dangerous methods of weight loss. 

As stated by the national eating disorder association there is a high correlation between weight loss content and disorderly eating among women who have been influenced by this negative content. 

Therefore, there is a need for people to evaluate and identify reliable health information, competencies commonly known as health literacy. This has led to efforts by governments and public health organizations to use social media to interact with users, to limited success.

Other social media, such as pro-anorexia sites, have been found in studies to cause significant risk of harm by reinforcing negative health-related behaviors through social networking, especially in adolescents.

Social media affects the way a person views themselves. The constant comparison to edited photos, of other individual's and their living situations, can cause many negative emotions.

This can lead to not eating, and isolation. As more and more people continue to use social media for the wrong reasons, it increases the feeling of loneliness in adults.

Further information:
During the coronavirus pandemic, the spread of information throughout social media regarding treatments against the virus has also influenced different health behaviors. 

For example, People who use more social media and belief more in conspiracy theory in social media during the COVID-19 pandemic had worse mental health and is predictive of their compliance to health behaviors such as hand-washing during the pandemic.


Effects on individual and collective memory:

News media and television journalism have been a key feature in the shaping of American collective memory for much of the 20th century. Indeed, since the colonial era of the United States, news media has influenced collective memory and discourse about national development and trauma.

In many ways, mainstream journalists have maintained an authoritative voice as the storytellers of the American past. Their documentary-style narratives, detailed exposés, and their positions in the present make them prime sources for public memory.

Specifically, news media journalists have shaped collective memory on nearly every major national event—from the deaths of social and political figures to the progression of political hopefuls.

Journalists provide elaborate descriptions of commemorative events in U.S. history and contemporary popular cultural sensations. Many Americans learn the significance of historical events and political issues through news media, as they are presented on popular news stations. 

However, journalistic influence has grown less important, whereas social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, provide a constant supply of alternative news sources for users.

As social networking becomes more popular among older and younger generations, sites such as Facebook and YouTube can gradually undermine the traditionally authoritative voices of news media. For example, American citizens contest media coverage of various social and political events as they see fit, inserting their voices into the narratives about America's past and present and shaping their own collective memories. 

An example of this is the public explosion of the Trayvon Martin shooting in Sanford, Florida. News media coverage of the incident was minimal until social media users made the story recognizable through their constant discussion of the case. Approximately one month after Martin's death, its online coverage by everyday Americans garnered national attention from mainstream media journalists, in turn exemplifying media activism. 

In some ways, the spread of this tragic event through alternative news sources parallels that of Emmett Till—whose murder by lynching in 1955 became a national story after it was circulated in African-American and Communist newspapers.

Negative interpersonal interactions:
Further information: Cyberbullying

Social media use sometimes involves negative interactions between users. Angry or emotional conversations can lead to real-world interactions, which can get users into dangerous situations. Some users have experienced threats of violence online and have feared these threats manifesting themselves offline.

Related issues include cyberbullying, online harassment, and 'trolling'. According to cyberbullying statistics from the i-Safe Foundation, over half of adolescents and teens have been bullied online, and about the same number have engaged in cyberbullying. Both the bully and the victim are negatively affected, and the intensity, duration, and frequency of bullying are the three aspects that increase the negative effects on both of them.

Social comparison:

One phenomenon that is commonly studied with social media is the issue of social comparison. People compare their own lives to the lives of their friends through their friends' posts.

Because people are motivated to portray themselves in a way that is appropriate to the situation and serves their best interests, often the things posted online are the positive aspects of people's lives, making other people question why their own lives are not as exciting or fulfilling.

One study in 2017 found that problematic social media use (i.e., feeling addicted to social media) was related to lower life satisfaction and self-esteem scores; the authors speculate that users may feel if their life is not exciting enough to put online it is not as good as their friends or family.

Studies have shown that self-comparison on social media can have dire effects on physical and mental health because they give us the ability to seek approval and compare ourselves. 

In one study, women reported that social media are the most influential sources of their body image satisfaction; while men reported them as the second most impacting factor.

Social media has allowed for people to be constantly surrounded and aware of celebrity images and influencers who hold strong online presence with the number of followers they have. This constant online presence has meant that people are far more aware of what others look like and as such body comparisons have become an issue, as people are far more aware of what the desired body type is.

A study produced by King university showed that 87% of women and 65% of men compared themselves to images found on social media.

There are efforts to combat these negative effects, such as the use of the tag #instagramversusreality and #instagramversusreallife, that have been used to promote body positivity.

In a related study, women aged 18–30 were shown posts using this hashtag that contained side-by-side images of women in the same clothes and setting, but one image was enhanced for Instagram, while the other was an unedited, “realistic” version. Women who participated in this experiment noted a decrease in body dissatisfaction.

Sleep disturbance:

According to a study released in 2017 by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, the link between sleep disturbance and the use of social media was clear. It concluded that blue light had a part to play—and how often they logged on, rather than time spent on social media sites, was a higher predictor of disturbed sleep, suggesting "an obsessive 'checking'". 

The strong relationship of social media use and sleep disturbance has significant clinical ramifications for younger adults health and well-being. In a recent study, we have learned that people in the highest quartile for social media use per week report the most sleep disturbance. The median number of minutes of social media use per day is 61 minutes.

Lastly, we have learned that females are more inclined to experience high levels of sleep disturbance than males. Many teenagers suffer from sleep deprivation as they spend long hours at night on their phones, and this, in turn, could affect grades as they will be tired and unfocused in school. 

In a study from 2011, it was found that time spent on Facebook has a strong negative relationship with overall GPA, but it was unclear if this was related to sleep disturbances. Since blue light has increasingly become an issue smartphone developers have added a night mode feature that does not cause as much strain to the eyes as a blue light would.

Emotional effects:
See also: Social media and suicide

One studied emotional effect of social media is 'Facebook depression', which is a type of depression that affects adolescents who spend too much of their free time engaging with social media sites. This may lead to problems such as reclusiveness which can negatively damage one's health by creating feelings of loneliness and low self-esteem among young people. 

Using a phone to look at social media before bed has become a popular trend among teenagers and this has led to a lack of sleep and inability to stay awake during school. Social media applications curate content that encourages users to keep scrolling to the point where they lose track of time. 

There are studies that show children's self-esteem is positively affected by positive comments on social media and negatively affected self-esteem by negative comments. This affects the way that people look at themselves on a "worthiness" scale.  

A 2017 study of almost 6,000 adolescent students showed that those who self-reported addiction-like symptoms of social media use were more likely to report low self-esteem and high levels of depressive symptoms. From the findings on a population-based study, there is about 37% increase in the likelihood of major depression among adolescents. 

In a different study conducted in 2007, those who used the most multiple social media platforms (7 to 11) had more than three times the risk of depression and anxiety than people who used the fewest (0 to 2).

A second emotional effect is social media burnout, which is defined by Bo Han as ambivalence, emotional exhaustion, and depersonalization. Ambivalence refers to a user's confusion about the benefits she can get from using a social media site. Emotional exhaustion refers to the stress a user has when using a social media site.

Depersonalization refers to the emotional detachment from a social media site a user experiences. The three burnout factors can all negatively influence the user's social media continuance. This study provides an instrument to measure the burnout a user can experience when his or her social media "friends" are generating an overwhelming amount of useless information (e.g., "what I had for dinner", "where I am now").

A third emotional effect is the "fear of missing out" (FOMO), which is defined as the "pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent." FOMO has been classified by some as a form of social anxiety. It is associated with checking updates on friends' activities on social media. 

Some speculate that checking updates on friends' activities on social media may be associated with negative influences on people's psychological health and well-being because it could contribute to negative mood and depressed feelings. 

Looking at friends' stories or posts on various social media applications can lead users to feel left out and become upset because they are not having as fun as others. This is a very common issue between teen users of certain apps and it continues to affect their personal well-being.

On the other hand, social media can sometimes have a supportive effect on individuals who use it. Twitter has been used more by the medical community. While Twitter can facilitate academic discussion among health professionals and students, it can also provide a supportive community for these individuals by fostering a sense of community and allowing individuals to support each other through tweets, likes, and comments.

Social impacts:

Disparity:
Further information: Digital divide

The digital divide is a measure of disparity in the level of access to technology between households, socioeconomic levels or other demographic categories. People who are homeless, living in poverty, elderly people and those living in rural or remote communities may have little or no access to computers and the Internet; in contrast, middle class and upper-class people in urban areas have very high rates of computer and Internet access.

Other models argue that within a modern information society, some individuals produce Internet content while others only consume it, which could be a result of disparities in the education system where only some teachers integrate technology into the classroom and teach critical thinking. While social media has differences among age groups, a 2010 study in the United States found no racial divide. 

Some zero-rating programs offer subsidized data access to certain websites on low-cost plans. Critics say that this is an anti-competitive program that undermines net neutrality and creates a "walled garden" for platforms like Facebook Zero. A 2015 study found that 65% of Nigerians, 61% of Indonesians, and 58% of Indians agree with the statement that "Facebook is the Internet" compared with only 5% in the US.

Eric Ehrmann contends that social media in the form of public diplomacy create a patina of inclusiveness that covers traditional economic interests that are structured to ensure that wealth is pumped up to the top of the economic pyramid, perpetuating the digital divide and post-Marxian class conflict.

He also voices concern over the trend that finds social utilities operating in a quasi-libertarian global environment of oligopoly that requires users in economically challenged nations to spend high percentages of annual income to pay for devices and services to participate in the social media lifestyle. 

Neil Postman also contends that social media will increase an information disparity between "winners" – who are able to use the social media actively – and "losers" – who are not familiar with modern technologies or who do not have access to them.

People with high social media skills may have better access to information about job opportunities, potential new friends, and social activities in their area, which may enable them to improve their standard of living and their quality of life.

Political polarization:
Further information on the political effects of media in general: Mediatization (media)

According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of Americans at least occasionally receive news from social media. Because of algorithms on social media which filter and display news content which are likely to match their users' political preferences (known as a filter bubble), a potential impact of receiving news from social media includes an increase in political polarization due to selective exposure. 

Political polarization refers to when an individual's stance on a topic is more likely to be strictly defined by their identification with a specific political party or ideology than on other factors. Selective exposure occurs when an individual favors information that supports their beliefs and avoids information that conflicts with their beliefs.

A study by Hayat and Samuel-Azran conducted during the 2016 U.S. presidential election observed an "echo chamber" effect of selective exposure among 27,811 Twitter users following the content of cable news shows. 

The Twitter users observed in the study were found to have little interaction with users and content whose beliefs were different from their own, possibly heightening polarization effects. 

Another 2016 study using U.S. elections, conducted by Evans and Clark, revealed gender differences in the political use of Twitter between candidates. While politics is a male dominated arena, on social media the situation appears to be the opposite, with women discussing policy issues at a higher rate than their male counterparts.

The study concluded that an increase in female candidates directly correlates to an increase in the amount of attention paid to policy issues, potentially heightening political polarization.

Efforts to combat selective exposure in social media may also cause an increase in political polarization. A study examining Twitter activity conducted by Bail et al. paid Democrat and Republican participants to follow Twitter handles whose content was different from their political beliefs (Republicans received liberal content and Democrats received conservative content) over a six-week period. 

At the end of the study, both Democrat and Republican participants were found to have increased political polarization in favor of their own parties, though only Republican participants had an increase that was statistically significant.

Though research has shown evidence that social media plays a role in increasing political polarization, it has also shown evidence that social media use leads to a persuasion of political beliefs. 

An online survey consisting of 1,024 U.S. participants was conducted by Diehl, Weeks, and Gil de Zuñiga, which found that individuals who use social media were more likely to have their political beliefs persuaded than those who did not. In particular, those using social media as a means to receive their news were the most likely to have their political beliefs changed. 

Diehl et al. found that the persuasion reported by participants was influenced by the exposure to diverse viewpoints they experienced, both in the content they saw as well as the political discussions they participated in. 

Similarly, a study by Hardy and colleagues conducted with 189 students from a Midwestern state university examined the persuasive effect of watching a political comedy video on Facebook. 

Hardy et al. found that after watching a Facebook video of the comedian/political commentator John Oliver performing a segment on his show, participants were likely to be persuaded to change their viewpoint on the topic they watched (either payday lending or the Ferguson protests) to one that was closer to the opinion expressed by Oliver. 

Furthermore, the persuasion experienced by the participants was found to be reduced if they viewed comments by Facebook users which contradicted the arguments made by Oliver.

Research has also shown that social media use may not have an effect on polarization at all. A U.S. national survey of 1,032 participants conducted by Lee et al. found that participants who used social media were more likely to be exposed to a diverse number of people and amount of opinion than those who did not, although using social media was not correlated with a change in political polarization for these participants.

In a study examining the potential polarizing effects of social media on the political views of its users, Mihailidis and Viotty suggest that a new way of engaging with social media must occur to avoid polarization. 

The authors note that media literacies (described as methods which give people skills to critique and create media) are important to using social media in a responsible and productive way, and state that these literacies must be changed further in order to have the most effectiveness. 

In order to decrease polarization and encourage cooperation among social media users, Mihailidis and Viotty suggest that media literacies must focus on teaching individuals how to connect with other people in a caring way, embrace differences, and understand the ways in which social media has a real impact on the political, social, and cultural issues of the society they are a part of.

Stereotyping:

Recent research has demonstrated that social media, and media in general, have the power to increase the scope of stereotypes not only in children but people of all ages. Both cases of stereotyping of the youth and the elderly are prime examples of ageism. The presumed characteristics of the individual being stereotyped can have both negative and positive connotations but frequently carry an opposing viewpoint.

For example, the youth on social media platforms are often depicted as lazy, immature individuals who oftentimes have no drive or passion for other activities. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, much of the youth were accused for spreading the disease and were blamed for the continuous lockdowns across the world. 

These misrepresentations make it difficult for the youth to find new efforts and prove others wrong, especially when a large group of individuals believe that the stereotypes are highly accurate. Considering the youthful groups that are present on social media are frequently in a new stage of their lives and preparing to make life-changing decisions, it is essential that the stereotypes are diminished so that they don’t feel invalidated.

Further, stereotyping often occurs for the elderly as they are presumed to be a group of individuals who are unaware of the proper functions and slang usage on social media.

These stereotypes often seek to exclude older generations from participating in trends or engaging them in other activities on digital platforms.

In Spain:

Three researchers at Blanquerna University, Spain, examined how adolescents interact with social media and specifically Facebook. They suggest that interactions on the website encourage representing oneself in the traditional gender constructs, which helps maintain gender stereotypes. 

The authors noted that girls generally show more emotion in their posts and more frequently change their profile pictures, which according to some psychologists can lead to self-objectification. 

On the other hand, the researchers found that boys prefer to portray themselves as strong, independent, and powerful. For example, men often post pictures of objects and not themselves, and rarely change their profile pictures; using the pages more for entertainment and pragmatic reasons.

In contrast, girls generally post more images that include themselves, friends and things they have emotional ties to, which the researchers attributed that to the higher emotional intelligence of girls at a younger age.

The authors sampled over 632 girls and boys from the ages of 12–16 from Spain in an effort to confirm their beliefs. The researchers concluded that masculinity is more commonly associated with positive psychological well-being, while femininity displays less psychological well-being. 

​Furthermore, the researchers discovered that people tend not to completely conform to either stereotype, and encompass desirable parts of both. Users of Facebook generally use their profiles to reflect that they are a "normal" person. In that study, social media was found to uphold gender stereotypes both feminine and masculine.

The researchers also noted that traditional stereotypes are often upheld by boys more so than girls. The authors described how neither stereotype was entirely positive, but most people viewed masculine values as more positive.

Effects on youth communication:

Social media has allowed for mass cultural exchange and intercultural communication. As different cultures have different value systems, cultural themes, grammar, and world views, they also communicate differently. 

The emergence of social media platforms fused together different cultures and their communication methods, blending together various cultural thinking patterns and expression styles.

Social media has affected the way youth communicate, by introducing new forms of language. Abbreviations have been introduced to cut down on the time it takes to respond online. The commonly known "LOL" has become globally recognized as the abbreviation for "laugh out loud" thanks to social media and use by people of all ages particularly as people grow up.

Another trend that influences the way youth communicates is (through) the use of hashtags. With the introduction of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, the hashtag was created to easily organize and search for information. Hashtags can be used when people want to advocate for a movement, store content or tweets from a movement for future use, and allow other social media users to contribute to a discussion about a certain movement by using existing hashtags.

Using hashtags as a way to advocate for something online makes it easier and more accessible for more people to acknowledge it around the world. As hashtags such as #tbt ("throwback Thursday") become a part of online communication, it influenced the way in which youth share and communicate in their daily lives.

Because of these changes in linguistics and communication etiquette, researchers of media semiotics have found that this has altered youth's communications habits and more.

Social media has offered a new platform for peer pressure with both positive and negative communication. From Facebook comments to likes on Instagram, how the youth communicate, and what is socially acceptable is now heavily based on social media.

​Social media does make kids and young adults more susceptible to peer pressure. The American Academy of Pediatrics has also shown that bullying, the making of non-inclusive friend groups, and sexual experimentation have increased situations related to cyberbullying, issues with privacy, and the act of sending sexual images or messages to someone's mobile device.

This includes issues of sexting and revenge porn among minors, and the resulting legal implications and issues, and resulting risk of trauma. On the other hand, social media also benefits the youth and how they communicate. Adolescents can learn basic social and technical skills that are essential in society. 

Through the use of social media, kids and young adults are able to strengthen relationships by keeping in touch with friends and family, make more friends, and participate in community engagement activities and services.

Criticism, debate and controversy:

Criticisms of social media range from criticisms of the ease of use of specific platforms and their capabilities, disparity of information available, issues with trustworthiness and reliability of information presented, the impact of social media use on an individual's concentration, ownership of media content, and the meaning of interactions created by social media.

Although some social media platforms, such as servers in the decentralized Fediverse, offer users the opportunity to cross-post between independently run servers using a standard protocol such as ActivityPub, the dominant social network platforms have been criticized for poor interoperability between platforms, which leads to the creation of information silos, viz. isolated pockets of data contained in one social media platform. 

However, it is also argued that social media has positive effects, such as allowing the democratization of the Internet while also allowing individuals to advertise themselves and form friendships. 

Others have noted that the term "social" cannot account for technological features of a platform alone, hence the level of sociability should be determined by the actual performances of its users. There has been a dramatic decrease in face-to-face interactions as more and more social media platforms have been introduced with the threat of cyber-bullying and online sexual predators including groomers being more prevalent. 

Social media may expose children to images of alcohol, tobacco, and sexual behaviors. In regards to cyber-bullying, it has been proven that individuals who have no experience with cyber-bullying often have a better well-being than individuals who have been bullied online.

Twitter is increasingly a target of heavy activity of marketers. Their actions focused on gaining massive numbers of followers, include use of advanced scripts and manipulation techniques that distort the prime idea of social media by abusing human trustfulness.

British-American entrepreneur and author Andrew Keen criticized social media in his 2007 book The Cult of the Amateur, writing, "Out of this anarchy, it suddenly became clear that what was governing the infinite monkeys now inputting away on the Internet was the law of digital Darwinism, the survival of the loudest and most opinionated. Under these rules, the only way to intellectually prevail is by infinite filibustering." 

This is also relative to the issue "justice" in the social network. For example, the phenomenon "Human flesh search engine" in Asia raised the discussion of "private-law" brought by social network platform.

Comparative media professor José van Dijck contends in her book The Culture of Connectivity (2013) that to understand the full weight of social media, their technological dimensions should be connected to the social and the cultural. She critically describes six social media platforms.

One of her findings is the way Facebook had been successful in framing the term 'sharing' in such a way that third party use of user data is neglected in favor of intra-user connectedness. The fragmentation of modern society, in part due to social media, has been likened to a modern Tower of Babel.

Essena O'Neill attracted international coverage when she explicitly left social media.

Trustworthiness and reliability:

There has been speculation that social media has become perceived as a trustworthy source of information by a large number of people. The continuous interpersonal connectivity on social media, for example, may lead to people regarding peer recommendations as indicators of the reliability of information sources. This trust can be exploited by marketers, who can utilize consumer-created content about brands and products to influence public perceptions.

The trustworthiness of information can be improved by fact-checking. Some social media has started to employ this.

Evgeny Morozov, a 2009–2010 Yahoo fellow at Georgetown University, contended that information uploaded to Twitter may have little relevance to the masses of people who do not use Twitter. In an article for the magazine Dissent titled "Iran: Downside to the 'Twitter Revolution'", Morozov wrote:
  • [B]y its very design Twitter only adds to the noise: it's simply impossible to pack much context into its 140 characters.
  • All other biases are present as well: in a country like Iran it's mostly pro-Western, technology-friendly and iPod-carrying young people who are the natural and most frequent users of Twitter. They are a tiny and, most important, extremely untypical segment of the Iranian population (the number of Twitter users in Iran — a country of more than seventy million people — was estimated at less than twenty thousand before the protests). 
  • In contrast, in the United States (where Twitter originated), the social network had 306 million accounts as of 2012.

Professor Matthew Auer of Bates College casts doubt on the conventional wisdom that social media are open and participatory. He also speculates on the emergence of "anti-social media" used as "instruments of pure control".

Data harvesting and data mining:
Further information: Social media mining

Social media 'mining' is a type of data mining, a technique of analyzing data to detect patterns. Social media mining is a process of representing, analyzing, and extracting actionable patterns from data collected from people's activities on social media.

Google mines data in many ways including using an algorithm in Gmail to analyze information in emails. This use of the information will then affect the type of advertisements shown to the user when they use Gmail.

Facebook has partnered with many data mining companies such as Datalogix and BlueKai to use customer information for targeted advertising. Massive amounts of data from social platforms allows scientists and machine learning researchers to extract insights and build product features.

