Date: Tue, 21 Mar 1995 06:10:54 -0800 (PST) From: Hannu Salmi <hansalmi@utu.fi> To: h-verkko@sara.cc.utu.fi Subject: Book Review: James L. Baughman, The Republic of Mass Culture (fwd)
Subject: Book Review: James L. Baughman, The Republic of Mass Culture
James L. Baughman, The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Film- making, and Broadcasting in America since 1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
This judicious survey offers a succinct, balanced history of the print, film, radio, and television industries since the late 1940s. Baughman argues that post-war media history is best conceived not in terms of technologal innovation or key personalities or headline events (like the quiz show or payola scandals), but, rather, "market forces, or, more accurately, a perception of the market" (220). Print, film, and radio all had to cease competing with television for the largest audience, and instead adopt market strategies that "would allow them to prosper in an age dominated by the 'home screen'" (xiv).
One of Baughman's major themes is that print, film, and radio responded tardily to television, not simply because they failed to appreciate television's popularity, but because each medium faced internal industry problems that absorbed their attention. Thus journalism was preoccupied with the challenge of automation and attendant labor conflicts; radio with the prospect of greater government regulation and rising production costs; and Hollywood with the retirement or death of the industry's founders, the decline of the foreign market, the separation of studios from their theater chains, labor turmoil, and Congressional probes of communist influence.
Over time, however, each medium began to target "sub-groups"-- distinct audience segments defined by class, education, and age --to win a share of the mass market. Not only did radio and film increasingly target the teen-age market, but a variety of other specific audiences, while almost totally ignoring the African American market.
Challenging the more extreme claims made about media influence on American society, Baughman decisively rejects the argument that the media have become an independent force in American politics, that they are responsible for increasing levels of cynicism, alienation, and estrangement or shifting sexual mores or violent, anti-social behavior. He offers cogent criticism of the claims that the mass media have homogenized American culture, reduced ideas and entertainment to a mass common denominator, presented uniformly-biased political viewpoints, and disseminated trival, artificially contrived "pseudo-events." He also criticizes the argument that the media was a primary force in turning the nation against the Vietnam war or uncovering the facts in the Watergate affair.
Brimming with information culled from social surveys, sociologists, and media critics, The Republic of Mass Culture is not only a provocative classroom textbook, but a valuable sourcebook for information on the impact of the mass media in the United States since middle of this century.
Steven Mintz University of Houston