Page 115 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Meaning of Self in Society

panies abroad. In the case of both social problems and criminal
behavior, media treatment is frequently ahistorical and often short-
lived; mass communication rarely employs its potential for a
sustained, long-term commitment to a particular cause or issue. Its
memory, locked away in archives, rarely surfaces to add an explana-
tory historical dimension to the respective coverage, and when it
does, its interpretive capacity is overshadowed by its documentary
character.
Representatives of an administrative class – such as doctors,
lawyers, police detectives, or military officers – crowd the media
reality as exemplars of a ruling social or political power elite. They
are the idols of authority, to paraphrase Leo Lowenthal, who have
come to join the idols of consumption to perform in the spectacle
of mass communication, vying for the attention of audiences, whose
own ambitions to occupy the subject position of their idols,
however, remain unfulfilled. They are also representations of a new
heroism, which is identified with the collective power of societal
institutions rather than with the symbols of the rugged individual-
ism that characterized earlier manifestations, for example the
cowboy-hero in Western movies.
Representations of working-class lives, on the other hand, remain
confined to mostly inconsequential episodes in sit-com environ-
ments, or are reduced to comic figures; foreigners are treated with
suspicion and exist as stereotypes in their media appearances. In fact,
nationality and ethnic origin dictate their fate as friends or foes from
countries that are mere labels on a world map that has not been
comprehended for years.
The geographic reality of mass communication is a reality of
unraveling events, when maps, weather forecasts, and on-the-spot
reports contribute to breaking news accounts that fail to provide
knowledge about an otherwise nonexistent cultural or historical
context. Since Vietnam, other regions, such as Kuwait, Kosovo,
Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq provide more recent media lessons in
geography designed to explain an American presence abroad rather
than the existence of another, possibly ancient, culture elsewhere
in the world. After all, the mass-mediated reality is an American
product that appeals to an American construction of the world,
which is rooted in American feelings of personal freedom and beliefs

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