Page 53 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

local newspaper as the ultimate source of information or entertain-
ment ceased with access to urban newspapers, movies, dime novels,
and a general increase in mobility. Consequently, the local press
adjusted in form and content to new demands with a coverage that
reflected disintegration or regret over a lost sense of community.
At the same time, there was an awakening to the pettiness and
triviality associated with the experience of place. It is well reflected
in Edgar Lee Masters’s 1915 Spoon River Anthology, in which the
author attacks the hypocrisies of a small community. Later Sinclair
Lewis and Sherwood Anderson continued to remind their readers
of the deceptions and pressures of small-town life, while Thornstein
Veblen mused over the transition from land as place to land as prop-
erty, or competition with neighboring cities, and the dire conse-
quences for Main Street. Still later, American sociologists, such as
Robert Park or Robert and Helen Lynd, among others, who shared
an interest in the historically significant conditions of community
life in the United States, examined its various structures – in the
form of bohemias, slums, rural settings, or suburbia, for instance –
and their emergence from urbanization. They also observed the
nature of the press. For Park, the newspaper was not a wholly ratio-
nal product, and understanding it meant to see it in its historic per-
spective. The Lynds described the operations of the community
press, walled in by a “free press” tradition with high obligations to
report all the news, the community’s expectation of a fearless press,
and financial controls with dependence on advertising and the pre-
dictable performance of editors as hired hands.
Despite the critique of community in the wake of its collapse
due to the inevitability of modernization, however, the quest for
community and its values remains alive, and reappears in the city,
ready to inspire commerce, industry and political discourse. It is a
longing for the communal state, the environment of the political
party or association, and the promise of companionship and secu-
rity that survive radical change and become a recurring theme in
representations of contemporary life. The notion of community is
incorporated in such phrases as “business community,” which offer
a substitute environment for the original locality, which has become
a desolate place. Others, like Dewey, would express a longing for
the “Great Community” and recall the close relationship between

41