Williams, Patricia.
"Metro Broadcasting, Inc. v. FCC: Regrouping
in Singular Times." Harvard Law Review 104.2 (1990): 535.Thus, executives in the communications industry exercise a power that is not merely concentrated but also propagandistic. They make far-reaching choices in a way that few others in our society can. They project their images of the world out into the world. They do not merely represent, but also recreate themselves and their vision of the world as desirable, salable. What they reproduce is not neutral, not without consequence. To pretend (as we all do from time to time) that film or television, for example, is a neutral vessel, or contentless, mindless, or unpersuasive, is sheer denial. It is, for better and frequently for worse, one of the major forces in the shaping of our national vision, a chief architect of the modern American sense of identity.
Even assuming that profit-seeking behavior explains all or that materialism is itself a kind of culture, if the United States is to be anything more than a loose society of mercenaries-of suppliers and demanders, of vendors and consumers-then it must recognize that other forms of group culture and identity exist. We must respect the dynamic power of these groups and cherish their contributions to our civic lives, rather than pretend they do not exist as a way of avoiding argument about their accommodation. And we must be on guard against either privileging in our law a supposedly neutral "mass" culture that is in fact highly specific and historically contingent or legitimating a supposedly neutral ethic of individualism that is really corporate group identity, radically constraining any sense of individuality, and silently advancing the claims of that group identity.