Selectivity in Mass Communication

Pather Panchali by Satyajit Ray

Mass communication is not a monolith; it is rather a bewildering variety of technological and institutional arrangements to achieve a variety of purposes, some sacred, some secular. Much of the contents of some are on an extremely high level. But the most visible media are frequently less exalted in their standards. Our approach should be to know so much about the excellence that exists that we can constantly bring it to the attention of our students, and to know enough about the structure of the media that we can exert effective leverage to have them raise their sights whenever it is economically possible.

A further dimension of the media that should concern us is their existence and change over time. It would be ideal if teacher training courses in the history of literature could be slightly modified to include a careful consideration of the changes in the sociology of authorship, audience, and media. If we know, for example, that the English upper class elite responded, in the eighteenth century, to the new middle class media forms of novel, newspaper, and magazine in much the same way that we middle class critics have responded to the new working class forms of the twentieth century, we might become more effective in our criticism.

In the furor over broadcasting payola, for example, everyone seems to have forgotten that our press was similarly venal in the mid-nineteenth century. Mark Twain's description in Roughing It of how journalists got shares for puffing mining claims is about payola, plain and simple. If the newspapers could be shamed out of that kind of chicanery, why not radio and TV?

In a similar way, if we remember that the rich nobles who had great manuscript book libraries at first scorned the vulgar printed articles, we can better appreciate the snobbish folly of those "intellectuals" who pride themselves on not having a TV set. It's perfectly legitimate, of course, not to want a TV or a hi-fi, or a subscription to Life, but to brag about not having something is surely prima facie evidence of a person's not being truly intellectual, i.e., thoughtful in a profound and comprehensive way.

What then are the characteristics of the most pervasive mass media (popular newspapers, pictorial journalism, entertainment movies, and network nighttime broadcasting) that work at cross purposes with our efforts to cultivate excellence in taste and language usage? The exceptions to the run of the mill form the basis for a later column in this series, but for the present let us consider the rule rather than the exception. In my judgment, the most subversive tradition of the media is their apotheosis of the entertainer in our culture.

Instead of encouraging the admiration and emulation of those professionals and scientists, artists and intellectuals, whose disciplines and skills make our society of abundance possible, our media system holds up for indiscriminate adoration and fantasy a rogue's gallery of irrelevant characters: sports champions, socialite playboys, and the ubiquitous stars of stage, screen, and TV. These persons are, in the broadest sense, "the entertainers" who, according to Webster, "engage the attention of others agreeably," by amusing and diverting. The word originally referred to the special kind of attention one shows to infrequent guests, when they are given the run of the house, the keys to the city.

But the significant difference about our mass media entertainment heroes is that what was once a something thing, an agreeable and wholesome diversion and recreation from the enervating work of survival, has now become an almost all the time happening. And the entertainer's values are simpleminded ones pleasing the audience, no matter how undemanding it may be.

Bob Hope praises Jimmy Durante as a great person because "he's big hearted and he lives to be nice to people." His philosophy is equally profound: "You only live once and you have maybe twenty-five more years to enjoy yourself, so why not live it up until the sheriff comes and wheels the whole thing off to be sold. When you've worked long enough and hard enough, I think you have the right to baby yourself a little." Bob Hope as a standup comic is fine; but when the court jester begins to hanker after the throne, it is time to question the hegemony of the entertainer as hero in America.

When Patti Page stops singing and starts to "Think" out loud about philosophy of life-talking sincerely but casually with God is her definition of prayer-then it is proper for the teachers of the young to resent the usurpation. Parents, preachers, counselors, and community leaders are among those whose advice is being undercut by the facile soothsaying of, say, Dick Clark, whose Your Happiest Years defines adolescence in such a way that maturity must be an anticlimax, something to shun.

Another peculiarly American fallacy that inhibits the maturing of the media is their giganticism, the fallacy of bigness. A movie is billed as costing 15 billion dollars, a metropolitan newspaper offers six (count 'em) book installments every Sunday, a TV spectacular has more sets than any other so far-all these assumptions that what is bigger is better implicitly challenge our attempts to foster respect for quality irrespective of size! We must constantly search for countervailing examples to this elephantiasis of the mind, e.g., the Indian film-maker Satyajit Ray made his great masterpiece "Pather Panchali" for $35,000, less than we spend for the production costs of a formula TV western.

Another ideal supported by the big media in America is the notion that the public can't be wrong. For example, ABC-TV, whose westerns and private eye shows have depressed the level of commercial TV, justified their appeal to the lowest common denominator in trade magazines in this way: "This is cultural democracy in action: The programming obligations of the broadcasters must therefore be based on a democratic concept of cultural freedom-that is, the rights of the people to want what they want when they want it." When critics objected to their influence, an executive of that network replied in Washington: "Can we legislate taste? Can we make it a criminal offense to be mediocre? Shall we set up a commissar of taste?"

In opposing the media when they subvert our purposes, we are not alone. More and more organized groups are taking sensible steps to promote the best the media have to offer at the same time they oppose the mediocre and regressive. In the specific suggestions that follow on the print, graphic, and broadcasting media in the English classroom, several principles apply:

(1) we should identify mature trends within each of the media and contrive ways of accelerating these trends;

(2) we should develop study themes in American culture that will enable us to analyze several of the media in unison, e.g., a paperback novel and its film and TV adaptations as well as newspaper and magazine criticism of both;

(3) a controlling concern should be our desire to use the widest range of media to appreciate the full spectrum of arts not only the print forms of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama but also their visual and electronic variations in film, broadcasting, photojournalism, and graphics, as well as the arts systematically neglected in formal education before the rise of four-color printing, such as painting, sculpture, and architecture (In other words, mass communication in all its richness now makes possible a full and comprehensive instruction in the humanities for the first time); and

(4) the key to individual maturity in all these activities is careful attention to the skills of reading and writing, observation and analysis. No matter how much the rise of widely popular (and thus at first vulgar) media complicates our task, nor how much more we potentially can do through intelligent exploitation of the miracles of four-color printing, LP recordings, and television, the traditional goals endure: linguistic mastery and esthetic sensibility-two processes that can be mutually reinforcing under the counsel of a sound and inspiring teacher.

Source: The English Journal, Vol. 49, No. 9 (Dec., 1960), pp. 646-648
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English