Life is indeed full of problems on which we have to make decisions, as citizens or as private individuals. But neither the real difficulty of these decisions, nor their true and disturbing challenge to each individual, can often be communicated through the mass media. The disinclination to suggest a real choice of individual decision, which is to be found in the mass media, is not simply the product of a commercial desire to keep the customers happy. It is within the grain of mass communications. The organs of the Establishment, however well intentioned they may be and whatever their form (the State, the Church, voluntary societies, political parties), have a vested(既得的)interest in ensuring that the public boat is not violently rocked and will so affect those who work within the mass media that they will be led insensibly towards forms of production which, though they go through the motions of dispute and enquiry, do not break through the skin to where such enquiries might really hurt. They will tend to move, when exposing problems, well within the accepted cliche (陈词滥调)assumptions of democratic society and will tend neither radically to question these cliches nor to make a disturbing application of them to features of contemporary life. They will stress the "stimulation" the programs give, but this soon becomes an agitation (动)of problems for the sake of the interest of that agitation in itself. They will, therefore, again assist a form of acceptance of the status quo. There are exceptions to this tendency, but they are uncharacteristic. The result can be seen in a hundred radio and television programs as plainly as in the nor mal treatment of public issues in the popular press. Different levels of background in the readers or viewers may be assumed, but what usually takes place is a substitute for the process of arriving at judgment. Programs such as this are noteworthy less for the "stimulation" they offer than for the fact that stimulation (repeated at regular intervals) may become a substitute for, and so a barrier to, judgments carefully arrived at and tested in the mind and on the pulses. Mass communications, then, do not ignore intellectual matters; they tend to castrate (删除) them to allow them to sit on the side of the fireplace, sleek (花言巧语的)and useless, a family plaything. How are the mass media said to influence our ability to make decisions