History of the Media

1
History of the Media

• Newspapers
• First newspapers were openly partisan printed
  party propaganda
  
• Very limited circulation
• Social and technological changes in early 1800s
  lead to an increase in readership of newspapers
  
• Spread of public education
• Rising incomes
• Invention of the rotary press
• Invention of the telegraph

2
History of the Media

• Yellow journalism (late 1800s)
• Attempt to increase newspaper sales by focusing
  on scandals, disasters and sensationalist
  reporting
  
• Objective journalism (early 1900s)
• Present stories objectively and
• present both sides of the issue

3
History of the Media

• Radio
• Invented 1903
• At first, radio reached exclusively a local
  audience
  
• Emergence of networks allowed radio to reach a
  national audience

4
History of the Media

• Television
• Invented 1923
• By the late 1950s, 90 of all households had at
  least one TV
  
• TV has changed the way in which news is
  presented by encouraging a story-telling approach
  to reporting

5
The Internet and Politics

• Candidates now regularly use blogs and web pages
  to get out their message, as do interest groups
  
• Podcasts, MySpace and UTube have been
  increasingly used by candidates and by individual
  supporters (without the knowledge of the
  candidate) both to support and to attack
  candidates
• Howard Dean revolutionized the use of the
  internet by using it to gather many small
  donations from large numbers of people
  
• E-mail and text messaging is increasingly being
  used to get out the vote and encourage people to
  attend rallies
  
• 2004 Bush Kerry spent almost 3 million on
  internet advertising