Page 83 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

demystification proceeds with the help of socially and politically
conscious examinations of communicative practices and the articu-
lation of emancipatory ideas through an expanding literature that
engages the field in a critique of culture and commodification in a
democratic society.
Finally, critical communication studies as an institutional frame-
work may help promote the importance of self-reflection as a first
step in a process of reconstructing relations of domination by offer-
ing theoretical insights, providing interpretive, qualitative research
strategies, and encouraging resistance with the goal of implement-
ing a democratic vision of communication and media. Such a task
can only succeed as a socially conscious practice, however, after criti-
cal communication studies exposes the relations of power in the
production of knowledge and the dissemination of information.
Challenging the instrumental rationality of an administrative or cor-
porate discourse reconfirms its own role as an historical agent of
change.
In the meantime, however, the constitutionally grounded relations
between mass communication and democracy continue to face a
series of problems, which are related to historical issues of societal
growth, media uses, and individual engagement in the process of
democratization.

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The centrality of communication in definitions of democracy has
been undisputed since the passage of the First Amendment to the
United States Constitution and the subsequent inclusion, following
Supreme Court interpretations, of other forms of mass communi-
cation (besides the press) during the earlier part of the twentieth
century. Similar developments occurred in other democratic soci-
eties, especially throughout Europe, where freedom of the press
became the cornerstone of democratic thought about the future of
society after the end of World War II.
But the later history of mass communication is more often than
not a history of struggling with reasons for protecting narrow
political and economic interests, and with issues of ownership and

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