message , the controls go beyond programming. The restraints 
are always directed to the “content,” which is always another 
medium. The content of the press is literary statement, as the 
content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is 
the novel. So the effects of radio are quite independent of its 
programming. To those who have never studied media, this 
fact is quite as baffling as literacy is to natives, who say, “Why 
do you write? Can’t you remember?”

     Thus, the commercial interests who think to render media 
universally acceptable, invariably settle for “entertainment” as 
a strategy of neutrality. A more spectacular mode of the 
ostrich-head-in-sand could not be devised, for it ensures 
maximal persuasiveness for any medium whatever. The literate 
community will always argue for a controversial or point-of-view 
use of press, radio, and movie that would in effect diminish the