The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (165 page)

 
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The various agents of mass communication and entertainment: newspapers, magazines and other publications, television, radio, and the cinema. They rely on widespread literacy, increased leisure, and ready access by the public to receiving equipment. Their entertainment function is usually predominant, attracting investment, providing revenue and securing (and retaining) an audience. Other functions, however, have greater political relevance, including the collection, organization, and transmission of news and information, the formation of opinion, and, in more or less open societies, some contribution to public debate. Nowhere have the media escaped regulation, control, and some censorship. Regulation usually relates to ownership, funding, and licensing arrangements, as well as providing for supervision of the length, content, and balance of programmes. With the rapid advance of technology there has been a growing concentration of media ownership, particularly in sectors where the audience is extensive and production costs are high.
Governments are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain close control and supervision, especially with the spread of satellite and cable transmissions, the advent of global media networks, and increased cross-media ownership. The emphasis has switched to deregulation, privatization, or experimentation with a mix of public-private ownership. Meanwhile studies of media influence suggest that, outside elections and other big events, there is but a small audience for serious political debate and comment, and that even that restricted public is neither very receptive nor particularly retentive. Any effects are subtle and indirect. Nevertheless media access is indispensable to the main parties and groups and also allows minority candidates with unorthodox views to be heard.
Some have argued that the rapid advance of information technology has led to profound changes in political campaigning. Others retort that this is to confuse the medium with the message.
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The notion that in some modern societies, people have been vulnerable to the appeals of totalitarianism because of a lack of restraining social networks. The concept was popularized by W. Kornhauser in
The Politics of Mass Society
(1959). Kornhauser found mass society in ‘the sources of support for communism, fascism, and other popular movements that operate outside of and against the institutional order’. Like a number of his contemporaries, he wished to explain especially how Nazism in Germany and, to some degree, fascism in Italy, had erupted through the networks of the rule of law and of
civil society
: the dictators had been able to appeal directly to the people and ignore all such constraints. Although Kornhauser is remarkably reluctant to define mass society, he seems to mean a society in which there is mass participation in politics but little
pluralism
or variegated civil society. Thus the analysis of mass society looks back to the discussions of alienation and anomie in (especially)
Marx
and
Durkheim
. Other writers to use it include Erich Fromm (
The Fear of Freedom
, 1942) and David Riesman (
The Lonely Crowd
, 1950). However, the concept is so poorly defined that it is no longer used in political sociology.

 
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The body of common people in a society. Anxiety about ‘the masses’ is as old as anxiety about democracy ( see e.g.
Plato
;
Aristotle
). It took clearer shape with eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writing about the
tyranny
of the majority ( see also
Madison
;
Tocqueville
). In his
Democracy in America
(1835–40), Tocqueville expressed anxiety about the rootlessness and lack of social networks of Americans, who were, as they remain, much more mobile than Europeans: ‘Each of them, living apart, is a stranger to the fate of all the rest.’ However, this sits awkwardly with Tocqueville's admiration for American political activism and their enthusiasm for voluntary associations. Similar difficulties of definition have dogged all attempts to define the ‘masses’ and the nature of the threat they pose to élites or to democratic stability ( see also
mass society
). Works which were once highly influential, such as Jose Ortegay Gasset's
Revolt of the Masses
(1932) are now rarely read.

 
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The deterrence doctrine of the Eisenhower administration, that the United States would feel free to use nuclear weapons at the time and place of its choosing to prevent any further expansion of communist rule achieved by military aggression.
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