Erik Barnouw's Mass Communication

Erik Barnouw's Mass Communication: Television, Radio, Film, Press: The Media and Their Practice in the United States of America (Rinehart, $4.50) deserves a place in your library next to Seldes' The Public Arts (Simon & Schuster). Barnouw, an associate professor of dramatic arts at Columbia, has been a free lance writer in all the media he describes, program director for several advertising agencies, network script editor, and government communications consultant.

His idealism, then, is tempered but not a bit weakened or compromised by a lively sense of the facts of life in the communication industries. This awareness is indispensable: too much well-intentioned criticism of excesses on the mass media is irrelevant because ignorant of the practical preconditions for achieving excellence. Barnouw's expertise is apparent in all four sections of his book: on the history, the psychology, the individual media, and the sponsors of mass communication.

Barnouw sees mass communication as an intrinsic part of the larger industrial revolution, characterized by quantity production (of words, images, sounds), wide geographic distribution, and retail outlets. Particularly fresh and convincing is his metaphor of the local broadcasting station as a supermarket of information and culture.

Just as the local A & P stocks local produce in addition to nationally advertised brands of canned goods, so must the local station create its own local programs in addition to serving as a distribution outlet for programs canned in New York or Hollywood. This single image provides the broadcaster and journalist with an entire theory of responsible communication. May many of them read Barnouw's book and act upon its mature and realistic idealism.

Barnouw is not "shocked" by the blatant emotional appeal of successful entertainment. The trick is to reach man's mind by touching his heart. The great challenge to the serious broadcaster, then, lies not in appealing to highly focused, intellectually disciplined audiences within easy reach; he must rather aim at the unfocused audiences that most desperately need intelligent perspectives on their lives and problems.

Finally, on the basis of his great experience in the media, he insists on an essentially optimistic principle: not only is triviality no guarantee to success on the media, but substance is not doomed to failure. The real question is not whether the program or message is fluff or great wisdom, but rather does the form of the message engage the deepest sympathies and energies of man.

Neither Pollyanna nor Cassandra, Barnouw is a tough-minded idealist who knows it's not enough to feel superior to frequent vulgarity on the media. The man with important ideas must learn how to use these new disciplines of communication. Clear, informed, completely unsentimental, Barnouw's book will give most teachers all the perspective they need on the media that predetermine the minds and sensibilities of their students.