Page 100 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

outside the culture industry, which defines genius by inclusion on
bestseller lists and record charts, or television rating sheets. Innova-
tion and popular creative effort, especially of oppositional voices
outside the industry, are frequently coopted and incorporated, and
thus politically neutralized and commercially exploited.
The success of media organizations with their strategies of pro-
ducing popular realities is frequently attributed to individual choice.
In fact – as Herbert Gans suggests – taste cultures in a democratic
society rely on what people choose; they cannot exist without them.
Under current conditions of mass communication in the hands of
commercial interests, however, taste cultures (whether high or low)
are manufactured and compromise specific individual (or group)
standards; individual choice is restricted to availability rather than
specificity of taste. In other words, availability represents the range
of experience and becomes the universe of choice, because there is
no other option in the world of mass communication.
Despite the best intentions, regulatory foresight, or ethical stric-
tures – dominant claims, couched in terms of national interest or
free-market principles, often prevail, with questionable, if not disas-
trous, results for the public interest. Since the question is not
whether the media are manipulated or not, but who manipulates
them, a reasonable solution is to make everyone a manipulator –
according to Enzensberger, who believes in the revolutionary poten-
tial of the media.
Today’s employment of communication technologies in support
of oligarchic media systems simulates public trust while ending a
traditional understanding of democracy that appreciates mass com-
munication as a shared democratic practice. In fact, mass commu-
nication reinforces the specter of a mass society (and its totalitarian
features) with centralizing features that reach across the social, cul-
tural, and political domains of society.
Democracy – by its very nature – is always a collective work in
progress, since it embraces a commitment to change. Problems arise
in political systems that insist on perpetuating their past (if not stag-
nant) versions of democracy on the strength of historical clout or
traditional practices. Thus, the United States has been reluctant to
experiment with (or change) political institutions or their ways,
while other societies in Europe or Asia – whose experience of

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