American Communication Research

The Remembered History

Everette E. Dennis, Ellen Ann Wartella

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136688737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book captures the essence of a never-to-be-repeated glimpse at the history of media research. It offers a unique examination of the origins, meaning, and impact of media and communication research in America, with links to European antecedents. Based on a high-level seminar series at Columbia University's Freedom Forum Media Studies Center, the book features work by leading scholars, researchers, and media executives. Participants in the series have called the program "heroic and unprecedented." The book encompasses essays, commentaries, and reports by such leading figures as William McGuire, Elihu Katz, and Leo Bogart, plus posthumous reports by Wilbur Schramm, Malcolm Beville, and Hilde Himmelweit. It also contains original insights on the collaboration of Frank Stanton, Paul Lazarfeld, and Robert K. Merton.

PART I

THE SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT

Chapter 1

The European Roots

Kurt Lang

University of Washington

Most U.S. scholars, dependent as they are on what appears in English-language publications, know little about foreign research in mass communication. The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Sills, 1968), to take one example, has seven articles on the mass media. Only the one by Wilbur Schramm, in which he compares “control and public policy” in the United States with that in other countries, draws on a significant amount of foreign language literature (Vol. 3, pp. 55–63). The bibliographies of the other six contain only one foreign entry—and this in a compendium that presents itself as “international.” It appears in the article on political communication by Ithiel de Sola Pool (Vol. 3, pp. 90–96), who mentions a German book on the Allied propaganda in World War I—Weltkrieg ohne Waffen [World War Without Weapons] by Hans Thimme. Published in 1932, it presented data in support of the political myth that the old imperial German army had not been defeated in the field; the stab in the back it received in 1918 was attributed to foreign propaganda.

In a 1977 report to the British Broadcasting Corp., Elihu Katz flatly asserted that “communication research … is surely an American science. It flourished for perhaps two decades under the founding fathers, Paul Lazarsfeld, Harold Lasswell and Carl Hovland” (Katz, 1977, p. 22). I do not dispute that it had indeed flourished under the leadership of these men. But let us also look at what one of these founding fathers wrote, in reference not just to his own role: “Many of the techniques which are now considered American in origin were developed in Europe 50 or a hundred years ago and then exported from the United States after they had been refined and made manageable for use on a mass scale” (Lazarsfeld, 1965, p. v).

This statement comes, quite obviously, from Lazarsfeld, coauthor with Katz of Personal Influence (Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955), a book that helped as much as any other to put to rest by the late 1950s inquiries into the effects of mass communication.

An earlier paper of mine (Lang, 1979) made a similar point but in a different context. That paper argues that much of what was being defined by Europeans as characteristically U.S. communication research (more or less as defined by Katz) had been introduced to the United States from the Old World, mostly by Germans (which in this case included Austrians), or by Americans who had studied in Germany or had been influenced by work in Central Europe during the first third of the 20th century. Siegfried Kracauer, Leo Lowenthal, Ernst Kris, Hans Speier, Herta Herzog, Kurt Lewin, and Karl Deutsch should be recognizable to students of mass communication. They had much influence on the generation educated right after World War II, the generation of which I, too, am a member.

But the European and more specifically the German influence goes back farther still. It is very much in evidence among the social scientists linked to the Chicago School of sociology. Both Robert E. Park and Lasswell had spent time in Germany early in their careers—the former taking a PhD at Heidelberg. Among other Chicagoans, I should also mention Helen M. Hughes, a student of Park, and her much neglected book News and the Human-lnterest Story (1940). And, of course, there is also the 1947 presidential address to the American Sociological Society by Louis Wirth on consensus and mass communication (1948), which in my judgment is still well worth reading, even though Wirth himself (unlike his two colleagues Herbert Blumer and Philip Hauser) never engaged in anything resembling what we have come to call mass communication research. These three certainly had some familiarity with the German literature on the subject.

I was moved to do the previously mentioned article at the urging of my wife, Gladys Engel Lang. Everything we do is at least in some remote way a joint product. It was written while we were in England, working on an entirely different project. Jeremy Tunstall had asked me to speak to his study group on recent communication research in Germany, which got me into a running controversy with some young academics there, against whom I remonstrated for their limited view of the history of their subject. They perceived a sharp opposition between U.S. media research as personified by Lazarsfeld and German media research, which they equated with the postwar Critical School at Frankfurt. Their view did not encompass the full scope of Lazarsfeld’s work, and a number of them, as it turned out in later discussion, acknowledged that they had never even heard of some of the other emigré scholars. My article was intended to correct this rather one-sided and restricted view of the history of communication research.

