Page 125 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Meaning of Self in Society

authored perspective on the world that reflects the construction of
a ( journalistic) narrative in a concrete historical situation for the
specific purposes of informing, entertaining, or even persuading an
audience.
The use of stereotypes – described by Walter Lippmann in the
1920s as preceding the use of reason – constitutes one way of label-
ing people or events that offers instantaneous identification with a
minimum of effort. It also ensures recognition and provides a short-
cut to an ideologically charged assessment of facts or figures, whose
proof is implied by the use of labels, such as “communism,” or, most
recently, “terrorism,” which carry a host of historically determined
meanings. Stereotyping is often used by news organizations to create
oppositions, like “them” and “us” (in criminal or conflictual cases),
which help accentuate the drama; but they also equate a current
concept – or its future treatments – permanently with a particular
ideological position.
In addition, television, and the time-conscious world of broadcast
journalism in particular, is a stereotyped world of mechanical
responses which either imply conditions or contain statements that
reflect politically or culturally specific ways of seeing people or events.
Lippmann’s suggestion that perspective, background, and dimension
of action are frozen in the stereotype fits modern mass communica-
tion practices. Indeed, media discourse is characterized by the sim-
plification of issues, the reduction of complicated social, economic,
or political matters to a rhetoric of pro and con, and the omission
of ideologically inconsistent – or oppositional – narratives.
These developments are significant, because the images of the
other that people carry in their heads depend almost exclusively on
the flow of information that is provided by mass media and expe-
dited by new technologies; this is true of domestic events, but it is
particularly significant for events abroad, when direct knowledge
fails altogether.The production of information – in the widest sense
– has shifted from individual efforts, such as those of foreign cor-
respondents, to wholesalers, such as news agencies, with severe con-
sequences for the specificity or depth of information that comes
with personal familiarity with a culture, including its language, and
a sense of independence that is inherent in the work of journalists
as intellectuals.

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