DIPLOM

American jou
alism itself has undergone a fundamental transformation in recent years, partly as a result of new technology and partly as a result of the changes in the society it has chosen to mirror. This is not surprising, since change itself is a hallmark of American culture. Whether it chooses to call itself an observer or not, the American news industry is a full-fledged participant in that culture, as well as in its country's democratic political system and its free-market economy.
Protected by gove
ment interference by a brief, 200-year-old clause in the American constitution, the press has emerged as the self-appointed monitor of official life, recorder of public events, and even unofficial arbiter of public behavior. The U.S. news industry is also a very big business. Daily newspapers alone generate some $32 billion in advertising revenue a year. Magazines - and there are more than 11,000 of them -- circulate more copies than there are Americans to read them. Every household has at least three radios, and more than 95 percent own televisions.
Needless to say, the press was not always such a mass medium. The American press started in the 18th century as a small instrument of the literate elite and an unapologetic participant in partisan politics. It was a pamphleteering press, operated by colonial postmasters and opinionated printers. It was not for at least another century that the American press had transformed itself into a fairly nonideological communications instrument, in step with the desires, dynamism, and diversity of the country itself.
But change notwithstanding, the American press has maintained two fundamental constants over the past two centuries: (1) its independence from gove
ment, and (2) its reliance on public acceptance - if not approval - for its financial survival.
Today, the press is better known as the media - the plural for "medium" (or means of conveyance) and a reflection of its many components in the electronic age. For...

The American press enjoys its role as the "watchdog of gove
ment." The power that comes from this largely self-appointed role has ea
ed the press the honorific title "the fourth estate," after the three official branches of gove
ment (legislative, judicial, and executive). It is also this role that prompted Thomas Jefferson, one of the founders of American democracy, to say some 200 years ago that if he had to choose between gove
ment without newspapers or newspapers without gove
ment, he "should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
The American news media enjoy a certain immunity from official reprisal. It is extremely difficult, for example, for a public official to win a libel suit against the media, because the courts have ruled that gove
ment servants must be open to special scrutiny and accountability in a democratic system. American jou
alists have also won a number of battles to protect the anonymity of news sources from gove
ment inquiry, but that war periodically erupts.
The American media is far more vulnerable to legal action from private citizens, whose right to privacy can be in direct confrontation with what the press calls the public's "right to know." Libel is a civil rather than a criminal offense in the United States, but the enormous size of monetary awards and penalties levied by the courts in recent years has had a "chilling" effect on jou
alistic enterprise, according to many in the news industry.
Credibility surveys vary on the question of who the American people trust more -- their press or their gove
ment. The answer varies with time and circumstance. Following the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, the press enjoyed a high degree of public confidence. But following scandal coverage that led to a senator's withdrawal from the 1988 presidential race, the press came under sharp criticism on charges of exceeding the bounds of good taste and privacy.
There is no universally accepted definition or set of definitions for...