Christianity and the Mass Media in America: Toward a Democratic Accommodation

Chapter 6: COMMUNING WITH CIVIL SIN: MAINSTREAM MEDIA PURGE EVIL

6 Communing with Civil Sin: Mainstream Media Purge Evil P P P In his classic book Public Opinion Walter Lippmann distinguished between the “world outside” and the “pictures in our heads.” Writing in the early 1920s, he observed the growing role of the mass media in modern society. He cogently argued that the media were a “pseudo-environment”—a human creation that people insert between themselves and their external world. This media environment, said Lippmann, is made up of “fictions.” “By fictions I do not mean lies,” he wrote. “I mean a representation of the environment which is in lesser or greater degree made by man himself. The range of fiction extends all the way from complete hallucination to the scientists’ perfectly self-conscious use of a schematic model. . . . For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance.” In order for people to “traverse the world,” he concluded , they “must have maps of the world. Their persistent difficulty is to secure maps on which their own need, or someone else’s need, has not sketched in the coast of Bohemia.”1 Lippmann’s “fictions” are mass-mediated representations of reality. Long before the rise of television, Lippmann recognized that the media were taking on mythological significance as epistemological “maps” of and for the 221 social world. Like religion, the mass media implicitly offer answers to a wide range of human questions about life. News, entertainment, advertising , and the like are rhetorical interpretations of reality. Lippmann called for an elite class of public interpreters who could construct pseudoenvironments that presumably would better match the underlying reality of society. Without this new group of intellectuals, he suggested, human ignorance and self-indulgence might so taint symbolic reality that Americans would lose touch with the world that they inhabit. The classical liberal marketplace of ideas was not enough. Neither was a self-informed public. Americans needed experts, veritable priests, to explain reality and to lead people in the right direction. James W. Carey writes of the journalist’s prescription for social progress, “Lippmann turned the political world over to private and specialized interests, albeit interests regulated by his new samurai class.”2 Nearly half a century later, Jacques Ellul addressed a similar theme but with far more pessimism. In his view, the public is not just lost but selfpropagandized —intellectuals and journalists included. Mass propaganda does not have to be forced upon people in order to shape effectively the public’s views of reality. Nor would any media intelligentsia be able to solve the problem; in fact, they are part of the problem. Ellul alleged that human beings want distorted pseudo-environments, to use Lippmann’s term. Propaganda is actually a result of mass society’s insatiable but misguided quest for certainty, security, and power. People willingly seek simplistic slogans and join moralistic causes that embrace delusions and distortions of truth. In the modern world, argues Ellul, propaganda simplifies and panders by telling people what they want to believe.3 Even religion becomes a victim of mass propaganda that feeds symbolically thirsty yet self-delusional audiences what they desire. “Everyone takes it for granted,” writes Ellul, “that fact and truth are one; and if God is no longer regarded as true in our day it is because He does not seem to be a fact. Now it is this kind of intimate conviction which constitutes the religion of the masses. To have a ‘religion’ there is no need of creeds and dogmas, ceremonies and rites: all that is necessary is that men in the mass should adhere to it in their hearts.”4 As traditional religion loses its anchors in tradition, mass-mediated “religion” emerges in the courts of mass opinion. To put the issue most critically, the media eclipse traditional religious faith and practice, substituting the winds of mass opinion for the stability of age-old truth as expressed in tribal sentiments. No social class of priestly intellectuals or journalists can reverse the tide of self222 Quentin J. Schultze delusional propaganda. Intellectuals are just as self-delusional as everyone else, says Ellul—maybe even more so. Lippmann, Ellul, and other media critics have contributed to a quasireligious understanding of both the media and culture.5 Perhaps the most important aspect of this paradigm is the way that media generate popular culture—culture that is not an expression of particular traditions, but rather is...