Almost all such groups (and many of their subdivisions) have their own communications systems. On the second level there are the specialized media owned and operated by the many organized groups in this country. Round tables, panels and forums, classrooms and legislative assemblies, and public platforms - any and all media, day after day, spread the word, someone’s word. The country is blanketed with billboards, handbills, throwaways, and direct mail advertising. A deluge of books and pamphlets is published annually. Approximately 16,500 motion picture houses have a capacity of almost 10,500,000. Approximately 2,000 radio stations of various types broadcast to the Nation’s 60,000,000 receiving sets. There are approximately 10,000 weekly newspapers and almost 6,000 magazines.
Almost 1,800 daily newspapers in the United States have a combined circulation of around 44,000,000. On the first level there are the commercial media. There are two main divisions of this communications system which maintain social cohesion.
Knowledge of how to use this enormous amplifying system becomes a matter of primary concern to those who are interested in socially constructive action. The United States has become a small room in which a single whisper is magnified thousands of times. Words hammer continually at the eyes and ears of America. Every resident is constantly exposed to the impact of our vast network of communications which reach every corner of the country, no matter how remote or isolated. The tremendous expansion of communications in the United States has given this Nation the world’s most penetrating and effective apparatus for the transmission of ideas. Any one of us through these media may influence the attitudes and actions of our fellow citizens. All these media provide open doors to the public mind.
This development was an inevitable result of the expansion of the media of free speech and persuasion, defined in other articles in this volume. FREEDOM of speech and its democratic corollary, a free press, have tacitly expanded our Bill of Rights to include the right of persuasion.