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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Most of the new developments in the mass media during the 1960's turned out to be unfulfilled promises, for good or ill. A partial list is suggestive:
1. The tapering off of the underground press.
2. The inconclusive, still smoldering Agnew controversy.
3. The decline of the mass magazine.
4. The rise of pornography as a mass medium.
5. The gradual eclipse of McLuhan and his theories.
6. The ambiguous influence of TV in politics following the excitement of the Kennedy-Nixon debates.
7. The blunted impact of the big reports: Kerner, Eisenhower, Pornography, and the Surgeon-General's report on violence.
8. The failure of educational TV to get up a full head of steam.
9. The failure of commercial TV to develop new, innovative, and imaginative programs.
10. The technological promises unfulfilled: the electronic newspaper and magazine, TV cassettes, CATV's slow march, home video tapes, 3-D TV, and so on, along with the persistence of raised-type printing, radio, comic strips, newsboys, and much else often proclaimed obsolete.
Despite inevitable overlapping, it is convenient to divide the foregoing into print and broadcasting.
1 See Kornbluth, Jesse, “The Underground Press and How It Went,” in Hammel, William M., ed., The Popular Arts in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972)Google Scholar; also Sale, J. Kirk, “You've Gome A Long Way, Baby, But You Got Stuck There,” in Francis, and Voelker, Ludmila, eds., Mass Media (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972)Google Scholar.
2 See “The Enemy Within,” Newsweek, 05 8, 1972, p. 61Google Scholar.
3 Efron, Edith, The News Twisters (Los Angeles: Nash, 1971)Google Scholar.
4 Weaver, Paul, “Is Television News Biased?,” The Public Interest, 26 (Winter, 1972), 66Google Scholar. I disagree with Professor Weaver about television's political power, however, as will be apparent later on in this essay.
5 A good though comparatively temperate example is the one by Lerone Bennett, Jr, “The White Media,” in Daly, Charles U., ed., The Media and the Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Center for Policy Study, 1968)Google Scholar.
6 Boorstin, Daniel J., “Television,” Life, 09. 10, 1971, p. 36Google Scholar.
7 These same effects were attributed to modern urbanism in pretelevision days in a seminal article by Wirth, Louis, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology, XLIV (07, 1938), 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It would be interesting to know whether Professor Boorstin regards television as a natural development of modern urbanism, or as playing a larger role in this syndrome.
8 Compare McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1964)Google Scholar, with Boorstin, Daniel J., The Image (New York: Atheneum, 1962)Google Scholar.
9 The most readable presentation of the basic McLuhan, ideas is in “An Interview with Marshall McLuhan,” Playboy, 03, 1969, p. 53 ff.Google Scholar
10 Ellul, Jacques, Propaganda, trans. Kellen, Konrad and Lerner, Jean (New York: Knopf, 1965)Google Scholar.
11 Wilson, James Q., “Violence, Pornography, and Social Science,” The Public Interest, 22 (Winter, 1971), 45–61Google Scholar.
12 This goes also for the Surgeon General's Report on Violence and the Media, the first volume of which has just appeared.
13 Bell, Daniel, The End of Ideology (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960)Google Scholar.
14 The frequent prediction of big-screen, 3-D, and stereoscopic TV so far hasn't come through. See Gabor, Dennis, Innovations: Scientific, Technological, and Social (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 56Google Scholar.
15 An excellent brief statement is that of Berelson, Bernard, “The Great Debate on Cultural Democracy,” in Barrett, Donald N., ed., Values in America (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1961)Google Scholar.