There are several types of mass media in the United States: television, radio, cinema, newspapers, magazines, books, and websites. The U.S. also has a strong music industry. New York City, Manhattan in particular, and to a lesser extent Los Angeles, are considered the epicenters of American media. Theories to explain the success of such companies include reliance on certain policies of the American federal government or a tendency to natural monopolies in the industry, with a corporate media bias.
Many media entities are controlled by large for-profit corporations who reap revenue from advertising, subscriptions, and sale of copyrighted material. American media conglomerates tend to be leading global players, generating large revenues as well as large opposition in many parts of the world. With the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, further deregulation and convergence are under way, leading to mega-mergers, further concentration of media ownership, and the emergence of multinational media conglomerates. These mergers enable tighter control of information.Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005. p. 671 By the early decades of the 21st century, a handful of corporations control the vast majority of both digital and legacy media.These 6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media In America. Business Insider. June 14, 2012.Frances Goldin, Debby Smith, Michael Smith (2014). Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA. Harper Perennial. p. 189: "Twenty years ago, thirty corporations controlled 90 percent of the media. Today, it is a grand total of six mega-corporations – Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, CBS and Comcast. Besides accumulating their own profits, the media are daily trumpets for the rest of the corporate world's advertising." Critics allege that localism, local news, and other content at the community level, media spending and coverage of news, and diversity of ownership and views have suffered as a result of these processes of media concentration.Converging Media, Diverging Politics: A Political Economy of News Media in the United States and Canada. Edited by David Skinner, James R. Compton, and Michael Gasher, Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. Robert William Jensen, review essay of "Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times," published in The Texas Observer, September 17, 1999, archived here
The organization Reporters Without Borders compiles and publishes an annual ranking of countries based upon the organization's assessment of their press freedom records. In 2023–24, United States was ranked 55th out of 180 countries (a drop of ten places from the previous year) and was given a "problematic" rating. A 2022 Gallup poll showed that only 11% of Americans trust television news and 16% trust newspapers. On the future of Spanish-language media in the U.S., Alberto Avendaño, ex-director of El Tiempo Latino/Washington Post, claimed that "Hispanic-American" news coverage in the English-language media is "absolutely pathetic", but he was optimistic, arguing that demographic shifts would inevitably render the Latino media a significant presence in the context of American media. According to a May 2023 AP-NORC poll, 74% of respondents said the media is to blame for increased political polarization in the United States. In 2025 a Gallup poll found that only 28% of Americans expressed a "Great deal/Fair amount" of trust and confidence in mass media when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly. With 62% of Republicans stating that have zero trust and confidence in Mass media. Independence being mixed in having no trust, not very much trust, and a Great deal/Fair amount of trust, and 51% of Democrats expressing a "Great deal/Fair amount" of trust in media a 19% decline from 70% who said so in 2022. It also found that people over the age of 65 had generally higher trust in mass media compared to other age groups.
Newspapers
After being widely successful in the 20th century, newspapers have declined in their influence and penetration into American households over the years. The U.S. does not have a national paper. The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today are the most circulated newspapers in the United States and are sold in most U.S. cities.
Although the primary audience for The New York Times (NYT) had initially been the residents of New York City and its surrounding metropolitan region, the NYT, nicknamed "the Grey Lady" and which has won the most Pulitzer Prizes of any publication, has gradually become the dominant "newspaper of record" for the U.S. media. Apart from its daily nationwide distribution, the term means that back issues are archived on microfilm by every decent-sized public library in the nation, and the Times' articles are often cited by both historians and judges as evidence that a major historical event occurred on a certain date. The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal are also newspapers of record, to a lesser extent. Although USA Today has tried to establish itself as a national paper, it has been widely derided by the academic world as the "McPaper" and is not subscribed to or archived by most libraries.
Apart from the aforementioned newspapers, all major metropolitan areas have their own local newspapers. Most metropolitan areas will generally support one or two major newspapers, with many smaller publications targeted towards particular audiences. Although the cost of publishing has increased over the years, the price of newspapers has generally remained low, forcing newspapers to rely more on advertising revenue and on articles provided by a major news agency wire service, such as the Associated Press, Bloomberg, and Reuters, for their national and world coverage.
