mass medium

plural mass mediums · plural mass media

1. Any means of public communication that reaches a large audience.

   Newspaper advertising is the backbone of our whole sales program. We look upon newspapers as a mass medium having practically universal acceptance by the public.

   1940, ——, quoting Wesley I. Nunn (Advertising Manager, Standard Oil Company of Indiana), The Newspaper as an Advertising Medium; a Handbook of the Newspaper in North America: Its Beginnings, Its Development, Its Services to the Public, and Its Usefulness to Buyers of Advertising, New York: Bureau of Advertising, American Newspaper Publishers Association, page 113

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   The Inquirer seems to be the morning paper that reaches the greatest number of the masses, but touches the classes hardly at all. The North American is second as a mass medium, perhaps, and Philadelphia authorities credit it with considerable circulation among women on account of its fashion news, furnished through the Wanamaker store.

   1904 July 6, “Daily Newspaper Investigations”, in Printers' Ink, volume 48, number 1, page 8

   It is obviously impossible to sell the average technical product to the several million readers of a big mass medium because they have neither the means nor the need for it.

   1923, S. M. Fechheimer, “Class Appeal in Mass Media”, in Noble T. Praigg, editor, Advertising and Selling, by 150 Advertising and Sales Executives, Garden City, NY: Associated Advertising Clubs of the World, chapter 5, page 238

   The movie is to dramatic representation what the book was to the manuscript. It makes available to many and at many times and places what otherwise would be restricted to a few at few times and places. The movie, like the book, is a ditto device. TV shows to 50,000,000 simultaneously. Some feel that the value of experiencing a book is diminished by being extended to many minds. This notion is always implicit in the phrases “mass media,” “mass entertainment”—useless phrases obscuring the fact that English itself is a mass medium.

   1960, Marshall McLuhan, “Classroom Without Walls”, in Explorations in Communication, Boston: Beacon Press