# Media Timeline The history of media itself — not of any one network or newspaper, but of the **channels**: writing, the printing press, the telegraph, radio, television, cable, the internet, the smartphone, the social feed, and now the generative model. The vault already tracks the companies (see [[Media Company Timelines Hub]]) and the conservative ecosystem built on top of them (see [[Right-Wing Media Timeline]]). This page is the layer underneath both: the sequence of technologies that decided what a "public" could be, who stood at the gate, and who learned the new grammar first. ## Core Thesis **Every medium arrives open and leaves owned.** Each new channel begins as a hobbyist's or outsider's tool, passes through a chaotic period in which nobody controls it, provokes a [[Moral Panic]], and is then consolidated, licensed, or captured. [[Tim Wu]] calls this the Cycle in *The Master Switch* (2010); the vault's own word for the end state is [[Media Capture]]. Two corollaries run through every era below: 1. **Whoever masters the grammar of a new medium first wins the politics of it.** Luther and the pamphlet, Paine and the broadside, Hearst and the headline, [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]] and [[Father Charles Coughlin]] on radio, [[John F. Kennedy]] on television, [[Rush Limbaugh]] on deregulated AM, [[Donald Trump]] on the feed. Incumbents usually understand a new medium last. 2. **The regulatory bargain follows scarcity.** When the channel was scarce (broadcast spectrum), the state demanded something back: licenses, the "public interest" standard, the [[Fairness Doctrine]]. When the channel became abundant (cable, then the internet), the obligations fell away. [[Section 230]] granted the platforms immunity without asking for anything in return. → The theory behind this page: [[Medium Theory]] · [[Media Theory Hub]] · [[Public Sphere]] · [[Attention Economy]] → The companies: [[Media Company Timelines Hub]] · The ecosystem: [[Right-Wing Media Timeline]] · The machines: [[Artificial Intelligence Timeline]] ## The Gatekeeper, Era by Era | Era | Dominant medium | Who held the gate | Governing bargain | |---|---|---|---| | Before 1440 | Manuscript, oral culture | Church, crown, scribes | Literacy itself was the gate | | 1440–1830 | Printing press, newspaper, pamphlet | Licensors, then printers and parties | Pre-publication licensing, then seditious libel, then the [[First Amendment]] | | 1830–1900 | Penny press, telegraph | Press barons, the wire services | Advertising pays; the telegraph monopoly sets the speed | | 1900–1945 | Radio, film | Networks, studios, the state | Spectrum licensed "in the public interest" | | 1945–1975 | Network television | Three networks | [[Fairness Doctrine]], equal time, spectrum scarcity | | 1975–1990 | Cable, satellite, FM | Cable operators, satellite programmers | Deregulation; the Fairness Doctrine repealed | | 1990–2004 | Cable news, the commercial web | Conglomerates, portals, search | [[Telecommunications Act of 1996]] and [[Section 230]] | | 2005–2019 | Smartphone, social feed | Platforms and their algorithms | Immunity without obligation | | 2020–2026 | Short video, podcasts, generative AI | Platforms, model makers, billionaire owners | Contested: divest-or-ban laws, copyright suits, ownership capture | --- ## Era 0 — Before the Press (c. 3200 BCE–1439) Communication at a distance or across time depends on a scarce skill (writing) and a scarce material (parchment, papyrus, paper). Whoever controls copying controls the record. - **c. 3200 BCE** — Writing emerges in Mesopotamia (cuneiform on clay) and, separately, in Egypt. [[Harold Innis]] later argues that durable, heavy media like clay and stone bias a civilization toward time and religious authority, while light media like papyrus bias it toward administering territory. - **c. 105 CE** — Papermaking is formalized in Han China (traditionally credited to the court official Cai Lun). It reaches the Islamic world in the 8th century and Europe by the 12th. - **868** — The *Diamond Sutra*, printed from woodblocks in Tang China, is the oldest surviving dated printed book. - **c. 1040s** — Bi Sheng invents movable type made of fired clay in Song China, as recorded by the scholar Shen Kuo. - **1377** — The *Jikji*, a Korean Buddhist text, is printed with movable metal type, more than 70 years before Gutenberg. **Why it matters:** printing was invented in East Asia first. What changed in Europe after 1440 was not the idea but the combination: an alphabet of a few dozen letters, a market economy, rival states that could not suppress print everywhere at once, and a religious