Ethical questions of the extent to which a company should be able to utilize a user's information have been called "big data". Users tend to click through Terms of Use agreements when signing up on social media platforms, and they do not know how their information will be used by companies. This leads to questions of privacy and surveillance when user data is recorded. Some social media outlets have added capture time and Geotagging that helps provide information about the context of the data as well as making their data more accurate.

On April 10, 2018, in a hearing held in response to revelations of data harvesting by Cambridge Analytica, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook chief executive, faced questions from senators on a variety of issues, from privacy to the company's business model and the company's mishandling of data.

This was Mr. Zuckerberg's first appearance before Congress, prompted by the revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign, harvested the data of an estimated 87 million Facebook users to psychologically profile voters during the 2016 election.

Zuckerberg was pressed to account for how third-party partners could take data without users’ knowledge. Lawmakers grilled the 33-year-old executive on the proliferation of so-called fake news on Facebook, Russian interference during the 2016 presidential election and censorship of conservative media.

Critique of activism:
Further information: Social media activism

​For The New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, the role of social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, in revolutions and protests is overstated. On one hand, social media makes it easier for individuals, and in this case activists, to express themselves. On the other hand, it is harder for that expression to have an impact. 

Gladwell distinguishes between social media activism and high-risk activism, which brings real changes. Activism and especially high-risk activism involves strong-tie relationships, hierarchies, coordination, motivation, exposing oneself to high risks, making sacrifices.

Gladwell discusses that social media are built around weak ties and he argues that "social networks are effective at increasing participation — by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires." According to him, "Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice, but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice."

Disputing Gladwell's theory, in the study "Perceptions of Social Media for Politics: Testing the Slacktivism Hypothesis", Kwak and colleagues (2018) conducted a survey which found that people who are politically expressive on social media are also more likely to participate in offline political activity.

Ownership of content:

Social media content is generated through social media interactions done by users through the site. There has always been a huge debate on the ownership of the content on social media platforms because it is generated by the users and hosted by the company. Added to this is the danger to the security of information, which can be leaked to third parties with economic interests in the platform, or parasites who comb the data for their own databases.

Privacy:
Main article: Privacy concerns with social networking services

Privacy rights advocates warn users on social media about the collection of their personal data. Some information is captured without the user's knowledge or consent through electronic tracking and third-party applications.

Data may also be collected for law enforcement and governmental purposes, by social media intelligence using data mining techniques. Data and information may also be collected for third party use. When information is shared on social media, that information is no longer private.

There have been many cases in which young persons especially, share personal information, which can attract predators. It is very important to monitor what you share and to be aware of who you could potentially be sharing that information with.

Teens especially share significantly more information on the internet now than they have in the past. Teens are much more likely to share their personal information, such as email address, phone number, and school names. 

Studies suggest that teens are not aware of what they are posting and how much of that information can be accessed by third parties.

There are arguments that "privacy is dead" and that with social media growing more and more, some heavy social media users appear to have become quite unconcerned with privacy.

Others argue, however, that people are still very concerned about their privacy, but are being ignored by the companies running these social networks, who can sometimes make a profit off of sharing someone's personal information. There is also a disconnect between social media user's words and their actions.

Studies suggest that surveys show that people want to keep their lives private, but their actions on social media suggest otherwise. Everyone leaves a trail when they use social media.

Every time someone creates a new social media account, they provide personal information that can include their name, birthdate, geographic location, and personal interests.

In addition, companies collect data on user behaviors. All of this data is stored and leveraged by companies to better target advertising to their users.

Another factor is ignorance of how accessible social media posts are. Some social media users who have been criticized for inappropriate comments stated that they did not realize that anyone outside their circle of friends would read their posts; in fact, on some social media sites, unless a user selects higher privacy settings, their content is shared with a wide audience.

According to a 2016 article diving into the topic of sharing privately and the effect social media has on expectations of privacy, "1.18 billion people will log into their Facebook accounts, 500 million tweets will be sent, and there will be 95 million photos and videos posted on Instagram" in a day.

Much of the privacy concerns individuals face stem from their own posts on a form of a social network. Users have the choice to share voluntarily and have been ingrained into society as routine and normative. Social media are a snapshot of our lives; a community we have created on the behaviors of sharing, posting, liking, and communicating. Sharing has become a phenomenon which social media and networks have uprooted and introduced to the world. 

The idea of privacy is redundant; once something is posted, its accessibility remains constant even if we select who is potentially able to view it. People desire privacy in some shape or form, yet also contribute to social media, which makes it difficult to maintain privacy.

Mills offers options for reform which include copyright and the application of the law of confidence; more radically, a change to the concept of privacy itself.

A 2014 Pew Research Center survey found that 91% of Americans "agree" or "strongly agree" that people have lost control over how personal information is collected and used by all kinds of entities.

Some 80% of social media users said they were concerned about advertisers and businesses accessing the data they share on social media platforms, and 64% said the government should do more to regulate advertisers.

According to the Wall Street Journal published on February 17, 2019, According to UK law, Facebook did not protect certain aspects of the user data.

The US government announced banning TikTok and WeChat from the States over national security concerns. The shutdown was announced for September 20, 2020. Access to TikTok was extended till 12 November 2020, and a federal court ruling on October 30, 2020, has blocked further implementation of restrictions that would lead to TikTok's shutdown.

Criticism of commercialization:

The commercial development of social media has been criticized as the actions of consumers in these settings have become increasingly value-creating, for example when consumers contribute to the marketing and branding of specific products by posting positive reviews.

As such, value-creating activities also increase the value of a specific product, which could, according to marketing professors Bernad Cova and Daniele Dalli (2009), lead to what they refer to as "double exploitation". Companies are getting consumers to create content for the companies' websites for which the consumers are not paid.

As social media usage has become increasingly widespread, social media has to a large extent come to be subjected to commercialization by marketing companies and advertising agencies. 

In 2014 Christofer Laurell, a digital marketing researcher, suggested that the social media landscape currently consists of three types of places because of this development: consumer-dominated places, professionally dominated places and places undergoing commercialization.
 
As social media becomes commercialized, this process has been shown to create novel forms of value networks stretching between consumer and producer in which a combination of personal, private and commercial contents are created.

Debate over addiction:
Main article: Problematic social media

As one of the biggest preoccupations among adolescents is social media usage, in 2011 researchers began using the term "Facebook addiction disorder" (F.A.D.), a form of internet addiction disorder. 

FAD is characterized by compulsive use of the social networking site Facebook, which generally results in physical or psychological complications. The disorder, although not classified in the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) or by the World Health Organization, has been the subject of several studies focusing on the negative effects of social media use on the psyche.

One German study published in 2017 investigated a correlation between extensive use of the social networking site and narcissism; the results were published in the journal PLoS One. According to the findings: "FAD was significantly positively related to the personality trait [of] narcissism and to negative mental health variables (depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms)."

As the number of SNS users increases, "SNS addiction" is emerging as a social problem. Concerns about excessive use of smartphones are not new, but the tendency to accelerate, especially in the COVID-19 era, seems clear. One thing that's creepy is that SNS addiction is not based on an individual's disposition or personality, but rather a result of the sophisticated design of SNS. (See Netflix series - Social dilemma)

When users take a break from SNS, they send all kinds of alarms to attract attention. They send an alarm to see who left a comment, who pressed like, and even to the comments that my acquaintance left elsewhere. AI is behind all these processes.

In the United States, the harmful effects of SNS addiction are revealed as the timing of the spread of SNS coincides with the rapid increase in suicide rates and suicide attempts among teenagers. There are only two types of industries that call customers "users", one for drugs and one for software, which is significant.

While these issues regarding social media addiction are continuous and increasing, there are ways to help reduce and curb one's social media obsessions. Turning off social media notifications (temporary or long-term) is one solution that can reduce social media addiction by reducing distraction, for those who struggle with the habit of constantly "refreshing" social media platforms and checking for new notifications.

However, a platform that came up with measures to prevent such addiction of SNS users has also emerged. Instagram has upgraded its function to inform users that they have seen all new posts by introducing the "all court up" function. Instagram also announced that it will soon add a "Usage checks" function that shows how much time it spends on Instagram. Experts advise that we should have a firm will to overcome SNS addiction.

Some feel that modern problems require modern solutions, so we are starting to see modern approaches like that of Dr. Alok Kanojia (a psychiatrist known online as Dr. K) who runs not only a coaching program but also YouTube and Twitch channels called HealthyGamerGG, where he talks about mental health and gaming, and conducts interviews.

Debate over use in academic settings:
Main articles:  ​
Having social media in the classroom was a controversial topic in the 2010s. Many parents and educators have been fearful of the repercussions of having social media in the classroom. 

There are concerns that social media tools can be misused for cyberbullying or sharing inappropriate content. As result, cell phones have been banned from some classrooms, and some schools have blocked many popular social media websites.

Many schools have realized that they need to loosen restrictions, teach digital citizenship skills, and even incorporate these tools into classrooms. Some schools permit students to use smartphones or tablet computers in class, as long as the students are using these devices for academic purposes, such as doing research.

Using Facebook in class allows for the integration of multimodal content such as student-created photographs and video and URLs to other texts, in a platform that many students are already familiar with.

Twitter can be used to enhance communication building and critical thinking and it provides students with an informal "back channel", and extend discussion outside of class time.

Censorship by governments:
Main article: Internet censorship

Social media often features in political struggles to control public perception and online activity.

In some countries, Internet police or secret police monitor or control citizens' use of social media. For example, in 2013 some social media was banned in Turkey after the Taksim Gezi Park protests.

Both Twitter and YouTube were temporarily suspended in the country by a court's decision. A new law, passed by Turkish Parliament, has granted immunity to Telecommunications Directorate (TİB) personnel. The TİB was also given the authority to block access to specific websites without the need for a court order. Yet TİB's 2014 blocking of Twitter was ruled by the constitutional court to violate free speech. 

More recently, in the 2014 Thai coup d'état, the public was explicitly instructed not to 'share' or 'like' dissenting views on social media or face prison. In July of that same year, in response to WikiLeaks' release of a secret suppression order made by the Victorian Supreme Court, media lawyers were quoted in the Australian media to the effect that "anyone who tweets a link to the WikiLeaks report, posts it on Facebook, or shares it in any way online could also face charges". 

On 27 July 2020, in Egypt, two women were sentenced to two years of imprisonment for posting TikTok videos, which the government claims are “violating family values”.

Decentralization and open standards:

Mastodon, GNU social, Diaspora, Friendica and other compatible software packages operate as a loose federation of mostly volunteer-operated servers, called the Fediverse, which connect with each other through the open source protocol ActivityPub.

In early 2019, Mastodon successfully blocked the spread of violent right-wing extremism when the Twitter alternative Gab tried to associate with Mastodon, and their independent servers quickly contained its dissemination.

In December 2019, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey made a similar suggestion, stating that efforts would be taken to achieve an "open and decentralized standard for social media". Rather than "de-platforming", such standards would allow a more scalable, and customizable approach to content moderation and censorship, and involve a number of companies, in the way that e-mail servers work.

Deplatforming:
Main articles: Deplatforming and Twitter suspensions

Deplatforming is a form of Internet censorship in which controversial speakers or speech are suspended, banned, or otherwise shut down by social media platforms and other service providers that normally provide a venue for free expression. 

These kinds of actions are similar to alternative dispute resolution.  As early as 2015, platforms such as Reddit began to enforce selective bans based, for example, on terms of service that prohibit "hate speech". 

According to technology journalist Declan McCullagh, "Silicon Valley's efforts to pull the plug on dissenting opinions" have included, as of 2018, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube "devising excuses to suspend ideologically disfavored accounts".

Law professor Glenn Reynolds dubbed 2018 the "Year of De-platforming", in an August 2018 article in The Wall Street Journal. According to Reynolds, in 2018, "the internet giants decided to slam the gates on a number of people and ideas they don't like. If you rely on someone else's platform to express unpopular ideas, especially ideas on the right, you're now at risk." 

Reynolds cited Alex Jones, Gavin McInnes and Dennis Prager as prominent 2018 victims of deplatforming based on their political views, noting, "Extremists and controversialists on the left have been relatively safe from de-platforming."

Most people see social media platforms as censoring objectionable political views.

Reproduction of class distinctions:

According to Danah Boyd (2011), the media plays a large role in shaping people's perceptions of specific social networking services.

When looking at the site MySpace, after adults started to realize how popular the site was becoming with teens, news media became heavily concerned with teen participation and the potential dangers they faced using the site. As a result, teens avoided joining the site because of the associated risks (e.g. child predators and lack of control), and parents began to publicly denounce the site. Ultimately, the site was labeled as dangerous, and many were detracted from interacting with the site.

As Boyd also describes, when Facebook initially launched in 2004, it solely targeted college students and access was intentionally limited. Facebook started as a Harvard-only social networking service before expanding to all other Ivy League schools. It then made its way to other top universities and ultimately to a wider range of schools.

Because of its origins, some saw Facebook as an "elite" social networking service. While it was very open and accepting to some, it seemed to outlaw and shun out most others who didn't fit that "elite" categorization. These narratives propagated by the media influenced the large movement of teenage users from one social networking service to another.

Use by extremist groups:
Main article: Terrorism and social media

According to LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (2018) by P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, the use of effective social media marketing techniques is not only limited to celebrities, corporations, and governments, but also extremist groups to carry out political objectives based on extremist ideologies. 

The use of social media by ISIS and Al-Qaeda has been used primarily to influence operations in areas of operation and gain the attention of sympathizers of extremist ideologies.

Social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and various encrypted-messaging applications have been used to increase the recruiting of members into these extremist groups, both locally and internationally.

Larger platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and various others have received backlash for allowing this type of content on their platform (see Use of social media by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). The use of social media to further extremist objectives is not only limited to Islamic terrorism, but also extreme nationalist groups across the world, and more prominently, right wing extremist groups based out of the United States.

2021 United States Capitol attack:
Main article: 2021 United States Capitol attack

As many of the traditional social media platforms banned hate speech (see Online hate speech), several platforms have become popular among right-wing extremists to carry out planning and communication of thoughts and organized events; these application became known as "Alt-tech".

Platforms such as Telegram, Parler, and Gab were used during the 2021 storming of the US Capitol in Washington, D.C. The use of this social media was used to coordinate attacks on the Capitol. 

Several members within these groups shared tips on how to avoid law enforcement and what their plans were with regards to carrying out their objectives; some users called for killings of law enforcement and politicians.

Deceased users:
Further information: Death and the Internet

Social media content, like most content on the web, will continue to persist unless the user deletes it. This brings up the inevitable question of what to do once a social media user dies, and no longer has access to their content. 

As it is a topic that is often left undiscussed, it is important to note that each social media platform, e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, has created its own guidelines for users who have died. 

In most cases on social media, the platforms require a next-of-kin to prove that the user is deceased, and then give them the option of closing the account or maintaining it in a 'legacy' status. Ultimately, social media users should make decisions about what happens to their social media accounts before they pass, and make sure their instructions are passed on to their next-of-kin.

See also:







Media Consumption and Viewer Habits Picture below: How Media Consumption Has Changed Over the Last Decade (2011-2021)
Media consumption or media diet is the sum of information and entertainment media taken in by an individual or group. It includes activities such as interacting with: 
An active media consumer must have the capacity for skepticism, judgement, free thinking, questioning, and understanding.

History:

For as long as there have been words and pictures, the people of the world have been consuming media. Improved technology such as the printing press has fed increased consumption. Around 1600 the camera obscura was perfected. Light was inverted through a small hole or lens from outside, and projected onto a surface or screen, creating a moving image. This new medium had a very small effect on society compared to the old ones.

The development of photography in the middle 19th century made those images permanent, greatly reducing the cost of pictures. By the end of the century millions of consumers were seeing new, professionally made photographs every day.

In the 1860s mechanisms such as the zoetrope, mutoscope and praxinoscope that produced two-dimensional drawings in motion were created. They were displayed in public halls for people to observe. These new media foreshadowed the mass media consumption of later years.

Around the 1880s, the development of the motion picture camera allowed individual component images to be captured and stored on a single reel. Motion pictures were projected onto a screen to be viewed by an audience. This moving camera affected the progression of the world immensely, beginning the American film industry as well as early international movements such as German Expressionism, Surrealism and the Soviet Montage.

For the first time people could tell stories on film, and distribute their works to consumers worldwide.

In the 1920s electronic television was working in laboratories, and in the 1930s hundreds of receivers were in use worldwide. By 1941 the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) was broadcasting two 15-minute newscasts a day to a tiny audience on its New York television station.

However, the television industry did not begin to boom until the general post–World War II economic expansion. Eventually television began to incorporate color, and multiple broadcasting networks were created.

Computers were developed in the middle 20th century and commercialized in the 1960s. Apple and other companies sold computers for hobbyists in the 1970s, and in 1981 IBM released computers intended for consumers.

On August 6, 1991, the internet and World Wide Web, long in use by computer specialists, became available to the public. This was the start of the commercialized Internet that people use today.

In 1999, Friends Reunited, the first social media site, was released to the public. Since then, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks have been created. Facebook and Twitter are the top social media sites in terms of usage. Facebook has a total of 1,230,000,000 consumers while Twitter has 645,750,000. Both companies are worth billions of dollars and continue to grow.

Overall media consumption has immensely increased over time, from the era of the introduction of motion pictures, to the age of social networks and the internet.

People involved:

Media is the sum of information and entertainment media taken in by an individual or group. The first source of media was solely word of mouth. When written language was established, scrolls were passed, but mass communication was never an option.

It wasn't until the printing press that media could be consumed on a high level. Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith and businessman from the mining town of Mainz in southern Germany printing press. His technology allowed books, newspapers, and flyers to be printed and distributed on a mass level.

The first newspaper written on paper was done by Benjamin Harris in the British-American Colonies. The invention of a newspaper was one of the most influential pieces in media consumption history, because it pertained to everyone.

Eventually communication reached an electronic state, and the telegraph was invented. Harrison Dyar, who sent electrical sparks through chemically treated paper tape to burn dots and dashes, invented the first telegraph in the USA. The telegraph was the first piece of equipment that allowed users to send electronic messages.

A more developed version came from Samuel Morse, whose telegraph printed code on tape and was operated using a keypad and an earpiece. The pattern of communication soon became known as Morse code.

Inventors Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell both independently designed the telephone. The telephone was simple enough for everyone to use and didn't require learning a code.

Soon after the telephone came the radio. Combining technology from both the telegraph and telephone, Guglielmo Marconi sent and received his first radio signal in 1895.

Finally in 1947, after a long period of development, television exploded as a medium. Not one person is responsible for the creation of the television, but Marvin Middlemark invented "rabbit ears" in 1930, which allowed for televisions to be a commercial product. 

The television has by far been the most influential consumed media and allowed news to spread on a visual level.

In 1976, Apple created the first consumer computer. The computer was the start of mass written communication using email. Apple continues to be a leading company in computer use.

In 1998, the first ever social media site SixDegrees.com was created by Andrew Weinreich. It enabled users to upload a profile and make friends with other users. Shortly later in 1999, Friends Reunited was created by Steve and Julie Pankhurst and friend Jason Porter.

Sites like MySpace created by Tom Anderson gained prominence in the early 2000s. By 2006, Facebook created by Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter created by Jack Dorsey both became available to users throughout the world. These sites remain some of the most popular social networks on the Internet.

Increase:

Among other factors, a person's access to media technology affects the amount and quality of his or her intake. In the United States, for instance, "U.C. San Diego scientists in 2009 estimated the 'average' American consumes 34 gigabytes of media a day." The amount of media consumption among individuals is increasing as new technologies are created.

According to phys.org, a new study done by a researcher at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, says that by 2015, the sum of media asked for and delivered to consumers on mobile devices and their homes would take more than 15 hours a day to see or hear, an amount equivalent to watching nine DVDs' worth of data per person per day.

With social media networks rapidly growing such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, our world of media consumption is reaching a younger and younger age group, making our consumption that much larger as a country. With mobile devices such as smartphones, news, entertainment, shopping and buying are all now at the tip of our fingers, anytime, anywhere.

Positive effects:

There are a number of positive effects of media consumption. Television can have positive effects on children as they are growing up. Shows like Sesame Street teach valuable lessons to children in developmental stages, such as math, the alphabet, kindness, racial equality, and cooperation. Dora the Explorer introduces foreign language to children of all backgrounds in a fun, cooperative environment.

Mass media has a huge grasp on today's adolescents. Many young people use different types of social media daily. Mass media can be used to socialize adolescents from around the world and can help to give them a fundamental understanding of social norms.

Media relating to advertising can also have a positive effect. Some alcohol manufacturers are known to spend at least ten percent of their budget on warnings about the dangers of drinking and driving. Also, studies show that milk consumption (though controversial) shot up in children fifteen years of age and younger due to print and broadcast advertisements.

Many video games can also have positive effects. Games like Wii Tennis and Wii Fit improve hand-eye coordination as well as general mental and physical health.

Video games, including shooting games, may positively impact a child's learning, as well as physical and mental health and social skills. Even games rated for mature audiences have been found to be beneficial to the development of children according to a study that was published by the American Psychological Association (APA). The study showed that there is a need to look at the positive effects as well as the negative ones. 

When a child plays video games, they naturally develop problem-solving skills. Strategic video games, such as role-playing games, release statistics that the more intense game play improved in problem solving skills and there is a significant rise in school grades as well, according to a study that was taken over a several year span but was published in 2013.

The study also showcased that the creativity of children was also enhanced by playing all genres of video games, including mature rated games. Research revealed that video games benefit children significantly more than other sources of technology.

The internet itself is an overwhelmingly useful resource for people of all ages, effectively serving as a personal library for any who access it. The sheer volume of educational websites, information and services offered are so immense that research has become a far easier task than it was in any previous period in human history.

