Paul Felix Lazarsfeld
 One of the forefathers of communications discipline
 Founder of the Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR) at Colombia University
 Founded the limited effects paradigm in media studies
 The article we will discuss is a canonical text in media studies
 It is one of the earliest and most prominent writings that have questioned the social functions of mass media
The Central question dealt with in Lazarsfeld and Merton’s article
 Is the social role of mass media overestimated?
 What role can be assigned to the mass media by virtue of the fact that they exist?
 Do mass media challenge the status quo?
 Do mass media reaffirm the existing power relations and conjuncture?
Things to be considered in answering these questions
 Mass media reach enormous audiences
 Approximately forty-five million Americans attend the movies every week
 Daily newspaper circulation is about fifty-four million
 Forty-six million American homes have TV sets
 Average American watches TV for three hours a day
 These are information with reference to 1950’s America
 These are only supply and consumption figures
 We cannot look at these and argue that media does or does not have a significant effect
 These figures only tell us what people do
 They don’t tell us anything about the social and psychological impact of the media (p.19)
The Mass media have cheated reformers of the fruits of their victories (pp. 19-20)
 Today, people have more leisure time
 Today, people have more access to information
 Today, people have more access to cultural heritage
 What do people do with these privileges?
 The article argues that they consume mass media and become lost in its entertaining mass culture
 The article suggests that this alone is enough to argue that mass media does not have the profound affect on our societies
as it is widely supposed
Some social functions of the media
 The status conferral function
 The mass media confer status on public issues, persons, organizations and social movements
 The enforcement of social norms
 The mass media enforce the dominant values and social norms that are already existent
 The narcotizing dysfunction
 Mass media produce politically apathetic and inert masses of population
The status conferral function of mass media
 When public figures or social policies receive attention in mass media their social standing raises.
 In this way, the media confer status to people, organizations, and policies
 Mass media bestow prestige and enhance the authority of individuals and groups by legitimizing their status
 Recognition by news reels, testifies that one is important, that one is singled out from the large anonymous masses, that
one’s opinions and behavior is significant enough to require public notice
 People who are first made prominent by receiving media attention then become used to create examples and to persuade
masses
 Advertising of testimonials to a certain product by ‘prominent people’
 Why are celebrities like Hulya Avsar, Cindy Crawford, Kenan Isik used in the advertisements of products?
 Why do political parties try to include celebrities into their numbers?
The enforcement of social norms
 The mass media may initiate organized social action by exposing conditions which are at variance with public moralities
 While certain norms values and practices that are inconvenient in a society may go unnoticed or unattended, once they
become public, become openly contested.
The narcotizing dysfunction
 It is argued that mass media create large mass populations that are politically apathetic and inert
 The masses engage with mass media on very high levels, however, this engagement rather than promoting organized
social action creates a superficial concern
 As an increasing time is devoted to reading, watching and listening, a decreasing share is available for social action
(p.22)
 The reader comes to mistake knowing about problems of the day for doing something about them
 Mass media is so effective in doing this that the addict does not even recognize his/her malady
 It may be true that mass media have lifted the level of information of large populations however, this usually results in
the transformation of energy from active participation to passive knowledge
The structure of ownership and operation
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The social effects of media vary as the system of ownership and control varies
It is not the reader or the viewer that supports media institutions. It is the advertising revenues.
Big businesses finance the production and distribution of mass media. Thus, he who pays the piper generally calls the
tune
 In the USA this may mean studying financial conglomerates
 In Britain, it might mean studying the government
 What about Turkey?
Social conformism
 Since mass media are supported by great business concerns, the media contribute to the maintenance of that system
 This is not seen only in advertisings but also in films, news, entertainment etc…
 Media do this both by emphasizing certain issues and leaving others out
 In this sense, mass media do not work towards a change but rather they reaffirm the status quo
 Mass media do not promote critical thought but rather unthinking allegiance
 Social objectives always loose when they clash with economic concerns/gains
Impact upon popular taste
 An important part of media is devoted to entertainment, this requires that the impact of mass media upon popular taste be
studies
 The article argues that aesthetic taste has become much poorer with mass media
 Now the arts have become mass produced and mass distributed. So educated or uneducated everyone has access to ‘high’
arts. This has lowered the value of art
 How has mass media contributed to this?
 Has mass media robbed the intellectual and the artistic elite of the art forms which might otherwise have been accessible
to the?
 Do mass audiences exert pressure upon creative individuals to produce art that caters to mass tastes?
 Think about the flourishing of Turkish pop music?
 Can media executives do anything about this by broadcasting only ‘high’ arts?
 Think about TRT for instance. It always broadcasts educating and high art forms.
 It used to be forbidden to listen write arabesk songs
 Consequently, Hakki Bulut was asked to compose ‘acisiz arabesk’ songs
 TRT would only broadcast high art forms and never Turkish folk music
 The article argues that in these cases, people simply stop consuming.
Propaganda for social objectives
 In order for mass media function as an effective tool for propaganda there are three conditions.
 Monopolisation
 Canalisation
 Supplementation
 At least one or more of these conditions must be satisfied
Monopolisation
 Monopolisation of the mass media occurs in the absence of counterpropaganda
 For example, the use of mass media by the Nazis
 I times of war the states monopolise media
Canalisation
 Advertising or propaganda usually attempts to canalise pre-existing behaviour patterns or attitudes
 It seldom seeks to instil new attitudes
 For Americans who have been socialised in the use of a toothbrush, it makes relatively little difference which brand of
toothbrush they use
 People might be canalised to by one brand of car or the other, but they can’t be convinced not to use cars at all
Supplementation
 Mass media can be an effective tool of propaganda if it functions as supplementation or is supplemented by face-to-face
contacts
 This argument is similar to Lazarsfeld’s two-step-flow model of communication
 Nazism did not attain hegemony just by capturing the mass media. Mass media played a supplementary role in its incline.
It supplemented the use of organised violence.
Conclusion
 Mass media prove most effective when
 they operate in a situation of monopoly
 The objective is one of canalising rather than modifying
 They operate in conjunction with face to face contacts
 In contemporary societies (capitalism), these three criteria are achieved only for the sake of reproducing the existing
system
 Thus, the very conditions which make for the maximum effectiveness of the mass media of communication operate
toward maintenance of the going social and cultural structure rather than toward its change.
The empirical communication research(paradigm) is characterized by
 counting and categorizing audience members and
 by the attempted measurement of direct effects of communication on those audiences.
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This form of research is mainly affiliated with USA
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University research in the States has long been funded by business and by political parties who have
given the university departments quite specific briefs.
The sponsors of such research are quite naturally concerned to know whether they are fully
exploiting the market or whether their newspapers, movies, TV programmes are failing to exploit
some sectors; whether their party propaganda really is encouraging the electorate to vote for them;
whether their advertising really is getting more people to eat their beans and so on.
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In the history of media studies, there has been a shift from strong effects to limited effects
paradigms and then back to strong effects.
 This shift from strong to weak has been initiated by the empiricist paradigm (lazarsfeld)
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It might be worth considering whether the Americans' definition of effects wasn't limited in the
first place.
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If you're looking for measurable effects, you're likely to be looking for something easily
measurable in the short term, whereas strong effects may only be apparent over the long term.
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the American tradition of research has been located within a pluralist view of the mass media.
Because the American research employed a very simple view of society's structure and of the nature
of media messages, the media were generally seen as being reflective of society in a fairly
unproblematic way.
In a democracy, it was assumed, all social groups have equal access to media output; consequently,
no group is in danger of having its interests disregarded or under-represented.
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