The Media and American Society

John Nerone

On closer examination, these accounts of media power become, well, quizzical.  Take Vietnam.  Content analysis shows network news and daily newspapers to have been staunchly pro-war until quite late in the game, and the military’s own study  shows  that public opinion varied according to the body count and not the news coverage (1).  So why does everybody remember it differently?  Well, the newsfolk remember it differently because it gives them a heroic past.  The military remembers it differently because it has given them a good reason to shut down the press in later wars large and small,  hot and cold.  This account reassures some that the system works, if slowly, and that the people are basically good at heart.  Others can believe that the system would have worked and the people would have been good (and we would have won the war)  if the media had behaved properly.  In short, blaming it on the media makes everyone happy, though for quite different reasons.

The media are so supple a scapegoat because there is no single agreed upon definition of what the media are.  Even media professionals are not entirely agreed on whether the media are singular (the media is) or plural (the media are, a usage that I insist on).  And no one has quite figured out the relationship between the media and earlier descriptions of communications—the press—for instance. 

These questions of definition are really historical ones.  The media themselves tend to be present- or future-minded and passively if not actively anti-historical, and even otherwise well-informed folk tend to think of the media without placing them in historical context.  But the media have quite a long history, and scholars from a variety of disciplines have been writing about it for quite a long time.  Before reviewing that work, though, I’d like to briefly discuss some of the different meanings of the words “media” and “communications.”

Within this understanding, though, there are still two ways of thinking about the media.  The first way is associated with Marshall McLuhan, the maverick Canadian scholar who remains, for better or worse, the thinker most often associated with the study of communication.  McLuhan equates “medium” with technology.  This is what he meant when he said “the medium is the message.”  He meant that the technology of communication (e.g., television) was as important as the content (e.g., the state of the union address).  To McLuhan and his followers (2) “the media” were speaking (orality), writing, print, and electronics. 

Choosing to think about media as technologies has implications for the way one thinks about the history of the media.  McLuhan again is the defining example.  In his thinking, each technology defines a mentality, so that the oral mind operates differently from the literate mind, which in turn differs from the electronic mind.  McLuhan thus outlined a grand narrative of history as the movement from one medium to the next and as progression from one stage of civilization to another: from the oral stage to the literate stage and so forth (3). 

But there is another meaning of the term media, one that can be found even in McLuhan.  Most contemporary media critics seem to refer to the collection of media organizations that produce and distribute news and entertainment.  Instead of meaning television and newspapers, then, “the media” usually means CBS and the New York Times.

These media have a history too, though not the same as McLuhan’s history.  McLuhan’s history leaped from stage to stage, while this other history tends to crawl through a forest of limited trends.  McLuhan saw civilization transformed with the “interiorization  of  literacy,” while  this  other   history  sees  societies developing a   variety of literate  formats for specific and often contradictory purposes.  McLuhan saw electronic communication creating a “global village,” while this other history sees the electronic media as transnational corporations creating and exploiting global markets. 

If we use media to mean technologies, then the media seem to have a life of their own, separate from societies, and acting upon them from the outside.  We talk about how the printing press transformed civilization.  But if we use media to mean media organizations, then these organizations might make some history, but not in conditions of their own choosing.  The history of any newspaper, for instance, is inextricably tied with all sorts of other histories—the history of education, which produced the readers; the history of economic development, which produced the advertisers; the history of transportation, which allowed for information flows before publication and distribution afterwards; the history of politics, which set the agenda for newspapers; and the history of ideas, which laid out a set of rules for newspapers to follow.  We could go on and on. 

If we use media to mean technologies, then there have always been media.  But if we use media to mean media organizations, then we’ll find that the modern media—newspapers, TV networks, and the like—are much different from earlier forms of communication.  We can talk about specific moments when the media came into existence.  The rest of this article will review some of those key moments. 

