Page 133 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Meaning of Self in Society

scientific and administrative work – ranging from medical research
to criminal evidence – only reinforce the status of the image as the
document of an objective truth.
The notion of objectivity in its journalistic application is also
related to an ethics of mass communication, where it provides direc-
tion and closure for a professional practice which had been over-
shadowed in the past by acts of sensationalism, exaggeration, and
fictionalization of information. Since objectivity is at the center of
what journalism has meant, according to Michael Schudson, it has
helped legitimize not only the profession, but also the industrial
practices of media ownership. Indeed, objectivity is an institutional
myth employed to maintain the status quo of media industries:
internally to boost confidence in the power of professional integrity,
and externally to confirm the dependability of the journalistic dis-
course and the credibility of the production of information.
Questions of objectivity ultimately raise expectations about truth
claims that arise from the process of mass communication and
burden journalistic practices; this is particularly so, when “news” and
“truth” are used interchangeably, and “truth” is understood – in an
elitist fashion – as an ultimate, authoritative answer that will dispel
doubts and offer confidence in the power of journalism. Times of
social, political, or economic uncertainty heighten the desire to
know the truth and increase the responsibility of the media to con-
front public visions of news as truth with explanations about the
existence of multiple truths, the centrality of discursive practices in
articulating truths in specific historical moments, and the nature of
constructing realities in general. After all, mass communication deals
in approximations, because the quality of a discourse relies on
the subjective knowledge and experience of those directing mass
communication, which differs from the idealized knowledge and
experience of a (democratic) public.
More generally, the trend towards an objectivist culture of mass
communication, in which objects of knowledge have their own
existence, obscures the identity of the source, and therefore the
social or political context of the narrative; or, as Alvin Gouldner
once observed, objectivism is a pathology of communication that
remains silent about the speakers, their interests and desires, and how
these interests are socially situated and structurally maintained. In

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