Page 49 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

perhaps even outside the concerns of the traditional fourth estate.
Mass communication has changed under these external conditions,
especially in its journalistic guise, as business interests – by sustain-
ing higher profits – have created new demands on the craft of jour-
nalism.These have been expressed through recent efforts to market
the notion of public journalism.
For instance, corporate efforts have resulted in a crusade for
responsive journalism regarding the change of local news coverage,
with serious consequences, not only for the profession, but also for
society and the relationship of information, knowledge, and democ-
racy.They not only suggest a new system of gathering and distrib-
uting information but imply – more fundamentally – a new
authority for defining the nature and type of information that pro-
vides the basis of social and political decision-making. The result is
a new partisanship that responds primarily to the needs of com-
merce and industry rather than to the social, economic, or political
requirements of an informed public. For instance, there is serious
concern among journalists, according to Thomas Leonard, based on
the observation that editors and reporters are often instructed that
readers are consumers or subjects rather than citizens.
Public journalism – despite its claims – is not an emancipatory
movement, but exposes – through its proponents – a range of lim-
itations that deny the possibility of radical change in the public
interest. It neither offers readers access to authorship in order to
confirm their expert standing in the community, nor encourages the
pursuit of public interest journalism under new forms of owner-
ship. Public journalism does not revitalize investigative journalism
or insist on a new understanding of professionalism that frees jour-
nalists from editorial controls and acknowledges their professional
independence. And under no circumstances is journalism con-
structed as intellectual labor. To make a difference, public journal-
ism must be freed from principles of profitability to serve the need
for human communication rather than the desire for economic gain.
Yet in fact the media are still fashioned and controlled by capital.
C. Wright Mills once concluded that writers as hired practitioners
of an information industry are directed by decisions of others and
not by their own integrity, because technical, economic, and social
structures – owned and operated by others – stand between the

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