The things we think of as media—public conveyors of public information—seem to have arisen in the eighteenth century.  The rise of the media was a transatlantic phenomenon, occurring at roughly the same time in North America and Western Europe.  Jurgen Habermas, the German philosopher, has argued that the historical context for the rise of the media was the creation of a bourgeois public sphere as a space between private life (i.e., the affairs of the free market and the nuclear family) and the modern state (6).  This public sphere was created so that citizens could argue about politics.  People had always argued about politics, but in the public sphere, arguments had to be framed in a particular way: as rational, as concerned with the common good rather than personal gain, as the arguments of every citizen rather than of a particular individual.  The rules of the public sphere called for arguments by “Publius,” the pseudonymous author of the Federalist papers, whose name might be best translated as “Citizen,” and whose real identity (or identities) was meant to be inconsequential. 

In the early- to mid-eighteenth century, versions of the public sphere appeared in North American cities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.  At the same time, newspapers appeared in these cities.  In part, the newspapers were called into existence by the needs of the public sphere, which demanded a medium where arguments could be framed (in theory) in an impersonal fashion and conveyed (in theory) to every citizen of a polity (7).  But newspapers were also driven by other factors: business markets called for information and advertising media; the growing transatlantic network of information made content readily available to colonial printers; and printers needed newspapers as a regular sources of income (8).  Printers needed colonial newspapers to publish private matters like market transactions; public disputes (like the controversy that led to the famous trial of John Peter Zenger) appeared only occasionally.  The business interests of colonial printers meshed with the ideological limitations of notions of appropriate conduct to keep colonial newspapers non- (if not anti-) controversial; and the realities of supply and demand kept circulations in the hundreds rather than the thousands.  The newspaper was a public medium, but before the Revolution it was hardly a mass medium. 

The Revolution was a key point in the formation of the U.S. media.  At first glance, it might seem that relatively little innovation took place.  Newspapers remained small—only four pages long—and continued to have limited circulations; the other “media” of the Revolution were likewise traditional in form: the sermon, the pamphlet, the broadside, even the riot were long-established means of public communication.  But while media didn’t change much in outward form, they changed a great deal in terms of meaning.  By its nature, the Revolution had to be, or at least seem to be, a massive popular movement.  As a result, its media had to communicate, or at least seem to communicate, with the entire populace, and not just with elites.  The media had to be mass media.  Patriots thus subsidized newspapers, whose circulation expanded modestly as the controversies of the 1760s and 1770s raged.  While circulation increased modestly, though, readership and audience expanded dramatically.  By all accounts, Revolutionary newspapers were passed from hand to hand, and were read aloud in public places: a newspaper’s total audience was probably twenty times its circulation. 

Even while the Revolution was turning the media into mass media, it was also giving media conductors a new set of responsibilities.  First, it demanded that printers and other communicators be patriots, and that their media advocate the common good.  Printers who were not patriotic were punished in a variety of ways, including mobbing (9).  At the same time,  printers were supposed to be editorially passive.  It was supposed to be the citizens, through pseudonyms like Publius, who were the propagandists of the Revolution; the People, not the Press, was to be sovereign.

The Revolution thus left the media with contradictory legacies.  Media operators were supposed to be public servants, but they were also supposed to be free and independent.  Media were supposed to be active advocates, but they were also supposed to be the passive instruments of the citizenry.  These contradictions remain in U.S. expectations of the media. 

In the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, people argued fiercely over whether the press should take sides in partisan quarrels.  Partisanism itself was a suspect notion, of course.  Republican ideology and Whig history taught that partisan movements were by nature conspiracies against the common good that would in the long run work only to the detriment of a republic.  By the 1820s, however, partisan competition had been accepted by many as normal and healthy.  Newspapers too became overwhelmingly partisan, and were co-opted into national partisan organizations.  Andrew Jackson’s kitchen cabinet consisted primarily of editors (10).  By the 1820s, newspapers were expected to be active, vigorous promoters and competitors in a political marketplace of opinion.

