7. Celebrity Philanthropy: In the Service of Corporate Propaganda Michael Barker
In the era of mass society, the mainstream media have long demonstrated a fixation on celebrities. The public are regaled daily with spectacular stories of their dramatic personal lives and are invited to engage as voyeurs of their glamour-to have a peek in on their soirées with the rich and powerful. In his seminal book, The Power Elite (1956), C. Wright Mills dedicated an entire chapter to celebrities, observing how, with the rise of national means of mass communication, “the institutional elite must now compete with and borrow prestige from these professionals in the world of the celebrity” (p. 71). He outlined the integral social function their lives fulfill in the management of democracy, noting that “the liberal rhetoric-as a cloak for actual powerand the professional celebrity-as a status distraction-do permit the power elite conveniently to keep out of the limelight” (p. 91). Writing so many years ago, Mills was unsure as to whether the power elite would be content to remain uncelebrated. Now, however, under the liberating permissiveness of the neoliberal regime of media indoctrination and social management, the differences between the jet-set crowd and the power elite are melting (per Marx’s observation: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…”). Actors become political leaders, while politicians become world class “actors.” The real power behind these figureheads, however, remains in the hands of what has become an
This article was first published in Gerald Sussman (ed.), The Propaganda Society: Promotional Culture and Politics in Global Context (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2011), pp. 145-158. Republished with the kind permission of Peter Lang Publishing Inc.