dispute waiting for a delivery system. ## Era 1 — The Print Revolution (1440–1700) The [[Printing Press]] turns copying from a craft into an industry. Authority over texts shifts from the Church and the scriptorium to printers, readers, and anyone with a grievance and a press. - **c. 1440–1450** — [[Johannes Gutenberg]] develops a press with movable metal type, oil-based ink, and an adapted screw press, first in Strasbourg and then in Mainz. - **c. 1454–1455** — The Gutenberg Bible is completed in Mainz, the first major book printed with movable type in Europe. - **1517** — Martin Luther's *Ninety-Five Theses* spread across German-speaking lands within weeks through cheap printed copies. The Reformation becomes the first mass-media campaign: Luther writes short vernacular pamphlets built for the new medium, and the Church answers with long Latin treatises. This is the template for corollary 1 above. - **1605** — *Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien*, published by Johann Carolus in Strasbourg, is generally recognized as the first newspaper. - **1644** — John Milton publishes *Areopagitica*, the classic English argument against pre-publication licensing of the press. - **1690** — *Publick Occurrences, Both Forreign and Domestick*, the first newspaper in the American colonies, is suppressed by Massachusetts authorities after a single issue, for printing without a license and for content the governor's council objected to. - **1695** — England's Licensing Act lapses and is not renewed, ending pre-publication censorship. Control shifts to prosecution after the fact, through seditious libel. ## Era 2 — Press, Revolution, and the Republic (1700–1830) The newspaper and the pamphlet become the infrastructure of revolution, and the new American state writes the press into its founding law and subsidizes it through the mail. - **1704** — The *Boston News-Letter* becomes the first continuously published newspaper in the colonies. - **1729** — [[Benjamin Franklin]] takes over the *Pennsylvania Gazette*, building an early American media network of partner print shops. He later becomes the first Postmaster General under the Continental Congress (1775). - **1735** — The jury in the seditious-libel trial of New York printer John Peter Zenger acquits him after his lawyer argues that the truth of his criticism of the royal governor is a defense. It sets no binding precedent, but it becomes the founding legend of American press freedom. - **1765** — The Stamp Act taxes printed paper, including newspapers. It turns the colonies' printers against the Crown and helps make the press a revolutionary institution. - **January 1776** — [[Thomas Paine]] publishes [[Common Sense]], the most widely read pamphlet of the Revolution, in plain language that carried well when read aloud. - **1787–1788** — The [[Federalist Papers]] run as newspaper essays in New York to argue for ratifying the Constitution. - **December 15, 1791** — The [[First Amendment]] is ratified: "Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." - **1792** — The Postal Act sets newspaper postage at 1 cent for up to 100 miles and 1.5 cents beyond, against 6 to 25 cents for a letter, and lets printers exchange papers free of charge. It is the first large federal subsidy of the press. See [[USPS]]. - **1798** — The [[Alien and Sedition Acts]] criminalize "false, scandalous and malicious" writing against the government. Opposition editors are prosecuted, and the backlash helps carry Jefferson to the presidency in 1800. ## Era 3 — The Industrial Press and the Wire (1830–1900) Steam presses and advertising make news a mass product. The telegraph separates communication from transportation for the first time: a message can travel faster than a horse or a ship. - **September 3, 1833** — Benjamin Day launches the *New York Sun* at one cent. The "penny press" sells readers to advertisers instead of selling papers to readers, the business model [[Tim Wu]] traces from here to the social feed. See [[Attention Economy]]. - **1839** — Louis Daguerre's photographic process is announced in Paris. Images begin to compete with text as evidence. - **May 24, 1844** — Samuel Morse sends "What hath God wrought" by [[Telegraph]] from Washington to Baltimore. - **May 1846** — Five New York dailies form the [[Associated Press]] to share the cost of telegraphing news of the [[Mexican-American War]]. Media historians often credit pooled wire copy with pushing newspapers toward the neutral, fact-first style later called objectivity, since the same copy had to be usable by papers of every party. The thesis is debated. - **1858** — The first