ABSTRACT
“The Press and the Making of Modern Media” shows ways the press and media corporations have acted both independently and interdependently to create a kind of storytelling that requires simultaneous attention to multimedia production values and the constraints of advertising. The chapter explains reasons why contemporary mass media tends to focus on soft news, or “infotainment,” more than hard news, and it describes the growth of what media analysts describe as a media monopoly, a phenomenon that has created difficulties in both maintaining journalistic standards and regulation of institutional practices. Using materials from this chapter, students should be able to explain how media have evolved with trends in technology into transnational organizations. They should have an understanding of the challenges in reporting stories using traditional techniques in this new climate, and they should be able to explain how corporate ownership of news outlets affects the content produced by journalists. Key words, names, and phrases associated with Chapter 14 include “The Media Monopoly” (Ben Bagdikian) and transnational conglomerates; Henry Luce, Clare Boothe Luce, and the rise of Time Warner; hard news versus soft news in the contemporary media landscape; and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and net neutrality.
