The commercial press reconfigured class relations by containing popular democracy.

Evidence

But one of its effects was indeed a reconstituting of the cultural and political relations between the dominant and the dominated classes: a change intimately connected with that containment of popular democracy on which “our democratic way of life” today appears to be so securely based. Its results are all too palpably with us still, today: a popular press, the more strident and virulent as it gradually shrinks; organized by capital “for” the working classes; with, nevertheless, deep and influential roots in the culture and language of the “underdog,” of “Us”: with the power to represent the class to itself in its most traditionalist form. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 998

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The whole analytic move — cultural form as a mechanism of democratic containment, not just ideology — is a dense, reusable framework.