Page 91 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

They not only suggest a new system of gathering and distributing
information, but, more fundamentally, a new authority for defining
the nature and type of information that provides the foundation of
social and political decision-making, and a new partisanship that
embraces the patrons of commerce and industry; in this sense, it
offers a new understanding of democracy as private enterprise rather
than public endeavor, when extent and quality of information,
including its specificity and accessibility, depend more on the social,
economic, or political needs of commerce and industry than on the
requirements or needs of an informed public.
When journalism has served society in the role of information
broker, it has been strengthened by its history and fortified by the
perpetuation of its myth, which rests on a belief in the availability
of truth, the objectivity of facts, and the need for public disclosure,
to create and sustain the idea of journalism as a necessary institu-
tion for a democratic way of life. Although journalists have played
a key role in the advancement of their own cultural and political
legacy since the last century, they have been frequently coopted and
deceived by media ownership in its own attempts to obtain the
confidence of large audiences for political and economic gains.
Journalists have adapted to the uses of mass communication tech-
nologies, as did others in media positions, including printers and
linotype operators, with some trepidation.Yet, there was never any
real doubt about the benefits of technological progress for the
democratic foundations of society, which is strengthened by the
presence of an increasingly sophisticated and far-reaching media
system that would produce and disseminate information or enter-
tainment faster, cheaper, and more widely.
Since technology is not autonomous but develops within the
context of economic, social, and political institutions, the growing
technical sophistication of the means of mass communication is evi-
dence of (political) choices that pit the advancement of mass com-
munication against the decline of social interaction, for instance
when television invaded the home. This development not only
raised issues of social control, loss of privacy, and lack of social com-
munication, but also posed questions about the transfer of creative
knowledge from journalists or writers to corporations and their
technicians. Also, technologies of mass communication, while over-

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