The Mass Media and the Frankfurt School

The Mass Media and the Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt school refers to a group of academics including Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, whose neo-Marxists views regard audiences as passive consumers of media texts. These theorists have tried to understand how mass audiences are both affected by and can affect the massive, corporatized media establishment that we see in countries like the U.S.
Early theorists such as these claimed that the Media industry was founded on mass deception and that the average consumer was a cultural dupe being inculcated into the values of the ruling classes without realizing it.
Many critics of this school feel that this represented a reintroduction of Marx’s ideas about mediation, or media as purveyors of a dominant ideology that destroyed the possibility that audiences for mass media were able to work against these ruling ideas.

(For more information click on these links http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/marxism/marxism08.html)