Mass Media the American Media

Mass Media

The American media has undergone many changes over the last decade or so; perhaps the most significant is the emergence of the publicly owned media outlet. In generations past, many media outlets were owned, and of course controlled, by individuals or management groups. Therefore, this change in the type of ownership of the media outlets has shaped the development of contemporary media in several key ways.

First, with media outlets being public in terms of ownership, they are managed day-to-day by paid employees, who ultimately are accountable to stockholders who of course are looking for return on investment, the emergence of competitors and the like. Therefore, the emphasis on attracting "paying customers" to a media resource, be it a newspaper, Website or television program, in some cases increases the quality of the information circulated, but in others causes news stories to be sensationalized to generate circulation dollars (Powers, 2005). This, therefore, has created a frenzy of information outlets, all of which are seeking to get the story out to the buying public first, making it more important than ever before for the consumer of the media products to intelligently assess the information for media bias, possible exaggerations, etc. These same consumers, however, also have a wider range of choices for their media, benefiting them, as they are not forced to settle for one media source, which in the past may have been owned by one individual, whose views and bias saturated the news reports (Campbell, et al., 2007). Looking to the future of this evolution of publicly owned mass media, the exact details are only speculative at this point, but one thing is clear- more sources will be competing for the attention and dollar of the reader, viewer, and listener, especially as technology creates new ways to spread the news of the day, or more precisely, of the nano-second, given lightning fast communication methods of the present, and future.