With very few exceptions, all the newspapers in the U.S. are privately owned, either by large chains such as Gannett or McClatchy, which own dozens or even hundreds of newspapers; by small chains that own a handful of papers; or in a situation that is increasingly rare, by individuals or families. Most general-purpose newspapers are either being printed one time a week, usually on Thursday or Friday, or are printed daily. Weekly newspapers tend to have much smaller circulation and are more prevalent in rural communities or small towns. Major cities often have "alternative weeklies" to complement the mainstream daily papers, for example, New York City's Village Voice or Los Angeles' L.A. Weekly, to name two of the best-known. Major cities may also support a local business journal, trade papers relating to local industries, and papers for local ethnic and social groups.
As competition from other media has evolved, the number of daily newspapers in the U.S. has declined over the past half-century, according to Editor & Publisher, the trade journal of American newspapers. In particular, the number of evening newspapers has fallen by almost one-half since 1970, while the number of morning editions and Sunday editions has grown. For comparison, in 1950, there were 1,772 daily papers (and 1,450 – or about 70 percent – of them were evening papers) while in 2000, there were 1,480 daily papers (and 766—or about half—of them were evening papers.) Daily newspaper circulation is also slowly declining in America, partly due to the near-demise of two-newspaper towns, as the weaker newspapers in most cities have folded: Year Circulation 1960 58.8 million 1970 62.1 million 1980 62.2 million 1990 62.3 million 2000 55.8 million
The primary source of newspaper income is advertising – in the form of "classifieds" or inserted advertising circulars – rather than circulation income. However, since the late 1990s, this revenue source has been directly challenged by Web sites like eBay (for sales of secondhand items), Monster.com (jobs), and Craigslist (everything). Additionally, as investigative journalism declined at major daily newspapers in the 2000s, many reporters formed their own non-profit investigative newsrooms. Examples include ProPublica on the national level, Texas Tribune at the state level and Voice of OC at the local level. The largest newspapers (by circulation) in the United States are USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times.
In August 2019, it was announced that New Media Investment Group had agreed to buy Gannett, and operations would continue under the Gannett rather than GateHouse name, at the Gannett headquarters but under New Media's CEO. The acquisition of Gannett by New Media Investment Group was completed on November 19, 2019, making the combined company the largest newspaper publisher in the United States. Immediately after the merger was finalized, all GateHouse Media URLs began redirecting to Gannett.com. La Opinión is the most read newspaper website in the United States, reaching more than 6 million readers each month. It is the largest Spanish-language newspaper in the United States and the second-most read newspaper in Los Angeles (after the Los Angeles Times).
Magazines
Thanks to the huge size of the English-speaking North American media market, the United States has a large magazine industry with hundreds of magazines serving almost every interest, as can be determined by glancing at any newsstand in any large American city. Most magazines are owned by one of the large media conglomerates or by one of their smaller regional brethren. The American Society of Magazine Editors sponsors the annual National Magazine Awards recognizing excellence.
The U.S. has three leading weekly news magazines: Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. Time and Newsweek are center-left while U.S. News & World Report tends to be center-right. Time is well known for naming a "Person of the Year" each year, while U.S. News publishes annual ratings of American colleges and universities. The U.S. also has over a dozen major political magazines, including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine and Foreign Policy among others. In entertainment the magazines Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone, L.A. Record and Billboard are very popular. In arts Smithsonian and Art in America magazines are major magazines.
In addition, hundreds of specialized magazines serve a variety of interests. General-interest publications include Vanity Fair, People, Maxim, Consumer Reports, Sports Illustrated. Fashion magazines include Vogue, Glamour, GQ, InStyle, Cosmopolitan, while publications such as Motor Trend, Health, AARP the Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Bon Appétit, and Saveur focus on other specific interests. Professional and industry publications include Scientific American for scientists, Communications of the ACM (for computer science specialists), IEEE Spectrum (for engineers), the ABA Journal (for lawyers), Businessweek and Forbes for business, Architectural Digest and Architectural Record for architects.
El Nuevo Cojo (Los Angeles), and Two Mundos Magazine (Miami) are two bilingual (English/Spanish) lifestyle and entertainment magazines. It's not a coordinated exodus for magazines in the United States but the transition from print's primacy to digital's that has started at the turn of the century.
Radio
American radio broadcasts in two bands: FM and AM. Some stations are only talk radio – featuring interviews and discussions – while music radio stations broadcast one particular type of music: Top 40, hip-hop, country, etc. Radio broadcast companies have become increasingly consolidated in recent years. National Public Radio is the nation's primary public radio network, but most radio stations are commercial and profit-oriented. Talk radio as a political medium has also exploded in popularity during the 1990s, due to the 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, which meant that stations no longer had to "balance" their day by programming alternative points of view.