transatlantic telegraph cable carries messages for a few weeks before failing. A durable cable follows in **1866**. - **October 24, 1861** — The transcontinental telegraph is completed, and the Pony Express shuts down two days later. - **March 7, 1876** — Alexander Graham Bell receives his telephone patent. - **1877** — Thomas Edison's phonograph becomes the first device to record sound and play it back. - **1890s** — The circulation war between William Randolph Hearst's *New York Journal* and Joseph Pulitzer's *New York World* produces [[Yellow Journalism]]. After the USS *Maine* explodes in Havana harbor (**February 15, 1898**), the Hearst press blames Spain without evidence and helps drive the country into the [[Spanish-American War]]. - **December 28, 1895** — The Lumière brothers hold the first public screening of projected motion pictures for a paying audience, in Paris. ## Era 4 — Broadcast and Propaganda (1900–1945) Radio puts a single voice in millions of living rooms at once. The state licenses the airwaves, and governments, demagogues, and advertisers all discover what one voice can do to a mass audience. - **December 12, 1901** — Guglielmo Marconi reports receiving the first transatlantic [[Radio]] signal, the letter "S" in Morse code, in Newfoundland. - **1902–1906** — The muckraking era: [[Ida Tarbell]]'s Standard Oil series begins in *McClure's* in November 1902. Magazines with national reach make investigative journalism a political force. See [[Muckraking]]. - **February 8, 1915** — D. W. Griffith's [[Birth of a Nation]] opens. It is screened at the White House, and its glorification of the Klan coincides with the Klan's 1915 revival. Film's first blockbuster is also its first mass propaganda event. - **1917** — The U.S. Committee on Public Information (the Creel Committee) runs the first large American state propaganda campaign, for World War I. [[Edward Bernays]] works for it and afterward markets its techniques to corporations as "public relations." - **November 2, 1920** — KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcasts the Harding–Cox election returns, usually counted as the start of commercial radio broadcasting. - **1922** — [[Walter Lippmann]] publishes *Public Opinion*, arguing that citizens act on "the pictures in our heads" (his phrase) supplied by the press, not on the world itself. - **1926–1927** — RCA forms the NBC radio network (1926), and CBS follows (1927). Network programming replaces local stations as the center of radio. See [[Comcast and NBCUniversal Timeline]] and [[CBS Timeline]]. - **February 23, 1927** — The [[Radio Act of 1927]] creates the Federal Radio Commission and establishes that broadcasters use the public's airwaves under licenses granted for the "public interest, convenience, or necessity." - **September 7, 1927** — Philo Farnsworth transmits the first all-electronic [[Television]] image in San Francisco. - **1928** — Bernays publishes *Propaganda*: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society." See [[Propaganda]]. - **March 12, 1933** — [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]] gives his first fireside chat, on the banking crisis. Radio lets a president bypass hostile newspaper owners and speak directly to voters. - **1933** — In Germany, [[Joseph Goebbels]]'s propaganda ministry promotes the cheap *Volksempfänger* ("people's receiver") to put a state-controlled radio in every home. - **1933** — Edwin Armstrong patents wideband FM radio, which is clearer and nearly free of static. RCA, invested in AM, fights it. - **June 19, 1934** — The [[Communications Act of 1934]] replaces the radio commission with the [[FCC]], with authority over both radio and wire communication. - **1930s** — [[Father Charles Coughlin]]'s weekly broadcasts reach an audience commonly estimated in the tens of millions and turn increasingly antisemitic and pro-fascist by 1938. He is pushed off the air around 1940, not by a law but by a broadcasting-industry code change against selling airtime for controversial views. He is the first American demagogue of the electronic age and a direct ancestor of [[Talk Radio]]. - **October 30, 1938** — Orson Welles's *The War of the Worlds* broadcast. Newspapers, eager to discredit radio as a news rival, report a mass panic. Later research finds the panic was greatly exaggerated: the first media panic was partly a newspaper story about radio. - **April 30, 1939** — RCA introduces television to the public at the New York World's Fair, broadcasting [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]]'s opening address. - **1940** — [[Edward R. Murrow]]'s CBS broadcasts from London