THE MADISON AVENUE VILLAIN
585
One suspects that the entire free enterprise system
is
lobbying
against reform. For not only are the abuses of the media abso–
lutely essential to their survival as commercial enterprises, but
the survival of the economy is, in turn, largely contingent on
the media. Whatever their avowed function, TV, radio, movies,
mass magazines, most publishing, and a majority of news–
papers are now primarily dedicated to the marketing of un–
necessary goods (either their own or their sponsors'), and with–
out these mass markets the present system would probably flop.
Thus, the question posed by Newton Minow to the National
Association of Broadcasters-"Is there a person in this room
who claims that broadcasting can't do better?"-has an air of
crashing irrelevancy. Since the main purpose of the media is
to sell the largest number of goods to the largest number of
people, the standardization or debasement of the product, what–
ever the personal attitudes of the producers, is the almost mech–
anically logical outcome.
For, despite the pained protestation of liberal critics, the
present condition of the media is one of the inevitabilities of
popular democracy when the will of the compact majority in–
vades the field of culture. One would like to have faith in the
instinctual good taste of the masses, but there is absolutely no
evidence to confute the findings of media experts like Leo
Rosten of
Look
who writes: "When the public is free to choose
among various products, it chooses--again and again and again
-the frivolous as against the serious, 'escape' as against reality,
the lurid as against the tragic, the trivial as against the serious,
fiction as against fact, the diverting as against the significant."4
Correlate this with the following statement by Frank Stanton of
+.
In short, Westerns and gangster programs have not been forced on the
people--they have been demanded by them. The reasons for these
demands are too complicated to pursue here. Suffice it to say, mass
culture is the inevitable result of mass industrial society, and inevitably
accompanies it. I suspect that when the networks develop methods by
which to measure public taste more accurately, the programs will get
even worse.