Social media has provided invaluable benefits for people over the course of its lifetime and has served as an incredibly effective method of interacting and communicating with others in nearly every part of the world.

Media consumption has proven to serve as an indispensable asset in the educational field, serving both instructors and students alike. Instructors and students consume media for school curricula in Ontario. Media literacy is prominent amongst the youth who have essentially been born into an era where media is a global driving force. When a student learns to approach media sources with a critical lens, it can be observed that all forms of media have no sense of neutrality. 

Students who consume media are capable of questioning the validity of the media they are exposed to, in turn developing their own sense of critical thinking. To broaden their comprehension skills, students often find it useful to question an author's purpose, the reasoning for the placement of specific images or motifs, the representation of content and its meaning to individuals, and the effects of the media on individual and societal thinking.

Media related to learning is typically considered a source as well as a tool. Since its start, many have successfully used Rosetta Stone (software) to assist in the process of learning a new language. Rosetta Stone is a source compatible with several platforms i.e. (iPad, Tablet, Phone Apps Websites).

Negative effects:

Media consumption can have a wide range of negative behavioral and emotional effects. There are many instances of violence in movies, television, video games and websites which can affect one's level of aggression. These violent depictions can desensitize viewers to acts of violence and can also provoke mimicking of the acts. Since violence is so rampant in media, viewers believe they live in a more violent world than they actually do.

The reach of media is expanding globally and with this television has become a vice around the world. Television addiction has been labeled as the plug-in drug since 1977. Over the years televisions are now located in almost every home, according to most recent estimates taken by Nielsen in the U.S. alone there are 116.4 million T.V. homes.

Television can have a negative impact on adolescents and cause them to behave in a manner that is not part of normal social norm. In an article about media violence on society it states that extensive TV viewing among adolescents and young adults is associated with subsequent aggressive acts. 

Programs that portray violent acts can change an adolescent's view on violence and this may lead them to develop aggressive behavior. These shows usually portray a person who commits a crime or resorts to violence. They also show that these people go unpunished for their crime, creating the notion that crime is something a person can get away with. Studies show that 65% of people between the age of 8 to 18 have a television in their room. 

The average high-schooler watches, on average, 14 hours of television a week. Excessive television viewing and computer game playing has also been associated with many psychiatric symptoms, especially emotional and behavioral symptoms, somatic complaints, attention problems such as hyperactivity, and family interaction problems.

When adolescents watch television for long periods of time, they spend less time being active and engaged in physical activity. Many adolescents who spend large amounts of time watching television see actors as role models and try to emulate them by trying to be like them this can also have a negative impact on people's body images, mostly women. 

After seeing beautiful and thinner than average women in the media, viewers may feel worse about themselves and sometimes develop eating disorders. 

Some believe that the reason obesity rates have greatly increased in the last 20 years is due to increased media consumption. This is due to the fact that children are spending much more time playing video games and watching television than exercising. Social media is said to also cause anxiety and depression.

Research suggests that young people who spend more than 2 hours per day on social media are more likely to report poor mental health, including psychological distress.

Numerous studies have also shown that media consumption has a significant association with poor sleep quality. Television and computer game exposure affect children's sleep and deteriorate verbal cognitive performance.

Another problem that has developed due to increased media consumption is that people are becoming less independent. With text messaging and social media, people want instant gratification from their friends and often feel hurt if they do not receive an immediate response. Instead of having self-validation, people often need validation from others.

Another issue with independence is that since children frequently get cellphones when they are very young, they are always connected and never truly alone. Today, many children do not have the rite of passage of being on their own because they can always call their parents if they need help or are frightened.

Minorities are often put in a negative light in the media as well, with blacks being portrayed as criminals, Hispanics portrayed as illegal aliens, and people from the Middle East portrayed as terrorists. Research has shown that consuming much media with headlines that depict minorities in negative ways can affect how people think.

Effects on Self-Esteem:

Media has played a huge role in society for years in selling people on the expectations of how an ideal male and female body should look. These images of the "ideal body" can have a very negative effect on self-esteem in both men and women. These images can play significant role in eating disorders in men and women as well. 

The idea of body comparison goes back to Festinger's (1954) Social Comparison Theory. Festinger argues that individuals make body comparisons in areas for which they relate. If someone who is over-weight and is an environment that focuses on health, thinness, or body images (e.g. the gym or the beach) they may be more likely to see thinness as an ideal that can increase dissatisfaction with their own body.

The more a person engages in body comparison, the more likely they may struggle with low self-esteem and a negative body image. Women are sold to believe that to be beautiful, they must be a size zero and have long legs. Men are sold the notion that they must big biceps and zero body fat.

Reading magazines with images of toned muscular men has been reported to lower body and self-esteem in men and they start worrying more about their own health and physical fitness.

Social media:

The amount of time spent on social media can inform people about their self-esteem. Research has shown that individuals with lower self-esteem may have an easier time expressing themselves on social media rather than in the real world. 

Many people use metrics such as how many people are following them and likes to measure acceptance or rejection from peers. One study from the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, argues that individuals who feel accepted and part of the "in crowd" have a higher sense of self-esteem than those who do not feel as though they are a part of these crowds.

Semiotics of American youth media consumption:

American youth may have personal television sets, laptops, iPods and cell phones all at their disposal. They spend more time with media than any single activity other than sleeping. As of 2008, the average American ages 8 to 18 reported more than 6 hours of daily media use.

The growing phenomenon of "media multitasking"—using several forms of media at the same time—multiplies that figure to 8.5 hours of media exposure daily. Media exposure begins early, typically increases until children begin school, then climbs to a peak of almost 8 hours daily among 11 and 12-year-old children. Media exposure is positively related to risk-taking behaviors and is negatively related to personal adjustment and school performance.

Of teenagers ages 12 to 17 in 2014, 78% had a cell phone, and 47% of those owned smartphones. 23% of teens owned a tablet computer and 93% had a computer or access to one at home. Of teenagers ages 14 to 17, 74% accessed the Internet on mobile devices occasionally. One in four teens were mostly cell phone users, consuming a majority of their media with applications on their phone.

Media consumption, particularly social media consumption, plays a major role in the socialization and social behaviors of adolescents. Socializing through media differs from socializing through school, community, family, and other social functions.

Since adolescents typically have greater control over their media choices than over other social situations face-to-face, many develop self-socialization patterns. This behavior manifests itself actively in personal social development and outcomes due to the vast array of choices made available through social media.

Adolescents have the ability to choose media that best suits their personalities and preferences, which in turn create youth that have a skewed view of the world and limited social interaction skills. Socialization can consequently grow increasingly difficult for youth. Media, parents and peers may each convey conflicting messages to adolescents. With vastly differing views of how to approach various situations, confusion can be apparent and youth may avoid or internalize their social weaknesses.

Social semiotics represent a significant role in how adolescents learn and employ social interaction. Impressionable adolescents regularly imitate the sign systems seen in the media.

These semiotic systems affect their behavior through connotations, narratives, and myths. Adolescents are shaped by the sign systems in the media they consume. For example, many young girls in the 1990s dressed and acted like the Spice Girls, a pop band that gathered prolific and critical acclaim at the time.

Similarly, boy bands created a trend of many teenage boys frosting their hair in the early 2000s. With more exposure to the media and images of models, young women are more likely to conform to the ideals of specific body images. Anorexia, bulimia and models smoking convey to girls that a feminine person is thin, beautiful, and must do certain things to her body to be attractive.

A code of femininity (see media and gender) implies today that a "true" woman is thin, girlish, frail, passive, and focused on serving others. On the other hand, the code of masculinity for a young males raised within the past several decades may include the ideals of profusely individualistic and self-sufficient natures, oft personified in film characters such as cowboys and outlaw bikers.

The images, myths, and narratives of these ideas imply that a "true" man is a relentless problem solver, physically strong, emotionally inexpressive, and at times, a daredevil with little regard for societal expectations and the law of the land.

The never ceasing flood of signs, images, narratives, and myths surrounding consumers of media have the capability to influence behavior through the use of codes. Codes are maps of meaning, systems of signs that are used to interpret behavior. Codes connect semiotic systems of meaning with social structure and values.

The idea of being judged on femininity or clothing relates to experiences later in life, including job interviews and the emphasis placed on reaching financial success.

Media consumption has become an integral part of modern culture and has shaped younger generations through socialization and the interpretations provided for the signs and world around them.

​Effect on Public Attitudes Regarding Crime and Justice:

​Media consumption affects the public's perception of the justice system through the relationship of fear regarding crime, the perceived effectiveness of law enforcement, and the general attitudes about punishment for crime.

The justice system has been consistently portrayed in mass media in negative tandem through the portrayal of criminals, deviants, and law enforcement officials, in turn affecting their overall perception by the public.

A 2003 study by Dowler showed the effects of media consumption influences public attitudes regarding crime and justice. In this study, a relationship between media and crime was found to be dependent on characteristics of the message and receiving audience, where substantial amounts of local crimes reported raised fear, while lower crime amounts lead to a feeling of safety. 

George Gerbner's empirical studies of the impact of media consumption discovered that television viewers of crime-based shows are more fearful of crime than those who are not consuming that type of media.

A study conducted by Chermak, McGarrell, & Gruenewald focused on media coverage of police misconduct, producing results where greater consumption of media portraying dishonesty amongst law enforcement led to increasing confirmation bias in the direction of the officer's guilt.

See also:







Pew Research: How Social Media is Reshaping News

BY MONICA ANDERSON AND ANDREA CAUMONT (SEPTEMBER 24, 2014)

The ever-growing digital native news world now boasts about 5,000 digital news sector jobs, according to our recent calculations, 3,000 of which are at 30 big digital-only news outlets. Many of these digital organizations emphasize the importance of social media in storytelling and engaging their audiences.

As journalists gather for the annual Online News Association conference, here are answers to five questions about social media and the news.
1) How do Social Media sites stack up on news? 

When you take into account both the total reach of a site (the share of Americans who use it) and the proportion of users who get news on the site, Facebook is the obvious news powerhouse among the social media sites. Roughly two-thirds (64%) of U.S. adults use the site, and half of those users get news there — amounting to 30% of the general population.

YouTube is the next biggest social news pathway — about half of Americans use the site, and a fifth of them get news there, which translates to 10% of the adult population and puts the site on par with Twitter. Twitter reaches 16% of Americans and half of those users say they get news there, or 8% of Americans. And although only 3% of the U.S. population use reddit, for those that do, getting news there is a major draw–62% have gotten news from the site.


​2) How do social media users participate in news? 

Half of social network site users have shared news stories, images or videos , and nearly as many  (46%) have discussed a news issue or event. In addition to sharing news on social media, a small number are also covering the news themselves, by posting photos or videos of news events.

Pew Research found that in 2014, 14% of social media users posted their own photos of news events to a social networking site, while 12% had posted videos. This practice has played a role in a number of recent breaking news events, including the riots in Ferguson, Mo.

​3) How do social media users discover news? 

Facebook is an important source of website referrals for many news outlets, but the users who arrive via Facebook spend far less time and consume far fewer pages than those who arrive directly.

The same is true of users arriving by search. Our analysis of comScore data found visitors who go to a news media website directly spend roughly three times as long as those who wind up there through search or Facebook, and they view roughly five times as many pages per month. 

This higher level of engagement from direct visitors is evident whether a site’s traffic is driven by search or social sharing and it has big implications for news organizations who are experimenting with digital subscriptions while endeavoring to build a loyal audience.

​4) What’s the news experience like on Facebook? 
Our study of news consumption on Facebook found Facebook users are experiencing a relatively diverse array of news stories on the site — roughly half of Facebook users regularly see six different topic areas. The most common news people see is entertainment news: 73% of Facebook users regularly see this kind of content on the site. 

Unlike Twitter, where a core function is the distribution of information as news breaks, Facebook is not yet a place many turn to for learning about breaking news. (Though the company may be trying to change that by tweaking its algorithm to make the posts appearing in newsfeed more timely.) Still, just 28% of Facebook news consumers ever use the site to keep up with a news event as it unfolds, less than half of those users would turn to Facebook first to follow breaking news.

​5) How does social media impact the discussion of news events? 

Our recent survey revealed social media doesn’t always facilitate conversation around the important issues of the day. In fact, we found people were less willing to discuss their opinion on the Snowden-NSA story on social media than they were in person. And Facebook and Twitter users were less likely to want to share their opinions in many face-to-face settings, especially if they felt their social audience disagreed with them.
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​
Pew Research Center (By Wikipedia)
The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan American think tank (referring to itself as a "fact tank") based in Washington, D.C.

It provides information on social issues, public opinion, and demographic trends shaping the United States and the world. It also conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, calls people randomly through their cell phone and landline numbers, media content analysis, and other empirical social science research.

The Pew Research Center does not take policy positions and is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts.

History:

In 1990, the Times Mirror Company founded the Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press as a research project, tasked with conducting polls on politics and policy. Andrew Kohut became its director in 1993, and The Pew Charitable Trusts became its primary sponsor in 1996, when it was renamed the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

In 2004, the trust established the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. In 2013, Kohut stepped down as president and became founding director, and Alan Murray became the second president of the center. In October 2014, Michael Dimock, a 14-year veteran of the Pew Research Center, was named president.

Funding:

The Pew Research Center is a nonprofit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization and a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts, its primary funder. For its studies focusing on demographics of religions in the world, the Pew Research Center has been jointly funded by the Templeton Foundation.

Research areas:
​
​The center's research includes the following areas:
  • U.S. politics and policy
  • Journalism and media
  • Internet and technology
  • Science and society
  • Race and ethnicity
  • Religion and public life
  • Global attitudes and trends
  • U.S. social and demographic trends

Reports:

Researchers at the Pew Research Center annually comb through publicly available sources of information and publications. The Pew Research Center released its 10th annual report on Global Restrictions on Religion as part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation.

The annual report looked at events that took place about 18 months to two years before its publication. While the previous reports focused on year-over-year change, this report provides a broader look at the trend in particular regions and in 198 countries and territories.

The report documents how government restrictions on religion and social hostilities involving religion have changed and increased, from 2007 to 2017. It said 52 governments impose high levels of restrictions on religion, up from 40 in 2007, while 56 countries experienced the highest levels of social hostilities involving religion, up from 38 in 2007.

According to the report, laws and policies restricting religious freedom and government favoritism of religious groups are the two types of restrictions that have been the most prevalent.

The trends suggest that religious restrictions have been rising around the world but not so evenly across all geographic regions or all kinds of restrictions.

The center published a new report with the General Social Survey on 13 September 2022 regarding the future trend of religion and reshaping of religion landscape in America. More and more Americans are leaving Christianity and identifying themselves as agnostic, atheist, or none.

The Pew Research Center projects that Christians in America will decline from 64% to "between a little more than half (54%) and just above one-third (35%) by 2070". 

In total, the center and the General Social Survey suggested four possible scenarios:
  1. "a stable rate of people moving in and out of Christianity;
  2. an increasing share of Christians leaving their religion as a decreasing number of people with no religious affiliation switching in;
  3. the same as the former but with no more than 50% of Christians switching their identity;
  4. and a scenario in which no person changes their religion." Christianity may lose the majority ranking by 2070 if the trend continues.

See also:
More About PEW Research Center: Budget: Address:
Website: www.pewresearch.org








Think Tanks in the United States, featuring the Brookings InstitutionFive of the Most Influential Think Tanks pictured below, from Left to Right, include Brookings Institution, Carnegie Endowment, Peterson Institute, Center for Strategic and International Studies, and American Enterprise Institute
​A think tank, or policy institute, is a research institute that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as: 
Most think tanks are non-governmental organizations, but some are semi-autonomous agencies within government or are associated with particular political parties, businesses or the military. 

Think-tank funding often includes a combination of donations from wealthy individuals and personal contributions, with many also accepting government grants.

Think tanks publish articles, studies or even draft legislation on particular matters of policy or society. This information is then used by governments, businesses, media organizations, social movements or other interest groups. Think tanks range from those associated with highly academic or scholarly activities to those that are overtly ideological and pushing for particular policies, with a wide range among them in terms of the quality of their research.

Later generations of think tanks have tended to be more ideologically oriented. Modern think tanks began as a phenomenon in the United Kingdom in the 19th and early 20th centuries, with most of the rest being established in other English-speaking countries.

Prior to 1945, they tended to focus on the economic issues associated with industrialization and urbanization. During the Cold War, many more American and Western think tanks were established, which often guided governmental Cold War policy. Since 1991, more think tanks have been established in non-Western parts of the world. More than half of all think tanks that exist today were established after 1980.

This article lists global policy institutes according to continental categories and then sub-categories by country within those areas. These listings are not comprehensive, given that more than 7,500 think tanks exist worldwide.

​History:

According to historian Jacob Soll, while the term "think tank" is modern, its concept "can be traced to the humanist academies and scholarly networks of the 16th and 17th centuries." Soll writes that "in Europe, the origins of think tanks go back to the 800s when emperors and kings began arguing with the Catholic Church about taxes.

A tradition of hiring teams of independent lawyers to advise monarchs about their financial and political prerogatives against the church spans from Charlemagne all the way to the 17th century, when the kings of France were still arguing about whether they had the right to appoint bishops and receive a cut of their income."

Soll cites as an early example the Académie des frères Dupuy, created in Paris around 1620 by the brothers Pierre and Jacques Dupuy [fr] and also known after 1635 as the cabinet des frères Dupuy. The Club de l'Entresol, active in Paris between 1723 and 1731, was another prominent example of an early independent think tank focusing on public policy and current affairs, especially economics and foreign affairs.

Several major current think tanks were founded in the 19th century. The Royal United Services Institute was founded in 1831 in London, and the Fabian Society in 1884. The oldest American think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was founded in Washington, D.C., in 1910 by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie charged trustees to use the fund to "hasten the abolition of international war, the foulest blot upon our civilization." 

The Brookings Institution (see below) was founded shortly thereafter in 1916 by Robert S. Brookings and was conceived as a bipartisan "research center modeled on academic institutions and focused on addressing the questions of the federal government."

After 1945, the number of policy institutes increased, with many small new ones forming to express various issues and policy agendas. Until the 1940s, most think tanks were known only by the name of the institution. During the Second World War, think tanks were often referred to as "brain boxes" after the slang term for skull.

Before the 1950s, the phrase "think tank" did not refer to organizations. From its first appearances in the 1890s up to the 1950s, the phrase was most commonly used in American English to colloquially and pejoratively refer to the human brain itself when commenting on an individual's failings (in the sense that something was wrong with that person's "think tank").

Around 1958, the first organization to be regularly described in published writings as "the Think Tank" (note the capitalization and the use of the definite article) was the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

However, the Center does not count itself as and is not perceived to be a think tank in the contemporary sense.  During the 1960s, the phrase "think tank" was attached more broadly to meetings of experts, electronic computers and independent military planning organizations. The prototype and most prominent example of the third category was the RAND Corporation, which was founded in 1946 as an offshoot of Douglas Aircraft and became an independent corporation in 1948. 

In the 1970s, the phrase became more specifically defined in terms of RAND and its ilk. During the 1980s and 1990s, the phrase evolved again to arrive at its broader contemporary meaning of an independent public policy research institute.

For most of the 20th century, such institutes were found primarily in the United States, along with much smaller numbers in Canada, the UK, and Western Europe. Although think tanks had also existed in Japan for some time, they generally lacked independence, having close associations with government ministries or corporations.

There has been a veritable proliferation of "think tanks" around the world that began during the 1980s as a result of globalization, the end of the Cold War, and the emergence of transnational problems. Two-thirds of all the think tanks that exist today were established after 1970 and more than half were established since 1980.

The effect of globalization on the proliferation of think tanks is most evident in regions such as Africa, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and parts of Southeast Asia, where there was a concerted effort by other countries to assist in the creation of independent public policy research organizations.

A survey performed by the Foreign Policy Research Institute's Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program underscores the significance of this effort and documents the fact that most of the think tanks in these regions have been established since 1992. As of 2002, there were more than 4,500 of these institutions worldwide. Many of the more established think tanks, having been created during the Cold War, are focused on international affairs, security studies, and foreign policy.

Types of Think Tanks:

Think tanks vary by ideological perspectives, sources of funding, topical emphasis and prospective consumers. Funding may also represent who or what the institution wants to influence; in the United States, for example, "Some donors want to influence votes in Congress or shape public opinion, others want to position themselves or the experts they fund for future government jobs, while others want to push specific areas of research or education."

A new trend, resulting from globalization, is collaboration between policy institutes in different countries. For instance, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace operates offices in Washington, D.C., Beijing, Beirut, Brussels and Moscow.

The Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program (TTCSP) at the University of Pennsylvania, led by Dr. James McGann, annually rates policy institutes worldwide in a number of categories and presents its findings in the Global Go-To Think Tanks rating index. However, this method of the study and assessment of policy institutes has been criticized by researchers such as Enrique Mendizabal and Goran Buldioski, Director of the Think Tank Fund, assisted by the Open Society Institute.

Advocacy:

In some cases, corporate interests, military interests, and political groups have found it useful to create policy institutes, advocacy organizations, and think tanks. For example, The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition was formed in the mid-1990s to dispute research finding an association between second-hand smoke and cancer. 

Military contractors may spend a portion of their tender on funding pro-war think tanks. According to an internal memorandum from Philip Morris Companies referring to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), "The credibility of the EPA is defeatable, but not on the basis of ETS [environmental tobacco smoke] alone,... It must be part of a larger mosaic that concentrates all the EPA's enemies against it at one time."

According to the Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, both left-wing and right-wing policy institutes are often quoted and rarely identified as such. The result is that think tank "experts" are sometimes depicted as neutral sources without any ideological predispositions when, in fact, they represent a particular perspective. 