during the Blitz bring the war into American homes in real time. - **July 1, 1941** — The FCC allows commercial television broadcasting to begin. The war freezes its growth until 1946. - **1945** — The FCC moves the FM band to higher frequencies, making existing FM receivers obsolete and setting FM back by more than a decade. Armstrong dies in 1954 while still in patent litigation with RCA. ## Era 5 — The Network Age (1945–1975) Three networks and a handful of newspapers set the national agenda. Because spectrum is scarce, the government regulates fairness, and a broad public shares one set of facts. - **1948–1955** — Television spreads faster than any medium before it: about **1%** of U.S. households own a set in 1948, and **75%** by 1955. - **1948** — The first community-antenna systems, the origin of [[Cable Television]], are strung in Pennsylvania and Oregon to bring broadcast signals into mountain valleys. - **1949** — The FCC adopts the [[Fairness Doctrine]]: licensees must cover controversial issues of public importance and present contrasting views. - **September 4, 1951** — The first coast-to-coast live television broadcast carries [[Harry S. Truman]]'s address to the Japanese peace treaty conference in San Francisco. - **March 9, 1954** — Murrow's *See It Now* broadcast on [[Joseph McCarthy]] uses McCarthy's own footage against him. The televised Army–McCarthy hearings that spring complete his fall. See [[McCarthyism]]. - **September 26, 1960** — The first Kennedy–Nixon televised debate. [[John F. Kennedy]] masters the camera, and [[Richard Nixon]] looks pale and ill. Politics begins to be judged by how it looks on screen. - **May 9, 1961** — FCC Chairman Newton Minow calls commercial television "a vast wasteland" in a speech to broadcasters. - **July 1962** — The Telstar satellite relays the first live transatlantic television pictures. - **March 9, 1964** — In [[New York Times Co. v. Sullivan]], the Supreme Court rules that public officials must prove "actual malice" to win a libel suit, protecting the national press as it covers the civil rights movement in the South. - **1964** — [[Marshall McLuhan]] publishes *Understanding Media*: "the medium is the message." See [[Medium Theory]] and [[Global Village]]. - **November 7, 1967** — The Public Broadcasting Act creates the [[Corporation for Public Broadcasting]], which later funds PBS (1969) and NPR (1970). - **February 27, 1968** — [[Walter Cronkite]] tells viewers the [[Vietnam War]] is "mired in stalemate." It is the high-water mark of the anchor as national authority. - **June 9, 1969** — In [[Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC]], the Supreme Court upholds the Fairness Doctrine on the ground of spectrum scarcity. The doctrine's legal footing is only as strong as the scarcity argument. - **October 29, 1969** — The first message is sent over [[ARPANET]], the [[DARPA]]-funded network that becomes the internet. See [[History of the Internet]]. - **November 13, 1969** — Vice President [[Spiro Agnew]]'s Des Moines speech attacks network news as an unelected, liberal elite. This is the opening of the conservative campaign against "media bias" that the [[Right-Wing Media Timeline]] carries forward. - **June 1971** — The *New York Times* and *Washington Post* publish the [[Pentagon Papers]]. The Supreme Court rejects the government's attempt to stop publication on June 30. - **1972–1974** — The *Washington Post*'s reporting on [[Watergate Scandal]] helps bring down [[Richard Nixon]], the peak of the press as an institutional check. ## Era 6 — Cable, Satellite, and Deregulation (1975–1990) Satellites and coaxial cable end spectrum scarcity, and with it the case for regulating fairness. FM takes music, AM turns to talk, and the Reagan FCC removes the old obligations. - **1975** — HBO becomes the first cable network delivered nationwide by satellite, beginning with the "Thrilla in Manila" fight. Satellite distribution makes national cable networks economically possible. - **December 1976** — [[Ted Turner]] puts his Atlanta station, WTCG (later WTBS), on satellite as a "superstation." - **1978** — **FM passes AM in total U.S. listeners for the first time.