The media could shed some of their morbid responsibility and become actively partisan in part because there were simply a lot more of them.  The number of papers published nationally doubled virtually every decade, increasing at a faster rate than the population.  Newspapers were published more frequently as dailies replaced weeklies, and any particular market (i.e., city or town) hosted several competing papers.  (In any large city, by the 1840s, a dozen or more daily newspapers competed).  With so many papers, it simply made less of a difference what each individual paper chose to print.  Moreover, whereas earlier a paper stood to lose market share by taking a partisan stance, now it seemed that, with so many competitors, a paper would gain market share by positioning itself as the Jacksonian paper or the Whig paper in a particular locale.  Again, ideology and practical circumstances conspired to define media practice. 

Behind the changes in media practice were other significant changes.  Especially notable were two “revolutions,” a reading revolution and a market revolution. 

The reading revolution took place over the long span of time between the late colonial period and the mid-nineteenth century.  Scholars studying the history of literacy and the history of the book have noted both quantitative and qualitative changes in this period.  Quantitatively, more people read and more reading material was available.  Qualitatively, people began to read extensively—looking at a wide range of material for purposes of gleaning current information—rather than intensively—looking at a few texts to divine timeless wisdom or inspiration.  David Hall has characterized this process as a shift from “scarcity” to “abundance,” and William Gilmore has summarized it by saying that reading became a necessity of life, so integrated into negotiating a changing world that people literally could not get along otherwise (11). 

Just as increased literacy and an expanding system of primary education created a boom in cultural exchanges, so too in the early nineteenth century did an expanding transportation network prompt a boom in market exchanges.  As urban markets grew, media practices were affected.  Newspapers became more commercial in several ways.  They became more concerned with conveying commercial information; this service may have been indispensable to the rise of markets.  They also devoted more attention to increasing the production of the commodities they could sell.  They tried to sell more newspapers to readers.  They tried to sell more space to advertisers.  And, less directly, they also tried to sell their readers to advertisers, since it is really the audience that advertisers buy when they purchase space in publications or time on radio or TV. 

Just how deeply the market revolution affected media practice is not agreed upon.  Some scholars, especially Michael Schudson, credit the rise of “democratic market society” with the very invention of news and, as necessary consequence, the decline of partisan journalism (12).  On the other hand, it seems clear that even after newspapers had become deeply involved in the new market economies, they remained tightly connected with partisan organizations and generally focused on political affairs.  Journalists did not make a fetish of “objectivity” until much later. 

The media were again transformed by the industrial revolution.  The impact of industrialization was complex and pervasive.  Inside the media, industrialization meant the transformation of the craftsman’s shop into something like a factory, with a more precise division of labor and with management removed from the workers; it also meant the appearance of corporate ownership structures, including the first chains.  The economies of scale introduced by industrial production and corporate ownership began a trend toward limited monopoly.  By the 1920s, competition was disappearing among local newspapers; by the 1980s, it was virtually nonexistent. 

For journalists, industrialization meant a new set of responsibilities.  Earlier, media and their operators were expected to compete in the marketplace of ideas.  But as competition waned, the marketplace of ideas moved inside the individual medium.  Now each news medium had acquired the obligation to present every point of view fairly.  Journalists stopped being mainly storytellers and redefined themselves as professionals serving the information needs of an increasingly dependent public.  Professionalization in the media was required by industrialization, by the logic that binds together monopoly and professionalism (13).  Ironically, journalists’ adoption of a stance of public service coincided with—and may have contributed to—declining public participation in politics.  Thomas Leonard has pointed out that it was just as the muckrakers were exposing corruption among elected officials that people stopped voting (14). 

The Industrial Revolution also created a new set of media.  Within a very brief span of time, mass circulation magazines, film, and radio insinuated themselves into the national popular culture, along with other culture industries that usually aren’t classified as media—department stores, amusement parks, and professional sports.  These media differed from newspapers in that they concentrated on entertainment and thus lacked both the ideological burdens and the bonuses (e.g., first amendment protection) that newspapers enjoyed.  They quickly became battlefields for a series of culture wars that continues to this day (15). 

