The direct effects paradigm
Hypodermic needle: overview
• Sometimes also referred to, after Schramm, as
the Silver Bullet Model (1982), this is the idea
that the mass media are so powerful that they
can 'inject' their messages into the audience, or
that, like a magic bullet, they can be precisely
targeted at an audience, who irresistibly fall
down when hit by the bullet. In brief, it is the idea
that the makers of media messages can get us
to do whatever they want us to do.
• In that simple form, this is a view which has never been
seriously held by media theorists. It is really more of a
folk belief than a model, which crops up repeatedly in the
popular media whenever there is an unusual or
grotesque crime, which they can somehow link to
supposedly excessive media violence or sex and which
is then typically taken up by politicians who call for
greater control of media output.
• If it applies at all, then probably only in the rare
circumstances where all competing messages are
rigorously excluded, for example in a totalitarian state
where the media are centrally controlled.
Advertising and World War I propaganda
• The 'folk belief' in the Hypodermic Needle Model was fuelled initially
by the rapid growth of advertising from the late nineteenth century
on, coupled with the practice of political propaganda and
psychological warfare during World War I. Quite what was achieved
by either advertising or political propaganda is hard to say, but the
mere fact of their existence raised concern about the media's
potential for persuasion. Certainly, some of the propaganda
messages seem to have stuck, since many of us still believe today
that the Germans bayoneted babies and replaced the clappers of
church bells with the churches' own priests in 'plucky little Belgium',
though there is no evidence for that. Some of us still cherish the
belief that Britain, the 'land of the free', was fighting at the time for
other countries' 'right to self-determination', though we didn't seem
particularly keen to accord the right to the countries we controlled.
The Inter-War Years
• Later, as the ‘Press Barons' strengthened their hold on British
newspapers and made no secret of their belief that they could make
or break governments and set the political agenda, popular belief in
the irresistible power of the media steadily grew. It was fuelled also
by widespread concern, especially among élitist literary critics, but
amongst the middle and upper classes generally, about the
supposed threat to civilised values posed by the new mass popular
culture of radio, cinema and the newspapers.
• The radio broadcast of War of the Worlds seemed also to provide
very strong justification for these worries.
• Concern also grew about the supposed power of advertisers who
were known to be using the techniques of behaviourist psychology.
Watson, the founding father of behaviourism, having abandoned his
academic career in the '20s, worked in advertising, where he made
extravagant claims for the effectiveness of his techniques.
Political propaganda in European
dictatorships
• 1917 had seen the success of the Russian
Revolution, which was followed by the
marshalling of all the arts in support of
spreading the revolutionary message.
Lenin considered film in particular to be a
uniquely powerful propaganda medium
and, despite the financial privations during
the post-revolutionary period, considerable
resources were invested in film production.
• This period also saw the rise and eventual triumph of
fascism in Europe. This was believed by many to be due
to the powerful propaganda of the fascist parties,
especially of Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels had great
admiration for the propaganda of the Soviet Union,
especially for Eisenstein’s masterpiece Battleship
Potemkin. Though himself a fanatical opponent of
Bolshevism, Goebbels said admiringly of that film:
'Someone with no firm ideological convictions could be
turned into a Bolshevik by this film.' The film was
generally believed to be so powerful that members of the
German army were forbidden to see it even long before
the Nazis came to power and it was also banned in
Britain for many years.
• After the war, Speer, Hitler's armaments
minister, said at his trial for war crimes:
[Hitler's] was the first dictatorship in the present
period of modern technical development, a
dictatorship which made complete use of all
technical means for the domination of its own
country ... Through technical devices like the
radio and the loudspeaker, eighty million people
were deprived of independent thought. It was
thereby possible to subject them to the will of
one man.
Post-War and the present day
• With the development of television after World War II and
the very rapid increase in advertising, concern about the
'power' of the mass media continued to mount and we
find that conern constantly reflected in the popular press.
That concern underlies the frequent panics about media
power. In the popular press, Michael Ryan was reported
to have gone out and shot people at random in
Hungerford because he had watched Rambo videos, two
children were supposed to have abducted and murdered
Jamie Bulger because they had watched Child's Play.
After the 1992 General Election, The Sun announced 'It's
the Sun what won it' - a view echoed by the then
Conservative Party Treasurer, Lord McAlpine, and the
defeated Leader of the Opposition, Neil Kinnock.
Empiricist tradition: overview
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•
It probably wouldn't be correct to say that the researchers in the empiricist
(or empirical) tradition are empiricists in the strictest sense in which it is
used in philosophy. Their approach to the study of mass media effects is
close to what we might expect to be the methods of the natural sciences
(physics, chemistry, biology etc.). It is characterised by counting and
categorising audience members and by the attempted measurement of
direct effects of communication on those audiences.
These entirely practical concerns are what we might well expect from
university departments in the USA, where this tradition has been most
prominent. 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.