** Through the 1980s music moves almost entirely to FM's better sound. That leaves AM with its long range and plenty of airtime but nothing to fill it with, and talk becomes the answer. - **March 19, 1979** — C-SPAN begins live coverage of the House floor. By 1984 [[Newt Gingrich]] and his allies are giving speeches to an empty chamber for the camera audience. - **1980** — About 16 million U.S. homes have cable. - **June 1, 1980** — [[Ted Turner]] launches [[CNN]], the first 24-hour news channel. - **August 1, 1981** — MTV launches, and music becomes a visual medium. - **1981–1987** — Reagan's FCC chairman Mark Fowler pursues broadcast deregulation, famously calling television "a toaster with pictures." - **October 1984** — The Cable Communications Policy Act limits local control over cable rates and franchises, fueling expansion. - **1986** — [[Rupert Murdoch]] launches the Fox broadcast network, the first viable fourth network. - **August 4, 1987** — The FCC abolishes the [[Fairness Doctrine]], arguing that cable and channel abundance have ended scarcity. [[Ronald Reagan]] had vetoed Congress's attempt to write it into law that June. See [[Fairness Doctrine Repeal]]. - **August 1, 1988** — [[Rush Limbaugh]] goes into national syndication on AM stations. He starts on 56 stations and is on more than 600 by 1994, and AM's empty hours become the infrastructure of [[Talk Radio]]. - **March 1989** — Tim Berners-Lee, at CERN, proposes the information system that becomes the World Wide Web. - **1990** — About 50 million U.S. homes have cable, roughly triple the 1980 figure. > [!note] Cable's real takeoff was the 1980s > The 1990s are often remembered as the cable decade, but cable's build-out happened in the 1980s (about 16 million homes in 1980, about 50 million in 1990). What the 1990s added was **cable news as a partisan business**: Fox News and MSNBC in 1996, and the consolidation unlocked by the 1996 Telecom Act. ## Era 7 — Cable News and the Commercial Web (1990–2004) The internet opens to the public and to commerce. Congress deregulates ownership and, almost as an afterthought, gives online platforms a liability shield. Cable news splits along partisan lines. - **January 1991** — CNN's live reports from Baghdad during the opening of the [[Gulf War]] make the network a global institution. Some call it "the CNN effect." - **August 6, 1991** — Berners-Lee makes the World Wide Web publicly available. - **1992** — About 60% of U.S. households have cable. Congress passes the Cable Act of 1992 over George H. W. Bush's veto to re-regulate rates. - **1993** — The Mosaic browser makes the web graphical and easy to use. - **August 9, 1995** — Netscape's IPO starts the dot-com boom. - **February 8, 1996** — [[Bill Clinton]] signs the [[Telecommunications Act of 1996]]. It removes the national radio-ownership cap, and [[Clear Channel]] grows from about 40 stations to more than 1,200 by 2002. Title V, the Communications Decency Act, includes [[Section 230]], which shields online services from liability for what their users post. - **July 15, 1996** — [[MSNBC]] launches. - **October 7, 1996** — [[Fox News]] launches under [[Roger Ailes]]. See [[Fox News Timeline]]. - **June 26, 1997** — In *Reno v. ACLU*, the Supreme Court strikes down the Communications Decency Act's indecency provisions, but Section 230 survives, now separated from the censorship law it was meant to go with. - **January 17, 1998** — The [[Drudge Report]] posts that *Newsweek* has held back the Monica Lewinsky story. A one-man website sets the national news agenda for the first time. - **September 4, 1998** — [[Google]] is incorporated. Search becomes the internet's gatekeeper. - **June 1999** — Napster launches. File-sharing breaks the music industry's distribution monopoly, and the industry's legal response previews every later copyright fight, including the AI fights of the 2020s. - **January 2000** — AOL announces its merger with Time Warner, the peak of the "old media buys new media" theory. U.S. cable subscriptions peak around 2000 at about 68.5 million. - **January 15, 2001** — [[Wikipedia]] launches. See [[Wikipedia Timeline]]. - **2002–2004** — The blogosphere becomes a political force. In September 2004, bloggers challenge the authenticity of documents used in a *60 Minutes* report on George W. Bush's National Guard service, and Dan Rather later leaves the anchor chair. - **February 4, 2004** — [[Facebook]] launches at Harvard. The same month, the word "podcasting" is coined. See [[Podcasting]]. ## Era 8 — Mobile and Social (2005–2019) The audience becomes the publisher, and the [[Smartphone]] puts a broadcast studio and a printing press in every pocket. Engagement-ranking algorithms replace editors as the gatekeepers. The platforms grow to billions of users with no public-interest obligation and full liability immunity. See [[History of Social Media]]. - **2005** — [[YouTube]] launches; its first video is uploaded on April 23, 2005. - **March 21, 2006** — The first tweet is sent on [[Twitter]]. See [[Twitter Timeline]]. - **September 2006** — Facebook introduces