UNIVERSIDAD AUTÓNOMA DE NUEVO LEÓN

FACULTAD DE INGENIERÍA MECÁNICA Y ELÉCTRICA

Student’s name: Juan Roberto Martínez Huerta

Class: British culture

Date: 13/05/2022
Place: Cd. Universitaria, San Nicolás de los Garza, N.L.
 MASS MEDIA AND ARTS IN THE USA
MASS MEDIA
T.V
In 1930, WNBC (W National Broadcasting Company) opened experimental TV
station to test out TV broadcasts. At first, NBC only broadcast for two hours, from 7
to 9 pm. There were no regular TV programs at the time. By the end of 1941,
television was getting more popular.

But only in 1948 there began the big TV boom. Suddenly, everyone wanted a TV set
and stores couldn't keep them in stock. Television is the major mass media of the
United States. The majority of households have more than one set. The major U.S.
broadcast television networks are NBC, CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System), ABC
(American Broadcasting Company). They are called «Big Three». Network daytime
schedules consist of talk shows and soap operas.
The US has the most highly-developed mass media in the world. Its dramas,
comedies, soap operas, animations, music videos and films have a global audience
and are part of the staple fare of broadcasters worldwide.

TV is America's most popular medium. ABC, CBS and NBC led the pack for decades
until the mass take-up of cable and satellite and the arrival of the Fox network. Fox
News Channel is the dominant US cable news network.
But viewing habits are changing and the proportion of consumed content accounted
for by live broadcast TV is falling. The US leads the world in the adoption of over-
the-top (OTT) video-on-demand, delivered by broadband internet.

Radio
The interwar period is primarily associated with the rapid development of
broadcasting. The first test broadcasting station appeared in the United States
before World War I. First radio programs in the USA refer to the end of 1920s.
The United States does not have a federal government-owned national broadcaster.
Most of people in the US listen to their local state radio stations. But station WNYC
(W New York City) has the largest audience in the United States. It is about one
million listeners each week. It focuses mostly on news and cultural programs.

VOA (Voice of America) provides programming for broadcast on radio, TV and the
internet outside of the U.S., in 43 languages. It has the audience of 123 million
people each week. The Voice of America was forbidden to broadcast directly to
American citizens until July 2013. The intent of the legislation was to protect the
American public from propaganda actions.

Newspaper
The history of American newspapers goes back to the 17th century with the
publication of the first colonial newspapers. It was James Franklin, Benjamin
Franklin’s older brother, who first made a news sheet. It was called «The New
England Courant».
The United States have about 1,300 daily newspapers. Most daily newspapers are
distributed locally. A few of the best-known newspapers such as The Wall Street
Journal can be found throughout the country.
Here is a list of the 7 U.S. newspapers with the largest combined daily average
circulation:
1. Wall Street Journal
2. USA Today
3. New York Times
4. Los Angeles Times
5. Washington Post
6. Daily News
7. New York Post

The number of daily newspapers in the U.S. has declined over the past half-century.
For comparison, in 1950, there were 1,772 daily papers while in 2000, there were
1,480 daily papers.

Magazines
The magazine industry in America was established in 1741 in the historical city of
Philadelphia, PA. The 1st American magazine boom occurred between 1825 and
1850. During this period more than 2,000 magazines were founded. The reason was
literacy boom.
Nowadays there are over 11,000 magazines and periodicals in the United States.
They cover all topics and interests. Quite a few have international editions, e.g.,
National Geographic, Reader's Digest, Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Time, etc. The best-
known weekly newsmagazines are Time, Newsweek. They serve as a type of
national press.
Here is a top 10 most popular magazines in the USA:
1. AARP (the American Association of Retired Persons)
2. The Costco Connection
3. Game Informer
4. Better Homes & Gardens
5. Reader’s Digest
6. Good Housekeeping
7. National Geographic
8. Family Circle
9. People
1. 10.Woman’s Day

