Page 35 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

media organizations continued to help legitimize government pro-
nouncements regarding the state of the nation or the state of foreign
affairs. Their coverage, more often than not, exhausted itself in the
mere reproduction of ideologically determined government infor-
mation.This practice accommodated bureaucratic goals but violated
journalistic standards of maintaining professional skepticism regard-
ing government pronouncements.
Advertising, like propaganda, is the art of wrapping the truth in
imagination, as has been suggested. But while propaganda is often
subtle, couched in half-truths, and packaged as legitimate informa-
tion or news through public relations efforts, advertising, which
shares some of these characteristics, is ubiquitous and inescapable in
modern times. It appears directly, marked by its place or time in the
stream of mass communication, or indirectly, hidden in the narra-
tives of journalism or fiction, but always tuned in to the rhetoric
of mass society. In fact, advertising is the twentieth-century litera-
ture of the masses and a source of their social knowledge.They cling
to it with suspicion, but also with no real alternative, because adver-
tising is accessible, brief, and repetitive, produced in the language of
an industrial society in which real people in real-life situations are
doing real things as they relate to each other. Advertising also rein-
forces the myths (of freedom and equality, among others) on which
society relies to illustrate its understanding of democracy.
For these reasons, advertising messages appeal to people who like
a story, crave a positive outcome or happy end, and continue to par-
ticipate in the process of mass communication, as long as the payoff
is a good feeling, satisfaction without guilt, or just the thought of
belonging. People react to commercial messages irrespective of the
real conditions of existence, the prevalence of false needs – whose
content and function are determined elsewhere – or the lack of
autonomy. The encounter with advertising also reveals the use of
familiar sounds or visions of mass society, which discovers itself
buying its own experience and contributing unwittingly to its own
seduction.
Thus, advertising furnishes material goods with social meanings
in response to expressed or anticipated false or true needs. The
former are those which perpetuate toil, misery, and injustice, accord-
ing to Herbert Marcuse, while the latter are those of vital interest,

23