40 Fascinating Facts about Mass Media

Sitting close to the TV will not damage your eyesight. The myth spread after it was discovered that televisions made prior to 1967 emitted excessive radiation.

27. In 1937, a newspaper named Los Angeles Examiner published a full-page map predicting Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.

28. All of our terrestrial radio and television broadcasts become indistinguishable from background noise at only a few light years away from the Earth thanks to the inverse square law.

29. The heaviest newspaper ever delivered was the September 14, 1987 edition of the New York Times. It weighed 12 lbs. (5.4kg) and contained 1,612 pages.

30. The peak of TV attention can be assigned an exact date: Sunday, September 9, 1956, when Elvis Presley made his first appearance on television, on CBS’s Ed Sullivan Show. Its 82.6% share of US viewers has never been equaled or bettered.

In the 60s not only could you advertise cigarettes on television, but you could have cartoon characters be the pitchmen. For example, The Flintstones endorsed Winston cigarettes.

32. In 1996, a man broke into a radio station in New Zealand, held the staff hostage, and made them play Kermit’s Rainbow Connection non-stop.

33. Country music became popular in America partially through a pirate radio station of a quack doctor named John R. Brinkley based out of Kansas who built a fortune on a procedure to implant goat testicles into men's scrotums.

34. In 2015, a radio DJ named Joe Kohlhofer in Austria barricaded himself into his studio and played Wham's 'Last Christmas' 24 times in a row. He did it as a protest for lack of holiday spirit and only stopped after his 4-year-old daughter called in to complain.

35. When Chicago radio station “the loop” was replaced by a Christian music station, they signed off with the song ‘Highway to Hell.’

The practice of playing music for callers on hold began with a faulty phone line connection. A loose wire touching the steel frame of an office building caused it to act as a giant radio receiver, allowing callers to hear music from local radio stations while they waited on hold.

37. Immediately after the end of slavery was declared in America, there was a surge in Wanted Ads placed in newspapers across the country. African-Americans used them to search for family members sold or escaped, sometimes decades earlier.

38. The story of mass panic in New York caused by the radio broadcast of The War of The Worlds in 1938 is largely false and was caused by the newspaper industry sensationalizing the story, seeing it as an opportunity to attack the radio as being an untrustworthy source of news.

39. The Mainichi, one of the most popular national daily newspapers in Japan once circulated an entirely recyclable newspaper. It had plant seeds embedded in the newsprint. After reading, you could plant the newspaper directly into the soil and it would grow.

40. When Australia beat England in a cricket match in 1882, a British newspaper published an obituary proclaiming the death of English cricket. The symbolic ashes of its cremation were placed in an urn, and both teams still compete to win them back every two years.