15.2: The Evolution of News

Something like news reporting has existed since at least 59 B.C., when Julius Caesar ordered that government deeds and other important events be publicized in the Acta Diurna (“Daily Acts”), stone carvings displayed on regularly-updated public message boards. Though technological advances dramatically improved the efficiency of the publishing industry over the centuries, by the time of the American Revolutionary War information still traveled at a rate that was extremely slow by today’s standards. Printed pamphlets that could be passed from reader to reader were popular in the colonies, but it might take two months for news from Boston to travel down to Savannah this way. When Paul Revere famously rode from town to town in 1775 to alert colonists of approaching British regulars, the speed of breaking news was literally a horse’s gallop.

Early American pamphlets and newspapers were manufactured using hand-operated printing presses to stamp ink onto paper. The use of the term press to refer collectively to all news media — as in “freedom of the press,” “press conference,” or “press release” — is a holdover from the days when newspapers were essentially the only game in town. This and many other journalistic terms derived from the newspaper industry (such as headline and column) are still commonly used today, even for nonprint media.

For the first century-and-a-half of the United States’ independence, the printed word was its dominant news source. Newspapers remained unchallenged until the arrival of commercial radio in 1920. Radio did not completely displace print publications, but it did offer the option to listen to the news rather than read it. During the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” brought the voice of the president into Americans’ homes in a way that was impossible in the days before radio. When Roosevelt addressed Congress in 1941 to call for a declaration of war with Japan in the aftermath of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, almost four out of every five American households were tuned in to hear what he had to say.

On the heels of radio came television, which also dramatically changed mass media, this time by enabling Americans to not only listen to but also watch the news from the comfort of their living rooms. Television ownership in the United States exploded in the 1950s: fewer than 10% of households owned a television set at the start of the decade, but over 85% did by the end of it. By the 1960s, television had dethroned newspapers as Americans’ number one source for news. (Around the same time, total newspaper circulation began to plateau and then decline.)

When television took over as the top news medium in the United States, the menu of televised news was extremely limited. The “Big Three” networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — each offered only a few hours of news per day at most, using the rest of their airtime for entertainment programming unless there was a big event to cover, such as election results or a major party’s national convention. The popularization of cable television greatly increased the number of channels from which viewers could choose and enabled the establishment of 24-hour news networks, beginning with CNN in 1980. (CNN’s acronym stands for “Cable News Network,” because at the time it was the only one of its kind.) Unlike network news, cable news was available anytime Americans wanted to watch it, although much of the 24-hour news cycle consisted of repeat broadcasts.

Television remains a major source of news in the United States, but the emergence of the Internet kick-started yet another upheaval in the news ecosystem. What was once the domain of only the most tech-savvy became commonplace as more and more American households gained broadband Internet access (as Figure 15.1 below demonstrates). Much of the news consumed on the Internet was — and still is — produced by “legacy” media (like the New York Times, National Public Radio, or CNN), which now publish online content in addition to their print, radio, and television offerings. However, the relatively low cost of setting up a website compared to starting a newspaper or television network also paved the way for “digitally native” news organizations (such as Breitbart News, HuffPost, or Politico) to become influential producers and disseminators of news.

Figure 15.1: Percentage of Americans using the Internet, 1990–2023 (Sources: DataReportal, International Telecommunication Union)

Widespread Internet access paved the way for another revolution in news consumption in the form of social media. Although the meteoric rise of social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter was not primarily motivated by a desire for news consumption, these platforms proved to be powerful conduits for information about current events. Social media offer unprecedented levels of news interactivity: users can instantaneously comment on and share stories with friends, relatives, and total strangers. They can also spread uncorroborated falsehoods this way, which for a number of reasons have a much easier time going viral on social media than being disseminated through other media. Concerns about so-called “fake news” have not dimmed social media’s popularity: today, half of all Americans say they sometimes or often get news from social media.