Exercise 7. a) Read the article about printed and broadcst media in the US. Elaborate.

Radio in the USA

National Public Radio is the nation’s primary public radio network, but most radio stations are commercial and profit-oriented.

American radio broadcasts in two bands: FM and AM.

AM has shifted mainly to all-news format. Talk radio usually features a host, a celebrity or an expert on some subject, and the opportunity for listeners to call in and ask questions or express opinion on the air.

The call-in format is now heard on nearly 1 000 of the 10 000 commercial radio stations in the US.

FM came to dominate the music side of the programming. Besides the 10 000 comercial radion stations, the USA has 1 400 public radio satations. Most of these are run by universities and other public institutions for educational purposes and are financed by public funds and private donations.

Television in the USA

There are three basic types of television in the United States: broadcast, or “over-the-air” television, which is freely available to anyone with a TV in the broadcast area, cable television, and satellite television, both of which require a subscription to receive.

Broadcast television. The three major commercial television networks in the U.S. are NBC and CBS, which date to the early days of television (in fact, they both began in the 1920s as radio networks), and ABC, which began its life as a radio network spun off from NBC in 1943.

Major network affiliates run very similar schedules. Typically, they begin weekdays with an early-morning locally produced news show, followed by a network morning show, such as NBC’s Today, which mixes news, weather, interviews and music. Syndicated programming, especially talk shows, fill the late morning, followed often by local news at noon (Eastern Time). Soap operas dominate the early afternoon, while syndicated talk shows such as The Oprah Winfrey Show appear in the late afternoon. Local news comes on again in the early evening, followed by the national network’s news program at 6:30 or 5:30 p.m., followed by more news.

Saturday mornings usually feature network programming aimed at children (including animated cartoons), while Sunday mornings include public-affairs programs that help fulfill stations’ legal obligations to provide public-service programming. Sports and infomercials can be found on weekend afternoons, followed again by the same type of prime-time shows aired during the week.

Cable and satellite television. Until the 1970s, cable television was used only to rebroadcast over-the-air TV to areas that had trouble receiving signals. But in that decade, national networks dedicated exclusively to cable broadcasting appeared, along with cable-TV systems that provided service to major cities. Today, most American households receive cable TV, and cable networks collectively have greater viewership than broadcast networks.

Unlike broadcast networks, most cable networks air the same programming nationwide. Top cable networks include USA Network, ESPN and Versus (sports), MTV (music), Fox News (news), Sci Fi (science fiction), Disney Channel (family), Nick and Cartoon Network (Children’s), Discovery Channel and Animal Planet (documentaries), TBS (comedy), TNT (drama) and Lifetime (women’s).

Today Direct broadcast satellite television services, which became available in the U.S. in the 1990s, offers programming similar to cable TV. Dish Network and News Corporation’s DirecTV are the major DBS providers in the country. Satellites were originally launched and used by the Television networks as a method of distributing their programs from headquarters to local affiliates. In the 1970s individuals in remote locations, without access to Terrestrial television broadcasts, found they could get free television by installing large satellite dishes and aiming them at the various satellites owned by the networks. This had the additional benefit of providing channels that others could not receive. This included programs without commercials, live feeds not intended for broadcast, broadcasts from other countries and eventually cable television programming. To prevent people from receiving pay content for free, satellite transmissions are now scrambled. Newer transmission technology enabled satellite dishes to be much smaller and subscription services were developed.

Non-commercial television. Public television has a far smaller role than in most other countries. There is no state-owned broadcasting authority. Instead, the federal government subsidizes non-commercial television stations through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The income received from the government is insufficient to cover expenses and stations rely on corporate sponsorships and viewer contributions.

American public television stations air programming that commercial stations do not offer, such as educational, including cultural, and public affairs programming. Most public TV stations are affiliates of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), sharing programs like Sesame Street and Masterpiece Theatre. Unlike the commercial networks, PBS does not produce its own programming; instead, individual PBS stations create programming and provide these to other affiliates. New York City’s municipally-owned broadcast service, NYCTV, creates original programming that airs in several markets. Few cities have major municipally-owned stations.

Newspapers in the USA

Early in the 20th century, newspaper editors realized that the best way to attract readers was to give them all sides of a story, without bias. This standard of objective reporting is today one of American journalism’s most important feature.

Another dominant feature of early 20th century journalism was the creation of chains of newspapers operating under the same ownership. Nowadays all the newspapers in the U.S., with a very few exceptions, are privately owned, either by large chains such as Gannett or McClatchy, which own dozens or even hundreds of newspapers; by small chains that own a handful of papers; or in a situation that is increasingly rare, by individuals or families.

Most general-purpose newspapers are either being printed one time a week, usually on Thursday or Friday, or are printed daily. The top five daily newspapers by circulation in 1995 were the Wall Street Journal, the USA Today, the New York Times (NYT), the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post. Weekly newspapers tend to have much smaller circulation and are more prevalent in rural communities or small towns.

There is also a global newspaper – the International Herald Tribune, which is owned jointly by the New York Times and the Washington Post and is printed via satellite in 11 cities around the world.

Magazines in the USA

Thanks to the huge size of the English-speaking North American media market, the United States has a large magazine industry with hundreds of magazines serving almost every interest, as can be determined by glancing at any newsstand in any large American city. Most magazines are owned by one of the large media conglomerates or by one of their smaller regional brethren.

The U.S. has three leading weekly newsmagazines: TIME, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report. Time and Newsweek are center-left while U.S. News and World Report tends to be center-right, although all three (in theory, at least) strive to provide objective news reporting and limit personal bias to the opinion pages. Time is well-known for naming a “Person of the Year” each year, while U.S. News publishes annual ratings of American colleges and universities.

The U.S. also has over a dozen major political magazines (the exact number is debatable, of course), serving every part of the political spectrum from left to right.

Finally, besides the hundreds of specialized magazines that serve the diverse interests and hobbies of the American people, there are also dozens of magazines published by professional organizations for their members, such as Communications of the ACM (for computer science specialists) and the ABA Journal (for lawyers).

b)Using the information above, characterize the mass media of the US and indicate major titles in each group:

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