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Theories of Broadcast Media 25
To take their opening claim:

The sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively established
religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of precapitalism, together
with technological and social differentiation and specialization, have led to
cultural chaos is disproved every day; for culture now impresses the same
stamp on everything. Films, radio and magazines make up a system which
is uniform as a whole and in every part. (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1993: 30)

But the culture industry does not only produce standardized content;
it also produces the audience itself by way of ‘a circle of manipulation and
retroactive need in which the unity of the system [of the production and
consumption of meanings] grows ever stronger’ (31). This formulation
places emphasis on the fact that broadcast produces content for audiences
at the same time as it produces audiences for the content – one of the first
statements of how the media themselves are a system of social integration
which, despite its function as servile to the needs of commodity capitalism,
nevertheless facilitates a common culture. In other words the mass is
constituted by broadcast; it is not some kind of pre-given amorphous
body that has broadcast imposed on it. 9
For Adorno and Horkheimer, perhaps the most significant feature of
the culture industry is that it inculcates ‘obedience to hierarchy’ (38). In
the very structure of the few producing on behalf of the many, it discour-
ages the mass from taking initiative or from questioning the initiative
being taken by the elite. It is little wonder that the culture industry pro-
duces a loss of individuality (see 41) – a phenomenon which mass society
theory, as we saw, does not so much describe as promote in its selection
of methodology.
Interestingly, the culture industry thesis shares with the liberal-
pluralist perspective the idea of the media as an extension of social relations.
However, where there is a fundamental disagreement is over what exactly
is extended, which for the Frankfurt School is a replication of obedience to
hierarchy continuous with pre-media social relations. Moreover, for them,
the mass media collude in the reduction of social life to the flat, one-
dimensional intellectual and emotional habits of commodity consumption,
thereby completing the process of the spiritless circulation of commodities.

The media as an apparatus of ideology

For contemporary Marxist perspectives on the media, the culture industry
is an ‘industry’ in itself, but is less important as a site of the production of
‘new’ social relations that might be exclusively derived from mass media than
it is as a site of the reproduction of existing social relations – particularly
class divisions, but also the divisions of gender, ethnicity and race. The
Marxist approach is therefore interested in the meanings that are negotiated