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Media Relations |
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Media have always been an important element in the cycle of shaping public opinion. They decide which topics are on the agenda or not and who is given broadcasting time or publishing space. By featuring certain points of view and neglecting others media have the ability to influence public opinion and thus also political decision-making to a significant extent.
Therefore, besides educational and publishing programs, media are an essential element in the dissemination strategy of think tanks. To spread their respective ideology they provide print media with masses of op-ed's and their top staff regularly appears on television and radio shows as political advisers or policy experts.
Table: Media Citations: Spectrum of Major U.S. Think Tanks
Think Tank Ideology
| Media Citations 1995
| Media Citations 1996
| Media Citations 1997
| U.S. Conservative or right-leaning
| 7792 (51 %)
| 7706 (54 %)
| 7733 (53 %)
| U.S. Centrist
| 6361 (42 %)
| 4392 (30 %)
| 4623 (32 %)
| U.S. Progressive or left-leaning
| 1152 (7 %)
| 2177 (15 %)
| 2267 (16 %)
| Total
| 15305
| 14212
| 14623
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ARPAnet
ARPAnet was the small network of individual computers connected by leased lines that marked the beginning of today's global data networks. Being an experimental network mainly serving the purpose to test the feasibility of  wide area networks, the possibility of remote computing, it was created for resource sharing between research institutions, not for messaging services like E-mail. Although research was sponsored by US military, ARPAnet was not designed for directly martial use but to support military-related research.
In 1969 ARPANET went online and links the first two computers, one of them located at the University of California, Los Angeles, the other at the Stanford Research Institute.
But ARPAnet has not become widely accepted before it was demonstrated in action to a public of computer experts at the First International Conference on Computers and Communication in Washington, D. C. in 1972.
Before it was decommissioned in 1990, NSFnet, a network of scientific and academic computers funded by the National Science Foundation, and a separate new military network went online in 1986. In 1988 the first private Internet service providers offered a general public access to NSFnet. Beginning in 1995, after having become the backbone of the Internet in the USA, NSFnet was turned over to a consortium of commercial backbone providers. This and the launch of the World Wide Web added to the success of the global data network we call the Net.
In the USA commercial users already outnumbered military and academic users in 1994.
Despite the rapid growth of the Net, most computers linked to it are still located in the United States.
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