The subject on which Gladys and I have been working, the building and survival of artistic reputations,¹ has sharpened my consciousness of the selective processes that shape and, to a degree, distort the collective memory of even our own field. Obviously, no one—not even historians—can look at the past with anything but the eyes of their own time. But art historians Rudolph and Margot Wittkower conceded even more when they declared flatly that in art “misinterpretation is one of the great stimuli for keeping the past alive. Only that which strikes a congenial note will be taken up from an immensely rich tradition and revitalized” (Wittkower & Wittkower, 1963, p. 283). Others have pointed to a similar process of reinterpretation. Robert Escarpit (1958) referred to the tendency of writers to fall into oblivion some 10, 20, or 30 years after their death until they become defined as members of some literary collective or movement to make them appear more relevant to a contemporary public.

Something like this has happened in sociology and in the sociology of mass communication. Not only do we forget the past but we manage to see a past that fits our preconceptions. The current interest in the forerunners of our discipline, which I heartily welcome, strikes me as an effort to legitimate a discipline in danger of becoming overly concerned with de-contextualized minutia and of producing increasingly repetitive findings. Linking it to a rich intellectual tradition helps to support our claim. Significantly enough, Lazarsfeld, during the last two decades of his life, had also turned his attention to the precursors of modern empirical and statistical research methods; he also wrote on the theorists of public opinion.

It seems to me that the appeal of the critical approach to some of our colleagues is a symptom of the same concern. Its more radical adherents have been prone to overlook such historical facts as the involvement of one of its main apostles, Theodor Adorno, in empirical research. Not only had he been, while in the United States, the senior author of the monumental, though somewhat misguided, study of the authoritarian personality (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950), but upon his return to Germany he worked to introduce the empirical methods he had once, and others have since, denigrated as “administrative” research into sociology in order to prevent it from remaining simply a humanistic discipline (Geisteswissenschaft). The dissemination given Adorno’s dispute with Lazarsfeld over administrative research and, of course, to his more esoteric writings has been at the expense of other aspects of his past.

Having so far focused on the United States, let me turn to Europe. The same commercial and business interests that are known to have affected the direction of U.S. communication research also influenced the direction it took in Europe. But there was, it appears to me, at least one important difference between the two continents: A number of European scholars who wrote on the press did so after extensive experience in journalism. This holds for Albert Schaeffle, Karl Buecher, Emil Loebl, Siegfried Kracauer, and also, let us not forget, for Max Weber. The only one among the early Americans with this kind of dual career that readily comes to mind is Park. In France, Germany, and England, leading academics have generally had easier access to journalistic outlets. The association may account for the fact that as early as 1916, and partly under the impetus of World War I, plans for a university-based institute to study the press (Institut fuer Zeitungswissenschaft) at Leipzig were drawn up, soon to be followed, after the war, by the Zeitschrift fuer Zeitungskunde [Journal Newspaper Studies], a journal devoted to studies of the subject. Buecher, a respected economist, was the guiding spirit behind both.

Remember also that these projects preceded the advent of the two broadcast media—radio and television. The first did not become an important social force until around 1930, and no one at the time thought seriously about television. The press—the penny press, the yellow press, the tabloids, the community newspaper, and the more serious journals of opinion—was just about all there was to fit the label of “mass” communication. There was some interest as well in general reading habits. As movies made their appearance on the scene, these also became the subject of sociological study. One early study of the cinema was based on a questionnaire, albeit not a very sophisticated one, that asked people directly about what had moved them to go to a movie, whether they stayed to the end, and about any “artistic impressions” conveyed to them (Altenloh, 1914). It was a start, even though the approach may have been somewhat naïve by contemporary standards.

The interest of scholars in mass communication goes back much earlier of course. The question is where to begin. One likely candidate would be Karl Marx, who followed the European career path by writing for several newspapers, including the New York Tribune, but never focused on the press as an object of analysis. There is, however, Alexis de Tocqueville, whose writing on the role of the newspaper in the United States in the formation of public opinion predates Marx. It needs to be pointed out that the highly politicized French press and the part it had played in the Revolution had left a strong impression on French writers throughout the 19th century. They were highly conscious of the influence newspapers and periodicals could exercise. Indicative of this interest is the monumental eight-volume work by Eugène Hatin on the literary and political history of the press in France (1859–1864), which was followed 2 years later by his Bibliographie historique et critique de la presse périodique française ... précédé d’un essai historique et statistique sur la naissance et les progrès de la presse périodique dans les deux mondes (1866) [Historical and Critical Bibliography of the Periodical Press in France...preceded by an Historical and Statistical Essay on the birth and the Progress of the Periodical Press in the Two Worlds]. This extensive bibliography was preceded by a historical and statistical essay on the birth and progress of the periodical press in the Old and New Worlds. It provided the kind of statistical information on which later analysts could build.

Turning to the Germans, it seems to me that their studies had greater influence on the United States. In 1857, the economist Karl Knies published a book on the telegraph, in which he dealt extensively with the economics of information flow. I personally have never held a copy of that book in my hand, but the number of references to it allow one to conclude that it had some influence. The relationship between news reporting and the telegraph, first recognized well over 100 years ago, is once again being investigated by several scholars, including Richard Kielbowicz, a colleague of mine at the University of Washington.

