Television, magazines and especially newspapers have all seen dramatic changes in content, organization and methods of delivery to their audiences throughout their history. In the early days, when printing presses were first coming onto the scene, what few newspapers that existed could only produce a small number of pages of news per day, both due to physical limitations of the machines, and the limitation imposed by the communication technologies of the time. Today, though, all three mediums have an exceedingly large number of resources to draw upon. The legion of reporters the large corporations can afford to employ, reports given directly to them by content creators and even secondhand stories from around the internet leave these mediums with so much content that they cannot cram it all into a single episode, issue or release.
This is especially telling due to all three mediums’ use of the internet to deliver their content to their audience. They can literally throw hundreds of articles and shows at us each day, nearing thousands should we consider that any given person might stay up to date with 2 to 3 television series, read 1 or 2 newspapers for news, and keep an eye on between 1 and 5 magazines. With all of this information coming our way, we should easily be the most literate society to have existed on this planet. Despite this, citizens of the United States are woefully uninformed about the goings on of not just local events, but of national and international events as well. How can this be, though, with such an alarming amount of information being hurled at us? Looking at how content has evolved over the past hundred years, it’s very easy to discover the answer to this question.
Even just 50 to 60 years ago, shows like Leave it to Beaver and I Love Lucy were hugely popular. These shows were extremely conservative, and were some of the very few shows available for viewing, aside from ‘the news’. The number of magazines in existence at that time was also only a fraction of the number of magazines that currently exist. At this point, newspapers were relatively established, but during their beginning, there were a very small number of papers in existence. Now, though, a staggering number of ‘competitors’ among these mediums exist, as easily evidenced by the existence of about 6 ESPN channels, the dozens of magazines we all see when we visit our family doctor and the dozens of newspapers offered to those of us walking around cities by peddlers of such printed mediums. The competition among such a huge number of companies means that they have to ensure that their product will sell. By far, it would seem that the current strategy they use is extraordinarily effective: extremism.
Looking at the average cable television news story from my high school years, every third to fourth story involved a crime and/or a death, every other story was sad or depressing, and every single story had an overly dramatized title. Magazines such as The Enquirer hype up all of their stories on the front page by using provocative language about the lives of celebrities that should not even concern most of us. Even newspapers have fallen victim to this type of over-advertising their product, in order to try to compete with television and magazine news. Each medium has to attempt to outsell each other medium in order to keep its head above the water in the vast ocean of media companies that now exist. Those that fail to outsell their competition eventually go under, and get lost among the staggering amount of content being hurled at ‘modern’ civilization. They literally dumb down their content to make it easier to produce, and to appeal to a ‘wider’ range of customers, so that they can keep up with the deluge of other stories and media constantly being thrown at us. The only problem is that: they don’t really need to.
In reality, most of these companies are owned by a very small number of parent (and super-parent) corporations, who own nearly every piece of media that reaches our eyes and ears. Each one can slightly change the content of what they receive from their vast network of sources, and send it to a great many of their subsidiaries, who then alter it slightly more to ‘make it their own.’ Where responsible organizations would forward an unbiased story, though, these companies send only what is in their best interest to be published. This leaves us sorely lacking in a second, vital view on most issues, and with no information about things that these small number of corporations wish to keep hidden. They intentionally keep us in the dark, in order to maintain the large amount of power that they already have. The cycle can be broken, though, by citizens demanding better of these companies, and by taking actions into their own hands. United, modern civilization could keep itself very well informed, and could do a great amount of good in the world. We all have to participate, though, we all have to do our part, and be good citizens and keep ourselves and each other informed and entertained, rather than take what they give us.
