The Communication Media of Great Britain, Press, Broadcasting and TV, Are Among the Most

Mass Media

Newspapers

The communication media of Great Britain, press, broadcasting and TV, are among the most influential in the world. There is no censorship of press in Great Britain but the editors of newspapers are responsible for what they publish.

There are four “quality dailies“, The Times, The Guardian, The Financial Timesand The Daily Telegraphwhich contain a great variety of national and international news, reports from parliamentary debates, reviews of the arts, features about fashion and sport and business news. They present different political views and orientations but they are not organs of political parties.

The Times is the most famous of them all. It is an independent paper, which has got three weekly supplements: The Times Literary, Educational and Higher Education Supplement, which are published and sold separately.The Daily Telegraph is aright-wing paper and The Guardian is in general apaper of the left. The Financial Times publishes business news, stock exchange news, and also art reviews.

Then there are papers with avery high circulation such as theDaily Mirrorand the Sun which belong to “popular papers“.They hardly publish any serious material; their articles mostly deal with sex scandals and money.

The British Sunday newspapers, such as The Observer and the Sunday Times have enormous circulation. They contain more pages than daily papers and usually publish articles concerned with comment and general information rather than news. Several Sunday papers publish amagazine supplement in color.

The British weekly political and literary journals such as The Economist, The New Statesman and Spectators have large nationwide circulation.

The satirically weekly, Punch, is an old British paper. It is not as popular among the young people as its rival, Private Eye.

Besides these there are many specialist weekly and monthly magazines for women and teenage girls, for people interested in various kinds of sports and hobbies, such as yachting, tennis, model railways, gardening and cars.

The power of press in the U.S.A. is enormous.The U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of press and the press media act as acheck on governmental action.

The largest daily newspapers published in the USA are The Wall StreetJournal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and many others.All of these are serious “quality papers“.

The New York Times is ranked as “the world’s top daily“.

The largest American newspapers also collect and sell news, news features and photographs to many other newspapers in the USA and abroad.

American newspapers get much of their news from large news agencies just like newspapers of other countries of the world. The two U.S. news agencies AP (Associated Press), UPI (United Press International), and the British Reuter are the largest international agencies of the English-speaking countries.

Reading the Sunday paper is an American tradition. There are 762 Sunday newspapers in USA.

There are over 11 000 magazines published in the United States. They cover all topics and interests and some have also international editions (e.g. National Geographic or Vogue).

Radio, Television and Video

In Britain radio and television broadcasting is provided by the state-owned BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), which has ahigh international reputation for impartiality and objectivity.

The BBC has five radio programmes and two television channels. Its radio and television broadcasts include news, sport, educational, cultural and entertainment programmes. The BBC´s five programmes for radio broadcasting have their specializations. As for TV programmes the BBC has two TV channels (BBC 1 and BBC 2) and two television channels (Channel 3 and Channel 4) are put out by independent commercial companies. The British are thus able to receive four TV channels. There are about adozen regional TV companies which broadcast in their region some programmes of local interest.

Commercial satellite and cable TV was begun in 1990 by two companies which joined together and formed British Sky Broadcasting.

There is great number and variety of different types of radio and TV stations in the USA. All radio and television stations in the United States of America must be licensed to broadcast by the Federal Communication Commission, which is an independent federal agency. Each license is given for afew years only and can be taken away if aradio or TV station does not keep the regulation of the FCC.

Hundreds of radio stations of USA broadcast in other languages than English for minorities.

Millions of American TV viewers watch television transmitted over cables. The cable TV is very popular as it increases the number of channels. Since the time the U.S. launched the world’s first communication space satellite in 1965, the satellite TV has become quite common in the U.S.A. and other countries of the world.