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US media systemNgima Gelu Lama

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• Heaviest television viewers in the world-hitting five hours a day.

• Radio listeners- on average just over two-and-a-half hours a day.

• Twelve million Americans have their personal blog.

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US Politics

• The Constitution sets up a federal system of government by dividing powers between the national, state and local governments. – citizens elect officials to serve in the national, state

and local governments. – each level of government raises money through

taxation from the citizens living in the area it serves. – The idea of separating powers among the various

elements of government was designed to restrict governmental power and prevent its abuse.

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Media Ownership

• Mostly owned primarily by wealthy individuals.

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Media Regulation and control

• Even registration is not required for the publication of any newspapers.

• Many of the media are controlled by large for-profit corporations who reap revenue from advertising, subscriptions, and sale of copyrighted material. 

• There is no direct or indirect government control over the newspaper press through subsidies, licensing, labor policies, licenses for printing, or any other official means.

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• Broadcast media, of course, operate under an entirely different set of regulations, given their relationship with the FCC.

• No federal censorship agency.• “Market Censorship”• No laws specifically prohibiting foreign

investment in the U.S. media, except in broadcasting.

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Federal Communications Commission

• NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, The CW, MyNetworkTV and ION Television

• Noncommercial public television network – PBS• Hispanic terrestrial networks like Univision, Telemundo,

Telefutura etc

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State of Mass Media in the USA• Number of Television Stations: 1,500 • Number of Television Sets: 219,000,000 • Number of Cable Subscribers: 70,991,360 • Cable Subscribers per 1,000: 252.1 • Satellite Subscribers per 1,000: 57.5 • Number of Radio Stations: 10,322 • Number of Radio Receivers: 575,000,000 • Number of Individuals with Computers: 161,000,000 • Computers per 1,000: 579.0 • Number of Individuals with Internet Access: 95,354,000 • Internet Access per 1,000: 342.9

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Education and Training 

• The University of Missouri founded the world's first permanent school of journalism in 1908, after nearly thirty years of agitation from the Missouri Press Association.

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Political bias

• Media watchdog, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) did a study of ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News in 2001 in which they found that “92 percent of all U.S. sources interviewed were white, 85 percent were male and, where party affiliation was identifiable, 75 percent were Republican.

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Regarding PBS

• 76% of sources were official or “elite” sources; women and people of different ethnicities were far under-represented; Republican sources outnumbered Democract sources by 66% to 33%; issues such as Iraq, Katrina, and immigration all followed conservative leanings.

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• Julian Assange, the infamous head of WikiLeaks is interviewed here by Russia Today; he talks about the Spring Revolution in the Middle-East and then moves on to slam Facebook - saying it's "the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented". He goes on to say that "Facebook, Google, Yahoo...have built in interfaces for U.S intelligence", that "they have automated the process" of passing on information and that when people add their friends "they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies.

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Thank you