"Smile while I cut your throat": Mass media, myth, and the contested "Harmonization" of the working class

Abstract

This article uses the present political economy of communication as a vantage point from which to examine the issue of alternative media, dominant power relations, and the ideological construct s arising from and perpetuated by such relations. An exercise in antilabor public relations, or "scientific strikebreaking," is examined and juxtaposed with how such messages were received by a working-class community during the 1930s as evidenced in the editorial commentary and reportage of its labor newspaper. A theoretical approach that provides for the consideration of psychic and material domination through myth and discursive resistance to such domination provides a framework within which to examine the dialectical exchange. The contested meaning of "harmony" and similar contradictory themes of the advertising suggests the emergence of a working-class consciousness at a specific historical juncture and points to the importance of alternative media locally and nationally. Furthermore, previous studies of business-sponsored propaganda campaigns in the 1930s and 1940s have not considered to any significant degree how working-class people and their media interpreted and resisted these and similar messages on an immediate level. © 2001 Sage Publications.