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Book Review: Myths for the Masses

Mark Andrejevic
Journal of Communication Inquiry 2005 29: 277
DOI: 10.1177/0196859905275479

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Journal REVIEWS
10.1177/0196859905275479
BOOK of Communication Inquiry

Myths for the Masses, by Hanno Hardt. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004, 153
pp., ISBN 0-631-23621-X (hardcover).

More than a year after the United States made its controversial decision to invade
Iraq and divest it of its elusive weapons of mass destruction, the nation’s two most
prominent political newspapers of record, the New York Times and Washington Post,
publicly apologized for their shoddy coverage during the build-up to war. The admit-
tedly flawed reporting and the papers’ public hand wringing received little attention,
far less than had been given to two other media botches: the fabricated feature stories
of Times reporter Jayson Blair and famed news anchor Dan Rather’s failed attempt to
break a story critical of President Bush’s National Guard Service. Amid all the hoopla
surrounding the Rather scandal, moreover, the core question as to whether Bush
shirked his duties or received special treatment remained ignored and unanswered. In
the era of the hyperconcentrated entertainment industrial complex, it seems even the
coverage of the coverage is flawed: The emphasis remains on mistakes that are sensa-
tional but trivial. What better time, in short, for a polemic on the fate and failings of the
mass media?
Hanno Hardt’s Myths for the Masses, part of Blackwell’s Manifestos series, pro-
vides a theoretically rich salvo from the academic world, offering a wide-ranging con-
sideration of the shortcomings and largely unredeemed democratic potential of the
mass media in the contemporary climate of conglomeration and hypercommercialism.
The format, a 141-page, two-part essay, allows Hardt the freedom to cover a range of
issues and to bring the breadth of his theoretical and historical knowledge to bear on
the current state of an industry that facilitates “the production of consent and compli-
ance” (p. 28) rather than individual autonomy and democratic participation. The book
is not a densely argued tome, but rather a loose and rangy but tactical overview that, in
keeping with the spirit of the manifesto, relies on Hardt’s impressive command of the
tradition of mass communication research and social theory to ponder the past, pres-
ent, and potential future of the industry and the society it serves. The result is a medi-
tation on a career’s worth of reading in the field, and beyond, that draws on authors
ranging from Dewey and Lippmann to Lacan and Debord.
Hardt, whose approach is carefully but relentlessly dialectic, hews close to the sen-
sibility of the manifesto, which, as Janet Lyon (1999) puts it, “is the form that exposes
the broken promises of modernity” (p. 3). Thus, Hardt touches on the sore points of
a media industry that has failed to live up to the promise of facilitating democratic par-
ticipation, slavishly serves the interests of economic and political elites, and has pre-
sided over and participated in the displacement of public deliberation by sensation-
alized spin, leveling the distinction between citizenship and consumption. Early on in
the book, he traces the coordinates of the structural transformation described by
Habermas: Mass media that got their start as tools in the service of revolutionary and

Journal of Communication Inquiry 29:3 (July 2005): 277-280

DOI: 10.1177/0196859905275479
© 2005 Sage Publications

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278 Journal of Communication Inquiry

emancipatory interests were all too quickly enlisted to provide propaganda for the new
status quo and economic elites. The promise of the Great Society defaults to propa-
ganda for the “ownership society.” At the same time, Hardt is not willing to give up on
the media. To surrender their potential would be to ignore the power of the unfulfilled
promise that continues to sustain them. Indeed, it would be to undermine the efficacy
of the manifesto form itself, which, as Lyon suggests, “promulgates the very dis-
courses it critiques: it makes itself intelligible to the dominant order through a logic
that presumes the efficacy of modern democratic ideals” (p. 3). Why bother publishing
a manifesto in a commercial media market, unless such ideals retain their purchase
even if, or perhaps in part because, they remain so aggressively unfulfilled? For Hardt,
the mass media remain multisided phenomena even if they seem to have landed with
the avaricious and shallow side face up. There are, he suggests, potentials lurking
beneath the surface: “mass communication appear as a force for integration, positively
through assimilation into a common culture and negatively through hegemonic prac-
tices of incorporation” (p. 14).
The first part of the book traces the historical role of the mass media in facilitating
and then thwarting the process of deliberation and the promise of democratic partici-
pation. The dialectic of individuality and community has, under the pressure of capi-
tal, developed exactly the wrong way according to Hardt: The homogenization of indi-
vidual desire channeled through the mechanism of the market is accompanied by the
demolition of commonality through “mobility, heterogeneity, and centralization”
(p. 43). In the wake of the decline of traditional social relations, the promise of the
mass media to reinvent community on a broader, more decentralized scale defaulted to
the promotion of “consumption as a routinized form of participation in the (commer-
cial) life of society” (p. 44).
Hardt outlines the history of the marketplace of ideas’ assimilation to the market-
ing of ideology and the default of the public interest to whatever catches the public’s
attention. He blames the American ideology of technological progress and an un-
fettered faith in privatization, commercialization, and the marketplace model of
democracy. The result he describes is a free press only in the sense of “Pepsi Free”:
mass produced, saccharine, and without substance: “There is no free press—or free-
dom of expression—in a society of captive audiences, where mass communication
turns into an ideologically predetermined performance for the purpose of commercial
gain rather than public enlightenment” (p. 51). The indictment is severe but, unfortu-
nately, deserved, especially with respect to U.S. television news outlets, which gen-
erate pyrotechnic entertainment, but disturbingly little in the way of investigative,
thoughtful news coverage. Instead of repeating Hardt’s charges, however, it is perhaps
useful to judge media performance by its results. Consider, for example, the fact noted
by the Christian Science Monitor that saturation news coverage of the September 11
attacks and the subsequent U.S. response seemed to reduce the level of popular knowl-
edge with time. Shortly after the attacks, polls indicated that only 3% of those asked
who was behind the attacks mentioned Iraq. A year later, more than 44% of those
polled thought that either most or some of the hijackers were Iraqi. The media’s failure
to subject administration claims to critical scrutiny, based just as assuredly on market-
ing concerns as an unreflective form of patriotism, had taken its toll.

