Short answers, pulled from the story.
Mass media refers to the forms of media that reach large audiences via mass communication. It includes broadcast media, digital media, print media, social media, streaming media, advertising, and events. It also encompasses news, advocacy, entertainment, and public service announcements.
By the early 2000s, a classification called the seven mass media came into use. It comprises print from the late 15th century, recordings from the late 19th century, cinema around 1900, radio around 1910, television around 1950, the Internet around 1990, and mobile phones around 2000.
Print is notable for being the first example of mass media as the term is used today, starting in Europe in the Middle Ages. Johannes Gutenberg printed the Latin Bible on a printing press with movable type in 1453, though books remained too expensive to count as a mass medium for at least a century afterward.
The largest media deal in history was the acquisition of Time Warner by AOL Inc. for 164,746.86 million US dollars. Between 1985 and 2018, about 76,720 deals were announced in the media industry, totaling around 5,634 billion US dollars.
In 1997, J. R. Finnegan Jr. and K. Viswanath identified three main effects of mass media: the knowledge gap, agenda setting, and cultivation of perceptions. Agenda setting describes how people are influenced in how they think about issues, while cultivation describes how media exposure shapes audience perceptions over time.
In 2012, an article asserted that 90 percent of US mass media, including radio, video news, and sports entertainment, were owned by six major companies: GE, News-Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS. Some consider this concentration of media ownership a threat to democracy.
Media artist Joey Skaggs has demonstrated how easily mass media can be manipulated using fabricated press releases, staged events, and fictitious experts. His long-running hoaxes reveal how news outlets can be drawn to sensational narratives, often publishing stories with minimal fact-checking.