Alloway was still referring to the continuum model of culture in the late 1960s which “could accommodate all forms of art, permanent and expendable, personal and collective, autographic and anonymous.” At a time when popular culture was being blamed for distracting the population from politics, Alloway was still justifying it in the sort of terms he had used in the 1950s: “Popular culture is influential as it transmits prompt and extensive news, in visual, verbal and mixed forms, about style changes that will affect the appearance of our environment…” This statement could be challenged along the lines of the “lessons in consuming” that encouraged social conformity, but the remainder of the sentence was an innovation: popular culture could also transmit information about “political and military events that will put our accepted morality under new pressures.” This claim had greater credence by the end of the 1960s: the mass media were helping to shape public opinion about domestic politics and Vietnam by reporting the grim reality of race riots and the war, thereby challenging both the supposed impartiality of the police, and the heroic war propaganda uttered through official channels.

Alloway was an unswerving apologist for popular culture, and also an early one. The pessimism of British cultural critics like Richard Hoggart was paralleled in the USA by writers such as Bernard Rosenberg and David M. White whose 1957 Mass Culture: the Popular Arts in America helped shape attitudes about popular culture. It included an essay by Dwight MacDonald whose dismissal of popular culture was unqualified: “Mass culture is imposed from above. It is fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen; its audience are passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying and not buying. The Lords of Kitsch, in short, exploit the cultural need of the masses in order to make a profit and/or to maintain their class rule.” While those attitudes were still in evidence in the 1960s, the explosion of youth culture transformed many people's thinking about the value and virtues of popular culture. Mass culture could be creative, innovative, progressive, relevant, and exciting, but there was still the problem of how to talk about it. Edward A. Shils suggested a categorization of popular culture into “superior,” “mediocre,” and “brutal” but, for Alloway, this perpetuated hierarchical distinctions based on inappropriate criteria such as longevity.