mass-communication-theory

140 Section 3 From Limited-Effects to Critical Cultural Theories: Ferment in the Field
and nuclear weapons that render today’s threats from stateless Islamic radicals pale
by comparison (Pooley, 2008).
During the 1950s, as the limited-effects perspective began to take shape, new
social research centers modeled after those at Yale and Columbia opened across the
United States. One of the early leaders in the field, Wilbur Schramm, was personally
responsible for establishing communication research centers at the University of
Illinois, Stanford University, and the University of Hawaii. By 1960, many of the
“classic studies” of limited effects had been published and become required reading
for the first generation of doctoral students in the newly created field of mass communication
research. This new perspective dominated during the 1960s; it remained
quite strong through the 1970s, and its influence echoes even today.
Did the creators of the limited-effects perspective believe that the power of
media was limited? Recently, historians have argued that the same researchers
who published limited-effects findings were also accepting large government contracts
to design and test propaganda, which they obviously thought to be effective
(Park and Pooley, 2008). During the Cold War much of this propaganda was
targeted at Third World populations also targeted by the Communists. These
researchers were also accepting contracts to improve the effectiveness of domestic
Civil Defense propaganda.
As we discuss the early research, we will illustrate the factors that combined to
make development of the perspective possible. We list these factors here, and we
will refer to them in later sections.
1. The refinement and broad acceptance of empirical social research methods
was an essential factor in the emergence of the limited-effects perspective.
Throughout this period, empirical research methods were effectively promoted
as an ideal means of measuring, describing, and ultimately explaining social
phenomena. A generation of empirical social scientists working in several
academic disciplines declared them to be the only “scientific” way of dealing
with social phenomena. They dismissed other approaches as overly speculative,
unsystematic, or too subjective (see the discussion of postpositivism in Chapter 1).
Because so few people at the time understood the limitations of empirical
research methods, they often uncritically accepted the findings and conclusions
derived from them. When these outcomes conflicted with past theories, the
older theories were questioned and rejected, often on the basis of a handful of
inconclusive findings.
2. Empirical social researchers successfully branded people who advocated mass
society and propaganda notions as “unscientific.” They accused mass society
theory advocates of being fuzzy-minded humanists, doomsayers, political
ideologues, or biased against media. Also, mass society and propaganda
notions lost some of their broad appeal as the threat of propaganda seemed
to fade in the late 1950s and 1960s. Within social science departments, study
of propaganda was abandoned in favor of public opinion research.
3. Social researchers exploited the commercial potential of the new research
methods and gained the support of private industry. One of the first articles
Lazarsfeld wrote after arriving in the United States was about the use of survey
research methods as a tool for advertisers (Kornhauser and Lazarsfeld, 1935).
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