Page 116 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Meaning of Self in Society

in material security. More generally, the relentless spread of imagery
throughout the world reinforces an American perspective: for
example, the popularity of CNN news clips elsewhere suggests that
the world is seen through American eyes.
In the search for personal identity, ethnocentric realities produced
by mass communication, for instance, turn the more intimate idea
of love into an American film and television creation. For instance,
love, not unlike sports, becomes the active and engaging pursuit of,
if not the hunt for, an object of desire, which meets traditional
expectations of romantic love in terms of age, race, and gender. It
happens mostly to young, racially compatible, heterosexual individ-
uals, whose physical attraction is carefully portrayed; there is no sex,
but suggestions of passion, which seize up after marriage, when an
amicable – even slightly hostile or resentful – relationship prevails.
The home becomes the focus of a marital life in which wives rather
than husbands become effective leaders and problem-solvers with
great energy and efficiency. Children are not born, they just appear,
as Gilbert Seldes observed years ago in The Great Audience, and
fatherhood becomes just another challenge and a source of conflict
in dramatic terms. Work is a natural condition, albeit without pro-
tection against arbitrary management decisions; union membership
is rarely an issue and neither are labor–management relations.They
remain, like so much else concerning the real conditions of work,
unexposed, and become at best material for context or background.
But crises at home or at work drive the drama and suggest that
(married) life consists of confronting an unending series of trivial
predicaments.Yet relationships endure, faith in each other prevails,
and threats of separation or divorce are successfully dismissed. If not,
breakup or dissolution are the consequence of major (social) prob-
lems, such as alcoholism or promiscuity, rather than intellectual (or
sexual) incompatibility. The stability of marriage as a social institu-
tion becomes an ideologically charged issue and the reason for the
dramatic struggles that unfold weekly in the media realities of family
life.
Finally, while heroism provides opportunities for strengthening
the myth of individualism, its manifestation resides more frequently
in institutional contexts – such as the police or the military.Yet it
remains a favorite topic of coverage across the media spectrum, in

104