mass-communication-theory

88 Section 2 The Era of Mass Society and Mass Culture
INSTANT ACCESS
Propaganda Theory
Strengths Weaknesses
1. Is first systematic theory of mass
communication
2. Focuses attention on why media might
have powerful effects
3. Identifies personal, social, and cultural
factors that can enhance media’s power to
have effects
4. Focuses attention on the use of campaigns
to cultivate symbols
THE INSTITUTE FOR PROPAGANDA ANALYSIS
1. Underestimates abilities of average people to
evaluate messages
2. Ignores personal, social, and cultural factors
that limit media effects
3. Overestimates the speed and range of media
effects
Should the power of propaganda be used for democratic ends (the Lasswell/Lippmann
view), or because propaganda, by its very existence, was antidemocratic,
was education the best way to deal with it (the Dewey view)? The disagreement
over the proper place of propaganda in a democracy was no theoretical exercise.
Social scientists believed the fate of the country, the world in fact, rested on its
outcome.
In 1937, the threat of external propaganda was so great that a group of social
scientists, journalists, and educators founded the Institute for Propaganda Analysis
with the goal of orchestrating a nationwide educational effort to combat its effects.
During the four years of its existence, the institute was quite productive, generating
numerous pamphlets, books, and articles explaining how propaganda works (read
more about propaganda techniques in the box entitled “Applying the Seven Propaganda
Techniques”). The institute was successful in developing an antipropaganda
curriculum adopted by high schools and adult education programs across the country.
It was so successful that it came under attack for undermining the effectiveness
of propaganda techniques seen as essential to defending democracy.
In 1941, an opponent and a defender of the institute’s educational efforts faced
off in the pages of Public Opinion Quarterly, a journal that devoted considerable
attention to propaganda during the 1930s and 1940s. Bruce L. Smith questioned
the value of propaganda analysis, that is, education, because he believed it fostered
cynicism that could actually lead most students toward authoritarian views. At the
time he wrote this article, he headed the U.S. Justice Department’s efforts to censor
propaganda and arrest foreign agents who engaged in it. He argued:
Students at first become tremendously interested in the sportive side of launching an
attack on “propaganda devices.” . . . After this first excitement, they tend to become
morally indignant, at least in most cases, about the sheer quantity of fraud and misleading
utterance to which they have been exposed all their lives, especially in paid
advertising and in political speeches. At this point they have a tendency to espouse
some program or other of violent censorship and even suppression of those who issue
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