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 BOOK REVIEWS 279

Hardt’s program for critical communication studies—to be undertaken in the inter-

est of reform—is twofold: to subject the mass communication studies tradition itself to
critical scrutiny and to connect theoretical claims “with the specifics of everyday expe-
riences” (p. 69). In an era in which the promise of participation has been assimilated to
the forms of monitoring and data gathering made possible by the advent of interactive
electronic media, Hardt calls for a critical approach that cuts through the marketing
rhetoric to “clarify notions of participation, access, and control of the means of mass
communication while insisting on freedom of the press as a universal right rather than
a particular property right” (p. 73). And here, perhaps, is what distinguishes media
manifestos on the left from those of the right: the attempt to locate failures not in the
personal biases and political concerns of media workers, but in the limitations
imposed by the commercial structure of the mass media: “Intellectual freedom is never
the issue as long as journalists or other creative workers remain subservient to media
ownership, while the latter insist on being identified with democratic practices and the
idea of press freedom” (p. 78). Freedom of the press, in such an account, might better
be identified as freedom from the strictures of commercial ownership.
In the book’s second essay, Hardt narrows his focus to the implications of mass
media for a conception of self in contemporary society, exploring the ways in which
they assimilate the “very idea of communication” to “a form of participation as con-
sumption” (p. 93) and perform the ideological work of personalizing, and thus de-
contextualizing, social problems. As in the case of most polemics, not a pejorative
term within the context of a manifesto, the book is short on concrete examples and
explications. The goal is not to build a case for a comprehensive interpretation of con-
temporary media practice so much as it is to diagnose the intersecting communication
pathologies of an ailing society. The one example he does invoke is that of the Septem-
ber 11 attacks, to which, he argues, TV response was frustratingly inadequate:

Reduced to a mere marker of a historical event, television was blinded by its

inherent inability to absorb and reproduce its totality, physically and emotion-
ally, reducing the attempt to convey the horror of the moment to the repetitive
presentation of spectacular images. (p. 131)

This repetition, he suggests, served as a compulsive deferral of meaning—the com-

pensatory and masking gesture of a news apparatus unable and unwilling to help citi-
zens make sense of an increasingly interdependent world. It is tempting to push the
insight one step further: repetition served as an agonizing stimulus that forestalled crit-
ical reflection while channeling a sense of benumbed outrage that came to pass for
clarity of purpose. In response to another automatically repeated observation—the
claim that the attacks “changed everything”—Hardt’s diagnosis suggests that on the
contrary, very little has changed when it comes to the ability of the mass media to serve
the interests of a democratic society during the most crucial of times. This perhaps
explains the urgency of Hardt’s manifesto and of its resuscitation of a call for a “com-
mitment to mass communication as a mode of public participation” (p. 89) rather than
as a purveyor of spectacle.
For those who have followed Hardt’s thoughtful and rigorous contributions to the
field, Myths for the Masses serves as both a rallying cry and think piece: a free-form

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280 Journal of Communication Inquiry

essay composed of reflections, observation, and analysis informed by a career’s worth

of close engagement with mass communication theory and history. Although his
assessment is not overly encouraging, the adoption of a manifesto format allows him
to unfold his critique against the background of the unfulfilled potential of an increas-
ingly powerful industry and the field of study it has both inspired and frustrated. The
result is a book that, in keeping with the critical tradition described by Lyon (1999),
“exposes the broken promises of modernity” (p. 3), but, at the same time, refuses to
give up on them.

Mark Andrejevic
University of Iowa

Reference
Lyon, J. (1999). Manifestoes: Provocations of the modern. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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