TELEVISION: THE NEW STATE RELIGION?

Excerpt Both classical electoral and classical Marxist theories of government are based on assumptions rooted in cultural developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These developments also gave rise to mass communications and eventually to research on mass communications. In the past few decades, however, rapidly accumulating changes brought about a profound transformation of the cultural conditions on which modern theories of government and of mass communications rest. That change presents an historic challenge to these theories and to scientific workers concerned with these theories. I would like to sketch the nature of that challenge and to make a few tentative suggestions about the tasks ahead.