The relationship between society and the mass media in the United States has been at the center of attention for media theorists and researchers ever since the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. Several forms of new media—mass circulation newspapers and magazines, movies, sound films, and radio—came on the scene at the same time that industrialization and urbanization, great population shifts within the country, and heavy immigration wrought profound change in the nature of U.S. society. The traditional rural character of America was slipping further into history, replaced by a boiling brew of new and different people with strange and different habits crowded into rapidly growing cities. Crime rose. Social and political unrest spread. Workers agitated for greater rights, safety, and security. Magazine muckrakers used their popular publications to challenge the abuses of...