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Group Enmity and Accord

The Commercial Press in Three American Cities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Judith R. Blau
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Extract

Social theory provides two opposing views about the role played by mass communications in modernizing America. Mass society theorists, including José Ortega y Gasset (1932), George Seldes (1938), and Joseph Bensman and Bernard Rosenberg (1963), and also critical theorists, especially Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1991 [1944]) and Jürgen Habermas (1989), maintained that the mass press weakens authentic forms of community, whereas, in contrast, Chicago School sociologists, especially Robert Park(1971 [1922]), contended that the newspaper, notably the ethnic press, buffers the individual against the brutalizing effects of the city’s impersonality and disorganization.

Instead of encouraging reflective and rational thought, the commercial press, according to Habermas (1989: 195), is both emblem and harbinger of the decay of civil society as it reinforces the totalizing processes of modernity and offers the public crass and stultifying banalities.

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Social Science History , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , summer 2000, pp. 395 - 413
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Copyright © Social Science History Association 2000 

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