Page 62 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

century. Finally, when social and political power is constituted by
information – and social knowledge – as a new form of property,
class divisions occur over access to and participation in social
communication.
These conditions of journalism are an outgrowth of late capital-
ism and the logical conclusion of a long march into a free-market
system which denies collective interests and shuns collective respon-
sibilities. Journalism is an intellectual vocation, although frequently
undermined by the technical rationale of journalism education itself
and the anti-intellectual orientation of many media organizations.
Intellectuals operate in a world of ideas, and their stage is the
realm of the media; they occupy a specific sociopolitical role and
function openly in reaction to specific areas of concern. Ralph
Dahrendorf once described them as the court jesters of modern
society who must doubt the obvious, suggest the relativity of
authority, and ask questions that no one else dares to ask.The power
of intellectuals lies in their freedom with respect to the hierar-
chy of the social order. They are, after all, qualified to speak on
matters of culture and engage society in a critique which utters
uncomfortable truths but also engages with the possibility of real-
izing utopian dreams.
A political challenge to curb the growing power of media indus-
tries and the corporate control of journalism, in particular, encoun-
ters the unlimited power of employers to interfere in the labor of
journalists, to jeopardize their positions as intellectual workers, and,
ultimately, to turn the idea of journalism into a campaign for their
private vision of the world.
These visions include the larger, global claims of media industries
– strengthened by the economic and political goals of commerce
and government – on the role of mass communication in the service
of national interests.

IX

The increasing complexity of a global existence, often treated by
proponents as a communal affair, is rarely reflected in American

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