The Impact of Mass Communications in America

The impact of mass communications in America is manifest in the antitrust, wage, and hour laws and in the regulation of securities. But social historians give little or no credit to the role of the mass media in making possible the original Social Security Act. Medicaid and Medicare are the result largely of the mass propaganda of various insurance businesses drummed into the American people through the media for the last twenty years. Confronted with the tremendous increases in population and mobility, and the consequent enormous increase in the areas of public interest, the media have been swamped with an increase in news. In the circumstances, media everywhere have tended to raise the thresholds of their attention. This rise has had a profound influence on our governmental structure. The media now report only a fraction of our legal cases. Thus, we have an unofficial system of secret courts. The courts, bar associations, and legislatures are trying to provide a court system whose secrecy is officially instead of unofficially sanctioned. Attention has been focused on Washington, D.C., with the result that the nation is stumbling toward a parliamentary form of government. Thus, the media have both simplified and complicated American life—simplified it by making it easy to concentrate on a few great issues and political leaders and complicated it by making it impossible for many individuals to be heard when the mechanisms of society impinge abrasively upon their rights and lives.