Page 92 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

coming geographical distance, generate a distancing of the subject,
who becomes alienated in the absence of an irreducible, dialogical
face-to-face situation. In other words, not mass communication
technology as such, but its organization, control, and creative appli-
cation remain major problems in capitalist societies.
Mass communication is an urban phenomenon that responds to
consumer demand. The media offer entertainment for the masses,
or prepare information for those with communicative competence;
they sell space and time to others who want to be heard. All of this
has less to do with a need for a democratic discourse, and more
with a desire to advertise products or services.Thus, with the iden-
tification of their patterns of consumption, the participatory element
of mass communication has been reduced to what people want; the
result is media fare that remains highly sensitive to shifts between
need and desire. In fact, mass communication also implies a manu-
factured commonality among people that is based on a leveling of
taste cultures and an undoing of ideological differences.The goal is
to deliver an aura of compliance that promises tranquility while
reinforcing the dominant ideological order in society.
The exception to these developments – which may be found
mostly outside the United States – has been the more recent history
of public media, such as broadcasting, in Japan and most of western
Europe after World War II. In these cases, the process of electronic
mass communication became a public responsibility as ownership
fell into the hands of citizens whose representatives acted indepen-
dently with mandates that had no ties to commerce or politics –
or at least in some instances and at the beginning of this develop-
ment. The lesson of the last half-century, however, has been that
public ownership alone does not guarantee a more egalitarian or
democratic system of mass communication. What is also needed is
political control and a built-in accountability without commercial
participation. Nevertheless, the result has been the creation of a plu-
ralistic system of media ownership in many European societies,
which shifted to include a two-tier system of broadcasting when
the state capitulated after political and commercial pressure for
private ownership became too powerful to resist in the early 1990s.
The idea that the state is responsible for conditions that ensure
not just the liberty of individuals, but their ability to realize their

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