Audiences: Reception and Injection Models

Propaganda Analysis and the Hypodermic Needle Model

Studies of audiences began in the arena of propaganda analysis, a project of mid-20th-century media research and behaviorism, which seeks to understand human thoughts and actions as innate responses to stimuli. These early researchers did not place great emphasis on gender in their studies. Nonetheless, early mass-media researchers laid the groundwork for future audience researchers.

The hypodermic needle, or magic bullet, model of communication implies that the mass media inject or insert meanings into the audience members' consciousness. In this model, the viewing, listening, or reading publics all experience the information communicated (such as a radio program, a television show, a book, or a magazine article) in the same way. This model of audience behavior took hold in the period of time after World War I, as researchers were interested in analyzing how effective mass [Page 10]media's propaganda efforts were. These researchers, often funded by the U.S. government, were interested in how fascist and communist powers used media to indoctrinate their citizens.

Leading the field of propaganda research, Harold Lasswell made a case for the hypodermic needle model in his analysis of mass-media propaganda in the World War I, Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927). In this book, Lasswell asserted that mass communication during the war period could be characterized as national governments sending messages to an audience whose response was uniform. Lasswell's understanding of the one-way flow of communications is summed up in his distillation of how to break down all communication into a number of universal elements: “Who says what to whom in what channel with what effect?”

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