Page 55 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

identity (and credibility) of sources. It is a referential value that
is based on matching information with events, both represented,
however, through mass communication. Thus, truth has become a
matter of trust in pronouncements about the state of affairs that are
produced by the media; they originate with popular emissaries of
the industry, whose own expert sources are typically selected from
within a narrow ideological range of experts. Mass communication
therefore not only creates the social or political realities in which
people live, but confirms these realities by supplying reliability (or
consistency) and the comforts of knowing the truth.
The products of mass communication are a contiguous text that
combines commercial and political propaganda, information, and
entertainment to offer instant gratification in a communal atmos-
phere that appeals to individuals, who are caught in a historically
determined drift of social relationships. The media are friend and
companion, and fulfill, according to Henk Prakke (speaking of tele-
vision), an amicus function, which focuses on the intimate relation-
ship between audiences and their favorite programs or celebrities.
Radio personalities and movie stars earlier in the twentieth century
had offered similar comforts to an alienated public – not to speak
of pinup girls and male crooners, or characters in famous novels. In
either case, mass communication functions as the cultural or social
setting in which individuals, grounded in the community of fans,
express and reinforce their feelings of belonging.
In the meantime, the local as a social reality, or as a source of
theoretical claims of authentic communication, has receded into the
pages of early twentieth-century history. Instead, mobility, hetero-
geneity, and centralization have demolished commonalities among
people and led to the rise of mass society. Along the way, theorists
such as Frédéric Le Play and Emile Durkheim noticed a disinte-
gration and atomization of society – reflecting Karl Marx’s obser-
vations of the role of the bourgeoisie in the change from familial
to money relations – and industrialization disturbed the pastoral set-
tings of social theory. Later Ferdinand Tönnies described the change
from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft as an inevitable move from a social
order that is founded on harmony to one that rests on convention
and agreement and is ideologically justified in public opinion. Sim-
ilarly, Durkheim spoke of mechanic and organic solidarity, Robert

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