SOSC 4000 Study Guide - Final Guide: Walter Cronkite, Penny Press, Media Consumption
23 Apr 2019
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Document Summary
With the growth of the penny press in the 1830s, some newspapers adopted advertising-centric business models that required much larger audiences than highbrow partisan opinions would attract. So the motivation to mislead shifted slightly more toward commercially minded sensationalism, spurring some of the most memorable media fakes in american history. In 1835, the new york sun ran a six-part series, great astronomical discoveries lately made, which detailed the supposed discovery of life on the moon. The hoax landed in part because the sun"s circulation was huge by standards of the day, and the too-good-to-be-true story supposedly enticed many new readers to fork over their pennies as well. Many other newspapers were skeptical of the sun"s moon story. But public backlash was muted in part because of the lack of widely accepted standards for the content appearing in readers" news feeds, not unlike today.
