Popular Culture

Popular Culture 1

American culture and politics supported the development of free-flowing, media communications. Before the period of World Wars, the legislature seldom had security concerns sufficient to meddle with the media. There was government control or custom of censorship of the press. Colonial resistance to the Stamp Act (1765) set a point of reference for resistance to any assessments being encroached on media or newspapers. The First Amendment restricts Congress from shortening the flexibility of press or speech. In the years 1920s as well as 1930s, the Supreme Court utilized the Due Process Clause of the fourteenth Amendment to apply these sureties to the states (Herrinf, 2001).

Different parts of American political society, open trials, public legislative deliberation, additionally energized the development of the press. Fear of concentrated force and furious rivalry between political groups disheartened government to control media. Not at all like numerous different countries, United States of America never improved boundless government responsibility for outlets of media. The media considered not many impediments to pandering to open tastes. The U.S. government pursued many policies that encouraged the growth of the mass media: Universal, cheap postal delivery, including favorable treatment for newspapers and magazines. Universal public education that encouraged the growth of mass literacy. They play vital role in protection of intellectual property (but not for foreign copyright until the 1890s) (Herrinf, 2001).

With high literacy rates, New England was the first region to develop newspapers. Printers would produce newspapers as a sideline to more profitable material such as business documents or religious tracts. Early American newspapers tended to be bland. They avoided challenging the local authorities, and often focused on reprinting news from London. The trial of John Peter Zenger, publisher of the New York Weekly Journal, in 1733 marked the end of prosecutions for seditious libel (Mutz & ...