In the United States, think tank publications on education are subjected to expert review by the National Education Policy Center's "Think Twice" think tank review project.

A 2014 New York Times report asserted that foreign governments buy influence at many United States think tanks. According to the article: "More than a dozen prominent Washington research groups have received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government officials to adopt policies that often reflect the donors' priorities."

Global think tanks:
Main article: List of think tanks

​United States:
See also: List of think tanks in the United States

As the classification is most often used today, the oldest American think tank is the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, founded in 1910. The Institute for Government Research, which later merged with two organizations to form the Brookings Institution, was formed in 1916.

Other early twentieth century organizations now classified as think tanks include:
In collaboration with the Douglas Aircraft Company, the Air Force set up the RAND Corporation in 1946 to develop weapons technology and strategic defense analysis.

The Hudson Institute is a conservative American think tank founded in 1961 by futurist, military strategist, and systems theorist Herman Kahn and his colleagues at the RAND Corporation. Recent members include Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state under Donald Trump who joined in 2021.

More recently, progressive and liberal think tanks have been established, most notably the Center for American Progress and the Center for Research on Educational Access and Leadership (CREAL). The organization has close ties to former United States President Barack Obama and other prominent Democrats.

Think tanks help shape both foreign and domestic policy. They receive funding from private donors, and members of private organizations. By 2013, the largest 21 think tanks in the US spent more than $1 billion per year. 

Think tanks may feel freer to propose and debate controversial ideas than people within government. The progressive media watchgroup Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has identified the top 25 think tanks by media citations, noting that from 2006 to 2007 the number of citations declined 17%. 

The FAIR report reveals the ideological breakdown of the citations: 37% conservative, 47% centrist, and 16% liberal. Their data show that the most-cited think tank was the Brookings Institution, followed by the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Enterprise Institute, The Heritage Foundation, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

In 2016, in response to scrutiny about think tanks appearing to have a "conflict of interest" or lack transparency, executive vice president, Martin S. Indyk of Brookings Institution – the "most prestigious think tank in the world" admitted that they had "decided to prohibit corporations or corporate-backed foundations from making anonymous contributions."

In August 2016, The New York Times published a series on think tanks that blur the line. One of the cases the journalists cited was Brookings, where scholars paid by a seemingly independent think tank "push donors' agendas amplifying a culture of corporate influence in Washington."

For example, in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars the Brookings Institution provided Lennar – one of the United States' largest home builders – with a significant advantage in pursuing a US$8 billion revitalization project in Hunters Point, San Francisco.

In 2014, Lennar's then-regional vice president in charge of the San Francisco revitalization, Kofi Bonner was named as a Brookings senior fellow – a position as 'trusted adviser' that carries some distinction. Bruce Katz, a Brookings vice president, also offered to help Lennar "engage with national media to develop stories that highlight Lennar's innovative approach."

U.S. Government think tanks:

Government think tanks are also important in the United States, particularly in the security and defense field. These include:
The government funds, wholly or in part, activities at approximately 30 Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs). FFRDCs, are unique independent nonprofit entities sponsored and funded by the United States government to meet specific long-term technical needs that cannot be met by any other single organization.

FFRDCs typically assist government agencies with scientific research and analysis, systems development, and systems acquisition. They bring together the expertise and outlook of government, industry, and academia to solve complex technical problems.

These FFRDCs include:
Similar to the above quasi-governmental organizations are Federal Advisory Committees. These groups, sometimes referred to as commissions, are a form of think tank dedicated to advising the US Presidents or the Executive branch of government. They typically focus on a specific issue and as such, might be considered similar to special interest groups.

However, unlike special interest groups these committees have come under some oversight regulation and are required to make formal records available to the public. As of 2002, about 1,000 of these advisory committees were described in the FACA searchable database.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more details about that topic:
​See also: ___________________________________________________________________________

Brookings Institution

​The Brookings Institution, often stylized as simply Brookings, is an American research group founded in 1916.

Located on Think Tank Row in Washington, D.C., Brookings:
  • conducts research and education in the social sciences,
  • Its stated mission is to "provide innovative and practical recommendations that advance three broad goals:
    • strengthen American democracy;
    • foster the economic and social welfare, security and opportunity of all Americans;
    • and secure a more open, safe, prosperous, and cooperative international system."

Brookings has five research programs at its Washington campus:
  1. Economic Studies, 
  2. Foreign Policy, 
  3. Governance Studies, 
  4. Global Economy and Development, 
  5. and Metropolitan Policy. 

It also established and operated three international centers:
In 2020 and 2021, the institution announced it was separating entirely from its centers in Doha and New Delhi, and transitioning its center in Beijing to an informal partnership with Tsinghua University, known as Brookings-Tsinghua China.

The University of Pennsylvania's Global Go To Think Tank Index Report has named Brookings "Think Tank of the Year" and "Top Think Tank in the World" every year since 2008.

The Economist describes Brookings as "perhaps America’s most prestigious think-tank."

Brookings states that its staff "represent diverse points of view" and describes itself as nonpartisan, and various media outlets have alternately described Brookings as centrist, liberal, or right-wing. 

An academic analysis of congressional records from 1993 to 2002 found that Brookings was cited by conservative politicians almost as often as by liberal politicians, earning a score of 53 on a 1–100 scale, 100 representing the most liberal score. 

​The same study found Brookings to be the most frequently cited think tank by U.S. media and politicians.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Brookings Institution:​







Ted Turner, "Media Mogul" Pictured below: Ted Turner With (then) wife Jane Fonda in 1992
​Ted Turner (Robert Edward Turner III) (born November 19, 1938) is an American entrepreneur, television producer, media proprietor, and philanthropist. He founded the Cable News Network (CNN), the first 24-hour cable news channel. In addition, he founded WTBS, which pioneered the superstation concept in cable television, which later became TBS.

As a philanthropist, Turner gave $1 billion to create the United Nations Foundation, a public charity to broaden U.S. support for the UN. Turner serves as Chairman of the United Nations Foundation board of directors. 

Additionally, in 2001, Turner co-founded the Nuclear Threat Initiative with US Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA). NTI is a non-partisan organization dedicated to reducing global reliance on, and preventing the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. He currently serves as Co-Chairman of the Board of Directors.

​Turner's media empire began with his father's billboard business, Turner Outdoor Advertising, which he took over in 1963 after his father's suicide. It was worth $1 million.

His purchase of an Atlanta UHF station in 1970 began the Turner Broadcasting System. CNN revolutionized news media, covering the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986 and the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

Turner turned the Atlanta Braves baseball team into a nationally popular franchise and launched the charitable Goodwill Games. He helped revive interest in professional wrestling by buying World Championship Wrestling (WCW).

Turner's penchant for controversial statements earned him the nicknames "The Mouth of the South" and "Captain Outrageous". Turner has also devoted his assets to environmental causes. He was the largest private landowner in the United States until John C. Malone surpassed him in 2011. 

Turner uses much of his land for ranches to re-popularize bison meat (for his Ted's Montana Grill chain), amassing the largest herd in the world. He also created the environmental-themed animated series Captain Planet and the Planeteers.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Ted Turner:






​​
Newspapers, including a List of Newspapers in the United States Pictured below: American Fads and Crazes: 1920s (Library of Congress)
Click here for a List of American Newspapers

​A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background.

Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as: 
Most newspapers are businesses, and they pay their expenses with a mixture of subscription revenue, newsstand sales, and advertising revenue.

The journalism organizations that publish newspapers are themselves often metonymically called newspapers.

Newspapers have traditionally been published in print (usually on cheap, low-grade paper called newsprint). However, today most newspapers are also published on websites as online newspapers, and some have even abandoned their print versions entirely.

Newspapers developed in the 17th century, as information sheets for merchants. By the early 19th century, many cities in Europe, as well as North and South America, published newspapers.

Some newspapers with high editorial independence, high journalism quality, and large circulation are viewed as newspapers of record.

With the advent of the internet many newspapers are now digital, with their news presented online rather than in a physical format, with there now being a decline in sales for paper copies of newspapers.

​Overview

​Newspapers are typically published daily or weekly. News magazines are also weekly, but they have a magazine format. General-interest newspapers typically publish news articles and feature articles on national and international news as well as local news.

The news includes: 
Usually, the paper is divided into sections for each of those major groupings (labelled A, B, C, and so on, with pagination prefixes yielding page numbers A1-A20, B1-B20, C1-C20, and so on).

Most traditional papers also feature an editorial page containing editorials: 
  • written by an editor (or by the paper's editorial board)
  • and expressing an opinion on a public issue,
  • opinion articles called "op-eds" written by guest writers (which are typically in the same section as the editorial),
  • and columns that express the personal opinions of columnists, usually offering analysis and synthesis that attempts to translate the raw data of the news into information telling the reader "what it all means" and persuading them to concur.

Papers also include articles that have no byline; these articles are written by staff writers.

A wide variety of material has been published in newspapers. Besides the aforementioned news, information and opinions, they include:
As of 2017, newspapers may also provide information about new movies and TV shows available on streaming video services like Netflix. Newspapers have classified ad sections where people and businesses can buy small advertisements to sell goods or services; as of 2013, the huge increase in Internet websites for selling goods, such as Craigslist and eBay has led to significantly less classified ad sales for newspapers.

Most newspapers are businesses, and they pay their expenses with a mixture of subscription revenue, newsstand sales, and advertising revenue (other businesses or individuals pay to place advertisements in the pages, including display ads, classified ads, and their online equivalents). Some newspapers are government-run or at least government-funded; their reliance on advertising revenue and profitability is less critical to their survival.

The editorial independence of a newspaper is thus always subject to the interests of someone, whether owners, advertisers or a government. Some newspapers with high editorial independence, high journalism quality, and large circulation are viewed as newspapers of record.

Many newspapers, besides employing journalists on their own payrolls, also subscribe to news agencies (wire services) (such as the Associated Press, Reuters, or Agence France-Presse), which employ journalists to find, assemble, and report the news, then sell the content to the various newspapers. This is a way to avoid duplicating the expense of reporting from around the world. Circa 2005, there were approximately 6,580 daily newspaper titles in the world selling 395  million print copies a day (in the U.S., 1,450 titles selling 55  million copies). 

The late 2000s–early 2010s global recession, combined with the rapid growth of free web-based alternatives, has helped cause a decline in advertising and circulation, as many papers had to retrench operations to stanch the losses. Worldwide annual revenue approached $100 billion in 2005–7, then plunged during the worldwide financial crisis of 2008–9.

Revenue in 2016 fell to only $53  billion, hurting every major publisher as their efforts to gain online income fell far short of the goal.

The decline in advertising revenues affected both the print and online media as well as all other mediums; print advertising was once lucrative but has greatly declined, and the prices of online advertising are often lower than those of their print precursors.

Besides remodelling advertising, the internet (especially the web) has also challenged the business models of the print-only era by crowdsourcing both publishing in general (sharing information with others) and, more specifically, journalism (the work of finding, assembling, and reporting the news). Besides, the rise of news aggregators, which bundle linked articles from many online newspapers and other sources, influences the flow of web traffic.

Increasing paywalling of online newspapers may be counteracting those effects. The oldest newspaper still published is the Ordinari Post Tijdender, which was established in Stockholm in 1645.

Definitions:

Newspapers typically meet four criteria:
  1. Public accessibility: Its contents are reasonably accessible to the public, traditionally by the paper being sold or distributed at newsstands, shops, and libraries, and, since the 1990s, made available over the Internet with online newspaper websites. While online newspapers have increased access to newspapers by people with Internet access, people without Internet or computer access (e.g., homeless people, impoverished people and people living in remote or rural regions) may not be able to access the Internet, and thus will not be able to read online news. Literacy is also a factor that prevents people who cannot read from being able to benefit from reading newspapers (paper or online).
  2. Periodicity: They are published at regular intervals, typically daily or weekly. This ensures that newspapers can provide information on newly emerging news stories or events.
  3. Currency: Its information is as up to date as its publication schedule allows. The degree of up-to-date-ness of a print newspaper is limited by the need for time to print and distribute the newspaper. In major cities, there may be a morning edition and a later edition of the same day's paper, so that the later edition can incorporate breaking news that have occurred since the morning edition was printed. Online newspapers can be updated as frequently as new information becomes available, even several times per day, which means that online editions can be very up-to-date.
  4. Universality: Newspapers covers a range of topics, from political and business news to updates on science and technology, arts, culture, and entertainment.

History:

Gazettes and bulletins:

In Ancient Rome, Acta Diurna, or government announcement bulletins, were produced. They were carved in metal or stone and posted in public places.

In China, early government-produced news-sheets, called Dibao, circulated among court officials during the late Han dynasty (second and third centuries AD). Between 713 and 734, the Kaiyuan Za Bao ("Bulletin of the Court") of the Chinese Tang Dynasty published government news; it was handwritten on silk and read by government officials. In 1582, there was the first reference to privately published newssheets in Beijing, during the late Ming Dynasty.

In early modern Europe, the increased cross-border interaction created a rising need for information which was met by concise handwritten news-sheets. In 1556, the government of Venice first published the monthly notizie scritte, which cost one gazetta, a small coin. 

These avvisi were handwritten newsletters and used to convey political, military, and economic news quickly and efficiently to Italian cities (1500–1700)—sharing some characteristics of newspapers though usually not considered true newspapers. However, none of these publications fully met the classical criteria for proper newspapers, as they were typically not intended for the general public and restricted to a certain range of topics.

Newspapers:
Main article: History of newspaper publishing
See also: List of the earliest newspapers and Newspaper production process

Europe:
See also: History of British newspapers

​The first mechanical, movable type printing that allowed the mass production of printed books was invented by Johann Gutenberg around 1450.

In the 50 years after Gutenberg started printing, an estimated 500,000 books were in circulation, printed on about 1,000 presses across the continent. Gutenberg's invention was a simple device, but it launched a revolution marked by repeated advances in technology and, as a result, a popularization of the ideals of liberty and freedom of information exchange.

The emergence of the new media in the 17th century has to be seen in close connection with the spread of the printing press from which the publishing press derives its name. 

The German-language Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien, printed from 1605 onwards by Johann Carolus in Strasbourg, is often recognized as the first newspaper. At the time, Strasbourg was a free imperial city in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation; the first newspaper of modern Germany was the Avisa, published in 1609 in Wolfenbüttel.

They distinguished themselves from other printed material by being published on a regular basis. They reported on a variety of current events to a broad public audience. Within a few decades, newspapers could be found in all the major cities of Europe, from Venice to London.

The Antwerp periodical De Nieuwe Tijdinghe was published in Brabant Dutch as from 1605 by Abraham Verhoeven and is thought to have been the first regularly appearing newssheet.

The Dutch Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt, &c. ('Courant from Italy, Germany, etc.') of 1618 was the first to appear in folio- rather than quarto-size. Amsterdam, a center of world trade, quickly became home to newspapers in many languages, often before they were published in their own country. 

The first English-language newspaper, Corrant out of Italy, Germany, etc., was published in Amsterdam in 1620. A year and a half later, Corante, or weekely newes from Italy, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bohemia, France and the Low Countreys was published in England by an "N.B." (generally thought to be either Nathaniel Butter or Nicholas Bourne) and Thomas Archer. 

The first newspaper in France was published in 1631, La Gazette (originally published as Gazette de France). The first newspaper in Italy, in accordance with the oldest issue still preserved, was Di Genova published in 1639 in Genoa. The first newspaper in Portugal, A Gazeta da Restauração, was published in 1641 in Lisbon. The first Spanish newspaper, Gaceta de Madrid, was published in 1661.

Post- och Inrikes Tidningar (founded as Ordinari Post Tijdender) was first published in Sweden in 1645, and is the oldest newspaper still in existence, though it now publishes solely online. Opregte Haarlemsche Courant from Haarlem, first published in 1656, is the oldest paper still printed. It was forced to merge with the newspaper Haarlems Dagblad in 1942 when Germany occupied the Netherlands.

Since then the Haarlems Dagblad has appeared with the subtitle Oprechte Haerlemse Courant 1656. Merkuriusz Polski Ordynaryjny was published in Kraków, Poland in 1661. The first successful English daily, The Daily Courant, was published from 1702 to 1735.

Americas:
See also: History of American newspapers

​In Boston in 1690, Benjamin Harris published Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick. This is considered the first newspaper in the American colonies even though only one edition was published before the paper was suppressed by the government. In 1704, the governor allowed The Boston News-Letter to be published and it became the first continuously published newspaper in the colonies.

Soon after, weekly papers began being published in New York and Philadelphia. These early newspapers followed the British format and were usually four pages long. They mostly carried news from Britain and content depended on the editor's interests. In 1783, the Pennsylvania Evening Post became the first American daily.

In 1752, John Bushell published the Halifax Gazette, which claims to be "Canada's first newspaper". However, its official descendant, the Royal Gazette, is a government publication for legal notices and proclamations rather than a proper newspaper.

In 1764, the Quebec Gazette was first printed 21 June 1764 and remains the oldest continuously published newspaper in North America as the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph. It is currently published as an English-language weekly from its offices at 1040 Belvédère, suite 218, Quebec City, Quebec, Canada.

In 1808, the Gazeta do Rio de Janeiro had its first edition, printed in devices brought from England, publishing news favourable for the government of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves since it was produced by the official press service of the Portuguese crown.

In 1821, after the ending of the ban of private newspaper circulation, appears the first non-imperial printed publication, Diário do Rio de Janeiro, though there existed already the Correio Braziliense, published by Hipólito José da Costa at the same time as the Gazeta, but from London and with forcefully advocated political and critical ideas, aiming to expose the administration's flaws.

The first newspaper in Peru was El Peruano, established in October 1825 and still published today, but with several name changes.

Asia:
Main articles:  ​
During the Tang Dynasty in China (618–906), the Kaiyuan Za Bao published the government news; it was block-printed onto paper. It is sometimes considered one of the earliest newspapers to be published.

The first recorded attempt to found a newspaper of the modern type in South Asia was by William Bolts, a Dutchman in the employ of the British East India Company in September 1768 in Calcutta. However, before he could begin his newspaper, he was deported back to Europe.

In 1780 the first newsprint from this region, Hicky's Bengal Gazette, was published by an Irishman, James Augustus Hicky. He used it as a means to criticize the British rule through journalism.

The Jobo, which is discussed in the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty, is published in 1577 as a privately run commercial newspaper. It was printed daily, and covered a range of topics, including weather, constellations, and current affairs. In 2017, a Korean monk claimed to have discovered an extant copy of the Jobo.

Middle East:
Main article: History of Middle Eastern newspapers

The history of Middle Eastern newspapers goes back to the 19th century. Many editors were not only journalists but also writers, philosophers and politicians. With unofficial journals, these intellectuals encouraged public discourse on politics in the Ottoman and Persian Empires. Literary works of all genres were serialized and published in the press as well.

The first newspapers in the Ottoman Empire were owned by foreigners living there who wanted to make propaganda about the Western world. The earliest was printed in 1795 by the Palais de France in Pera. Indigenous Middle Eastern journalism started in 1828, when Muhammad Ali, Khedive of Egypt, ordered the local establishment of the gazette Vekayi-i Misriye (Egyptian Affairs). 

It was first paper written in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic on opposite pages, and later in Arabic only, under the title "al-Waqa'i'a al-Masriya".

The first non-official Turkish newspaper, Ceride-i Havadis (Register of Events), was published by an Englishman, William Churchill, in 1840. The first private newspaper to be published by Turkish journalists, Tercüman-ı Ahvâl (Interpreter of Events), was founded by İbrahim Şinasi and Agah Efendi and issued in 1860. 

The first newspaper in Iran, Kaghaz-e Akhbar (The Newspaper), was created for the government by Mirza Saleh Shirazi in 1837. The first journals in the Arabian Peninsula appeared in Hijaz, once it had become independent of Ottoman rule, towards the end of World War I.

One of the earliest women to sign her articles in the Arab press was the female medical practitioner Galila Tamarhan, who contributed articles to a medical magazine called "Ya'asub al-Tib" (Leader in Medicine) in the 1860s.

Industrial Revolution:

By the early 19th century, many cities in Europe, as well as North and South America, published newspaper-type publications though not all of them developed in the same way; content was vastly shaped by regional and cultural preferences. 

Advances in printing technology related to the Industrial Revolution enabled newspapers to become an even more widely circulated means of communication, as new printing technologies made printing less expensive and more efficient.

In 1814, The Times (London) acquired a printing press capable of making 1,100 impressions per hour. Soon, this press was adapted to print on both sides of a page at once. This innovation made newspapers cheaper and thus available to a larger part of the population.

In 1830, the first inexpensive "penny press" newspaper came to the market: Lynde M. Walter's Boston Transcript. Penny press papers cost about one sixth the price of other newspapers and appealed to a wider audience, including less educated and lower-income people. 

​In France, Émile de Girardin started "La Presse" in 1836, introducing cheap, advertising-supported dailies to France. In 1848, August Zang, an Austrian who knew Girardin in Paris, returned to Vienna to introduce the same methods with "Die Presse" (which was named for and frankly copied Girardin's publication).

​Categories:

While most newspapers are aimed at a broad spectrum of readers, usually geographically defined, some focus on groups of readers defined more by their interests than their location: for example, there are daily and weekly business newspapers (e.g., The Wall Street Journal and India Today) and sports newspapers.

More specialist still are some weekly newspapers, usually free and distributed within limited regional areas; these may serve communities as specific as certain immigrant populations, the local gay community or indie rock enthusiasts within a city or region.

Frequency:

Daily:
A daily newspaper is printed every day, sometimes with the exception of Sundays and occasionally Saturdays (and some major holidays). Saturday and, where they exist, Sunday editions of daily newspapers tend to be larger, include more specialized sections (e.g., on arts, films, entertainment) and advertising inserts, and cost more.

