Page 88 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

pace of economic development when he wrote that the “New
World democracy” remained an almost complete failure in its social
aspects, but also in its grand religious, moral, literary, and esthetic
results, regardless of its success in uplifting the masses, in ma-
terial developments, and in a highly deceptive superficial popular
intellectuality.
This “superficial popular intellectuality” was the result of mass
communication, which later on produced “infotainment” and dis-
traction by trivia; it was also a consequence of cultural deteriora-
tion, as mass culture critics charge, when the authority of the
unqualified rules expressions of mass communication. Later criticism
echoes these concerns, blaming corporate ownership for changing
expectations of professional standards and returning, albeit implic-
itly, to the economic determinants of mass communication.
It is a devotion to business that characterized nineteenth-century
American life, and mass communication reproduces its atmosphere
in structure and content. Structurally, it represents the efforts of
private ownership, aligned with other business interests, that forge
an identity of media property as commercial investment rather than
civic responsibility. Its content is a reminder of merchandizing and
reproduces an adscititious vocabulary, which includes words such
as industry, business, commercialism, or capitalism. These are the
symbols of a new materialism that emerged from the Industrial
Revolution and became the ideological markers of mass communi-
cation in its industrial phase. The latter describes the developing
relationship between democracy and mass communication since the
start of the twentieth century. It replaces the democratic phase of
mass communication, which began when democratic goals of equal-
ity and participation were pursued under the guidance of bourgeois
thought.
The struggle for freedom spread throughout the rest of society
and provided change, encouraged by a feeling of inclusiveness that
came with the practice of communication.Thus, the fight for justice
and equality (during the nineteenth century) was fought with means
of mass communication that were available and accessible to those
struggling to be heard. For instance, party newspapers, pamphlets,
and campaign posters were widely used, giving individuals a voice
and a sense of belonging. Democracy was experienced in the act of

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