Suchergebnisse

The Review of Politics, which with this issue closes its fortieth year of publication, bears an interesting and faintly exotic relationship to the modern history of Notre Dame and of the Church. At first glance nothing could seem further from what many regarded as the somnolent provincialismof a Midwest Catholic college than the background and career of the founding editor of The Review, Waldemar Gurian. Had Notre Dame been the offspring of a small and youthful religious sect, there could have been no Gurian and no Review. What helped to make both possible was the universal Church, more especially the Church of the Western world. Many observers thought the universal Church itself steeped in somnolent, albeit worldwide provincialism. But the fact is that the Church was, in the 1930's, stirring with change, change which reflected and in turn influenced changes in the intellectual temper of the secular world.

Most of the new developments in the mass media during the 1960's turned out to be unfulfilled promises, for good or ill. A partial list is suggestive:1. The tapering off of the underground press.2. The inconclusive, still smoldering Agnew controversy.3. The decline of the mass magazine.4. The rise of pornography as a mass medium.5. The gradual eclipse of McLuhan and his theories.6. The ambiguous influence of TV in politics following the excitement of the Kennedy-Nixon debates.7. The blunted impact of the big reports: Kerner, Eisenhower, Pornography, and the Surgeon-General's report on violence.8. The failure of educational TV to get up a full head of steam.9. The failure of commercial TV to develop new, innovative, and imaginative programs.10. The technological promises unfulfilled: the electronic newspaper and magazine, TV cassettes, CATV's slow march, home video tapes, 3-D TV, and so on, along with the persistence of raised-type printing, radio, comic strips, newsboys, and much else often proclaimed obsolete.Despite inevitable overlapping, it is convenient to divide the foregoing into print and broadcasting.