ARTS
Music
At the beginning of the 21st century, and seen from a worldwide perspective, it is the
American popular music that had its origins among African Americans at the end of
the 19th century that, in all its many forms—ragtime, jazz, swing, jazz-influenced
popular song, blues, rock and roll and its art legacy as rock and later hip-hop—has
become America’s greatest contribution to the world’s culture, the one indispensable
and unavoidable art form of the 20th century.
The recognition of this fact was a long time coming and has had to battle prejudice
and misunderstanding that continues today. Indeed, jazz-inspired American popular
music has not always been well served by its own defenders, who have tended to
romanticize rather than explain and describe. In broad outlines, the history of
American popular music involves the adulteration of a “pure” form of folk music,
largely inspired by the work and spiritual and protest music of African Americans.
September 1954 is generally credited as the next watershed in the evolution of
American popular music, when a recent high-school graduate and truck driver
named Elvis Presley went into the Memphis Recording Service and recorded a
series of songs for a small label called Sun Records.

It is, perhaps, necessary for an American to live abroad to grasp how entirely
American soul music had become the model and template for a universal language
of emotion by the 20th century. And for an American abroad, perhaps what is most
surprising is how, for all the national reputation for energy, vim, and future-focused
forgetfulness, the best of all this music.

Movies
Hollywood, also called Tinseltown, district within the city of Los Angeles, California,
U.S., whose name is synonymous with the American film industry. The first house in
Hollywood was an adobe building (1853) on a site near Los Angeles, then a small
city in the new state of California. Hollywood was laid out as a real-estate subdivision
in 1887 by Harvey Wilcox, a prohibitionist from Kansas who envisioned a community
based on his sober religious principles. Real-estate magnate H.J. Whitley, known as
the “Father of Hollywood,” subsequently transformed Hollywood into a wealthy and
popular residential area.
In 1908 one of the first storytelling movies, The Count of Monte Cristo, was
completed in Hollywood after its filming had begun in Chicago. In 1911 a site on
Sunset Boulevard was turned into Hollywood’s first studio, and soon about 20
companies were producing films in the area.
After World War II, film studios began to move outside Hollywood, and the practice
of filming “on location” emptied many of the famous lots and sound stages or turned
them over to television show producers. With the growth of the television industry,
Hollywood began to change, and by the early 1960s it had become the home of
much of American network television entertainment.
Many stars, past and present, live in neighbouring communities such as Beverly Hills
and Bel Air, and the Hollywood Forever Cemetery contains the crypts of such
performers as Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, and Tyrone Power. Hollywood
Boulevard, long a chic thoroughfare, became rather tawdry with the demise of old
studio Hollywood

Theater
American theater is traditionally dated from the arrival of Lewis Hallam's English
troupe in Williamsburg in 1752. After the end of the Revolutionary War, the Republic
witnessed a slow expansion of the dramatic arts. Theaters were built in Charleston,
Philadelphia, Newport, New York, and Boston.

Theater became a more pervasive part of American life during the early nineteenth
century and the two decades before and after the turn of the century were golden
years for theater. In the second half of the nineteenth century, theater became both
more diverse and more specialized. Audiences could choose between legitimate
theater, ballet, vaudeville, burlesque, and opera. In the second half of the 19th
century, vaudeville emerged. From the 1880s through the 1930s, vaudeville's fast-
paced collage of music, comedy, dance, novelty numbers, and skits appealed to a
large audience.
Today's American theater might be divided into three categories. First, Broadway
productions persist and many new plays, usually about 50 productions a season, are
presented first in the theater district of New York City. Over the years, New York
theater has developed new avenues known as "off-Broadway" and "off-off
Broadway" where plays are staged in small playhouses, but some rank with the best
Broadway performances in professional skill. Second, many fine regional theaters
produce some of the best new drama. Subsidized by corporations, foundations and
the government, regional theater for some critics represents the best hope of
American drama. Finally, colleges and universities support active theater programs.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fiedler E., Jansen R., Norman-Risch M.. America in close-up// Longman Group UK
Limited 1990. - 261 p.
Hollywood | History, Movies, Sign, & Facts. (2021). Encyclopedia Britannica.
Retrieved May 13, 2022, from https://www.britannica.com/place/Hollywood-
California
Stevenson D.K. American Life and Institutions//Klett 1987 – 110 p.
United States - Popular music. (2021). Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved May 13,
2022, from https://www.britannica.com/place/United-States/Popular-music