mass media

What do Johannes Gutenberg, Tim Berners-Lee, and Mark Zuckerberg have in common? From movable type to the World Wide Web to social media, all are technological titans who helped bring information, opinion, entertainment, and many other types of expression to a global audience. In other words, they helped make mass media possible.

What mass media is and isn’t

Mass media is an umbrella term that refers to the systems, technologies, and organizations that communicate information, ideas, entertainment, advertising, and cultural expression to large audiences. Traditionally it has included newspapers, magazines, books, radio, film, and television. Today mass media also incorporates websites, search engines, podcasts, streaming services, social media platforms, and digital communication created by artificial intelligence.

The power of mass media, from the 15th century to the 21st century, has always been its ability to reach a vast audience. And although Gutenberg’s mechanized printing press produced content at a never-before-experienced pace (roughly 250 sheets an hour!), it was glacial compared with the frenetic 24-7 ricocheting of information around the world in today’s digital age. The ability to share information with a large audience in no way guarantees that it is factually correct, without bias, or fundamentally true. Discerning those things about the media has always been the responsibility of the masses.

Media: 1450s to 2000

Gutenberg’s creation of mechanized printing—printing presses date to 14th-century Asia, but mechanization in 15th-century Europe revolutionized the process—initially led to the publication of church documents, some basic texts, poetry, and, of course, his now-legendary Bible in the 1450s. Within a century, the technology had developed such that the great works of Roman philosophers were more commonly available. The printing of pamphlets—some offering news, others offering opinion—became much more widespread.

Consider that when Martin Luther reportedly nailed his Ninety-five Theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany, in 1517, the printing press was the reason that within weeks his critique of the Roman Catholic Church became widely known. The Protestant Reformation, it could be said, was one of the first protest movements to have its roots in mass media. It would not be the last.

As printing became more efficient and affordable, newspapers and magazines emerged as influential forms of mass communication. Early newspapers—often focusing on a single topic—appeared in Europe and Japan during the 17th century. They became increasingly important as literacy rates rose and urban populations expanded.

Newspapers came to play a major role in shaping public opinion, reporting political developments, supporting commercial activity, and encouraging civic engagement. As an indication of the power (or perceived power) of mass media, the first newspaper in the United States, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick (Boston, September 1690), was suppressed by the colonial governor after one issue.

Advances in printing technology, transportation networks, and communication systems such as the telegraph allowed news to be gathered and distributed more rapidly than ever. Magazines developed alongside newspapers, often providing more in-depth coverage of politics, science, culture, literature, and current events.

Radio emerged in the early 20th century as the first electronic medium capable of reaching national audiences in real time. Television later combined sound and images to become the dominant mass medium of the post-World War II era. Even more so than with newspapers and magazines, these forms of mass media created shared national experiences, whether it was families gathering around radios to listen to U.S. Pres. Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats in the 1930s and ’40s or hundreds of millions of people around the globe tuning in to see “Who shot J.R.?” in the 1980s.

The emergence of cable television in the last quarter of the 20th century marked a significant step in the fragmentation of the mass media audience. Unlike traditional broadcast television, which relied on a limited number of over-the-air networks, cable systems delivered programming through coaxial and later fiber-optic cables, allowing audiences access to specialized channels devoted to news, sports, music, science, history, education, and entertainment.

The launch of networks such as CNN in 1980 introduced the concept of 24-hour news coverage, fundamentally changing how people received information about current events. Cable television ushered in the era of viewers increasingly selecting content tailored to their interests rather than consuming the same programming as a broad national audience. This shift laid important groundwork for today’s highly personalized digital media environment and helped reshape the economics, politics, and culture of mass communication.

The rise of the Internet in the late 20th century transformed mass media yet again. Unlike earlier media, which generally relied on one-way communication from content producers to audiences, the Internet enabled users to become creators, publishers, and distributors of content. Social media platforms—including Facebook, which was created by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004—accelerated this shift, allowing individuals, organizations, and governments to communicate instantly with global audiences without the fact-checking associated with more traditional mass media. With this transformation, media was more in the hands of the masses than at any time in history, but the digital age also disrupted existing business models, creating economic crises for print publications, radio, and broadcast television and consolidating ownership of what remained into fewer hands.

