mass-communication-theory

Chapter 6 The Rise of Limited-Effects Theory 157
Butwhatiftelevisionnews—because covering violent crime is easier, less expensive,
and less threatening to the continued flow of advertising dollars than covering
white-collar crime, and because violent crime, especially that committed downtown
near the studio, provides better pictures than a scandal in the banking industry—
were to present inner-city violence to the exclusion of most other crime? What if
entertainment programmers, because of time, format, and other pressures (Gerbner,
1990), continually portrayed their villains as, say, dark, mysterious, different? Do
the selective processes still kick in? When the ubiquitous mass media that we routinely
rely on repeatedly provide homogeneous and biased messages, where will we
get the dissonant information that activates our defenses and enables us to hold onto
views that are inconsistent with what we are being told? Does this situation exist in
the United States today? Do most mainstream media routinely provide inherently
biased messages? We will return to these and similar questions in later chapters.
Today, more than sixty years after the Allport and Postman study, would the
knife still find its way from the white man’s hand into the black man’s? Have the
civil rights movement and television programming like The Cosby Show and
That’s So Raven made a difference? Or does routine news coverage of violent
crime continue to fuel our apprehensions and therefore our biases? Later chapters
that deal with theories that view mass communication as more symbolically, rather
than informationally, powerful will address these questions. For now, though, you
can explore the issue with help from the box entitled “Drug Users: Allport and
Postman Revisited.”
LIMITATIONS OF THE EXPERIMENTAL PERSUASION RESEARCH
Like the research approach developed by Lazarsfeld, the Yale approach had important
limitations. Here we list and compare them with those described for the Lazarsfeld
research.
1. Experiments were conducted in laboratories or other artificial settings to
control extraneous variables and manipulate independent variables. But it was
often difficult to relate these results to real-life situations. Researchers made
many serious errors in trying to generalize from laboratory results. Also, most
experiments take place over relatively short time periods. Effects that don’t
take place immediately remain unidentified. Hovland found long-term effects
only because the military trainees he was studying were readily accessible for a
longer period. Most researchers don’t have this luxury. Some are forced to
study “captive” but atypical populations like students or prisoners.
2. Experiments have the opposite problems from surveys when researchers study
the immediate effects of specific media messages. As noted earlier, it is
cumbersome if not impossible to study effects of specific messages using
surveys. By contrast, experiments are ideally suited to studying the immediate
effects of specific media content on small or homogeneous groups of people.
Experiments aren’t, however, suited to studying the cumulative influence of
patterns of overall media use within large heterogeneous populations.
This limitation of experimental research has produced serious biases in its
accumulated findings. Because the study and comparison of an individual
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