ABSTRACT
Communication is vital to all systems of government in the modern world, but nowhere more so than in the pluralistic politics of the United States, with its frequent elections, groups ceaselessly competing for influence over policy, and a complex institutional structure. The print media – newspapers, broadsheets, journals and books – were important features of American colonial societies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and remained the only medium of communication, other than word of mouth, until well into the nineteenth century. The situation began to change with the development of the telegraph and the use of the Morse code, so that messages which would previously have taken days to carry by horse or train could be sent from one side of the continent to the other in minutes. The invention of the telephone made possible direct communication from one individual to another across the country. It was the invention of radio, however, that really inaugurated the era of ‘the mass media’ so that President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with his ‘fireside chats’, could potentially reach every citizen. After the Second World War television began to transform the role of the media in politics. In the late twentieth century the development of the internet brought a new dimension of person-to-person communication, the impact of which on the conduct of politics is only now becoming apparent.
