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24 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
Marxist tradition of the critique of ideology as well as the critique of the
unequal ownership and control of the means of communication according
to class divisions in capitalist societies. The critique of ideology, which
will be explored in the following section, views the media as a powerful
apparatus for ‘ideologies’ – which are not simply just ideas – for repro-
ducing the values and structures that are active in the maintenance of
class inequality. But the media are also significantly an industry in them-
selves, an industry in which commodities are bought and sold.
As the markets and innovations for developing subsistence com-
modities become exhausted, modern capitalism has tended to turn its
attention to industries for which demand has fewer limitations, and has
targeted altogether new needs that are created by historical circumstances.
Service industries, military industries and leisure industries (tourism,
music, entertainment, sport) each provide economic markets which are
potentially unlimited and insatiable. The earliest thinkers on this pheno-
menon were Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who, in the mid-1940s,
published their now canonized critique of the culture industry: ‘The Culture
Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ (1993).
The culture industry carries all of the hallmarks of capitalist produc-
tion. Its products are standardized, emptied of aesthetic merit and capable
of mass production, and they are consumed on scales as vast as those on
which they are produced. The primary consequence of this massification
of culture was, for Adorno and Horkheimer that it had profound implica-
tions for aesthetic reception. Art is appreciated not for its special ability to
communicate truth or beauty but for its marketability. A Hollywood movie
has to have a sex scene and a car chase, done in a certain way. The con-
temporary novel must have a minimum number of elements in order to be
a ‘best-seller’. The weekly ‘life’ magazine must have the requisite revela-
tion on weight loss, improving sex life or overcoming relationship and fam-
ily disorders. But it is not just the conventions within genres that become
standardized; new genres appear which even mock the masses they are
purporting to represent, such as the spectacle of humiliation characterizing
‘candid camera’, celebrity-hosted talk shows, ‘world’s funniest home
videos’ or ‘funniest advertisements’, or even ‘world’s dumbest criminals’.
Conversely, celebrities have their own television genres, like ‘Lifestyles of the
Rich and Famous’ or ‘Entertainment Tonight’. Alternatively, serious social
issues like AIDS, Third World relief or the environment receive modest
attention, unless they are promoted by a music or film celebrity. From the
period when the control of information, communication and entertainment
is concentrated in the hands of a few to be sold to the many, culture itself
can become a commodity in all kinds of forms.
Insofar as culture becomes massified through broadcast principle,
Adorno and Horkheimer see it as replacing religion and the smaller units
of integration of the feudalist world. This thesis at its broadest is therefore
continuous with the mass society tradition in accounting for the social
acceptance and role which broadcast achieves.