Page 58 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

These developments have been accompanied by a need for social
(or political) control, which produces ideas about what to do to
people rather than about what people could do for themselves with
the means of communication to meet the promise of personal
advancement and social well-being. The result is a new vision of a
democratic future that insists on reinforcing the notion that the
media serve power – allegedly for the public good – rather than aid
empowerment. The manifestation of this vision in the corporatiza-
tion of society strengthens the centralization of reality construction
as a collective effort, for instance, by news agencies and leading
media organizations.
The ideological perspective in mass communication appears with
its political practice of defending individual freedom (and the prin-
ciples of a free press) and of confirming a belief in serving democ-
racy.The latter, combined with the prestige of technology, reinforces
the myth of a strong and independent media system. However, as
a cultural practice, mass communication remains subject to the
social, political, and economic forces by which society is shaped and
defined, confirming its supportive role and function in the arsenal
of the dominant power structure and, therefore, its dependence on
the overarching institutional relations of politics and commerce.
These conditions have not gone unnoticed in the United States,
but the consistent, and sometimes blatant, criticism – from Upton
Sinclair to Noam Chomsky – of mass communication during the
twentieth century, has rarely touched the public in any significant
way. Individual protests or outright rejection are easily absorbed, and
the media rely on monopolistic or oligarchic practices in their
respective surroundings; they neutralize opposition and eventually
force a discontented audience to return to consulting the same
media for vital information about their immediate environment.
There are few, if any, alternatives. Some competing newspapers
have survived in larger cities, while national broadcasting networks
and cable television, in particular, carry homogenized information
and entertainment. Standards of journalism, or definitions of news,
are subjected to business interests, while aesthetic or creative con-
siderations in entertainment yield to market demands. Even excep-
tions – such as the Public Broadcasting System, a few publishers of
books or small magazines, and independent radio stations as poten-

46