The plural form of the word medium, a neuter singular in Latin, is media. Even if you are a monoglot American — and it wouldn’t kill you to learn a little Latin — this should be easy to remember.

While no one insists that every word naturalized into English from Latin or Greek should retain its original inflections, there are good reasons to insist on media as a plural.

First, as a point of fact, we have more than one medium of transmitting information. We have entertainment media and news media. Among them newspapers, magazines, book publishers, radio, television, the Internet, films and music recordings take distinctive forms and have diverse interests.

Second, as a consequence, any sentence containing the phrase the media is will be an overbroad generalization, probably to score political points. On the left, the media are faceless tools of corporate interests, narcotizing the public into acceptance of mindless bourgeois-consumerist oppression. (If you think that The Sun is a lefty publication, your education in socialism has been sadly neglected.) On the right the media are Marxist subversives undermining religion and morality by narcotizing the public into a porno-atheistical torpor. (Think of all that smut in The Atlantic Monthly.)

Keeping media as a plural form is a step toward greater clarity of thinking.