Commercial Culture: The Mass Media System and the Public Interest

A powerful critique of American mass communications by a scholar who is also an experienced practitioner, Commercial Culture scrutinizes the mass media system and shows how it might be improved. Bogart highlights four trends that together sound an urgent call for reform: the blurring of distinctions among traditional media and between individual and mass communication; the increasing concentration of media control in a disturbingly small number of powerful organizations; the shift from advertisers to consumers as the source of media revenues; and the growing confusion of information and entertainment, of the real and the imaginary. The appetite for media, Bogart argues, differs from other demands the market is left to satisfy because it shapes the public's character and values. In this work he calls for a coherent national media policy, respectful of the American tradition of free expression, and subject to vigorous public debate.