Changing landscape in the 21st century

In the middle of the 20th century, people got their news and information from a limited number of discrete sources, including:

• Television networks: In the United States, those were ABC, CBS, and NBC, and the main difference in their broadcasts was not the news delivered but the anchor who delivered it. The same could be said for the BBC in England and other networks around the world.
• Newspapers: Delivered to people’s doorstep each morning, newspapers covered local and national news. Newspapers were also a key source of information about other forms of mass media, publishing what movies were playing at the local theater, showcasing weekly television books that told people what was airing when, and, crucially, providing advertising. The number of daily newspapers in the U.S. has fallen from more than 1,700 in 1980 to less than 950 in 2025.

The two initially had a synergistic quality. Walter Cronkite, anchor of the CBS Evening News and often called “the most trusted man in America,” ended his first broadcast in 1962 by saying: “That’s the news. Be sure to check your local newspapers tomorrow to get all of the details on the headlines we’re delivering to you.”

Such a message became largely unthinkable in the diversified and disrupted news and information space of the 21st century. A study published in 2026 by the Pew Research Center showed that about 36 percent of Americans got breaking news from “their preferred news organization,” down from 54 percent in 2018. The percentage of Americans who got breaking news from social media went from 9 percent to 19 percent in the same period. The impact of that fragmentation has been the loss of trusted gatekeepers, a role traditionally held by mass media outlets. For example, political differences among parties and movements were always part of the landscape. But disagreeing with the principles held by an opposition party is fundamentally different than believing that the other party is intentionally spreading a false message. Some scholars posit that the political polarization that rose in the United States and around the world during the 21st century had its roots in the increasingly fragmented media world. After the 2016 U.S. presidential election, some social media companies pledged to enact content moderation guardrails to mitigate against false stories circulating on their platforms, but those pledges were ultimately short-lived.

What that means for consumers of news and information is that more work needs to be done to determine if information distributed on mass media is trustworthy. It is often referred to as fake news, and there is broad acceptance that mass media is plagued with misinformation and disinformation, which can be defined as the unintentional spreading of false information (misinformation) and the deliberate proliferation of false information (disinformation). Although intent always matters, in the 24-7 information environment of the digital age, an innocent mistake (misinformation) can cause as much damage as the intentional falsehood. Consider:

• The mistaken reports in 2011 that U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords had died in an assassination attempt were misinformation, the result of a journalistic error amplified by the digital news cycle.
• The intentional spreading of a false story that a Washington, D.C., restaurant was a front for a pedophile ring run by Democrats was disinformation and led to a shooting at the restaurant by a man who believed the reports and wanted to free the children.

The disruption of mass media is not limited to news and information. The rise of streaming services resulted in one of the biggest changes in the history of mass media. Streaming greatly expanded the television programs, films, music, podcasts, and other forms of entertainment that people have access to, giving audiences unprecedented control over when, where, and how they consume content. That serves, whether for good or for ill, to dilute the shared-experience aspect of mass media in such a way that it is hard to imagine another entertainment event along the lines of “Who shot J.R.?” or the M*A*S*H finale uniting a population.

Companies such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Spotify, and Apple Music shifted media consumption away from fixed broadcast schedules and physical media toward on-demand digital delivery over the Internet, significantly impacting the business model for cable television. At the same time, streaming platforms became major producers of original programming, competing directly with established television networks and film studios.

The emerging technology that has the potential to further disrupt mass media is artificial intelligence (AI), which presents opportunities for greater efficiencies while also threatening to disrupt the workplace of content creation and make it harder for media consumers to determine what content is created by humans and what is created by large language models. AI content has proliferated in mass media in the form of deepfakes, which can include images, videos, or audio that portrays something that does not exist in reality or events that have never occurred.

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