Popular Culture

So much of popular culture seems like a drug for the masses to keep the generic person focused on fashion, celebrity, weird behaviour on reality TV and trivia rather than refined debate, rational analysis, fine art, writing, good music and generally uplifting forms of expression.
There are broadly two ways of looking at this:
People do the selecting and if they didn't want to watch stupid talent shows, stories about celebrities, soap operas, reality TV and formula-driven crime drama they wouldn't. This argument for popular culture as "what the people want" is rather undercut by the fact that "people" are tuning off TV and selecting what they want elsewhere- mainly the internet. The web may or may not be of higher value intellectually than TV but there is a greater variety of content and there we link to the opposing argument.
The media are driven by commercial interwst to attract viewers or readers in the greatest numbers at the lowest production costs. Hence they produce cheap shows aimed at the lowest common denominator, appealing to the basest of human interests and in turn they debase the audience and readeship by promoting interest in puerile, nasty, lurid subject matter.
There is a proposition that the whole point of this is that it enhances those in power to maintain power without real challenge.
That proposition has many layers not just political. Academia is motivated by self-interst to obscure consideration into literature, film and art to make their discipline exclusive and therefore remote from the general parties in the same way political parties do not really want to increase their membership.
In Burma, we see the blunt, maked use of power by thos in control. In the "civilised west" the combination of many, thousdands of people with wealth, with the control of state instrument of power or of the media tend to use them to maintain their control of the means of power to the exclusion of others.
Where is there a true example of a participatory democracy really?