Page 66 - Cultural Theory

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••• The Frankfurt School •••

culture within academia and the views of the media of the New Left and others in the
aftermath of the 1960s. The anthology Mass Culture (Rosenberg and White, 1957) con-
tained Adorno’s article on television and many studies influenced by the Frankfurt
School approach. Within critical communication research, there were many criticisms
of network television as a capitalist institution and critics of television and the media
such as Herbert Schiller, George Gerbner, Dallas Smythe, and others were influenced by
the Frankfurt School approach to mass culture, as was C. Wright Mills in an earlier era
(see Kellner, 1989: 134ff.).
From the perspectives of the New Left, Todd Gitlin wrote ‘Thirteen theses on tele-
vision’ that contained a critique of broadcasting as manipulation with resonances to
the Frankfurt School in 1972 and continued to do research and writing that devel-
oped in his own way a Frankfurt School approach to television, focusing on TV in
the United States (1980; 1983; 2002). A 1987 collection, Watching Television, con-
tained studies by Gitlin and others that exhibited a neo-Frankfurt School approach
to television, and many contemporary theorists writing on television have been
shaped by their engagement with the Frankfurt School, including a series of books
by Douglas Kellner (1990; 1992; 2001; 2003a; 2003b) that analyze the structure of
corporate media in relation to capital and the state and that interrogate specific
media events such as the Gulf War, the Clinton sex scandals, the 2000 US election
theft, the September 11 terror attacks and subsequent Terror War, drawing on
Frankfurt School perspectives.

Habermas and the Public Sphere

The Frankfurt School also provides useful historical perspectives on the transition from
traditional culture and modernism in the arts to a mass-produced media and consumer
society. In his ground-breaking book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,
Jürgen Habermas further historicizes Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of the culture
industry. Providing historical background to the triumph of the culture industry,
Habermas notes how bourgeois society in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
was distinguished by the rise of a public sphere that stood between civil society and
the state and which mediated between public and private interests. For the first time in
history, individuals and groups could shape public opinion, giving direct expression to
their needs and interests while influencing political practice. The bourgeois public
sphere made it possible to form a realm of public opinion that opposed state power and
the powerful interests that were coming to shape bourgeois society.
Habermas notes a transition from the liberal public sphere which originated in the
Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions to a media-dominated
public sphere in the current stage of what he calls ‘welfare state capitalism and mass
democracy’. This historical transformation is grounded in Horkheimer and Adorno’s
analysis of the culture industry, in which giant corporations have taken over the pub-
lic sphere and transformed it from a site of rational debate into one of manipulative
consumption and passivity. In this transformation, ‘public opinion’ shifts from

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