Lindblom - The Market System - Afghan Journalists' Committee

Persuading the Masses 219As early as 1950 in the United States, nearly half thecontents of the best newspapers and nearly all the contentsof the lesser papers were estimated to come from publicrelations releases. That is in addition to paid advertisingspace. Is this assault on the mind becoming intensified?World over, advertising has grown three times faster thanthe global population. And many observers call attention towhat they consider a continuing degradation of discourse.Public issues are increasingly aired not through the exchangeof sustained coherent argument but by fragmentaryquestion-and-answer or by soundbite sloganeering. The averageinterval of uninterrupted speech on television by U.S.presidential candidates dropped from an already deplorable42.3 seconds in 1968 to an abysmal 9.8 seconds by 1988.All over the world, the days when a candidate or officialcould educate constituents, thus playing the classic leadershiprole, seem to be receding. Politics, it is now often said,is huckstering. As for communication from the marketelite on products, its mixture of emptiness, confusion, anddeceit may have descended to a level below which there isnot much room to drop further. The indisputable benefits ofliteracy and the mass media have come at a heavy cost.Some of these trends in relations between the marketelite and customers may be slowed or stopped by a newgrowth of multilateral communication through the Internet.A consulting firm, addressing prospective businessclients, reminds them: “In the new electronic economy, potentialbuyers can print out a dozen independent reviews ofyour product in minutes with a few clicks of a mouse.” Towhich it adds: “Knowledge is power, and suddenly your customersare awash in it.”In some quarters, feelings run high and biases deep onthe effects of the sales-promotion and public-relations in-