Typically, the majority of these newspapers' staff members work Monday to Friday, so the Sunday and Monday editions largely depend on content made in advance or content that is syndicated.

Most daily newspapers are sold in the morning. Afternoon or evening papers, once common but now scarce, are aimed more at commuters and office workers. In practice (though this may vary according to country), a morning newspaper is available in early editions from before midnight on the night before its cover date, further editions being printed and distributed during the night.

The later editions can include breaking news which was first revealed that day, after the morning edition was already printed. Previews of tomorrow's newspapers are often a feature of late night news programs, such as Newsnight in the United Kingdom. In 1650, the first daily newspaper appeared, Einkommende Zeitung, published by Timotheus Ritzsch in Leipzig, Germany.

In the United Kingdom and some other Commonwealth countries, unlike most other countries, "daily" newspapers do not publish on Sundays. In the past there were independent Sunday newspapers; nowadays the same publisher often produces a Sunday newspaper, distinct in many ways from the daily, usually with a related name; e.g., The Times and The Sunday Times are distinct newspapers owned by the same company, and an article published in the latter would never be credited to The Times.

In some cases a Sunday edition is an expanded version of a newspaper from the same publisher; in other cases, particularly in Britain, it may be a separate enterprise, e.g., The Observer, not affiliated with a daily newspaper from its founding in 1791 until it was acquired by The Guardian in 1993.

Usually, it is a specially expanded edition, often several times the thickness and weight of the weekday editions and containing generally special sections not found in the weekday editions, such as Sunday comics and Sunday magazines (such as The New York Times Magazine and The Sunday Times Magazine).

In some countries daily newspapers are not published on Christmas Day, but weekly newspapers would change their day e.g. Sunday newspapers are published on Saturday December 24, Christmas Eve when Christmas Day falls on Sunday.

Semi-weekly:

Some newspapers are published two times a week and are known as semi-weekly publications.

Triweekly:

As the name suggests, a triweekly publishes three times a week. The Meridian Star is an example of such a publication.

Weekly:
Main article: Weekly newspaper

Weekly newspapers are published once a week, and tend to be smaller than daily papers.

Biweekly:

Some publications are published, for example, fortnightly (or biweekly in American parlance). They may have a change from normal weekly day of the week during the Christmas period depending the day of the week Christmas Day is falling on.

​Geographical scope and distribution:

Local or regional:

A local newspaper serves a region such as a city, or part of a large city. Almost every market has one or two newspapers that dominate the area. Large metropolitan newspapers often have large distribution networks, and can be found outside their normal area, sometimes widely, sometimes from fewer sources.

National:
See also: List of national newspapers

​Most nations have at least one newspaper that circulates throughout the whole country: a national newspaper.

Some national newspapers, such as the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, are specialised (in these examples, on financial matters).

There are many national newspapers in the United Kingdom, but only a few in the United States and Canada. In Canada, The Globe and Mail is sold throughout the country. In the United States, in addition to national newspapers as such, The New York Times is available throughout the country.

There is also a small group of newspapers which may be characterized as international newspapers. Some, such as The New York Times International Edition, (formerly The International Herald Tribune) have always had that focus, while others are repackaged national newspapers or "international editions" of national or large metropolitan newspapers.

In some cases, articles that might not interest the wider range of readers are omitted from international editions; in others, of interest to expatriates, significant national news is retained. As English became the international language of business and technology, many newspapers formerly published only in non-English languages have also developed English-language editions.

In places as varied as Jerusalem and Mumbai, newspapers are printed for a local and international English-speaking public, and for tourists. The advent of the Internet has also allowed non-English-language newspapers to put out a scaled-down English version to give their newspaper a global outreach.

Similarly, in many countries with a large foreign-language-speaking population or many tourists, newspapers in languages other than the national language are both published locally and imported.

For example, newspapers and magazines from many countries, and locally published newspapers in many languages, are ready to be found on newsstands in central London. In the US state of Florida, so many tourists from the French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec visit for long stays during the winter ("snowbirds") that some newsstands and stores sell French-language newspapers such as Le Droit.

​Subject matter:

General newspapers cover all topics, with different emphasis. While at least mentioning all topics, some might have good coverage of international events of importance; others might concentrate more on national or local entertainment or sports.

Specialised newspapers might concentrate more specifically on, for example, financial matters. There are publications covering exclusively sports, or certain sports, horse-racing, theatre, and so on, although they may no longer be called newspapers.

Technology:

​Print:
Main article: printing press

For centuries newspapers were printed on paper and supplied physically to readers either by the local distribution or in some cases by mail, for example for British expatriates living in India or Hong Kong who subscribed to British newspapers.

Newspapers can be delivered to subscribers homes and/or businesses by a paper's own delivery people, sent via the mail, sold at newsstands, grocery stores and convenience stores, and delivered to libraries and bookstores.

Newspaper organizations need a large distribution system to deliver their papers to these different distributors, which typically involves delivery trucks and delivery people. In recent years, newspapers and other media have adapted to the changing technology environment by starting to offer online editions to cater to the needs of the public.

In the future, the trend towards more electronic delivery of the news will continue with more emphasis on the Internet, social media and other electronic delivery methods. However, while the method of delivery is changing, the newspaper and the industry still have a niche in the world.

Online:
Main article: Online newspaper

As of 2007, virtually all major printed newspapers produced online editions distributed over the Internet, which, depending on the country, may be regulated by journalism organizations such as the Press Complaints Commission in the UK. 

But as some publishers find their print-based models increasingly unsustainable, Web-based "newspapers" have also started to appear, such as the Southport Reporter in the UK and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which stopped publishing in print after 149 years in March 2009 and became an online-only paper.

Since 2005 in the UK more than 200 regional newspapers have closed down resulting in a 50% decline in the number of regional journalists. A 2016 study by King's College, London, found that the towns that lost their local newspapers receded from democratic values and experienced the loss of public faith in the authorities.

A new trend in newspaper publishing is the introduction of personalization through on-demand printing technologies or with online news aggregator websites like Google news.

Customized newspapers allow the reader to create their individual newspaper through the selection of individual pages from multiple publications. This "Best of" approach allows revival of the print-based model and opens up a new distribution channel to increase coverage beneath the usual boundaries of distribution.

Customized newspapers online have been offered by MyYahoo, I-Google, CRAYON, ICurrent.com, Kibboko.com, Twitter. times and many others. With these online newspapers, the reader can select how much of each section (politics, sports, arts, etc.) they wish to see in their news.

​Organization and personnel:
​
In the U.S., the overall manager or chief executive of the newspaper is the publisher. In small newspapers, the owner of the publication (or the largest shareholder in the corporation that owns the publication) is usually the publisher. 

Most newspapers have four main departments devoted to publishing the newspaper itself—editorial, production/printing, circulation, and advertising, although they are frequently referred to by a variety of other names. Most papers also have the non-newspaper-specific departments found in other businesses of comparable size, such as accounting, marketing, human resources, and IT.

Throughout the English-speaking world, the person who selects the content for the newspaper is usually referred to as the editor. Variations on this title such as editor-in-chief, executive editor, and so on are common.

For small newspapers, a single editor may be responsible for all content areas. At large newspapers, the most senior editor is in overall charge of the publication, while less senior editors may each focus on one subject area, such as local news or sports. These divisions are called news bureaus or "desks", and each is supervised by a designated editor. Most newspaper editors copy edit the stories for their part of the newspaper, but they may share their workload with proofreaders and fact checkers.

Reporters are journalists who primarily report facts that they have gathered, and those who write longer, less news-oriented articles may be called feature writers. Photographers and graphic artists provide images and illustrations to support articles. Journalists often specialize in a subject area, called a beat, such as sports, religion, or science. Columnists are journalists who write regular articles recounting their personal opinions and experiences. 

Printers and press operators physically print the newspaper. Printing is outsourced by many newspapers, partly because of the cost of an offset web press (the most common kind of press used to print newspapers), and also because a small newspaper's print run might require less than an hour of operation, meaning that if the newspaper had its own press it would sit idle most of the time.

If the newspaper offers information online, webmasters and web designers may be employed to upload stories to the newspaper's website.

The staff of the circulation department liaise with retailers who sell the newspaper; sell subscriptions; and supervise distribution of the printed newspapers through the mail, by newspaper carriers, at retailers, and through vending machines. Free newspapers do not sell subscriptions, but they still have a circulation department responsible for distributing the newspapers.

Sales staff in the advertising department not only sell ad space to clients such as local businesses, but also help clients design and plan their advertising campaigns. Other members of the advertising department may include graphic designers, who design ads according to the customers' specifications and the department's policies. In an advertising-free newspaper, there is no advertising department.

Zoned and other editions:

Newspapers often refine distribution of ads and news through zoning and editioning. Zoning occurs when advertising and editorial content change to reflect the location to which the product is delivered.

The editorial content often may change merely to reflect changes in advertising—the quantity and layout of which affects the space available for editorial—or may contain region-specific news.

In rare instances, the advertising may not change from one zone to another, but there will be different region-specific editorial content. As the content can vary widely, zoned editions are often produced in parallel. Editioning occurs in the main sections as news is updated throughout the night.

The advertising is usually the same in each edition (with the exception of zoned regionals, in which it is often the 'B' section of local news that undergoes advertising changes). As each edition represents the latest news available for the next press run, these editions are produced linearly, with one completed edition being copied and updated for the next edition.

The previous edition is always copied to maintain a Newspaper of Record and to fall back on if a quick correction is needed for the press. For example, both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal offer a regional edition, printed through a local contractor, and featuring locale specific content. The Journal's global advertising rate card provides a good example of editioning.
Format:

​Most modern newspapers are in one of three sizes:
  1. Broadsheets: 600 mm × 380 mm (23+1⁄2 in × 15 in), generally associated with more intellectual newspapers, although a trend towards "compact" newspapers is changing this. Examples include The Daily Telegraph in the United Kingdom.
  2. Tabloids: half the size of broadsheets at 380 mm × 300 mm (15 in × 11+3⁄4 in), and often perceived as sensationalist in contrast to broadsheets. Examples include:The Sun, The National Enquirer, The Star Magazine, New York Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, and The Globe. Microdaily" is infrequently used to refer to a tabloid-sized free daily newspaper that offers lower ad rates than its broadsheet competitors. The content of a microdaily can range from intense local news coverage to a combination of local and national stories.
  3. Berliner or Midi: 470 mm × 315 mm (18+1⁄2 in × 12+1⁄2 in) used by European papers such as Le Monde in France, La Stampa in Italy, El País in Spain and, from 2005 until 2018, The Guardian in the United Kingdom.

Newspapers are usually printed on cheap, off-white paper known as newsprint. Since the 1980s, the newspaper industry has largely moved away from lower-quality letterpress printing to higher-quality, four-color process, offset printing.

In addition, desktop computers, word processing software, graphics software, digital cameras and digital prepress and typesetting technologies have revolutionized the newspaper production process. These technologies have enabled newspapers to publish color photographs and graphics, as well as innovative layouts and better design.

To help their titles stand out on newsstands, some newspapers are printed on colored newsprint. For example, the Financial Times is printed on a distinctive salmon pink paper, and Sheffield's weekly sports publication derives its name, the Green 'Un, from the traditional color of its paper. The Italian sports newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport is also printed on pink paper while L'Équipe (formerly L'Auto) is printed on yellow paper. Both the latter promoted major cycling races and their newsprint colors were reflected in the colors of the jerseys used to denote the race leader; for example the leader in the Giro d'Italia wears a pink jersey.

Circulation and readership:
Main articles: 
The number of copies distributed, either on an average day or on particular days (typically Sunday), is called the newspaper's circulation and is one of the principal factors used to set advertising rates. Circulation is not necessarily the same as copies sold, since some copies or newspapers are distributed without cost.

Readership figures may be higher than circulation figures, because many copies are read by more than one person, although this is offset by the number of copies distributed but not read (especially for those distributed free). In the United States, the Alliance for Audited
Media maintains historical and current data on average circulation of daily and weekly newspapers and other periodicals.

According to the Guinness Book of Records, the daily circulation of the Soviet newspaper Trud exceeded 21,500,000 in 1990, while the Soviet weekly Argumenty i Fakty boasted a circulation of 33,500,000 in 1991.

According to United Nations data from 1995 Japan has three daily papers—the Yomiuri Shimbun with circulations well above 5.5 million. Germany's Bild, with a circulation of 1.15 million, was the only other paper in that category. In the United Kingdom, The Sun is the top seller, with around 1.2 million copies distributed daily.

In the U.S., The Wall Street Journal has a daily circulation of approximately 2.02 million, making it the most widely distributed paper in the country.

While paid readership of print newspapers has been steadily declining in the developed OECD nations, it has been rising in the chief developing nations (Brazil, India, Indonesia, China and South Africa), whose paid daily circulation exceeded those of the developed nations for the first time in 2008. 

In India, The Times of India is the largest-circulation English newspaper, with 3.14 million copies daily. According to the 2009 Indian Readership Survey, the Dainik Jagran is the most-read, local-language (Hindi) newspaper, with 55.7 million readers. According to Tom Standage of The Economist, India currently has daily newspaper circulation of 110 million copies.

A common measure of a newspaper's health is market penetration, expressed as a percentage of households that receive a copy of the newspaper against the total number of households in the paper's market area.

In the 1920s, on a national basis in the U.S., daily newspapers achieved market penetration of 123 percent (meaning the average U.S. household received 1.23 newspapers). As other media began to compete with newspapers, and as printing became easier and less expensive giving rise to a greater diversity of publications, market penetration began to decline.

It wasn't until the early 1970s, however, that market penetration dipped below 100 percent.

By 2000, it was 53 percent and still falling. Many paid-for newspapers offer a variety of subscription plans. For example, someone might want only a Sunday paper, or perhaps only Sunday and Saturday, or maybe only a workweek subscription, or perhaps a daily subscription.

​Most newspapers provide some or all of their content on the Internet, either at no cost or for a fee. In some cases, free access is available only for a matter of days or weeks, or for a certain number of viewed articles, after which readers must register and provide personal data. In other cases, free archives are provided.

Advertising:

A newspaper typically generates 70–80% of its revenue from advertising, and the remainder from sales and subscriptions. The portion of the newspaper that is not advertising is called editorial content, editorial matter, or simply editorial, although the last term is also used to refer specifically to those articles in which the newspaper and its guest writers express their opinions.

(This distinction, however, developed over time – early publishers like Girardin (France) and Zang (Austria) did not always distinguish paid items from editorial content.).

The business model of having advertising subsidize the cost of printing and distributing newspapers (and, it is always hoped, the making of a profit) rather than having subscribers cover the full cost was first done, it seems, in 1833 by The Sun, a daily paper that was published in New York City. Rather than charging 6 cents per copy, the price of a typical New York daily at the time, they charged 1-cent, and depended on advertising to make up the difference.

Newspapers in countries with easy access to the web have been hurt by the decline of many traditional advertisers. Department stores and supermarkets could be relied upon in the past to buy pages of newspaper advertisements, but due to industry consolidation are much less likely to do so now. Additionally, newspapers are seeing traditional advertisers shift to new media platforms.

The classified category is shifting to sites including Craigslist, employment websites, and auto sites. National advertisers are shifting to many types of digital content including websites, rich media platforms, and mobile.

In recent years, the advertorial emerged. Advertorials are most commonly recognized as an opposite-editorial which third parties pay a fee to have included in the paper. 

​Advertorials commonly advertise new products or techniques, such as a new design for golf equipment, a new form of laser surgery, or weight-loss drugs. The tone is usually closer to that of a press release than of an objective news story. Such articles are often clearly distinguished from editorial content through either the design and layout of the page or with a label declaring the article as an advertisement. However, there has been growing concern over the blurring of the line between editorial and advertorial content.

​Journalism:
Main article: Journalism

​Since newspapers began as a journal (record of current events), the profession involved in the making of newspapers began to be called journalism. In the yellow journalism era of the 19th century, many newspapers in the United States relied on sensational stories that were meant to anger or excite the public, rather than to inform.

The restrained style of reporting that relies on fact checking and accuracy regained popularity around World War II. Criticism of journalism is varied and sometimes vehement. Credibility is questioned because of anonymous sources; errors in facts, spelling, and grammar; real or perceived bias; and scandals involving plagiarism and fabrication.

In the past, newspapers have often been owned by so-called press barons, and were used for gaining a political voice.

After 1920 most major newspapers became parts of chains run by large media corporations such as: 
Newspapers have, in the modern world, played an important role in the exercise of freedom of expression. Whistle-blowers, and those who "leak" stories of corruption in political circles often choose to inform newspapers before other mediums of communication, relying on the perceived willingness of newspaper editors to expose the secrets and lies of those who would rather cover them.

However, there have been many circumstances of the political autonomy of newspapers being curtailed. Recent research has examined the effects of a newspaper's closing on the reelection of incumbents, voter turnout, and campaign spending.

Opinions of other writers and readers are expressed in the op-ed ("opposite the editorial page") and letters to the editors sections of the paper. Some ways newspapers have tried to improve their credibility are:
  • appointing ombudsmen,
  • developing ethics policies and training,
  • using more stringent corrections policies,
  • communicating their processes and rationale with readers,
  • and asking sources to review articles after publication.

Impact of television and Internet:
Main article: Decline of newspapers
Further information: Online newspapers

​By the late 1990s, the availability of news via 24-hour television channels and the subsequent availability of online journalism posed an ongoing challenge to the business model of most newspapers in developed countries.

Paid newspaper circulation has declined, while advertising revenue—the bulk of most newspapers' income—has been shifting from print to social media and news websites, resulting in a general decline.

One of the challenges is that a number of online news websites are free to access. Other online news sites have a paywall and require paid subscription for access. In less-developed countries, cheaper printing and distribution, increased literacy, a growing middle class, and other factors have compensated for the emergence of electronic media, and newspaper circulation continues to grow.

In April 1995, The American Reporter became the first daily Internet-based newspaper with its own paid reporters and original content. The future of newspapers in countries with high levels of Internet access has been widely debated as the industry has faced down soaring newsprint prices, slumping ad sales, the loss of much classified advertising, and precipitous drops in circulation.

Since the late-1990s, the number of newspapers slated for closure, bankruptcy, or severe cutbacks has risen—especially in the United States, where the industry has shed a fifth of its journalists since 2001. 

A June 2022 report estimated that 2 newspapers die each week, and revealed that the US dropped from 8,891 newspapers in 2005 to 6,377 at the end of May 2022. Journalism jobs dropped from about 75,000 in 2006 to 31,000 in 2022.

The debate has become more urgent lately, as the 2008–2009 recession shaved newspapers' profits and as once-explosive growth in web revenue has leveled off, forestalling what the industry hoped would become an important source of revenue. 

At issue is whether the newspaper industry faces a cyclical trough (or dip), or whether new technology has rendered print newspapers obsolete. As of 2017, an increasing percentage of millennials get their news from social media websites.

In the 2010s, many traditional newspapers have begun offering "digital editions", accessible via computers and mobile devices. Online advertising allows news websites to show catered ads, based on a visitor's interests.

See also:



​



Rupert Murdoch and His Media Empire, as well Dominion Lawsuit against Fox​​​Pictured below: Photos: Media mogul Rupert Murdoch | CNN
[Your WebHost elected to consolidate Rupert Murdoch and his Media Empire along with the Dominion Lawsuit as there is a chance that the Murdoch empire will have to transition into a more traditional democracy in order to survive. We'll see.

First, we will cover Rupert Murdoch, his media empire, then close out Dominion's lawsuit against the Murdoch empire.]

Rupert Murdoch:

Keith Rupert Murdoch AC KCSG (born 11 March 1931) is an Australian-born American investor and media proprietor. Through his company News Corp, he is the owner of hundreds of local, national, and international publishing outlets around the world, including:
With a net worth of US$21.7 billion as of 2 March 2022, Murdoch is the 31st richest person in the United States and the 71st richest in the world.

After his father's death in 1952, Murdoch took over the running of The News, a small Adelaide newspaper owned by his father.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Murdoch acquired a number of newspapers in Australia and New Zealand before expanding into the United Kingdom in 1969, taking over the News of the World, followed closely by The Sun.

In 1974, Murdoch moved to New York City, to expand into the US market; however, he retained interests in Australia and the UK.

In 1981, Murdoch bought The Times, his first British broadsheet, and, in 1985, became a naturalized US citizen, giving up his Australian citizenship, to satisfy the legal requirement for US television network ownership.

In 1986, keen to adopt newer electronic publishing technologies, Murdoch consolidated his UK printing operations in London, causing bitter industrial disputes. His holding company News Corporation acquired Twentieth Century Fox (1985), HarperCollins (1989), and The Wall Street Journal (2007).

Murdoch formed the British broadcaster BSkyB in 1990 and, during the 1990s, expanded into Asian networks and South American television. By 2000, Murdoch's News Corporation owned over 800 companies in more than 50 countries, with a net worth of over $5 billion.

In July 2011, Murdoch faced allegations that his companies, including the News of the World, owned by News Corporation, had been regularly hacking the phones of celebrities, royalty, and public citizens.

Murdoch faced police and government investigations into bribery and corruption by the British government and FBI investigations in the US. On 21 July 2012, Murdoch resigned as a director of News International.

Many of Murdoch's papers and television channels have been accused of biased and misleading coverage to support his business interests and political allies, and some have credited his influence with major political developments in the UK, US, and Australia.

​Activities in the United States:

Murdoch made his first acquisition in the United States in 1973, when he purchased the San Antonio Express-News.

In 1974, Murdoch moved to New York City, to expand into the US market; however, he retained interests in Australia and Britain.

Soon afterwards, he founded Star, a supermarket tabloid, and in 1976, he purchased the New York Post. On 4 September 1985, Murdoch became a naturalized citizen to satisfy the legal requirement that only US citizens were permitted to own US television stations.

