Mass Communications Media
See also: Media cultureIncreased business competition, and the introduction of econometric methods have changed the business practices of the mass communications media. The business monopoly practice of media consolidation has reduced the breadth and the depth of the journalism practiced and provided. The reduction of operating costs (overhead expenses) eliminated foreign news bureaus and reporters, in favour of publishing the public relations publications (news releases) of a government, a business, and a political party as fact.
Refinements in the tracking systems that measure approval-ratings and audience-size increased the cultural incentive for producers to write as simply and as simplistically possible by diminishing the intellectual complexity of the argument presented in the programme, usually at the expense of factual accuracy, logic, and complexity. Cultural theorists including Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, Neil Postman, Henry Giroux, and Pierre Bourdieu invoke these effects as evidence that commercial television is an especially pernicious contributor to the dumbing-down of communications. Nonetheless, the critic Stuart Hall said that teachers of critical thinking — parents and academic instructors — can improve the quality (breadth and depth) of their instruction by occasionally including television programmes..
Read more about this topic: Dumbing Down
Famous quotes containing the words mass communications, mass and/or media:
“If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator—the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)
“For half a mile from the shore it was one mass of white breakers, which, with the wind, made such a din that we could hardly hear ourselves speak.... This was the stormiest sea that we witnessed,—more tumultuous, my companion affirmed, than the rapids of Niagara, and, of course, on a far greater scale. It was the ocean in a gale, a clear, cold day, with only one sail in sight, which labored much, as if it were anxiously seeking a harbor.... It was the roaring sea, thalassa exeessa.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The media network has its idols, but its principal idol is its own style which generates an aura of winning and leaves the rest in darkness. It recognises neither pity nor pitilessness.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)