Timeline: United States News Media Development
1735 — John Peter Zenger trial (truth is a defense against criminal libel charges)
Before 1776 — Colonial Press
1791 — First Amendment
1798 — Alien and Sedition Acts
1790s-1830s — Partisan Press
1830s — “Penny Press”
1844 — invention of the telegraph
1861-1865 — photography begins to come of age as Matthew Brady documents the Civil War
1878-ca. 1895 — origins of film
1890s — rise of “Yellow Journalism” — Pulitzer and Hearst (note also “magazine “muckraking” until about 1915, and 1920s “Jazz Journalism”)
1895 — first wireless message sent (Marconi)
1903 — first film that told a story (The Great Train Robbery – 12 minutes long)
1908 — first Journalism school established (U. of Missouri – lectures in journalism offered there 1878-1885 — Columbia turned down Pulitzer’s first offer to endow a journalism school, in 1892)
1915 — Birth of a Nation film
1919 — Schenck v. United States (re: free speech in wartime — can be suppressed only if it would create a “clear and present danger” to the government)
1920 — first commercial radio station broadcast (KDKA in Pittsburgh — broadcast election returns)
1926 — first radio network established (NBC)
1927 — The Jazz Singer (first “talking picture”); also, first experimental TV broadcast
1931 — Near v. Minnesota (re: limitations on the First Amendment – prior restraint is valid only in very limited situations — note also the 1971 Pentagon Papers case)
1934 — Federal Communications Act passed (third law regulating electronic media) — establishes FCC
1936 — Life becomes the first American picture magazine
1930s and 1940s — “golden ages” for radio and film
1939 — TV demonstrated at New York World’s Fair
1950 — Cable TV begins (to deliver signals in mountainous territory)
1952 — FCC ends four-year freeze on TV licenses, while studying allocation policies
1963 — NBC begins first 30-minute evening news broadcasts
1966 — federal Freedom of Information Act approved.
1967 — Public Broadcasting Act passed (PBS and NPR created in 1970 and 1971)
1969-1982 — Internet developed (on a limited basis)
1970 — HBO starts as first premium cable channel
1970s — VCR developed
1980 — CNN begins operations
1980s — CD-ROM invented
1991 — World Wide Web created
1995 — radio begins transmitting via the Internet (first newspapers go online in the 1990s)
1996 — passage of the Telecommunications Act (revising the Federal Communications Act and continuing to ease regulation of electronic media)
2001 — AOL merges with Time Warner (with very mixed results)
2003 — FCC implements new ownership regulations relaxing ownership restrictions; ongoing public and congressional opposition leads to modifications
2004 — public and official concern over broadcast “indecency” produces strong negative reactions and FCC scrutiny
2005 — journalists’ confidentiality re-emerges as a legal (and ethical) issue when a federal special prosecutor subpoenas journalists to appear before a grand jury investigating leaks. Judith Miller of The New York Times goes to jail for 85 days and eventually reveals her source
2006 — Knight-Ridder newspaper chain is forced by institutional stockholders to put itself up for sale, and is bought by McClatchy, which then sells off 12 dailies and numerous weeklies in “non-growth markets”
Criticism erupts over whether publication in The New York Times and other papers of information about governmental surveillance programs compromises national security interests; similar concerns are also raised in other countries.