In March 1984, Marvin Davis sold Marc Rich's interest in 20th Century Fox to Murdoch for $250 million due to Rich's trade deals with Iran, which were sanctioned by the US at the time. Davis later backed out of a deal with Murdoch to purchase John Kluge's Metromedia television stations. 

Rupert Murdoch bought the stations by himself, without Marvin Davis, and later bought out Davis's remaining stake in Fox for $325 million. 

The six television stations owned by Metromedia formed the nucleus of the Fox Broadcasting Company, founded on 9 October 1986, which later had great success with programs including The Simpsons and The X-Files.

In 1986 Murdoch bought Misty Mountain, a Wallace Neff designed house on Angelo Drive in Beverly Hills. The house was the former residence of Jules C. Stein. Murdoch sold the house to his son James in 2018.

On 20 July 2005, News Corporation bought Intermix Media Inc., which held Myspace, Imagine Games Network and other social networking-themed websites, for US$580 million, making Murdoch a major player in online media concerns.

In June 2011, it sold off Myspace for US$35 million. On 11 September 2005, News Corporation announced that it would buy IGN Entertainment for $650 million (USD).

In May 2007, Murdoch made a $5 billion offer to purchase Dow Jones & Company. At the time, the Bancroft family, who had owned Dow Jones & Company for 105 years and controlled 64% of the shares at the time, declined the offer. Later, the Bancroft family confirmed a willingness to consider a sale.

Besides Murdoch, the Associated Press reported that supermarket magnate Ron Burkle and Internet entrepreneur Brad Greenspan were among the other interested parties. 

In 2007, Murdoch acquired Dow Jones & Company, which gave him such publications as: 
In June 2014, Murdoch's 21st Century Fox made a bid for Time Warner at $85 per share in stock and cash ($80 billion total) which Time Warner's board of directors turned down in July. Warner's CNN unit would have been sold to ease antitrust issues of the purchase.

On 5 August 2014 the company announced it had withdrawn its offer for Time Warner, and said it would spend $6 billion buying back its own shares over the following 12 months.

Murdoch left his post as CEO of 21st Century Fox in 2015 but continued to own the company until it was purchased by Disney in 2019. A number of television broadcasting assets were spun off into the Fox Corporation before the acquisition and are still owned by Murdoch. This includes Fox News, of which Murdoch was acting CEO from 2016 until 2019, following the resignation of Roger Ailes due to accusations of sexual harassment.

Political activities in the United States:
​
McKnight (2010) identifies four characteristics of his media operations: 
  1. free market ideology;
  2. unified positions on matters of public policy;
  3. global editorial meetings;
  4. and opposition to liberal bias in other public media.

In The New Yorker, Ken Auletta writes that Murdoch's support for Edward I. Koch while he was running for mayor of New York "spilled over onto the news pages of the Post, with the paper regularly publishing glowing stories about Koch and sometimes savage accounts of his four primary opponents."

According to The New York Times, Ronald Reagan's campaign team credited Murdoch and the Post for his victory in New York in the 1980 United States presidential election. Reagan later "waived a prohibition against owning a television station and a newspaper in the same market," allowing Murdoch to continue to control The New York Post and The Boston Herald while expanding into television.

On 8 May 2006, the Financial Times reported that Murdoch would be hosting a fund-raiser for Senator Hillary Clinton's (D-New York) Senate re-election campaign. 

In a 2008 interview with Walt Mossberg, Murdoch was asked whether he had "anything to do with the New York Post's endorsement of Barack Obama in the democratic primaries". Without hesitating, Murdoch replied, "Yeah. He is a rock star. It's fantastic. I love what he is saying about education. I don't think he will win Florida [...] but he will win in Ohio and the election. I am anxious to meet him. I want to see if he will walk the walk."

In 2010, News Corporation gave US$1 million to the Republican Governors Association and $1 million to the US Chamber of Commerce. Murdoch also served on the board of directors of the libertarian Cato Institute. Murdoch is also a supporter of the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act.

Murdoch was reported in 2011 as advocating more open immigration policies in western nations generally. In the United States, Murdoch and chief executives from several major corporations, including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing and Disney joined New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to form the Partnership for a New American Economy to advocate "for immigration reform – including a path to legal status for all illegal aliens now in the United States". 

The coalition, reflecting Murdoch and Bloomberg's own views, also advocates significant increases in legal immigration to the United States as a means of boosting America's sluggish economy and lowering unemployment. The Partnership's immigration policy prescriptions are notably similar to those of the Cato Institute and the US Chamber of Commerce — both of which Murdoch has supported in the past.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page has similarly advocated for increased legal immigration, in contrast to the staunch anti-immigration stance of Murdoch's British newspaper, The Sun.

On 5 September 2010, Murdoch testified before the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law Membership on the "Role of Immigration in Strengthening America's Economy". In his testimony, Murdoch called for ending mass deportations and endorsed a "comprehensive immigration reform" plan that would include a pathway to citizenship for all illegal immigrants.

In the 2012 US presidential election, Murdoch was critical of the competence of Mitt Romney's team but was nonetheless strongly supportive of a Republican victory, tweeting: "Of course I want him [Romney] to win, save us from socialism, etc."

In October 2015, Murdoch stirred controversy when he praised Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson and referenced President Barack Obama, tweeting, "Ben and Candy Carson terrific. What about a real black President who can properly address the racial divide? And much else." After which he apologized, tweeting, "Apologies! No offence meant. Personally find both men charming."

During Donald Trump's term as US President Murdoch showed support for him through the news stories broadcast in his media empire, including on Fox News. In early 2018, Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, had an intimate dinner at Murdoch's Bel Air estate in Los Angeles.

Murdoch is a strong supporter of Israel and its domestic policies. In October 2010, the Anti-Defamation League in New York City presented Murdoch with its International Leadership Award "for his stalwart support of Israel and his commitment to promoting respect and speaking out against anti-Semitism." 

However, in April 2021, in a letter to Lachlan Murdoch, its director Jonathan Greenblatt wrote that the ADL would no longer make such an award to his father. This was in the immediate context of accusations made by the ADL against Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson and his apparent espousal of the White replacement theory.

​In 2023, during a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News, Murdoch acknowledged that some Fox News commentators were endorsing election fraud claims they knew were false.

Click on the following blue hyperlinks for more about Rupert Murdoch: ___________________________________________________________________________

List of assets owned by News Corp

Click on any of the following Hyperlinks for a Breakdown of News Corp Assets
​___________________________________________________________________________

Dominion Lawsuit against Fox

​Dominion Voting Systems Corporation is a company that produces and sells electronic voting hardware and software, including voting machines and tabulators, in Canada and the United States. 

The company's headquarters are in Toronto, Ontario, where it was founded, and Denver, Colorado. It develops software in offices in the United States, Canada, and Serbia.

Dominion produces electronic voting machines, which allow voters to cast their votes electronically as well as optical scanning devices used to tabulate paper ballots. 

Dominion voting machines have been used in countries around the world, primarily in Canada and the United States. Dominion systems are employed in Canada's major party leadership elections, and they are also employed across the nation in local and municipal elections.

Dominion products have been increasingly used in the United States in recent years. In the 2020 United States presidential election, equipment manufactured by Dominion was used to process votes in twenty-eight states, including the swing states of Wisconsin and Georgia.

The company was subjected to extensive attention following the 2020 election, in which then-president Donald Trump was defeated by Joe Biden, with Trump and various surrogates promoting conspiracy theories, which falsely alleged that Dominion was part of an international cabal that stole the election from Trump, and that it used its voting machines to transfer millions of votes that had been cast for Trump instead to Biden.

There was no evidence supporting these claims, which have been debunked by various groups including election technology experts, government and voting industry officials, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). 

These conspiracy theories were further discredited by hand recounts of the ballots cast in the 2020 presidential elections in Georgia and Wisconsin; the hand recounts in these states found that Dominion voting machines had accurately tabulated votes, that any error in the initial tabulation was instead caused by human error, and that Biden had defeated Trump in both battleground states.

In December 2020 and January 2021, Fox News, Fox Business, Newsmax, and the American Thinker withdrew allegations they had reported about Dominion and Smartmatic after one or both companies threatened legal action for defamation. 

In January 2021, Dominion filed defamation lawsuits against former Trump campaign lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, seeking $1.3 billion in damages from each.

After Dominion filed its lawsuit against Powell, One America News Network (OANN) removed all references to Dominion and Smartmatic from its website, though without issuing public retractions. 

During subsequent months, Dominion filed suits seeking $1.6 billion in damages from each of Fox News, Newsmax, OANN and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, while also suing Mike Lindell and his corporation, MyPillow.

​Despite motions by the defendants to dismiss the lawsuits, judges ruled that the cases against Fox News, Lindell, and MyPillow could proceed.

Pictured below: A Dominion ImageCast precinct-count optical-scan voting machine, mounted on a collapsible ballot box made by ElectionSource

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Dominion Voting Systems:







Media cross-ownership in the United States Pictured below: Media convergence and vertical integration – death of the local voice or the essential evolution of an industry?
Media cross-ownership in the United States

Media cross-ownership is the common ownership of multiple media sources by a single person or corporate entity. 

Media sources include:
  • radio,
  • broadcast television,
  • specialty and pay television,
  • cable,
  • satellite,
  • Internet Protocol television (IPTV),
  • newspapers,
  • magazines and periodicals,
  • music, film,
  • book publishing,
  • video games,
  • search engines,
  • social media,
  • internet service providers,
  • and wired and wireless telecommunications.

Much of the debate over concentration of media ownership in the United States has for many years focused specifically on the ownership of broadcast stations, cable stations, newspapers, and websites. Some have pointed to an increase in media merging and concentration of ownership which may correlate to decreased trust in 'mass' media.

Ownership of American media:

Over time, both the number of media outlets and concentration of ownership have increased, translating to fewer companies owning more media outlets.

Digital:

Also known as "Big Tech," a collection of five major digital media companies are also noted for their strong influence over their respective industries:

Alphabet: Owns search engine Google, video sharing site YouTube, proprietary rights to the open-source Android operating system, blog hosting site Blogger, Gmail e-mail service, and numerous other online media and software outlets.

Amazon: Owns the Amazon.com e-commerce marketplace, cloud computing platform AWS, video streaming service Amazon Prime Video, music streaming service Amazon Music, and video live streaming service Twitch. Amazon also owns Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Orion Pictures, MGM Television, premium cable channel and direct-to-consumer streaming service MGM+, and extensive film and television content libraries via MGM Holdings. 

Apple: Produces iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV products, the iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS operating systems, music streaming service Apple Music, video streaming service Apple TV+, news aggregator Apple News, and gaming platform Apple Arcade.

Meta: Owns social networks Facebook and Instagram, messaging services Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, and virtual reality platform Oculus VR.

Microsoft: Owns business-oriented social network LinkedIn, web portal MSN, search engine Bing, cloud computing platform Microsoft Azure, Xbox gaming consoles and related services, Office productivity suite, Outlook.com e-mail service, Skype video chat service, and Windows operating system. Microsoft also owns major and largest US video game publisher Xbox Game Studios  ​
The Walt Disney Company: Owns the following: See: List of assets owned by The Walt Disney Company.

Netflix: Owns the largest subscription over-the-top video service in the United States; it also owns many of the films and television series released on the service. Netflix also owns DVD Netflix (dvd.netflix.com), a mail-order video rental service.

Netflix also has close ties to Roku, Inc., which it spun off in 2008 to avoid self-dealing accusations but maintains a substantial investment and owns the Roku operating system used on a large proportion of smart televisions and set-top boxes.

NBCUniversal: Owns 
NBCUniversal is a subsidiary of Comcast, in turn controlled by the family of Ralph J. Roberts (with Ralph's son Brian L. Roberts being the largest shareholder).
Warner Bros.
Paramount Global: Owns:
The Redstone family, through National Amusements, holds a controlling stake in Paramount Global.
Fox Corporation: Owns
Sony Pictures Entertainment: Owns: 
Lionsgate: Owns: 
AMC Networks: Owns
  • James Dolan and his family have 67% voting power over the company.
___________________________________________________________________________

Print:

Due to cross-ownership restrictions in place for much of the 20th century limiting broadcasting and print assets, as well as difficulties in establishing synergy between the two media, print companies largely stay within the print medium.

The New York Times Company: In addition to The New York Times, the company also owns:
Although publicly traded, its controlling Class B shares are privately held by the descendants of Adolph Ochs who acquired the newspaper in 1896.

Nash Holdings Owns The Washington Post, whose subsidiaries include content management system provider Arc Publishing and media monetization platform Zeus Technology. ​
News Corp Owns:
Both News Corp and Fox Corporation are controlled by the family of Rupert Murdoch.

Bloomberg L.P. Owns: 
Advance Publications Owns:
Hearst Communications Owns a wide variety of newspapers and magazines including :
Gannett owns :
In November 2019, GateHouse Media merged with Gannett, creating the largest newspaper publisher in the United States, which adopted the Gannett name. Through the merger, Gannett is currently controlled by New Media Investment Group, which is owned by SoftBank Group through Fortress Investment Group. 
Tribune Publishing is the second-largest owner of newspapers in the United States by total number of subscribers, which owns: ___________________________________________________________________________

Record labels: ___________________________________________________________________________

Video Gaming:

Activision Blizzard: Largest independent video game publisher in United States. In January 2022, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Activision.

Electronic Arts: Second-largest of the video game publisher.

Take-Two Interactive: Third-largest of the video game publisher.
___________________________________________________________________________

Radio:

Sirius XM Radio: Owns a monopoly on American satellite radio, as well as Pandora Radio, a prominent advertising-supported Internet radio platform. 72% of Sirius XM is owned by Liberty Media, which is controlled by John Malone.

iHeartMedia: Owns 858 radio stations,
​Audacy Owns 235 radio stations across 48 media markets and internet radio platform Audacy.

Cumulus Media Owns 429 radio stations, including:
​Townsquare Media Owns 321 radio stations in 67 markets, including the assets of Regent Communications, Gap Broadcasting, and Double O Radio.
___________________________________________________________________________

Local television:

E. W. Scripps Company Owns hundreds of television stations and the following networks: 
Digital assets include: 
Scripps previously held assets in radio, newspapers and cable television channels but has since divested those assets.

​Gray Television: Owns television stations in 113 markets, including the assets of:  Also co-manages the digital network Circle with the Grand Ole Opry. 
Hearst Television: Owns 29 local television stations. It is the third-largest group owner of ABC-affiliated stations and the second-largest group owner of NBC affiliates. Parent company Hearst Communications owns 50% of broadcasting firm A&E Networks, and 20% of the sports broadcaster ESPN—the last two both co-owned with The Walt Disney Company. 
Nexstar Media Group: The largest television station owner in the United States owning 197 television stations across the U.S., most of whom are affiliated with the four "major" U.S. television networks. It also owns: 
Sinclair Broadcast Group owns or operates a large number of television stations across the country that are affiliated with all six major television networks, including stations formerly owned by Allbritton Communications, Barrington Broadcasting, Fisher Communications, Newport Television (and predecessor Clear Channel) and Bally Sports.

Other Sinclair assets include: See: List of stations owned or operated by Sinclair Broadcast Group.


​Tegna Inc. owns or operates 66 television stations in 54 markets, and holds properties in digital media. Comprises the broadcast television and digital media divisions of the old Gannett Company.

___________________________________________________________________________

History of FCC regulations

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution included a provision that protected "freedom of the press" from Congressional action. For newspapers and other print items, in which the medium itself was practically infinite and publishers could produce as many publications as they wanted without interfering with any other publisher's ability to do the same, this was not a problem.

The debut of radio broadcasting in the first part of the 20th century complicated matters; the radio spectrum is finite, and only a limited number of broadcasters could use the medium at the same time.

The United States government opted to declare the entire broadcast spectrum to be government property and license the rights to use the spectrum to broadcasters. After several years of experimental broadcast licensing, the United States licensed its first commercial radio station, KDKA, in 1920.

Prior to 1927, public airwaves in the United States were regulated by the United States Department of Commerce and largely litigated in the courts as the growing number of stations fought for space in the burgeoning industry.

In the earliest days, radio stations were typically required to share the same standard frequency (833 kHz) and were not allowed to broadcast an entire day, instead having to sign on and off at designated times to allow competing stations to use the frequency.

The Federal Radio Act of 1927 (signed into law February 23, 1927) nationalized the airwaves and formed the Federal Radio Commission, the forerunner of the modern Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to assume control of the airwaves.

One of the first moves of the FRC was General Order 40, the first U.S. bandplan, which allocated permanent frequencies for most U.S. stations and eliminated most of the part-time broadcasters.

Communications Act of 1934:

The Communications Act of 1934 was the stepping stone for all of the communications rules that are in place today. When first enacted, it created the FCC (Federal Communications Commission). It was created to regulate the telephone monopolies, but also regulate the licensing for the spectrum used for broadcasting.

The FCC was given authority by Congress to give out licenses to companies to use the broadcasting spectrum. However, they had to determine whether the license would serve "the public interest, convenience, and necessity". 

The primary goal for the FCC, from the start, has been to serve the "public interest". A debated concept, the term "public interest" was provided with a general definition by the Federal Radio Commission. The Commission determined, in its 1928 annual report, that "the emphasis must be first and foremost on the interest, the convenience, and the necessity of the listening public, and not on the interest, convenience, or necessity of the individual broadcaster or the advertiser."

Following this reasoning, early FCC regulations reflected the presumption that "it would not be in the public's interest for a single entity to hold more than one broadcast license in the same community. The view was that the public would benefit from a diverse array of owners because it would lead to a diverse array of program and service viewpoints."

The Communications Act of 1934 refined and expanded on the authority of the FCC to regulate public airwaves in the United States, combining and reorganizing provisions from the Federal Radio Act of 1927 and the Mann-Elkins Act of 1910. It empowered the FCC, among other things, to administer broadcasting licenses, impose penalties and regulate standards and equipment used on the airwaves.

The Act also mandated that the FCC would act in the interest of the "public convenience, interest, or necessity." The Act established a system whereby the FCC grants licenses to the spectrum to broadcasters for commercial use, so long as the broadcasters act in the public interest by providing news programming.

Lobbyists from the largest radio broadcasters, ABC and NBC, wanted to establish high fees for broadcasting licenses, but Congress saw this as a limitation upon free speech.

Consequently, "the franchise to operate a broadcasting station, often worth millions, is awarded free of charge to enterprises selected under the standard of 'public interest, convenience, or necessity.'"

Nevertheless, radio and television was dominated by the Big Three television networks until the mid-1990s, when the Fox network and UPN and The WB started to challenge that hegemony.

Cross-ownership rules of 1975:

In 1975, the FCC passed the newspaper and broadcast cross-ownership rule. This ban prohibited the ownership of a daily newspaper and any "full-power broadcast station that serviced the same community". This rule emphasized the need to ensure that a broad number of voices were given the opportunity to communicate via different outlets in each market.

Newspapers, explicitly prohibited from federal regulation because of the guarantee of freedom of the press in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, were out of the FCC's jurisdiction, but the FCC could use the ownership of a newspaper as a preclusion against owning radio or television licenses, which the FCC could and did regulate.

The FCC designed rules to make sure that there is a diversity of voices and opinions on the airwaves. "Beginning in 1975, FCC rules banned cross-ownership by a single entity of a daily newspaper and television or radio broadcast station operating in the same local market."

The ruling was put in place to limit media concentration in TV and radio markets, because they use public airwaves, which is a valuable, and now limited, resource.

Telecommunications Act 1996:

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was an influential act for media cross-ownership. One of the requirements of the act was that the FCC must conduct a biennial review of its media ownership rules "and shall determine whether any of such rules are necessary in the public interest as the result of competition." The Commission was ordered to "repeal or modify any regulation it determines to be no longer in the public interest."

The legislation, touted as a step that would foster competition, actually resulted in the subsequent mergers of several large companies, a trend which still continues. Over 4,000 radio stations were bought out, and minority ownership of TV stations dropped to its lowest point since the federal government began tracking such data in 1990.
​
Since the Telecommunications Act of 1996, restrictions on media merging have decreased. Although merging media companies seems to provide many positive outcomes for the companies involved in the merge, it might lead to some negative outcomes for other companies, viewers and future businesses. The FCC even found that they were indeed negative effects of recent merges in a study that they issued.
​
Since 21st century:

In September 2002, the FCC issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking stating that the Commission would re-evaluate its media ownership rules pursuant to the obligation specified in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. 

In June 2003, after its deliberations which included a single public hearing and the review of nearly two-million pieces of correspondence from the public opposing further relaxation of the ownership rules the FCC voted 3-2 to repeal the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership ban and to make changes to or repeal several of its other ownership rules as well.

In the order, the FCC noted that the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership rule was no longer necessary in the public interest to maintain competition, diversity or localism. However, in 2007 the FCC revised its rules and ruled that they would take it "case-by-case and determine if the cross-ownership would affect the public interest.

The rule changes permitted a company to own a newspaper and broadcast station in any of the nation's top 20 media markets as long as there are at least eight media outlets in the market. If the combination included a television station, that station couldn't be in the market's top four.

As it has since 2003, Prometheus Radio Project argued that the relaxed rule would pave the way for more media consolidation. Broadcasters, pointing to the increasing competition from new platforms, argued that the FCC's rules—including other ownership regulations that govern TV duopolies and radio ownership—should be relaxed even further.

The FCC, meanwhile, defended its right to change the rules either way." That public interest is what the FCC bases its judgments on, whether a media cross-ownership would be a positive and contributive force, locally and nationally.

