586
ROBERT BRUSTEIN
CBS
and you
will
see why liberal analyses of these problems
in
terms of Madison Avenue villains are so fearfully inadequate:
"A mass medium survives when it maintains a satisfactory bat–
ting average on affirmative responses, and it goes down when
negative responses are too numerous or too frequent." Taken
together, these two propositions coalesce to form an indisputable
logic-the logic of profit-which will never be contravened as
long as the media must pay its way through mass appeal. For
the logic of profit compels the media to manufacture trash, trea–
cle, and triviality as mechanically as the assembly line manu–
factures cheap and shoddy goods, the difference being that
in
the media there is no room for a luxury market. Under these
conditions, an honest reply by Madison Avenue to Mr. Minow's
question might sound very much like the plaint of Brechtian
man:
Wir waren gut-anstatt so roh/ Doch die Verhaltnisse,
sie sind nicht so
("We would be good-not coarse and crude/
I'
But circumstances just won't have it so").
To speak, then, of "improving" mass culture without de–
veloping a much more radical vision of what is wrong with it
is to lose sight of the most obvious economic realities. The media
will never reform because they survive by selling to the agencies;
the agencies will never reform because they survive by selling
to the sponsors; the sponsors will never reform because
they
survive by selling to the masses; and the masses will never re–
form because they are always being brutalized by the media-a
vicious circle which promises only to revolve more ferociously
in future. As for pay TV, which some envision as an alternative
solution, this plan will merely eliminate the Madison Avenue •
villain without eliminating the need for a mass market. There
will probably be no reform at all without some action of an
extreme kind to recover the media from those who control it
for profit, but this would mean a radical revision of the whole
economic system.
3
Since it is doubtful if our liberal critics are
5. Even this might not prove enough. The only alternative to commercial
sponsorship of the media is government sponsorship, but under
our
