Page 87 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

breed resentment.When access is blocked by pricing policies, people
tend to make do with whatever is affordable and accessible, but tele-
vision and radio are no substitute for print media, including books.
CNN does not replace the New York Times, for instance, and free
shoppers are no match for local newspapers; yet, economically
deprived individuals are forced to rely on their only access to infe-
rior information sources. Access to the internet is not universal – it
also involves investment in technology and transmission fees – and
is plagued by economic issues similar to conventional media uses.
In addition, computers – and the internet – are environments of
individual activities, which require intellectual abilities in support of
curiosity and a desire to know.
As people become acquainted with the one-dimensionality of
information or entertainment that characterizes cable news pro-
gramming – but is equally visible across networks and local stations,
and in many local newspapers – they are rendered speechless. Inca-
pable of articulating their own distinctive (political) positions,
because this state of mass communication coopts the language of
the oppressed – or the masses – which is always poor, monotonous,
and immediate, according to Roland Barthes, considerable segments
of the population experience mass communication as a process of
confinement rather than liberation.
A successful mode of participation calls upon the complex of
social, cultural, political, and economic determinants of a democra-
tic existence, and therefore moves beyond traditionally held views.
These began perhaps with Adam Smith, Karl Marx, or later social
prophets in the United States such as William Graham Sumner, who
thought that the individual is economically determined and that
economic needs must be the controlling condition. After all, a
passion for material well-being was the foundation of what Charles
Peirce wanted to call the “Economical Century.”
These views furnished a rationale for constructing audiences eco-
nomically (as paying customers) and considering mass communica-
tion as a process of integrating individuals into a consumption cycle.
There was no further concern for their general welfare, including
the consequences of their citizenship in a democratic society, when
they appeared as “the masses” in the literature of the day. Walt
Whitman referred critically in his Democratic Vistas to the relentless

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