mass-communication-theory

Chapter 10 Media and Society: The Role of Media in the Social World 299
effects—that people interpret media messages based on preexisting attitudes and
beliefs and therefore reinforcement of those attitudes and beliefs is the result.
Incorrect, she wrote, because “as regards the connection between selective perception
and the effect of the mass media, one can put forward the hypothesis that the more
restricted the selection the less the reinforcement principle applies, in other words the
greater the possibility of mass media changing attitudes” (1973, p. 78).
The way news is collected and disseminated, she continued, effectively restricts
the breadth and depth of selection available to citizens. She identified three characteristics
of the news media that produce this scarcity of perspective:
1. Ubiquity: The media are virtually everywhere as sources of information.
2. Cumulation: The various news media tend to repeat stories and perspectives
across their different individual programs or editions, across the different
media themselves, and across time.
3. Consonance: The congruence, or similarity, of values held by newspeople
influences the content they produce.
This view of media effects suggests that two different social processes, one
macro-level and one micro-level, simultaneously operate to produce effects.
Audience members, because of their desire to be accepted, choose to remain silent
when confronted with what they perceive to be prevailing counteropinion.
Newspeople, because of the dynamics of their news-gathering function, present a
restricted selection of news, further forcing into silence those in the audience who
wish to avoid isolation.
In an essay critical of spiral-of-silence theory, Ehhu Katz (1983) summarized
Noelle-Neumann’s thinking this way:
(1) Individuals have opinions; (2) Fearing isolation, individuals will not express their opinions
if they perceive themselves unsupported by others; (3) A “quasi-statistical sense” is
employed by individuals to scan the environment for signs of support; (4) Mass media
constitute the major source of reference for information about the distribution of
opinion and thus the climate of support/nonsupport; (5) So do other reference groups … ;
(6) The media tend to speak in one voice, almost monopolistically; (7) The media tend
to distort the distribution of opinion in society, biased as they are by the … views of
journalists; (8) Perceiving themselves unsupported, groups of individuals—who may, at
times, even constitute a majority—will lose confidence and withdraw from public debate,
thus speeding the demise of their position through the self-fulfilling spiral of silence.
They may not change their own minds, but they stop recruitment of others and abandon
the fight; (9) Society is manipulated and impoverished thereby. (p. 89)
This understanding led Katz to conclude that these “more subtle, more sociological
[macro-level] definitions of effect” (p. 96) would have us “consider the
dark side of mass communication. Even in the democracies, media—like interpersonal
communication—can impose acquiescence and silence in defiance of the
free flow of information” (p. 91). This commentary is especially noteworthy
because it is offered by someone who helped pioneer uses-and-gratifications
research and who coauthored a classic limited-effects study based on the data collected
in Decatur (Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955). Katz clearly was reluctant to accept
Noelle-Neumann’s assertions and discredited them by arguing that they are an
updated version of mass society theory.
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