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Cultural Studies and the Political Economy of Media Scholarship 119

(likened to blood vessels) and communication (likened to nerves). According
to Dewey, “the Great Society created by steam and electricity may be a
society, but it is no community. . . . Communication alone can create a great
community.” 6
Dewey, however, cast a blind eye toward other possibilities: in particular,
domination and subordination through technological means. The chief failing
of the Chicago School, according to Daniel Czitrom, was its “refusal to ad-
dress the reality of social and economic conflict in the present;” in other
7
words, it neglected critical political economy.
Without Macpherson’s insights, the naïve technological optimism of the
Chicago theorists would be difficult to comprehend—given the uses to which
media and other technologies were then being put. In 1917, for example, act-
ing on the advice of journalist Walter Lippmann, the Wilson Administration
created the Committee on Public Information (CPI) as the government’s
propaganda arm for the Great War. CPI produced hundreds of ads promoting
the war effort and pressured newspapers into giving it free advertising space.
It distributed thousands of official news releases and war-related public in-
terest stories. It even published its own newspaper. Meanwhile, the com-
8
mercial press was “continually silenced by orders and prosecutions;” war crit-
ics were arrested, “often without warrants, hustled off to jail, held
incommunicado without bail.” No enlightenment and fostering of democ-
9
racy here!
Nor were the war years exceptional. Rather, they simply fulfilled a revolu-
tion in political and economic control begun prior to the turn of the century
10
through the introduction of new media of communication whereby media
diffused image-based advertising of addictive and non-addictive branded
products, opening up “a nether realm between truth and falsehood. . . . The
world of advertisements,” according to Jackson Lears, “gradually acquired an
Alice-in-Wonderland quality.” 11
Dewey’s former student and arch nemesis, renowned journalist Walter
Lippmann, had a better grip on what was happening. Writing contemporane-
ously with the Chicago School, in his influential 1922 tome Public Opinion,
Lippmann claimed that most of us, most of the time, live in a pseudoenviron-
ment, defined as the “way in which the world is imagined . . . a hybrid com-
pounded of ‘human nature’ and ‘conditions.’” 12 For Lippmann, democracy
had turned a corner (he called it “a new image of democracy”), because ex-
perts could garner popular consent for their purportedly wise and beneficent
policies by skillfully manipulating mediated pseudoenvironments. The ultra
conservative Lippmann saw this deception as necessary for governance in the
modern age, and he thereby helped inspire, or at least “justify,” the public