Page 80 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

communication and media encouraged practical responses to con-
crete problems.The result was a discursive shift that provided oppor-
tunities for alternative ways of conceptualizing society, the public
sphere, and the nature of democratic practice itself, based on an
understanding of a historically grounded reality of institutions and
practices that could be grasped, interrogated, and reconstructed
through a dialectical process. It reflected a materialist-realist position
and suggested the importance of material differences in terms of the
conditions of communication, or the place of the media at a given
historical moment.
Furthermore, Marxism and Cultural Studies introduced an ideo-
logical dimension to the study of communication; they recognized
the importance of power and confirmed the significance of human
agency for communicative practices. Both insisted that the goals
of their respective inquiries were the critique and transformation of
specific social, political, or economic conditions for the purposes of
social and political change, specifically, and emancipation, generally.
Thus, they insisted on the role of advocacy and were apt to embrace
(social or political) activism grounded in the changing nature of his-
torical knowledge and its potential for different explanations of a
contemporary way of life. Ideologies, like language, are symbolic
systems that are produced by a public discourse – in or exclusive
of certain facts or fictions – and in the service of specific recon-
structions of reality. Ideology, language, and mass communication are
also linked to form an articulated belief system that finds its expres-
sion in the work of media and support from a community (of
believers) which resists change.
Under these conditions, the acquisition of knowledge and the
emancipatory goals of critical communication studies are defined by
the prospects of change and reconstruction, as ideas become obso-
lete and are overruled by new insights and practices. In fact, a crit-
ical communication theory renews itself as it confronts different
conditions and is propelled into different historical situations.
As a result of these developments, mass communication research
has been challenged to abandon its secure ideological location to
become part of the inquiry by joining an agenda that reflects the
activist (and often confrontational) stance of critical communication
inquiry. Such a position suggests that facts cannot be separated from

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