Page 97 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

cruel facts of an ordinary life and the propitious myths of mass
communication, but also for others who already know that only the
privileged live in fictions and survive. For them participation turns
into an alienating process of consumption with only limited options
for escaping the pervasiveness of political, economic, and cultural
agendas of mass communication. In other words, the freedom of
an individual to be misled, seduced, and eventually incorporated,
turns quickly into an unfreedom that comes with burying local
autonomy, language, and customs under a flow of ideologically
determined information and entertainment.
While the effectiveness of mass communication in the globaliza-
tion of the mind is undisputed, however – as is the usefulness of
the media in its support – success still depends on domination and
control. Thus, the call for freedom of the media has become a ral-
lying cry of those whose politics continue to prepare the ground
for a re-colonialization of the world.They constitute an alliance of
those in control of the means of communication, including a new
elite, whose interests in reshaping the world know no social soli-
darity or respect for democratic institutions. Instead, they perpetu-
ate the myths of free markets and the vision of a free world with
the help of mass communication to reinforce their own vision of
an open territory for the expansion of their economic and finan-
cial assets.This remains the most blatant example so far of the abuse
of mass communication against public interest and necessity and
its collapse as a means of spreading and fortifying the idea of
democracy.
In other words, we have come a long way from a time when, in
the early years of the twentieth century, bourgeois idealism fought
for the rights of a free press to strengthen the idea of democracy
and for notions of joining technology and democracy for the benefit
of a new democratic order.
Not unlike the histories of other enabling technologies – from
nuclear science to biogenetics – mass communication technologies
share the risk of after-effects for the life of a democracy.The history
of mass communication technology has been a history of consoli-
dation, concentration, and centralization. It began in modern times
with the availability of superior technologies in the days of Amer-
ican radio, when networks supplanted local programming. Culture

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