Page 60 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

vidualized tragedies rather than war, atrocities, or the environment
as enduring global issues that fill newspapers and news hours in an
endless and disconnected cycle of spectacles; the latter reflect the
impatience of modern times, curiosity for the sake of new thrills,
and relief at the lack of knowledge or interest among audiences.
In the meantime, Robert McChesney characterizes contempo-
rary media in terms of corporate concentration, conglomeration,
and hyper-commercialism, while Ben Bagdikian reports on the
accelerated centralization of media power in the face of favorable
economic conditions and an expanding market. Economic changes
are accompanied by a shifting climate of media ownership which
seems to thrive on breaking with traditional notions of public trust
or public interest. Many years earlier,William Allen White observed
that media owners – who pursue media ownership in search of
power and prestige – seem to display an “unconscious arrogance of
conscious wealth” after they make their fortunes in some other
calling than journalism. In fact, the media have become part of
the corporate domain of the American society which converts
economic domination into political power. Thus, the media shape
consciousness and help reinforce the dominant corporate ideology,
which becomes the reigning political ideology.
Changes in the size and quality of media ownership have been
accompanied by a considerable and long-lasting concern among
intellectuals about their own predicament – which is their inability
to act on what they know and foresee. What they have foreseen,
however, exists as a critical observation about culture and cultural
institutions in American society and provides a historical perspec-
tive on the role of the media; the observation reaches from the cul-
tural crisis described by Lewis Corey in the 1930s to the workings
of the “cultural apparatus” outlined by C.Wright Mills in the 1940s,
or the “cultural mass” addressed by Daniel Bell in the 1970s – not
to mention the more recent impact of British writers such as E. P.
Thompson, Raymond Williams, or Stuart Hall on revitalizing
critical cultural studies in the United States. Their notions of class,
power, ideology, and the nature of representation, in particular, push
progressive thought beyond the traditional boundaries of American
pragmatism and provide opportunities for a cultural discourse, for
instance, that addresses the historical realities of newsroom labor and

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