The interest of Knies extended beyond the influence of a single invention, even one as important as the telegraph. Approaching his subject from an economic perspective, he contended that news communication between localities was complementary to exchange relationships, if not directly mandated by them. This line of thought was further developed by Buecher as well as by members of the Chicago School of sociologists in their ecological studies of newspaper circulation. More generally, what Knies implied, namely that functional relationships precede participation in a common normative order, has become a generally accepted postulate within the social science community.

But more than anyone else, it was Karl Buecher who took the lead in the development of the new field he called Zeitungskunde—a rough equivalent of mass communication research. Buecher, as mentioned, was among those who had begun their careers as working journalists. After becoming an academic, in his writings he addressed the many aspects of the press—its nature and function as an institution, journalistic practice, and the education of journalists—contained in the volume of his collected essays on the subject (Buecher, 1926). He also developed the kind of economic statistics on newspapers and the newspaper industry that have become common in the industrialized nations. Buecher must be judged as a major figure in every sense of the word. Available in English in a collection titled Industrial Evolution (1901) is his essay on the genesis of journalism, which treats the newspaper as:

primarily a commercial contrivance, forming one of the most important pillars of contemporary economic activity.... In fact, the newspaper forms a link in the chain of modem commercial machinery; it is one of those contrivances by which in society the exchange of intellectual and material goods is facilitated.

It futher bemoans the fact that “those departments of knowledge that cannot form the basis of an academic career are inadequately investigated. This is the fate of journalism” (pp. 215–216).

Other important work to come out of Germany were Ludwig Salomon’s three-volume history on the German press (1900–1906), which dealt in a remarkably thorough fashion with developments up to 1850, and a book by H. Wuttke (1875) dealing with the press and the emergence of public opinion. The latter topic takes us back to the phenomenon that had so intrigued Tocqueville. In the chapter of his Democracy in America on the relation between associations and newspapers, he raised the question of how to obtain cooperation in some common enterprise “when men are no longer united among themselves by firm and lasting ties.” Men cannot combine, he wrote, until a “newspaper takes up the notion or the feeling which had occurred simultaneously, but singly to each of them…. The newspaper brought them together and keeps them united.” From this he concluded that “newspapers make associations, and associations make newspapers” (Tocqueville, 1900, p. 119).

Notice that the argument in these extracts is not that the newspaper functions as a creator of opinions but rather that it articulates opinions that have no other vehicle of expression. There is nothing of the supposedly “all powerful” media in this passage nor in any of the other work I shall be citing. I cannot refrain from repeated reminders that this frequently cited theory never really had any followers among persons we would consider social scientists. But it was congruent with the popular fears about the effectiveness of the propaganda of totalitarian regimes and was used as a straw man that helped dramatize conclusions drawn from empirical findings in a U.S. context and make them appear more novel than they actually were. The theory has been buried rhetorically a countless number of times.

The relation between press and party (or association), so important throughout the 19th century, was also addressed by Emil Loebl, deputy editor in chief of the Wiener Zeitung, in a book titled Kultur und Presse [Culture and Press] (Loebl, 1903). This book was quite influential and helped establish Zeitungskunde as an academic discipline. It was mentioned favorably by Weber in his 1910 address to the first meeting of the German sociological association but is little known today and available in only a few U.S. libraries. Loebl’s treatment is not so much historical as systematic and critical, with each chapter proceeding from definitions and concepts to analyze the organization of newspapers, the content of newspapers, and journalistic practices. Subjects examined include professional journalism and its relation to society, the anonymity of authorship and journalistic education, the function of the press and the resources at its disposal, its relation to politics and governmental authority, and the value of press freedom and the theory that supports it.

Loebl also had something to say about public opinion, which he saw as the product of two factors: an “original and living idea” and a “multiplier.” (The last term is his.) Usually but not invariably this multiplier function is performed by the press. He was careful to note that public opinion also exists outside the press and sometimes develops, even attains power, in opposition to it. Thus, “the propagator of an idea disposes over other means for the dissemination and the reinforcement of his idea: books, a parliamentary platform, associations, assemblies, public lectures, informal get-togethers, and direct muted agitation from person to person” (1903, p. 255). T...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part I: The Schools of Thought
• 1 The European Roots
• 2 The Chicago School and Mass Communication Research
• 3 The Yale Communication and Attitude-Change Program in the 1950s
• 4 Diffusion Research at Columbia
• 5 Children and Television
• 6 The Press as a Social Institution
• Part II: Eyewitness Accounts
• 7 Fashioning Audience Ratings—From Radio to Cable
• 8 Stanton, Lazarsfeld, and Merton—Pioneers in Communication Research
• 9 A Conversation With Frank Stanton
• 10 The Master Teachers
• 11 Research as an Instrument of Power
• 12 Addressing Public Policy
• Part III: Reassessment
• 13 Constructing a Historiography for North American Communication Studies
• 14 The History Reconsidered
• Appendix: Biographic Sketches of 65 Contributors to the Field of Communication Research
• About the Contributors and Editors
• Author Index
• Subject Index