the News Feed, the start of the ranked, algorithmic feed. See [[Facebook Timeline]]. - **January 2007** — Netflix begins streaming video. See [[Netflix Timeline]]. - **January 9, 2007** — Steve Jobs announces the iPhone, which goes on sale June 29, 2007. The App Store follows in July 2008. - **2008** — [[Barack Obama]]'s campaign is widely credited as the first to win a presidency with a social-media and online-organizing operation at its center. - **October 2010** — [[Instagram]] launches. - **2010–2011** — The [[Arab Spring]] is hailed as a series of "Twitter revolutions." Within a few years authoritarian governments learn to use the same tools for surveillance and disinformation. - **August 2014** — [[Gamergate]] becomes the template for networked harassment campaigns and a recruiting ground for the alt-right. The same year, *Serial* starts the modern podcast boom. - **2016** — The [[2016 Presidential Election]]: the [[Internet Research Agency]] runs Russian influence operations on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. "[[Fake News]]" is popularized as a name for fabricated viral stories, then taken over by [[Donald Trump]] as an attack on the press itself. - **2017–2018** — [[ByteDance]] launches [[TikTok]] internationally and merges it with Musical.ly in August 2018. Recommendation by algorithm replaces the social graph as the organizing principle of the feed. - **December 14, 2017** — The FCC under [[Ajit Pai]] repeals the Obama-era [[Net Neutrality]] rules. - **March 2018** — The [[Cambridge Analytica Scandal]] reveals that data from tens of millions of Facebook profiles was harvested for political targeting. See [[Surveillance Capitalism]]. - **August 6, 2018** — Apple, Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify remove [[Alex Jones]] and [[InfoWars]], and Twitter follows in September. [[Deplatforming]] becomes a front in the free-speech culture war. ## Era 9 — Platform Wars and the Generative Turn (2020–2026) Short video, podcasts, and streaming overtake broadcast and cable. Billionaires buy the platforms and the newsrooms. Generative AI makes content nearly free to produce, which lowers its value and raises the value of trust and distribution. The state returns as a regulator, but mostly to settle scores over who owns the channel, not to impose a public-interest obligation. - **2020** — The [[COVID-19 Pandemic]] produces what the WHO calls an "infodemic." In May, [[Joe Rogan]] signs an exclusive deal with Spotify, a sign that podcasts have become a major medium. - **January 8, 2021** — Two days after the January 6 Capitol attack, Twitter permanently suspends [[Donald Trump]]. Amazon Web Services drops [[Parler]] days later. - **February 2022** — [[Truth Social]] launches, the former president's own platform. - **October 27, 2022** — [[Elon Musk]] completes his purchase of Twitter, later renamed X. See [[Musk Twitter-X Acquisition]]. - **November 30, 2022** — [[OpenAI]] releases ChatGPT. The [[Large Language Model]] becomes a consumer medium. See [[Generative AI]] and [[Artificial Intelligence Timeline]]. - **December 27, 2023** — The [[New York Times]] sues OpenAI and [[Microsoft]] for copyright infringement, the lead case on whether AI models can be trained on journalism without permission. - **January 2024** — An AI-generated robocall imitating Joe Biden's voice tells New Hampshire Democrats not to vote in the primary. See [[Deep Fakes]]. - **April 24, 2024** — The [[Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act]] becomes law, requiring ByteDance to divest TikTok or face a ban. - **Fall 2024** — In what was called the "podcast election," Trump appears on long-form podcasts with young male audiences, including *The Joe Rogan Experience* in October. - **January 18–19, 2025** — TikTok goes dark in the United States from late on January 18 until midday January 19. Trump, inaugurated the next day, extends the divestment deadline by executive order. See [[TikTok Ban (2020-2025)]]. - **May 2025** — For the first time, Nielsen measures streaming (44.8% of TV viewing) above broadcast and cable combined (44.2%). - **July 24, 2025** — The [[Rescissions Act of 2025]] cancels about $1.1 billion in advance funding for the [[Corporation for Public Broadcasting]]. - **August 7, 2025** — [[Skydance-Paramount]] closes its merger, putting [[CBS News]] under [[David Ellison]]. See [[Paramount Timeline]] and [[Scott Pelley Firing]]. - **September 2025** — ABC suspends [[Jimmy Kimmel]] after FCC Chairman [[Brendan Carr]] publicly threatens action and the station groups Nexstar and Sinclair pull the show from their ABC affiliates. The suspension is