“Propaganda,” a term that had languished somewhat since its coinage by the Catholic Church in the seventeenth century, thus began to come to the fore as the “dark side” of the emerging mass media phenomenon. “A word has appeared which has come to have an ominous clang in many minds – Propaganda” (Lasswell, 1927b, p. 2). What to do? From a research standpoint, scholars in the social sciences began to wonder whether it would be possible to document or even measure its negative impacts. The earliest and most prominent of these was Harold Lasswell, a political scientist whose work became very influential in the development of models and research questions in media effects. Lasswell wanted to move the study of media phenomena in a behavioral direction:
The strategy of propaganda, which has been phrased in cultural terms, can readily be described in the language of stimulus-response…. The propagandist may be said to be concerned with multiplication of those stimuli which are best calculated to evoke the desired responses, and with the nullification of those stimuli which are likely to instigate the undesired responses. (Lasswell, 1927a, p. 631)
Lasswell was reflecting the emergent confidence that social scientists could make something of an exact science of mediated communication, with the ability to predict outcomes and perhaps even to create messages based on quantitative understandings of audience characteristics and reactions. Terms such as “stimulus-response,” “instigate,” “evoke,” and “calculate” are words that are starting to move toward what would become the dominant American approach to media effects research. It was not long after Lasswell’s words that scholars from a variety of disciplines were pushing toward what would eventually become the media effects field.
Public opinion
Concurrently, in journalism, prescient commenters were beginning to recognize the power of media to present and even shape political reality in newspapers and in other print media. The most well-known of these was Walter Lippmann, a columnist and an early example of a public intellectual. In Public Opinion (1922), Lippmann put forth a concern with the “pictures in our heads,” which often did not coincide with reality. These were images about reality that were largely gained through media exposure. Lippmann pointed out that many (or even most) of the things we “know” to be true of the world can only be gained through media exposure. The superimposition of media images and constructions onto the world of politics and culture threatened a cherished principle of our democracy: that we can adequately know reality and base deliberative action by working from our own sense data. For Lippmann, influenced himself by his own experiences in World War I, we more often worked from “stereotypes.” Rather than observing and then defining what we saw, we defined first and then observed. Or worse: others defined for us and then we saw. This fact – the power of media to set conditions for and then structure human observation – would become very much a leitmotif in looking at media effects from both sociological and psychological perspectives. Ultimately, Lippmann was concerned that our actions, based on media-supplied images, were taking place in a pseudo-environment, one which paradoxically became, through our collective actions, the actual lived environment.
Overall, Lippmann’s stance on the media question was negative, leading to conclusions that it would be difficult to harness media power toward deliberative democracy. He imagined a possible solution to create a sort of “information bureau” that could be in charge of making sure that information was presented more objectively. Information would be “professionalized,” creating standards of ethics and truthfulness that would guard against the excesses of the propaganda era. Such an idea, of course, was never implemented, although later theories that argued for a “social responsibility” ethic of journalism (Siebert, Peterson, & Schramm, 1956) came close to Lippmann’s ideas. It would not be the first time that policy suggestions based on media effects ideas would find it hard to be implemented.
Toward media effects
After World War I, when radio brought electric instantaneity onto the scene, the stage was set for a mass media system that could reach national and even global audiences at any and every moment. The period between the two World Wars was fraught with troubling political and social developments that had media implications (and some also thought they were caused by the media). Ideas about mass communication seemed particularly credible in explaining phenomena such as the growth of Fascism and Communism, with their directed propaganda focused on the largest possible audiences and a monolithic message. The stunning media success of a figure such as Adolf Hitler was instructive and troubling. Practitioners of both Nazi and Communist propaganda portrayed their activities as having a scientific basis, and a sense of evil genius lurking behind the use of the new techniques came to be widely accepted in the West. While some early thinkers about mass media had argued that mass media could be harnessed to the creation of democracy at a mass level, others highlighted the dark-side mass political movements that were encouraged and arguably created by media that could convene and address this mass. The power of the new mass media could go in both directions. For democracy and for more authoritarian-oriented systems, questions that implicated mass behavior were very likely to suggest media as possible sources or causes of such behavior. The mass began to acquire a personality of its own, and the rise of the authoritarian systems was convincing Americans that the effects of mass media might not always be positive. Crowds and mobs, with cruel regularity, were punishing the idea of democracy around the globe, with its future uncertain.
The decade of events leading up to World War II catalyzed a lot in terms of what would become media effects research. It was a war effort that virtually all sectors of society enthusiastically participated in. In the same way that expert practitioners of communication (such as Hollywood directors and actors) joined their efforts to the war cause, scholars of communication and related fields wanted to apply their abilities as well. This meant solving questions related to propaganda. Lasswell’s early work had established among top-level social scientists the importance of understanding how propaganda had worked in World War 1, and there was every intention to use it to positive effect on the American side. It was in this period that a select group of scholars at elite institutions really began focusing efforts toward a scientific exploration of the direct impact of messages on audiences, in ways that we can see as a direct predecessor of the media effects tradition.
There are some competing accounts of how this research developed and what it led to. One story suggests that the influential social scientists who later came to be seen as the “founding fathers” (Schramm, 1954) of the field of mass communication research gathered their efforts toward a principled data-based examination of the effects of propaganda and other kinds of mass communication. Arguing against the supposedly-held public fear that mass communication had an almost irresistible power to “inject” its messages into unwitting audiences, these researchers revealed that the actual effects of mass communication, when studied empirically under controlled conditions, were modest. Their dismantling of the “hypodermic needle theory” of media thus led to something that was accepted quite readily for a long time in most empirical examinations of media effects: that the effects of media were actually quite modest (Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955; Klapper, 1960).
A second version of this story agrees that this group of researchers began with a focus on understanding