The history of each of the culture industries is characterized by corporate accumulation and oligopoly.  In film, a cartel of patent holders was replaced by an oligopoly of vertically integrated companies (the “Big Eight”) who continue to dominate production and distribution.  In radio, a few companies (RCA, AT&T, Westinghouse, GE) came to dominate equipment manufacture, and a pair of networks (NBC and CBS) controlled the bulk of programming and audiences.  Corporate control has worked with political pressures (periodic anti-Communist witchhunts) to make these media emphasize the sensational at the expense of the politically controversial (16). 

The media are a central part of the way modern societies maintain and extend themselves.  George Gerbner has said on many occasions that it would be impossible to govern without television, and I think he’s right.  A friend of mine put it more sarcastically when he said that, if people didn’t buy TVs, the government would give them away.  There’s no question that the media help to hold the center together: they have a centripetal effect. 

But this shouldn’t keep us from paying attention to the way that groups outside the center have used and been treated by mainstream media.  If the history of media has often been told in terms of the maintenance of the center, it might also be told as the story of the creation of conflicting group identities.  The media have a centrifugal as well as a centripetal history.  Because of the limitations of this article, I’ve focused on the development of the mainstream media; there are many other media histories to be told. 

Above all, the history of the media should  be  thought of in terms of the history of the public.  This does not mean that the media are the public; they populate the public sphere, and perhaps enable the public, but they cannot themselves constitute the public.  For that vital work, we must appeal to older actors—the people, or the citizenry.  When we blame the media for the problems of the public, we’re engaging in a very ahistorical form of scapegoating. 

1. Daniel Hallin, The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).  For a good summary of the army study, see William M. Hammond, “The Press in Vietnam as Agent of Defeat: A Critical Examination,” Reviews in American History 17 (1989): 312-23. 
2. Among the more important works in this vein, see Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982); Harold Adams Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951); Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963); Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Harry S. Stout, “Religion, Communications, and the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 34 (1977): 519-41.
3. This construct of communication-defined stages of history had precedents in Enlightenment thinking: see Paul Heyer, Communications and History: Theories of Media, Knowledge, and Civilization (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988). 
4. Richard D. Brown, Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America 1700-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), esp. chs. 1-4. 
5. Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
6. Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, tr. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). 
7. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
8. Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675-1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Stephen Botein, “‘Meer Mechanics’ and an Open Press: The Business and Political Strategies of Colonial Printers,” Perspectives in American History 9 (1975): 127-225.
9. Leonard Levy has argued that this meant that the Revolutionary generation was not libertarian in the modern sense of the word: Emergence of a Free Press (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).  Jeff Smith disagrees with Levy’s assessment: Printers and Press Freedom: The Ideology of Early American Journalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).  See also Norman Rosenberg, Protecting the Best Men: An Interpretive History of the Law of Libel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
10. The timing of the turn to partisanism is controversial.  David Hackett Fischer sees it happening very early: The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).  My own research indicates that newspaper conductors remained tied to an ideology of impartiality and the practices associated with it until around 1820: The Culture of the Press in the Early Republic: Cincinnati, 1793-1848 (New York: Garland, 1989). 
11. David Hall, “The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600-1850,” in William Joyce et al., eds, Printing and Society in Early America (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1983); William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and  Cultural Life in Rural  New England,  1780-1835 (Knoxville:  University of  Tennessee Press, 1989).
12. Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978).  Dan Schiller also sees the market as dictating objectivity and professionalism: Objectivity and the News: The Public and the Rise of Commercial Journalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).
13. This point is made elegantly in Douglas Birkhead’s “The Power in the Image: Professionalism and the ‘Communication Revolution,’” American Journalism 1 (1984): 1-14.
14. Thomas C. Leonard, The Power of the Press: The Birth of American Political Reporting (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), esp. ch. 8.  See also Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North 1865-1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
15. Lary L. May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Garth Jowett, Film: The Democratic Art (Boston: Little Brown, 1976); in a similar vein, see Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America (London: Verso, 1987). 
16. On film, see Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System (Basing-stoke: BFI, 1986).  On broadcasting, see Erik Barnouw’s Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). 

John Nerone is associate professor at the Institute for Communications Research at the University of Illinois.