The FCC held one official forum, February 27, 2003, in Richmond, Virginia in response to public pressures to allow for more input on the issue of elimination of media ownership limits. Some complain that more than one forum was needed.
​
In 2003 the FCC set out to re-evaluate its media ownership rules specified in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. On June 2, 2003, FCC, in a 3-2 vote under Chairman Michael Powell, approved new media ownership laws that removed many of the restrictions previously imposed to limit ownership of media within a local area. The changes were not, as is customarily done, made available to the public for a comment period.
  • Single-company ownership of media in a given market is now permitted up to 45% (formerly 35%, up from 25% in 1985) of that market.
  • Restrictions on newspaper and TV station ownership in the same market were removed.
  • All TV channels, magazines, newspapers, cable, and Internet services are now counted, weighted based on people's average tendency to find news on that medium. At the same time, whether a channel actually contains news is no longer considered in counting the percentage of a medium owned by one owner.
  • Previous requirements for periodic review of license have been changed. Licenses are no longer reviewed for "public-interest" considerations.

The decision by the FCC was overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Prometheus Radio Project v. FCC in June, 2004. The Majority ruled 2-1 against the FCC and ordered the Commission to reconfigure how it justified raising ownership limits.

The Supreme Court later turned down an appeal, so the ruling stands.

In June 2006, the FCC adopted a Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (FNPR) to address the issues raised by the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and also to perform the recurring evaluation of the media ownership rules required by the Telecommunications Act. The deliberations would draw upon three formal sources of input:
  1. the submission of comments,
  2. ten Commissioned studies,
  3. six public hearings.

The FCC in 2007 voted to modestly relax its existing ban on newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership. The FCC voted December 18, 2007 to eliminate some media ownership rules, including a statute that forbids a single company to own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin circulated the plan in October 2007. Martin's justification for the rule change is to ensure the viability of America's newspapers and to address issues raised in the 2003 FCC decision that was later struck down by the courts.

The FCC held six hearings around the country to receive public input from individuals, broadcasters and corporations.

Because of the lack of discussion during the 2003 proceedings, increased attention has been paid to ensuring that the FCC engages in proper dialogue with the public regarding its current rules change. FCC Commissioners Deborah Taylor-Tate and Robert McDowell joined Chairman Martin in voting in favor of the rule change. Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, both Democrats, opposed the change.

UHF discount:

Beginning in 1985, the FCC implemented a rule stating that television stations broadcasting on UHF channels would be "discounted" by half when calculating a broadcaster's total reach, under the market share cap of 39% of U.S. TV households.

This rule was implemented because the UHF band was generally considered inferior to VHF for broadcasting analog television. The notion became obsolete since the completion of the transition from analog to digital television in 2009; the majority of television stations now broadcast on the UHF band because, by contrast, it is generally considered superior for digital transmission.
​
The FCC voted to deprecate the rule in September 2016; the Commission argued that the UHF discount had become technologically obsolete, and that it was now being used as a loophole by broadcasters to contravene its market share rules and increase their market share through consolidation.

The existing portfolios of broadcasters who now exceeded the cap due to the change were grandfathered, including the holdings of Ion Media Networks, Tribune Media, and Univision.

However, on April 21, 2017, under new Trump administration FCC commissioner Ajit Pai, the discount was reinstated in a 2-1 vote, led by Pai and commissioner Michael O'Rielly.

The move, along with a plan to evaluate increasing the national ownership cap, is expected to trigger a wider wave of consolidation in broadcast television. 

A challenge to the rule's restoration was filed on May 15 by The Institute for Public Representation (a coalition of public interest groups comprising the following:  ​
They requested an emergency motion to stay the UHF discount order – delaying its June 5 re-implementation – pending a court challenge to the rule. The groups re-affirmed that the rule was technologically obsolete, and was restored for the purpose of allowing media consolidation.

The FCC rejected the claims, stating that the discount would only allow forward a regulatory review of any station group acquisitions, and that the Institute for Public Representation's criteria for the stay fell short of meeting adequate determination in favor of it by the court; it also claimed that the discount was "inextricably linked" to the agency's media ownership rules, a review of which it initiated in May of that year.

The challenge and subsequent stay motion was partly filed as a reaction to Sinclair Broadcast Group's proposed acquisition of Tribune Media (announced on May 8), which – with the more than 230 stations that the combined company would have, depending on any divestitures in certain markets where both groups own stations – would expand the group's national reach to 78% of all U.S. households with at least one television set with the discount.

On June 1, 2017, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals issued a seven-day administrative stay to the UHF discount rulemaking to review the emergency stay motion. The D.C. Court of Appeals denied the emergency stay motion in a one-page memorandum on June 15, 2017, however, the merits of restoring the discount is still subject to a court appeal proceeding scheduled to occur at a later date.

Following this, in November 2017, the FCC voted 3-2 along partisan lines to eliminate the cross-ownership ban against owning multiple media outlets in the same local market, as well as increasing the number of television stations that one entity may own in a local market.

Pai argued the removal of the ban was necessary for local media to compete with online information sources like Google and Facebook. 

The decision was appealed by advocacy groups, and in September 2019, the Third Circuit struck down the rule change in a 2-1 decision, with the majority opinion stating the FCC "did not adequately consider the effect its sweeping rule changes will have on ownership of broadcast media by women and racial minorities."

Pai stated plans to appeal this ruling. The FCC petitioned to the Supreme Court under FCC v. Prometheus Radio Project.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in April 2021 to reverse the Third Circuit's ruling, stating that the FCC's rule changes did not violate the Administrative Procedure Act, and that there was no Congressional mandate for the FCC to consider the impact on minority ownership of its rulemaking, thus allowing the FCC to proceed with relaxation of media cross-ownership rules.

Local content:

A 2008 study found that news stations operated by a small media company produced more local news and more locally produced video than large chain-based broadcasting groups. 

It was then argued that the FCC claimed, in 2003, that larger media groups produced better quality local content.

Research by Philip Napoli and Michael Yan showed that larger media groups actually produced less local content. In a different study, they also showed that "ownership by one of the big four broadcast networks has been linked to a considerable decrease in the amount of televised local public affairs programming"
​
The major reasoning the FCC made for deregulation was that with more capital, broadcasting organizations could produce more and better local content. However, the research studies by Napoli and Yan showed that once teamed-up, they produced less content.

Cross ownership between broadcasting and newspapers is a complicated issue. The FCC believes that more deregulation is necessary. However, with research studies showing that they produced less local content - less voices being heard that are from within the communities.

While less local voices are heard, more national-based voices do appear. Chain-based companies are using convergence, the same content being produced across multiple mediums, to produce this mass-produced content. It is cheaper and more efficient than having to run different local and national news. However, with convergence and chain-based ownership you can choose which stories to run and how the stories are heard - being able to be played in local communities and national stage.
___________________________________________________________________________

Media consolidation debate:

Robert W. McChesney:

Robert McChesney is an advocate for media reform, and the co-founder of Free Press, which was established in 2003. His work is based on theoretical, normative, and empirical evidence suggesting that media regulation efforts should be more strongly oriented towards maintaining a healthy balance of diverse viewpoints in the media environment.

However, his viewpoints on current regulation are; "there is every bit as much regulation by government as before, only now it is more explicitly directed to serve large corporate interests."

McChesney believes that the Free Press' objective is a more diverse and competitive commercial system with a significant nonprofit and noncommercial sector. It would be a system built for the citizens, but most importantly - it would be accessible to anyone who wants to broadcast. Not only specifically the big corporations that can afford to broadcast nationally, but more importantly locally.

McChesney suggests that to better our current system we need to "establish a bona fide noncommercial public radio and television system, with local and national stations and networks. The expense should come out of the general budget"

Benjamin Compaine:

Benjamin Compaine believes that the current media system is "one of the most competitive major industries in U.S. commerce." He believes that much of the media in the United States is operating in the same market. He also believes that all the content is being interchanged between different media.

Compaine believes that due to convergence, two or more things coming together, the media has been saved. Because of the ease of access to send the same message across multiple and different mediums, the message is more likely to be heard. He also believes that due to the higher amount of capital and funding, the media outlets are able to stay competitive because they are trying to reach more listeners or readers by using newer media.

Benjamin Compaine's main argument is that the consolidation of media outlets, across multiple ownerships, has allowed for a better quality of content. He also stated that the news is interchangeable, and as such, making the media market less concentrated than previously thought, the idea being that since the same story is being pushed across multiple different platforms, then it can only be counted as one news story from multiple sources.

Compaine also believed the news is more readily available, making it far easier for individuals to access than traditional methods.

American public distrust in the media:

A 2012 Gallup poll found that Americans' distrust in the mass media had hit a new high, with 60% saying they had little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly.

Distrust had increased since the previous few years, when Americans were already more negative about the media than they had been in the years before 2004.

Music industry:

Critics of media consolidation in broadcast radio say it has made the music played more homogeneous, and makes it more difficult for acts to gain local popularity. They also believe it has reduced the demographic diversity of popular music, pointing to a study which found representation of women in country music charts at 11.3% from 2000 to 2018.

Critics cite centralized control as having increased artist self-censorship, and several incidents of artists being banned from a large number of broadcast stations all at once.

After the controversy caused by criticism of President George W. Bush and the Iraq War by a member of the Dixie Chicks, the band was banned by Cumulus Media and Clear Channel Communications, which also organized pro-war demonstrations. 

After the Super Bowl XXXVIII wardrobe malfunction, CBS CEO Les Moonves reportedly banned Janet Jackson from all CBS and Viacom properties, including MTV, VH1, the 46th Annual Grammy Awards, and Infinity Broadcasting Corporation radio stations, impacting sales of her album Damita Jo.

News:

Critics point out that media consolidation has allowed Sinclair Broadcast Group to require hundreds of local stations to run editorials by Boris Epshteyn (an advisor to Donald Trump), terrorism alerts, and anti-John Kerry documentary Stolen Honor, and even to force local news anchors to read an editorial mirroring Trump's denunciation of the news media for bias and fake news.
​
See also:







Concentration of Media OwnershipPictured: Analyzing the Concentration of US Media Ownership
​Concentration of media ownership (also known as media consolidation or media convergence) is a process whereby progressively fewer individuals or organizations control increasing shares of the mass media. 

Contemporary research demonstrates increasing levels of consolidation, with many media industries already highly concentrated and dominated by a very small number of firms,

Globally, large media conglomerates include the following: 
As of 2022, the largest media conglomerates in terms of revenue are: 
Mergers:

Media mergers occur when one media company buys another. The current landscape of corporate media ownership in the United States of America can be described as an oligopoly.

Risks for media integrity:

Media integrity is at risk when small number of companies and individuals control the media market. Media integrity refers to the ability of a media outlet to serve the public interest and democratic process, making it resilient to institutional corruption within the media system, economy of influence, conflicting dependence and political clientelism.

Elimination of net neutrality:

Net neutrality is also at stake when media mergers occur. Net neutrality involves a lack of restrictions on content on the internet, however, with big businesses supporting campaigns financially they tend to have influence over political issues, which can translate into their mediums.

These big businesses, that also have control over internet usage or the airwaves, could possibly make the content available biased from their political stand point, or they could restrict usage for conflicting political views, therefore eliminating net neutrality.

Issues:

Concentration of media ownership is very frequently seen as a problem of contemporary media and society.

Freedom of the press and editorial independence:

Johannes von Dohnanyi, in a 2003 report published by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE)'s Office of the Representative on Freedom of the Media, argued market concentration among media—whether driven by domestic or foreign investors—should be "closely monitored" because "Horizontal concentration may cause dangers to media pluralism and diversity, while vertical concentration may result in entry barriers for new competitors." 

Von Dohnanyi argues that to "safeguard free and independent print media and protect professional journalism as one of the cornerstones of constitutional democracy" there should be standards for editorial independence, better labor protections for professional journalists, and independent institutions "to monitor the implementation and observance of all laws and regulations regarding concentration processes, media pluralism, content diversity and journalistic freedoms."

​​Deregulation:

Robert W. McChesney argues that the concentration of media ownership is caused by a shift to neoliberal deregulation policies, which is a market-driven approach. Deregulation effectively removes governmental barriers to allow for the commercial exploitation of media.

Motivation for media firms to merge includes increased profit-margins, reduced risk and maintaining a competitive edge. In contrast to this, those who support deregulation have argued that cultural trade barriers and regulations harm consumers and domestic support in the form of subsidies hinders countries to develop their own strong media firms.

The opening of borders is more beneficial to countries than maintaining protectionist regulations. Critics of media deregulation and the resulting concentration of ownership fear that such trends will only continue to reduce the diversity of information provided, as well as to reduce the accountability of information providers to the public.

The ultimate consequence of consolidation, critics argue, is a poorly informed public, restricted to a reduced array of media options that offer only information that does not harm the media oligopoly's growing range of interests.

For those critics, media deregulation is a dangerous trend, facilitating an increase in concentration of media ownership, and subsequently reducing the overall quality and diversity of information communicated through major media channels. Increased concentration of media ownership can lead to corporate censorship affecting a wide range of critical thought.

Media pluralism:

The concentration of media ownership is commonly regarded as one of the crucial aspects reducing media pluralism. A high concentration of the media market increases the chances to reduce the plurality of political, cultural and social points of views. 

Even if ownership of the media is one of the main concerns when it comes to assessing media pluralism, the concept of media pluralism is broader as it touches many aspects, from merger control rules to editorial freedom, the status of public service broadcasters, the working conditions of journalists, the relationship between media and politics, representation of local and regional communities and the inclusion of minorities' voices. 

Also, it embraces all measures guaranteeing citizens' access to diversified sources so to allow the formation of a plurality of opinions in the public sphere without undue influence of dominant powers.

Furthermore, media pluralism has a two-fold dimension, or rather internal and external:
  • Internal pluralism concerns pluralism within a specific media organisation: in this regard, many countries request public broadcast services to account for a variety of views and opinions, including those of minority groups.
  • External pluralism applies instead to the overall media landscape, for instance in terms of the number of media outlets operating in a given country.

Media ownership can pose serious challenges to pluralism when owners interfere with journalists' independence and editorial line. However, in a free market economy, owners must have the capacity to decide the strategy of their company to remain competitive in the market.

Also, pluralism does not mean neutrality and lack of opinion, as having an editorial line is an integral part of the role of editors provided that this line is transparent and explicit to both the staff and audience.

Determinants of media pluralism:

Size and wealth of the market:

"Within any free market economy, the level of resources available for the provision of media will be constrained principally by the size and wealth of that economy, and the propensity of its inhabitants to consume media." 

Those countries that have a relatively large market, like the United Kingdom, France or Spain have more financial background to support diversity of output and have the ability to keep more media companies in the market (as they are there to make profit). More diverse output and fragmented ownership will support pluralism.

In contrast, small markets like Ireland or Hungary suffer from the absence of the diversity of output given in countries with bigger markets. It means that "support for the media through direct payment" and "levels of consumers expenditure", furthermore "the availability of advertising support" [Gillian Doyle; 2002:15] are less in these countries, due to the low number of audience.

Overall, the size and wealth of the market determine the diversity of both media output and media ownership.

Consolidation of resources:

The consolidation of cost functions and cost-sharing. Cost-sharing is a common practice in monomedia and cross media. For example, "for multi-product television or radio broadcasters, the more homogeneity possible between different services held in common ownership (or the more elements within a programme schedule which can be shared between 'different' stations), the greater the opportunity to reap economies". 

Though the main concern of pluralism is that different organization under different ownership may buy the same e.g. news stories from the same news-supplier agency.

In the UK, the biggest news-supplier is The Press Association (PA). Here is a quoted text from PA web site: "The Press Association supplies services to every national and regional daily newspaper, major broadcasters, online publishers and a wide range of commercial organisations."

Overall, in a system where all different media organizations gather their stories from the same source, we can't really call that system pluralist. That is where diversity of output comes in.

Pluralism in media ownership:

​Media privatization and the lessening of state dominance over media content has continued since 2012. In the Arab region, the Arab States Broadcasting Union (ASBU) counted 1,230 television stations broadcasting via Arab and international satellites, of which 133 were state-owned and 1,097 private. 

According to the ASBU Report, these numbers serve as evidence of a decline in the percentage of state channels and a rise in national private and foreign public stations targeting the Arab region. The reduction of direct government ownership over the whole media sector is commonly registered as a positive trend, but this has paralleled by a growth in outlets with a sectarian agenda.

In Africa, some private media outlets have maintained close ties to governments or individual politicians, while media houses owned by politically non-aligned individuals have struggled to survive, often in the face of advertising boycotts by state agencies.

In almost all regions, models of public service broadcasting have been struggling for funding. In Western, Central and Eastern Europe, funds directed to public service broadcasting have been stagnating or declining since 2012.

New types of cross-ownership have emerged in the past five years that have spurred new questions about where to draw the line between media and other industries. A notable case has been the acquisition of The Washington Post by the founder of online retailer Amazon. While the move initially raised concerns about the newspaper's independence, the newspaper has significantly increased its standing in the online media—and print—and introduced significant innovations.

​The community-centred media ownership model continues to survive in some areas, especially in isolated, rural or disadvantaged areas, and mostly pertaining to radio. Through this model, not-for-profit media outlets are run and managed by the communities they serve.

​In the United States:
Main article: Media cross-ownership in the United States

Recent media mergers in the United States:

An infographic created by Jason at Frugal Dad states that in 1983, 90% of US media was controlled by 50 companies, and that in 2011, 90% was controlled by just 6 companies. 

One of the companies listed, News Corporation, was split into two separate companies on June 28, 2013, with publishing assets and Australian media assets going to News Corp and broadcasting and media assets going to 21st Century Fox.

Film industry:

In the United States, movie production has been dominated by major studios since the early 20th century; before that, there was a period in which Edison's Trust monopolized the industry.

The music and television industries recently witnessed cases of media consolidation, with Sony Music Entertainment's parent company merging their music division with Bertelsmann AG's BMG to form Sony BMG and Tribune's The WB and CBS Corp.'s UPN merging to form The CW.

In the case of Sony BMG, there existed a "Big Five" (now "Big Four") of major record companies, while The CW's creation was an attempt to consolidate ratings and stand up to the "Big Four" of American network (terrestrial) television (this despite the fact that the CW was, in fact, partially owned by one of the Big Four in CBS).

In television, the vast majority of broadcast and basic cable networks, over a hundred in all, are controlled by seven corporations: 
  1. Fox Corporation, 
  2. The Walt Disney Company (which includes the ABC, ESPN, FX and Disney brands), 
  3. National Amusements (which owns Paramount Global), 
  4. Comcast (which owns NBCUniversal), 
  5. Warner Bros. Discovery, 
  6. E. W. Scripps Company, 
  7. Cablevision (now known as Altice USA), or some combination thereof).

There may also be some large-scale owners in an industry that are not the causes of monopoly or oligopoly. iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel Communications), especially since the Telecommunications Act of 1996, acquired many radio stations across the United States, and came to own more than 1,200 stations.

However, the radio broadcasting industry in the United States and elsewhere can be regarded as oligopolistic regardless of the existence of such a player. Because radio stations are local in reach, each licensing a specific part of spectrum from the FCC in a specific local area, any local market is served by a limited number of stations.

In most countries, this system of licensing makes many markets local oligopolies. The similar market structure exists for television broadcasting, cable systems and newspaper industries, all of which are characterized by the existence of large-scale owners.

Concentration of ownership is often found in these industries.

Effect of ownership on coverage:

In a 2020 article, Herzog and Scerbinina argued that CNN's coverage in 2017 of a potential merger between its parent company Time Warner and AT&T was "self-centered, self-promoting, and self-legitimizing."

For Media Concentration in other countries, click on any of the following blue hyperlinks:
See also:







Telecommunications Act of 1996 Pictured below: Was the 1996 Telecommunications Act successful in promoting competition?*  (Brookings Institution)
* -- more about the Article "Was the 1996 Telecommunications Act successful in promoting competition?"
  • By Stuart N. Brotman Monday, February 8, 2016
​
Evaluating legislative success is more art than science. Today our nation commemorates the 20th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 becoming law, and there is now a sufficient period to evaluate whether the act has achieved what it was intended to accomplish.

The law was designed in part to support technology and service innovation by allowing the Regional Bell Operating Companies (aka “Baby Bells”) to enter new markets, including long-distance telephone and information services.

These had been prohibited by court oversight of the 1981 consent decree of AT&T and the Department of Justice. The resulting divestiture of AT&T created seven Baby Bells that were severely constrained from operating in a manner that best capitalized on their business strategies and assets.

Competing in the marketplace was also an essential part of tearing down the so-called Berlin Wall of telecommunications. Local telephone companies were prohibited by the Federal Communications Commission from offering cable television service.

The same prohibition applied to local cable television systems being able to offer telephone service. Until the Telecommunications Act of 1996, regulation ensured that these industries could not go head-to-head against each other for customers.

Lacking that incentive, both players did not place a high priority on upgrading their network infrastructures in any comprehensive way. As Chairman of the House Commerce Committee Thomas J. Bliley Jr. (R-VA) noted when the telecommunications reform legislation was being introduced, “it is imperative that the statutory guidelines be put in place so that companies can make business plans as we enter the information age…the federal government should not be in the business of refereeing among competitors through regulation.”

Perhaps Clay T. Whitehead, founding director of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy, best summarized what the 1996 Telecommunications Act tried to achieve: “set a framework based on those enduring principles of competition and open entry, allow a little time for the industry to get used to the ideas, and get out of the way.”

One of the clear legislative targets was to have competition serve as a force for broadband network development nationwide. The act’s legislative history reflects the goal of Congress “to  accelerate the deployment of an advanced capability that will enable subscribers in all parts of the United States to send and receive information in all its forms—voice, data, graphics, and video— over a high-speed switched, interactive, broadband, transmission capability.”

It’s fair to say that the law did not achieve immediate success. Five years after its enactment, only New York and Texas had determined that there was sufficient competition in the local telephone market to enable the Baby Bells operating there to also offer long-distance telephone service.

