Page 59 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

tial platforms for a public critique of mass communication – must
depend on government funding and private donations and are still
subject to commercially determined agendas.
Quite recently journalists have joined the chorus of mostly acade-
mic voices, which condemn the lack of serious news, or of in-depth
coverage of domestic and foreign affairs.Yet, even the latest critique,
which acknowledges the close ties between the quality of journalism
and the quality of life, and calls for an accountability by the powerful,
returns to visions of community and self-determination of individu-
als for solutions to problems that are systemic and the outcome of
commercial interests in a capitalist society.
For instance, Leonard Downie Jr. and Robert G. Kaiser suggest,
in The News about the News, that the fate of news will ultimately be
determined by what people decide to do about their country,
implying competence and power on the side of a reading public
whose real position, however, is socially and politically diminished.
The authors also disregard the personification of corporate interests
– accomplished by personal and compassionate appeals to individ-
uals for participation in the process of mass communication. In fact,
the business of mass communication is more interested in under-
standing how people want to be entertained than in what people
need to know to make conscious and informed decisions regarding
their lives in a democratic society.
Worse still is the treatment of journalists, as Howard Kurtz sug-
gests, when prose is squeezed and controversial ideas are pasteurized
and homogenized. Indeed, under current circumstances journalism
is no longer a craft, but a bureaucratic assignment to produce viable,
non-controversial reading or viewing materials for public con-
sumption. Journalists as intellectual workers operate under what Max
Weber calls bureaucratic management – which prevails in advanced
capitalist institutions like the media – and which translates into
adherence to an ordered system of subordination and control that
aims for permanence.Working within a highly structured system of
production, journalists become, under specific political conditions,
the most important representatives of the “demagogic species,”
according to Weber.
It is the outrage of the day rather than the events of the day,
compliance rather than controversy, kidnapping or murder as indi-

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