Page 37 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

advertisement it is necessary to “read between the lies.” But adver-
tising matured rapidly to become a formidable business with an
almost unlimited potential as commerce and industry expanded, and
there were new markets to be conquered. During the 1920s adver-
tising recovered from public criticism and converged with culture
to reflect the American way of life; it became increasingly difficult
to distinguish between reality and pure advertising imagery.
Over the next 80 years, the growing volume of advertising rev-
enues created not only wealth for the media industry, but also a
growing dependence on these profits for the survival and well-being
of media organizations. Today advertising serves economic interests
and reorganizes the flow of mass communication, as, for example,
in the segmentation of information and entertainment in broadcast
media by commercials. In other media, commercial interference
ranges from the harmonious use of color in print media, or the
interaction between editorial copy and advertisements, to visual and
aural styles drawn from other materials to obscure the boundaries
between information or entertainment and propaganda.
In fact, commercial messages create a new way of storytelling that
blends people and events, language and ideas with multiple purposes
and endings into a new genre. Its purpose is to serve what Edward
Bernays called in 1947 the “engineering of consent,” a new process
of achieving democracy through purposeful and scientific methods.
He described the freedom to persuade as the very essence of a
democratic process that is guaranteed by the constitution.
His advertising manifesto provided unparalleled power over the
means of communication and – in its service to politics – an agenda
for promoting a new market. The rise of political advertising
suggested the packaging and sale of political ideas, not unlike other
consumer goods. It reduced the participatory aspects of political
debate to a sales event, in which culture served to reinforce author-
ity, while mass communication provided the language of domina-
tion. In addition, political advertising constituted a welcome source
of revenue for media industries, which strengthened the ties
between economic and political interests, often at the expense of
journalistic autonomy and the representation of alternative social or
political views; the result was an infringement on freedom of choice.

25