Media of Mass Communication

It is the basic assumption that the mass media (newspaper, television and radio especially) are of considerable, and still growing, importance in modern societies. This view of the media is widely shared, and the reasons seem to lie in the fact that the media are :

·       a power source – a potential means of influence, control and innovsation in society; the primary means of transmission and source of information essential to the working of most social institutions.

·       the location (or arena) where many affairs of public life are played out, both nationally or internationally.

·       a major source of of definitions and images of social reality; thus also the place where the changing culture and the values of societies and groups are constructed, stored and most visibly expressed.

·       the primary key to fame and celebrity status as well as to effective performance in the public arena.

·       the source of an ordered and public meaning system which provides a benchmark for what is normal, empirically and evaluatively; deviations are signalled and comparisons made in terms of the public version of normally.

            In addition, the media are the single largest focus of leisure-time activity and means of entertainment. They also help organize and interrelate the rest of the leisure. As a result, they are a major and expanding industry, providing employment and a wide range of potential economics benefits.

            If these claims are accepted, it is not difficult to understand the great interest which the mass media have attracted since their early days, nor way they have been subject to so much public scruntiny and regulation as well as theorizing. The conduct of democratic (or undemocratic) politics, nationally and internationally, depends more and more on mass media, and there are few significant social issue which are addressed without some consideration of the role of the mass media, whether for good or ill. As will appear, the most fundamentals questions of society – those concerning the distribution and exercise of power, the management of problems and the processes of intregation and change – all turn on communication, especially the messages carried by the public means of communication, whether in the form of information.