11.1 Defining Mass Communication
Littlejohn and Foss define mass communication as “the process whereby media organizations produce and transmit messages to large publics and the process by which those messages are sought, used, understood, and influenced by audience.” McQuail states that mass communication is “only one of the processes of communication operating at the society-wide level, readily identified by its institutional characteristics.” Simply put, mass communication is the public transfer of messages through media or technology-driven channels to a large number of recipients from an entity, usually involving some type of cost or fee (advertising) for the user. “The sender often is a person in some large media organization, the messages are public, and the audience tends to be large and varied.” However, with the advent of outlets like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and text messaging, these definitions do not account for the increased opportunities individuals now have to send messages to large audiences through mediated channels.
Nevertheless, most mass communication comes from large organizations that influence culture on a large scale. Schramm refers to this as a “working group organizer.” Today the working groups that control most mass communication are large conglomerates such as Viacom, News Corp, Disney, Comcast, Time Warner, and CBS. In 2012, these conglomerates controlled 90% of American media, and mergers continue to consolidate ownership even more. An example of an attempt at such a takeover of power occurred throughout 2014, with Comcast and Time Warner pursuing a merger for $45 billion. Though it ultimately failed, this would have been one of the biggest mergers in history.
Remember our definition of communication study: “Who says what, through what channels (media) of communication, to whom, [and] what will be the results?” (Smith et al.). When examining mass communication, we are interested in who has control over what content, for what audience, using what medium, and what the results are. Media critic Robert McChesney said we should be worried about the increasingly concentrated control of mass communication that results when just a handful of large organizations control most mass communication: “The implications for political democracy, by any standard, are troubling.” When interviewed, Ben Bagdikian, media critic and former dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, cautiously pointed out that over the past two decades, major media outlets went from being owned by 50 corporations to just 5. Both McChesney and Bagdikian warn about the implications of having so few organizations controlling the majority of our information and communication. Perhaps this is the reason new media outlets like Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook have consistently grown in popularity, as they offer alternative voices to the large corporations that control most mass communication.
To understand mass communication, one must first be awar