By 2001, concentration within the industry actually increased, with only four companies in the United States handling 95 percent of local telecommunications service: Verizon, SBC, BellSouth and Qwest.

Fast forward to today’s telecommunications environment, where permitting both local telephone and cable companies to offer broadband service (including video) has been a powerful driver for new investment to facilities upgrades or new construction.

According to the United States Telecom Association, broadband providers have made $1.4 trillion in capital investments from 1996 through 2014.

And the National Broadband Map shows that all parts of the country (50 states along with all U.S. territories) now have broadband service, as the law intended. Competition from new entrants, notably Google, has provided competitive incentives for upgrading the speed of fixed broadband even further.

Today, fixed broadband at 100 mbps download or greater is available to 65 percent of Americans, up from only 11 percent in 2010."

[End of Brookings Article]
___________________________________________________________________________

​​The Telecommunications Act of 1996 (Wikipedia):

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 is a United States federal law enacted by the 104th United States Congress on January 3, 1996, and signed into law on February 8, 1996, by President Bill Clinton. It primarily amended Chapter 5 of Title 47 of the United States Code.

The act was the first significant overhaul of United States telecommunications law in more than sixty years, amending the Communications Act of 1934, and represented a major change in American telecommunication law, because it was the first time that the Internet was included in broadcasting and spectrum allotment.

The goal of the law was to "let anyone enter any communications business – to let any communications business compete in any market against any other." The legislation's primary goal was deregulation of the converging broadcasting and telecommunications markets.

The law's regulatory policies have been criticized, including the effects of dualistic re-regulation of the communications market.

Background:

Prior regime:

Previously, the Communications Act of 1934 ("1934 Act") was the statutory framework for U.S. communications policy, covering telecommunications and broadcasting. The 1934 Act created the FCC, the agency formed to implement and administer the economic regulation of the interstate activities of the telephone monopolies and the licensing of spectrum used for broadcast and other purposes.

The Act left most regulation of intrastate telephone services to the states.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a combination of technological change, court decisions, and changes in U.S. policy permitted competitive entry into some telecommunications and broadcast markets.

In this context, the 1996 Telecommunications Act was designed to allow fewer, but larger corporations, to operate more media enterprises within a sector (such as Clear Channel's dominance in radio), and to expand across media sectors (through relaxation of cross-ownership rules), thus enabling massive and historic consolidation of media in the United States. These changes amounted to a near-total rollback of New Deal market regulation.

Stated objective:

The 1996 Act's stated objective was to open up markets to competition by removing regulatory barriers to entry: The conference report refers to the bill "to provide for a pro-competitive, de-regulatory national policy framework designed to accelerate rapidly private sector deployment of advanced information technologies and services to all Americans by opening all telecommunications markets to competition".

Enactment:

The Act was approved by the 104th Congress on January 3, 1996, and was signed into law on February 8, 1996, by President Bill Clinton. It was the first bill signed at the Library of Congress.

Framework:

A purpose of the 1996 Act was to foster competition among companies that use similar underlying network technologies (e.g., circuit-switched telephone networks) to provide a single type of service (e.g., voice). For example, it creates separate regulatory regimes for carriers providing voice telephone service and providers of cable television, and a third for information services.

Preemption:

One key provision allowed the FCC to preempt state or local legal requirements that acted as a barrier to entry in the provision of interstate or intrastate telecommunications service.

Interconnectedness:

Since communications services exhibit network effects and positive externalities, new entrants would face barriers to entry if they could not interconnect their networks with those of the incumbent carriers.

Thus, another key provision of the 1996 Act sets obligations for incumbent carriers and new entrants to interconnect their networks with one another, imposing additional requirements on the incumbents because they might desire to restrict competitive entry by denying such interconnection or by setting terms, conditions, and rates that could undermine the ability of the new entrants to compete.

Intercarrier compensation:

Under these conditions, many calls will arise between parties on different networks. While it might be possible to have the calling party pay its carrier and the called party pay its carrier, for various reasons it has been traditional in the United States for the calling party's carrier to pay the called party's carrier for completing the call — this is called intercarrier compensation—and, in turn, recover those costs in the rates charged to its subscribers.

The 1996 Act requires that intercarrier compensation rates among competing local exchange carriers (CLECs) be based on the "additional costs of terminating such calls". However, the framework created by the 1996 Act set different intercarrier compensation rates for services that were not competing at that time but do compete today.

RBOCs may enter long distance:

To foster competition in both the long-distance and local markets, the 1996 Act created a process by which the Regional Bell Operating Companies ("RBOCs") would be free to offer long-distance service (which was not permitted under one of the terms of the 1982 Modified Final Judgement settling the government's antitrust case against the former Bell System monopoly) once they made a showing that their local markets had been opened up to competition. 

The list of Bell Operating Companies in the bill are:
  • Bell Telephone Company of Nevada,
  • Illinois Bell Telephone Company,
  • Indiana Bell Telephone Company, Incorporated,
  • Michigan Bell Telephone Company,
  • New England Telephone and Telegraph Company,
  • New Jersey Bell Telephone Company,
  • New York Telephone Company,
  • U S West Communications Company,
  • South Central Bell Telephone Company,
  • Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company,
  • Southwestern Bell Telephone Company,
  • The Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania,
  • The Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company,
  • The Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company of Maryland,
  • The Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company of Virginia,
  • The Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company of West Virginia,
  • The Diamond State Telephone Company,
  • The Ohio Bell Telephone Company,
  • The Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company,
  • or Wisconsin Telephone Company.

Wholesale access to incumbents' networks:

To allow new entrants enough time to fully build out their own networks, the Act requires the incumbent local exchange carriers to make available to entrants, at cost-based wholesale rates, those elements of their network to which entrants needed access in order not to be impaired in their ability to offer telecommunications services.

Universal service support made explicit:

Prior to enactment of the Act, universal service had been funded through implicit subsidies, levied as above-cost business rates, urban rates, and above-cost rates for the "access charges" that long-distance carriers paid as intercarrier compensation to local telephone companies for originating and terminating their subscribers' long-distance calls.

Recognizing that new entrants would target those services that had above-cost rates, and thus erode universal service support, Congress included in the 1996 Act a provision requiring universal service support to be explicit, rather than hidden in above-cost rates. 

This requirement has only been partially implemented, however, and therefore significant implicit universal services subsidies still remain in above-cost rates for certain services.

Policy considerations of new environment:

The regulatory framework created by the 1996 Act was intended to foster "intramodal" competition within distinct markets, i.e., among companies that used the same underlying technology to provide service.

For example, competition was envisioned between the incumbent local and long-distance wireline carriers plus new competitive local exchange carriers, all of which used circuit-switched networks to offer voice services.

It did not envision the intermodal competition that has subsequently developed, such as wireless service competing with both local and long-distance wireline service, VoIP competing with wireline and wireless telephony, IP video competing with cable television.

Providers from separate regulatory regimes have been brought into competition with one another as a result of subsequent deployment of digital broadband technologies in telephone and cable networks. Voice and video services can now be provided using Internet protocol and thus might be classified as unregulated information services, but these services compete directly with regulated traditional voice and video services.

Moreover, these digital technologies do not recognize national borders, much less state boundaries.

Given the focus on intramodal competition and the lack of intermodal competition, there was little concern about statutory or regulatory language that set different regulatory burdens for different technology modes.

As a result, the current statutory and regulatory framework may be inconsistent with, or unresponsive to, current market conditions in several ways:
  • Service providers that are in direct competition with one another sometimes may be subject to different regulatory rules because they use different technologies. Some examples are:
  • For certain long-distance calls, if the caller uses a wireless telephone number, the caller's wireless carrier is subject to a cost-based "reciprocal compensation" intercarrier compensation charge for the termination of that call. But if the caller made an identical call, from the same location to the same called party, using a wireline telephone (and hence a wireline long-distance carrier), that carrier would be subject to above cost "access charges" for the completion of the call.
  • When a long-distance call is made to a called party's wireline telephone, that party's wireline local exchange carrier can charge the calling party's long-distance carrier an above-cost access charge for terminating the call; but if an identical long-distance call were made to the same called party, from and to the same physical location, but to the called party's wireless telephone, the called party's wireless carrier is not allowed to charge the calling party's long-distance carrier any access charge for terminating the call. Indeed, the average intercarrier compensation rate ranges from 0.1 cents per minute for traffic bound to an information service provider ("ISP") to 5.1 cents per minute for intrastate traffic bound to a subscriber of a small (rural) incumbent local exchange carrier; individual rates can be as low as zero and as high as 35.9 cents per minute — even though in each case basically the same transport and switching functions are provided. (See CRS Report RL32889, Intercarrier Compensation: One Component of Telecom Reform, at pp. 2-5.)
  • the Federal Universal Service Fund is funded through an assessment on interstate telecommunications service revenues that exceeds 10% (the exact assessment rate varies from quarter to quarter); information services, even if they compete directly with the interstate telecommunications services, are not assessed.
  • Economic regulations intended to protect against monopoly power may not be fully taking into account intermodal competition.
  • The framework may not effectively address interconnection, access, and social policy issues for an IP architecture in which multiple applications ride on top of the physical (transmission) network layer.

Generally speaking, the number of broadband networks is limited by cost constraint up-front, fixed costs—which do not apply to applications providers. In this new environment, there will be three broad categories of competition:

  1. intermodal competition among a small number of broadband network providers that offer a suite of voice, data, video, and other services primarily for the mass market;
  2. intramodal competition among a small number of wireline broadband providers that serve multi-locational business customers who tend to be located in business districts; and
  3. competition between these few broadband network providers and a multitude of independent applications service providers. (In addition, there will continue to be niche providers that offer consumers users competitive options for specific services.)

These three areas of competition will all be affected by a common factor: will there be entry by a third broadband network to compete with the broadband networks of the local telephone company and the local cable operator?

There are four general approaches to the regulation of broadband network providers vis-a-vis independent applications providers (At present, the FCC follows the last two approaches):
  1. structural regulation, such as open access;
  2. ex ante non-discrimination rules;
  3. ex post adjudication of abuses of market power, as they arise, on a case-by-case basis;
  4. and reliance on antitrust law and non-mandatory principles as the basis for self-regulation.

There is consensus that the current universal service and intercarrier compensation mechanisms need to be modified to accommodate the new market conditions. For example, the current universal service funding mechanism is assessed only on telecommunications services, and carriers can receive universal service funding only in support of telecommunications services.

Thus, if services that had been classified as telecommunications services are re-classified as information services, as recently occurred for high-speed digital subscriber line ("DSL") services, then the universal service assessment base will decline and carriers that depend on universal service funding may see a decline in support.

It therefore may be timely to consider whether the scope of universal service should be expanded to include universal access to a broadband network at affordable rates, not just to basic telephone service.

​Major provisions:

The 1996 Telecommunications Act is divided into seven Titles:

Title I, "Telecommunications Service": Helps to outline the general duties of the telecommunication carriers as well as the obligations of all local exchange carriers (LECs) and the additional obligations of incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs).
  • Sec. 102. Eligible telecommunications carriers.
  • Sec. 103. Exempt telecommunications companies
  • Sec. 104. Nondiscrimination principle.
  • Sec. 151. Bell operating company provisions.

Title II, "Broadcast Services": Outlines the granting and licensing of broadcast spectrum by the government, including a provision to issue licenses to current television stations to commence digital television broadcasting, the use of the revenues generated by such licensing, the terms of broadcast licenses, the process of renewing broadcast licenses, direct broadcast satellite services, automated ship distress and safety systems, and restrictions on over-the-air reception devices
  • Sec. 201. Broadcast spectrum flexibility.
  • Sec. 202. Broadcast ownership.
  • Sec. 203. Term of licenses.
  • Sec. 204. Broadcast license renewal procedures.
  • Sec. 205. Direct broadcast satellite service.
  • Sec. 206. Automated ship distress and safety systems.
  • Sec. 207. Restrictions on over-the-air reception devices.

Title III, "Cable Services": Outlines the Cable Act reform, cable services provided by telephone companies, the preemption of franchising authority regulation of telecommunication services, VHS home video programming accessibility, and competitive availability of navigation devices.
  • Sec. 301. Cable Act reform.
  • Sec. 302. Cable service provided by telephone companies.
  • Sec. 303. Preemption of franchising authority regulation of telecommunications services.
  • Sec. 304. Competitive availability of navigation devices.
  • Sec. 305. Video programming accessibility.

Title IV, "Regulatory Reform": Outlines regulatory forbearance, a biennial review of regulations, regulatory relief, and the elimination of unnecessary Commission regulations and functions.
  • Sec. 401. Regulatory forbearance.
  • Sec. 402. Biennial review of regulations; regulatory relief.
  • Sec. 403. Elimination of unnecessary Commission regulations and functions.

Title V, "Obscenity and Violence":
Main article: Communications Decency Act

Outlines regulations regarding obscene programming on cable television, the scrambling of cable channels for nonsubscribers, the scrambling of sexually explicit adult video service programming, the cable operators' refusal to carry certain programs, coercion and enticement of minors, and online family empowerment, including a requirement for the manufacture of televisions that block programs using V-chip technology.

Title V also gives a clarification of the current laws regarding communication of obscene materials through the use of a computer.
  • Sec. 501. Short title.
  • Sec. 502. Obscene or harassing use of telecommunications facilities under the Communications Act of 1934.
  • Sec. 503. Obscene programming on cable television.
  • Sec. 504. Scrambling of cable channels for nonsubscribers.
  • Sec. 505. Scrambling of sexually explicit adult video service programming.
  • Sec. 506. Cable operator refusal to carry certain programs.
  • Sec. 507. Clarification of current laws regarding communication of obscene materials through the use of computers.
  • Sec. 508. Coercion and enticement of minors.
  • Sec. 509. Online family empowerment.
  • Sec. 551. Parental choice in television programming.
  • Sec. 552. Technology fund.
  • Sec. 561. Expedited review.

Title VI, "Effect on Other Laws" : Outlines the applicability of consent decrees and other laws and the preemption of local taxation with respect to direct-to-home sales.
  • Sec. 601. Applicability of consent decrees and other law.
  • Sec. 602. Preemption of local taxation with respect to direct-to-home services.

Title VII, "Miscellaneous Provisions" : Outlines provisions relating to:
  • the prevention of unfair billing practices for information or services provided over toll-free telephone calls,
  • privacy of consumer information,
  • pole attachments,
  • facilities siting,
  • radio frequency emission standards,
  • mobile services direct access to long-distance carriers,
  • advanced telecommunications incentives,
  • the telecommunications development fund,
  • the National Education Technology Funding Corporation,
  • a report on the use of advance telecommunications services for medical purposes,
  • and outlines the authorization of appropriations.
    • Sec. 701. Prevention of unfair billing practices for information or services provided over toll-free telephone calls.
    • Sec. 702. Privacy of customer information.
    • Sec. 703. Pole attachments.
    • Sec. 704. Facilities siting; radio frequency emission standards.
    • Sec. 705. Mobile services direct access to long-distance carriers.
    • Sec. 706. Advanced telecommunications incentives.
    • Sec. 707. Telecommunications Development Fund.
    • Sec. 708. National Education Technology Funding Corporation.
    • Sec. 709. Report on the use of advanced telecommunications services for medical purposes.
    • Sec. 710. Authorization of appropriations.

The Act makes a significant distinction between providers of telecommunications services and information services. The term 'telecommunications service' means the offering of telecommunications for a fee directly to the public, or to such classes of users as to be effectively available directly to the public, regardless of the facilities used.'

On the other hand, the term 'information service' means the offering of a capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications, and includes electronic publishing, but does not include any use of any such capability for the management, control, or operation of a telecommunications system or the management of a telecommunications service.

The distinction becomes particularly important when a carrier provides information services, because the Act enforces specific regulations against 'telecommunications carriers' but not against providers of information services. By one interpretation of the Act, a carrier providing information services is not a 'telecommunications carrier'.

For example, under this interpretation a carrier would not be a 'telecommunications carrier' when it is selling broadband Internet access. With the convergence of telephone, cable, and internet providers, this distinction has created much controversy.

Under BrandX, the Supreme Court applied the doctrine of Chevron deference and thereby allowed the question of how to interpret the Act's ambiguous language to be decided by the FCC.

The Act both deregulated and created new regulations. Congress forced local telephone companies to share their lines with competitors at regulated rates if "the failure to provide access to such network elements would impair the ability of the telecommunications carrier seeking access to provide the services that it seeks to offer" (Section 251(3)(2)(B)).

This led to the creation of a new group of telephone companies, "Competitive Local Exchange Carriers" (CLECs), that compete with "ILECs" or incumbent local exchange carriers.

Most media ownership regulations were eased, and the cap on radio station ownership was eliminated.

Title V of the 1996 Act is the Communications Decency Act, aimed at regulating Internet indecency and obscenity, but was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court for violating the First Amendment. Portions of Title V remain, including the Good Samaritan Act, which protects ISPs from liability for third-party content on their services, and legal definitions of the Internet.

The Act codified the concept of universal service and led to creation of the Universal Service Fund and E-rate. The Act employs the following terms of art: "Information service" which is defined as The offering of a capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications — Title I, Section 3(20) of the 1934 Act​

​Claims made in opposition to the Act:

When the smaller CLECs faced financial problems, the trend toward competition slowed, turning into a decade of reconsolidation. The two largest CLECs, Teleport Communications Group (TCG) and Metropolitan Fiber Systems (MFS) were acquired by AT&T and MCI/WorldCom.

Looking back five years after the bill was passed, the Consumers Union reported that wire to wire competition, the reason that sold the bill, had not succeeded as legislators had hoped. CLECs had captured just under seven percent of total lines in the country, and only three percent of homes and small businesses. Wire to wire competition accounted for only one percent of total lines nationwide.

The Consumers Union also raises one other major point. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 did not foster competition among ILECs as the bill had hoped. Instead, of ILECs encroaching on each other, the opposite occurred  – mergers.

Before the 1996 Act was passed, the largest four ILECs owned less than half of all the lines in the country while, five years later, the largest four local telephone companies owned about 85% of all the lines in the country.

Robert Crandall has argued that the forced-access provisions of the 1996 Act have had little economic value, and that the primary, sustainable competitive forces in phone and related, non-'radio', telecommunications are the wireline telephone companies, the cable companies, and the wireless companies.

The Act was claimed to foster competition. Instead, it continued the historic industry consolidation reducing the number of major media companies from around 50 in 1983 to 10 in 1996 and 6 in 2005. 

An FCC study found that the Act had led to a drastic decline in the number of radio station owners, even as the actual number of commercial stations in the United States had increased. This decline in owners and increase in stations has reportedly had the effect of Radio homogenization, where programming has become similar across formats.

Consumer activist Ralph Nader argued that the Act was an example of corporate welfare spawned by political corruption, because it gave away to incumbent broadcasters valuable licenses for broadcasting digital signals on the public airwaves. 

There was a requirement in the Act that the FCC not auction off the public spectrum which the FCC itself valued at $11–$70 billion.

It had been specifically named in the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace as an act "which repudiates your own [i.e. American] Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis".

Claims made in support of the law:

A Brookings Institute study concludes that the law incentivized facilities upgrades and new construction in the Telecommunications industry, despite increased industry concentration. In the long term, this helped to spread broadband access to more of the country.

The law led "baby bells" to offer long distance calling in two regions with sufficient competition, New York and Texas.

Later criticism:

In later years, criticism of the Telecommunications Act continued. One commentator, Warren J. Sirota, criticized the media's coverage of the bill and noted one provision that hadn't been covered. He wrote that: "Rightfully, this major change [the Telecommunications Act] in the nation's regulatory structure is receiving considerable media and press attention.

Unfortunately...most of the attention is going to the wrong issue, the Decency Act." He described this provision as "blatantly unconstitutional" and noted that the balance of the Act would "shape our future" by eliminating "barriers between the industry's segments, e.g., local and long-distance services, broadcast and cable television, etc."

The Kill Your Television website, which advocated people turn off their television sets, had a criticism of the law as well. They wrote: thanks to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the business is about to get bigger...Mergers, takeovers and acquisitions are becoming the norm in the television industry.

The new law has stripped down the television ownership rules so much, that big media players can and will be more aggressive in buying out smaller stations...A new legislative fight is brewing on the horizon as the broadcast industry gears up for the introduction of digital television...The Telecommunications Act['s]...highlights include: Deregulation of most cable TV rates by 1999...End [of] the FCC partial ban on broadcast networks owning cable systems...Extends TV and radio station license terms to eight years...Eases one-to-a-market rule to allow ownership of TV and radio combos...in the top 50 markets.

In the 2003 edition of his book, A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn wrote about alternative media, community newspapers and the creation of street newspapers trying to break up the corporate control of information.

On that topic, he talked about the Telecommunications Act of 1996: the Telecommunications Act of 1996...enabled the handful of corporations dominating the airwaves to expand their power further. Mergers enabled tighter control of information...The Latin American writer Eduardo Galeano commented..."Never have so many been held incommunicado by so few."

The impact of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 on the music industry is still felt today by musicians and the general radio listening public. The legislation eliminated a cap on nationwide radio station ownership and allowed an entity to own up to four stations in a single market. Within five years of the act's signing, radio station ownership dropped from approximately 5100 owners to 3800. 

Today, iHeartMedia is the largest corporation with over 860 radio stations under its name across the nation. The Telecommunications Act was supposed to open the market to more and new radio station ownership; instead, it created an opportunity for a media monopoly.

Larger corporations could buy out smaller independent stations, which affected the diversity of music played on air. Instead of DJs and music directors having control of what is played, market researchers and consultants are handling the programming, which lessens the chance of independent artists and local talent being played on air.

This is a primary reason so many artists on air have the same sound.

See also:







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