reversed within a week. The broadcast license, a 1927 tool, has become a lever over late-night comedy. - **September 2025** — Pew finds that one in five U.S. adults regularly get news on TikTok, up from 3% in 2020, including 43% of adults under 30. - **October 27, 2025** — [[Elon Musk]]'s [[xAI]] launches [[Grokipedia]], an AI-written rival to Wikipedia. - **January 2026** — The board of the [[Corporation for Public Broadcasting]] votes to dissolve the organization after losing its federal funding, ending the institution created in 1967. - **January 22, 2026** — The sale of TikTok's U.S. operations to the TikTok USDS Joint Venture, backed by a consortium including Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX, closes. - **February 27, 2026** — OpenAI says ChatGPT has 900 million weekly active users. - **October 6, 2026** — Paramount Skydance completes its roughly $110 billion acquisition of [[Warner Bros. Discovery]] and renames the combined company Skydance. [[CNN]] and [[CBS News]] are now owned by the same company for the first time. See [[Paramount Skydance - Warner Bros. Discovery Deal]] and [[CNN and Warner Bros. Discovery Timeline]]. --- ## Patterns Across the Eras **1. The Cycle: open, then owned.** Radio began with amateurs and ended as NBC and CBS. The web began with personal homepages and ended as Google and Meta. Cable began as community antennas and ended as a handful of conglomerates. Every medium follows Wu's Cycle, and the vault's [[Media Consolidation]] and [[Media Capture]] pages describe its last stage. The 2026 Skydance merger is the most recent case: CBS News and CNN under one owner. **2. First movers own the politics.** The people who first learned each medium's grammar were usually outsiders or insurgents: Luther, Paine, Hearst, Coughlin, Limbaugh, Drudge, Trump. Established institutions learn the grammar late, often after they have already lost the audience. **3. Every medium gets a panic.** Novels, penny papers, film, *War of the Worlds*, comic books (the 1954 Senate hearings and the Comics Code), television violence, video games, social media and teen mental health, and now AI. Some of the fears were justified and many were not. What is consistent is that the panic usually comes from the medium being displaced. See [[Moral Panic]]. **4. Scarcity buys obligation; abundance ends it.** The public-interest standard of 1927, the Fairness Doctrine of 1949, and *Red Lion* in 1969 all rested on a scarce spectrum. Cable and satellite ended the scarcity in the 1980s, and with it the obligation. The internet never had one: [[Section 230]] (1996) is a grant of immunity with nothing required in return. The fights of the 2020s over TikTok's ownership, the Kimmel suspension, and the FCC's leverage over merger approvals are the state looking for a new lever after the old one was given up. **5. When distribution gets cheap, attention gets expensive.** The penny press made paper cheap and sold readers to advertisers. Broadcasting made distribution free to the listener. The internet made it free to the publisher. Generative AI makes the content itself nearly free. Each step moves value toward whoever controls attention (platforms, algorithms, and now AI models that answer questions instead of sending readers to sources) and away from whoever produces the reporting. See [[Attention Economy]], [[News Deserts]], and [[Gannett Timeline]]. **6. Each medium changes what counts as public knowledge.** Print created shared texts, the wire created shared facts, network television created a shared evening, and the algorithmic feed ended all three. [[Neil Postman]] warned in 1985 that television was turning public discourse into entertainment. The feed adds personalization, so that no two people see the same public. See [[Filter Bubble]], [[Public Sphere]], and [[Disinformation]]. ## See Also - [[Media Company Timelines Hub]] — the company-level timelines (CBS, Fox News, CNN, Disney, Netflix, and others) - [[Right-Wing Media Timeline]] — the conservative ecosystem from the Fairness Doctrine to X - [[Artificial Intelligence Timeline]] — the generative turn in depth - [[History of the Internet]] · [[History of Social Media]] · [[History of Computing]] — the Tech History spine - [[Medium Theory]] · [[Marshall McLuhan]] · [[Harold Innis]] · [[Walter Ong]] · [[Neil Postman]] — the theory of media as environment - [[Tim Wu]] — the Cycle and the attention merchants - [[Media Consolidation]] · [[Media Capture]] · [[Tech Oligarch Media Map]] — who owns the channels now - [[Manufacturing Consent]] · [[Propaganda]] · [[Edward Bernays]] · [[Walter Lippmann]] — what the channels are used for