mass-communication-theory

162 Section 3 From Limited-Effects to Critical Cultural Theories: Ferment in the Field
issues. For example, Americans needed to know what to do in the event of a
nuclear attack. They also needed to know what their leaders were doing to deal
with threats from abroad. Classic theories of democracy assume that the public
must be well informed so that people can make good political decisions. As such,
the flow of information from elites to the public was essential if the United States
was to counter the Communist threat.
Persuasion research had identified numerous barriers to persuasion. News-flow
research focused on determining whether similar barriers impeded the flow of information
from media to typical audience members. It gathered generalizations derived
from laboratory-based attitude-change research and assessed their usefulness in
understanding real-world situations and problems. Some of the barriers investigated
included level of education, amount of media use for news, interest in news, and
talking about news with others. The researchers differentiated between “hard” and
“soft” news. Hard news typically included news about politics, science, world
events, and community organizations. Soft news included sports coverage, gossip
about popular entertainers, and human-interest stories about average people.
News-flow research found that most U.S. citizens learned very little about hard
news because they were poorly educated, made little use of media for hard news,
had low interest in it, and didn’t talk to other people about it (Davis, 1990). Except
for major news events such as President Eisenhower’s heart attack or the assassination
of President John F. Kennedy, most people didn’t know or care much about
national news events. Soft news generally was more likely to be learned than hard
news, but even the flow of soft news was not what might have been hoped. The
most important factor accelerating or reinforcing the flow of news was the degree
to which people talked about individual news items with others. News of the
Kennedy assassination reached most people very rapidly because people interrupted
their daily routine to tell others about it (Greenberg and Parker, 1965). Think back
to how you first heard about the events of 9/11. Did you hear or see a media report
or did someone else talk to you about them? Without talk, learning about most hard
news events rarely reached more than 10 to 20 percent of the population and was
forgotten by those people within a few days or weeks.
Studies of the flow of civil defense information identified similar barriers. In
most cases, members of the public were even less interested in mundane civil
defense information than they were in politics. In a series of field experiments
(DeFleur and Larsen, 1958), researchers dropped hundreds of thousands of leaflets
on small isolated towns in the state of Washington. They signaled their view of the
importance of their research by titling it “Project Revere”—like Paul Revere, they
were seeking ways to inform the nation about an impending attack. DeFleur and
Larsen wanted to determine how effective leaflets would be in warning people
about incoming Soviet bombers. For example, one set of leaflets announced that a
civil defense test was being conducted. Every person who found a leaflet was
instructed to tell someone else about it and then drop the leaflet in a mailbox.
The researchers were disappointed that relatively few folks read or returned the
leaflets. Children were the most likely to take them seriously. To get the most useful
effect, eight leaflets had to be dropped for every resident in town. Speculating
that people were ignoring the leaflets because they only warned of a hypothetical
attack, and threatening people with a real attack was considered too problematic,
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