[opendtv] How the government helped build America's media might.
- From: Monty Solomon <monty@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: undisclosed-recipient: ;
- Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2004 00:34:05 -0400
BOOKS
SPHERES OF INFLUENCE
by NICHOLAS LEMANN
How the government helped build America's media might.
The New Yorker
Issue of 2004-04-12
Posted 2004-04-05
When did the press become the media? It seems to have happened
sometime during the last generation-long enough ago, anyway, for us
to have forgotten that "media" is plural. But people who use "the
media" as a more encompassing term for "the press" (because it
includes broadcast journalism, too) may find it hard to get used to
the even more encompassing way it's used by scholars of
communications: for them, it takes in just about any channel through
which information is transmitted. As you're reading this, you are
probably near a telephone, a television set, a computer hooked up to
the Internet, a radio, a pager, a mailbox. Some of those things
receive and some can also send; some are meant for person-to-person
communication and some for interacting with institutions. They're all
forms of media.
In order to overcome ingrained habits of thought, suppose we remove
all ideas about journalism from our minds-don't worry, we'll
reinstall them later-and then contemplate the media. We immediately
start to think about those machines whose wondrous inventors-Samuel
F. B. Morse and Alexander Graham Bell and Guglielmo Marconi-we all
learned about as schoolchildren. But the technology picture is still
too simple, so let's delete the machines from our minds, too. What's
left? The media start to look like an array of political, economic,
and social arrangements, each of which, in a different way, turns
people into a public.
This is the perspective that the Princeton sociologist Paul Starr
forces on us in his ambitious new book, "The Creation of the Media:
The Political Origins of Mass Communications" (Basic; $27.50). Starr,
who has a practical acquaintance with the subject as co-founder of
the liberal monthly The American Prospect (and whom I know
professionally), has roamed through a vast scholarly literature to
produce a history that stretches from 1600 to 1941.
...
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?040412crbo_books
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