Broadcasting Theories

Theories of Media Effects and Broadcasting

Theories of media effects are predominantly a product of the 20th century. While some isolated studies on the effects of newspapers emerged around the turn of the 20th century, most theories were developed and tested as broadcasting emerged and spread as the dominant form of mass media. Traditionally, scholars consider that the first theories of media effects were working with the powerful effects hypothesis. Briefly, the hypothesis held that mass media had relatively powerful effects in terms of forming and changing beliefs and that the audience was relatively passive in terms of processing messages and accepting them. These concepts became prominent after World War I, when the propaganda used by all sides was eventually seen as a negative phenomenon; Americans began to question whether mass media such as newspapers could be too powerful, convincing people to engage in risky foreign ventures that they might not have undertaken. Harold Lasswell was an influential early figure who also developed the well-known model of communication: “Who says what to whom in what channel with what effect?” He was the first to study propaganda techniques and thus greatly influenced the study of media in general. Other influential figures on the early powerful effects theories were Edward Bernays (considered the “father” of public relations), Gustave Le Bon (a French theorist of crowd psychology), and John Watson (an important figure in behaviorism).

While we may now overestimate the extent to which early scholars viewed the media as having powerful effects, developments in broadcasting began to raise questions along the lines that the media might be too powerful. The rise of Fascism and Communism both relied heavily on propaganda. Hitler used radio and film as key elements of his propaganda policy. For U.S. Americans, the apparently all-too-easy submission of masses of people to totalitarian ideologies brought up queasy feelings about the “dark side” of mass media, especially broadcasting. The famous case of Orson Welles's radio adaptation of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds, in which many Americans thought that a fictional account of an invasion from Mars was real, further heightened concerns. However, Hadley Cantril, in his study of the event—another milestone in mass communication research and one of the first to deal with broadcasting—showed that only a relatively small portion of people panicked; moreover, he was able to show that certain personality characteristics and other conditions predicted a panic reaction, which ran counter to the notion of powerful effects. However, it cannot be denied that developments in radio throughout the 1930s contributed to fears that broadcast mass media might have become too powerful. On the positive side, Franklin Roosevelt's use of radio in his fireside chats was an example of the use of broadcasting to unite people around important issues and causes.

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