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For that story, turn to eminent historian and media theorist James Carey (who sits on Lemann's faculty at Columbia). As Carey observed in his 1989 book Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, most scholars are content with the "transmission" model of mass communication and ignore the "ritual" model. "If the archetypal case of communication under a transmission view is the extension of messages across geography for the purposes of control, the archetypal case under a ritual view is the sacred ceremony that draws persons together in fellowship and commonality." Carey says the mass media serves this function, providing a cause and the means for a shared public experience, by which a tribal conception of reality "is created, shared, modified, and preserved."

The importance of mass ritual in America was elevated by its status as a nation of settlers, westward explorers, and immigrants. In this transient social atmosphere, Americans relied on a common connection to, and the narratives of, the mass media to compensate for the relative weakness of their ethnic and religious ties. As Carey wrote in a separate essay: "In the absence of a shared and inherited culture, communication had to accomplish the tasks of social integration that were elsewhere the product of tradition." So the glow of the television, as Marshall McLuhan put it, became the campfire around which the American tribe gathered to hear the stories that defined their social roles and public lives.

"News is not information but drama," Carey says. "It is a presentation of reality that gives life an overall form, order, and tone." By the transmission model, the role of journalism is to "inform the public," and the true test of a healthy republic is whether Joe Citizen can dutifully recite a quote from the secretary of state he read in the paper this morning. But who really remembers anything the media told us two weeks ago? Two days ago? Two minutes ago on CNN's news crawl? Instead, the drama the media captures and creates, and the way we are invited to participate in the storytelling—as patriots, populists, angry scolders of the wicked and corrupt, venture capitalists, rational observers of zealous religious activists, members of a social class that envies the one above it and pities the one below it—now that we remember, and that we allow to shape our social identity. And that would have been a good topic for a big book on the media in America.

Nathan Bierma is Books & Culture's editorial assistant. His "At Random" column on language appears every Thursday in the Chicago Tribune.

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

The Creation of the Media is available from Amazon.com and other book retailers.

More information is available from the publisher.

More information about Paul Starr is available from his page at Princeton University.

Books & Culture Corner appears every Monday. Earlier editions of Books & Culture Corner and Book of the Week include:

Wasn't That a Mighty Fall | Martha Stewart, VeggieTales, and Narnia revisted. (June 29, 2004)

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