15.3: The Evolution of News

Something like news has existed since at least 59 B.C., when Julius Caesar ordered that government deeds be publicized in the Acta Diurna (“Daily Acts”), stone carvings displayed on regularly updated public message boards. Publishing technology improved over the centuries, but by the time of the American Revolutionary War information still traveled very slowly by today’s standards. Pamphlets passed from reader to reader were popular in the colonies, but it might take two months for news from Boston to travel to Savannah this way. When Paul Revere 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 those days. This and many other journalistic terms derived from the newspaper industry (such as headline and column) are still used today, even for nonprint media.

For the first century-and-a-half of the United States, 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, but it did offer the option to listen to news rather than read it. During the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” brought the president’s voice into Americans’ homes in a way that was impossible before radio. When Roosevelt addressed Congress in 1941 to call for a declaration of war with Japan after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, almost four out of every five American households were tuned in.

On the heels of radio came television, which enabled Americans to not only listen to but also watch 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 at the start of the decade, but over 85% did by the end of it. By the 1960s, television had dethroned newspapers as Americans’ main news source. (Around the same time, total newspaper circulation began to plateau and then decline.)

In its early days, 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. The rest of their airtime was reserved for more profitable entertainment programming, unless there were election results or other big news events to cover. The popularization of cable television greatly increased the number of channels from which viewers could choose and led to the creation of 24-hour news networks, beginning with CNN in 1980. (CNN’s initials stand for “Cable News Network,” because at the time it was the only one of its kind.) Unlike network news, cable news was available anytime, though at first much of the 24-hour news cycle consisted of repeat broadcasts.

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 American households gained broadband Internet access. Much of the news consumed online was (and still is) produced by “legacy” media that predate the Internet. These include the New York Times, National Public Radio, and CNN, which publish online content in addition to their print, radio, and television offerings. However, the low cost of setting up a website compared to starting a newspaper or television network paved the way for “digitally native” news outlets, such as Breitbart News, HuffPost, or Politico, to become influential producers and disseminators of news. Today, Internet sources are the preferred news medium for Americans under 50 years of age (as shown in Figure 15.1 below).

Figure 15.1: Preferred news medium by age group, 2024 (Source: Pew Research Center)

Widespread Internet access paved the way for another revolution in news consumption: social media. The meteoric rise of social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and X was not primarily motivated by a desire for news consumption. Still, they 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, which are much likelier to “go viral” on social media than on other media. Fears of so-called “fake news” have not dimmed social media’s popularity. Today, over half of all Americans say they often get news from social media.