The contours of this argument were most formally stated by such political theorists as Joseph Schumpeter who defined the democratic method as ’that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for people’s votes’ (Schumpeter, 1976, p. 269). Basically, this amounted to saying that democracy, as its critics had contended , was indeed a system of government by elites but one in which the majority govern. The contribution of American sociologists to this emergency repair job on the liberal-democratic tradition was to furnish a concept of social structure capable of breathing life into such constitutional bones. If the democratic process worked, they contended, it was because the wide range and variety of competing interest groups which constituted the bedrock of the social structure constantly checked and limited one another so as to prevent any one group from assuming a position of preponderance in relation to the others. Further, the incorporation of the masses into the political life of the nation, instead to being viewed negatively, was held to constitute a constraint which those elites temporarily vested with the responsibility for government cloud not afford to ignore.
These theoretical realignments had marked consequences for the way in which the media were viewed. Once regarded as the villains of mass society, they came to be viewed as the unsung heroes of liberalism-pluralism triumphant. The media, it was contended, were far from monolithic. The clash and diversity of the viewpoints contained within them contributed to the free and open circulation of ideas, thereby enabling them to play the role of a ‘fourth estate’ their dependency on majority opinion. Further, in a decisive rejection of the mass culture critique, the media’s role as the purveyors of culture was defended as it was pointed out that, in addition to an admittedly slushy pulp pulp culture, they were also responsible for making the established classics of high culture available to a wider audience whose cultural standards had been lifted with rising educational standards.