• The empiricist researchers were concerned to
find out as much as possible about media
audiences, in much the same terms as
advertisers today would seek information from,
say the National Readership Surveys: number of
people, age, sex, social status, occupation,
leisure and so on.
• By and large these data tended to be used to
support studies into the effectiveness of
communication, rules for mounting effective
campaigns and so on.
• Contemporary commentators on media research are
frequently dismissive of the 'scientific', experimental
methods often employed in early empiricist 'Effects
Research'. Whilst there is much to criticize in this
approach, the critics often unfairly overstate their case,
disregarding the methodological diversity which did exist
at the time. Such diversity was often forced upon the
researchers by the realization that their 'scientific',
‘positivistic' approach was based on a transmission
model of communication which conceives of a message
being sent from sender to receiver, disregarding
institutional, psychological, cultural and other factors
which contribute to any possible effects the media may
have.
Cultural effects: overview
• We are using the term 'cultural effects' here as shorthand
for the investigation of social, political and cultural
effects.
• Broadly speaking, those analysts who are concerned
with cultural effects fall into two camps:
• somewhat élitist literary critics who are distressed by the
spread of popular culture, which they see as diluting and
undermining the values enshrined in high culture
• Marxist critics whose 'critical' perspective derives from
the work of Karl Marx and from the Frankfurt School.
Their main concern is with the way that the mass media
are used to spread and legitimate the dominant ideology.
Uses and gratifications:
overview
• In the fairly early days of effects research,
it became apparent that the assumed
'hypodermic' effect was not borne out by
detailed investigation. A number of factors
appeared to operate to limit the effects of
the mass media.
• Katz and Lazarsfeld, for example, pointed
to the influence of group membership and
Hovland identified a variety of factors
ranging from group membership to the
audience's interest in the subject of the
message.
The active audience
• As a result of this evidence, attention began to turn from the
question of 'what the media do to the audience' to 'what the
audience do with the media'. Herta Herzog was one of the earliest
researchers in this area. She undertook (as part of Paul Lazarsfeld's
massive programme of research) to investigate what gratifications
radio listeners derived from daytime serials, quizzes and so on. Katz
summarises the starting point of this kind of research quite neatly:
• ... even the most potent of the mass media content cannot ordinarily
influence an individual who has 'no use' for it in the social and
psychological context in which he lives. The 'uses' approach
assumes that people's values, their interests, their associations,
their social rôles, are pre-potent, and that people selectively 'fashion'
what they see and hear to these interests (Katz (1959) in McQuail
(1971)
• Researchers in the uses and gratifications vein therefore
see the audience as active . It is part of the received
wisdom of media studies that audience members do
indeed actively make conscious and motivated choices
amongst the various media messages available.
• Like much of the research in the Empricist vein, the
American tradition of Uses and Gratfications research
has been located within a pluralist view of the mass
media. Within that context, especially where news
coverage is concerned, the conceptualization of the
media as the fourth estate is particularly significant.
Recent developments: overview
• Postmodernity
Many of the recent approaches to the mass
media are influenced, or at least informed
by, postmodernism.
Hovland
• Very important amongst these researchers was Carl Hovland of Yale
whose carefully controlled experiments were designed to test the
separate variables in the communication process. The main focus of
his research was persuasion. Many of the principles he established
are generally accepted today - one finds them being repeated, in
one form or another, by, for example, political spin doctors, PR
people, advertisers. However, it's worth bearing in mind that such
people are trying to sell their services and so may be making greater
claims for Hovland's principles than they deserve. Certainly, as
mentioned above, many contemporary critics would criticize the
unashamedly positivist approach adopted by Hovland, an approach
which implies that it is possible to discern general 'rules' for effective
and persuasive communication.
Lazarsfeld
• Paul Lazarsfeld was also a very important researcher who
contributed much to the development of empirical methods in the
social sciences during his work at the Columbia Bureau of Applied
Social Research. The most famous of the studies he conducted was
that into voting behaviour carried out in the 1940s and which led him
to develop the highly influential Two Step Flow Model of mass
communication.
• As a result of his research, Lazarsfeld concluded that the media
actually have quite limited effects on their audiences. This view of
the media is common to many of the researchers in the US.
Hovland, for example, whilst showing what variables can be altered
to make a communication more or less effective, also places
considerable emphasis on those factors, especially social factors
such as group membership, which limit the persuasiveness of the
message. Consequently, this view of the media is often referred to
as the 'limited effects' paradigm or tradition.
Limited effects
• In Towards a Sociology of Mass Communication (1971),
McQuail summarises some of the main findings of the
research which confirms this 'limited effects' view:
• 'persuasive mass communication is in general more
likely to reinforce the existing opinions of its audience
than it is to change its opinion' (from Klapper (1960))
• 'people tend to see and hear communications that are
favourable or congenial to their predispositions' (from
Berelson & Steiner (1964))
• 'people respond to persuasive communication in line
with their predispositions and change or resist change
accordingly' (from Berelson & Steiner (1964))
Consequently:
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•
•
•
•
•
•
'political campaigns tend to reach the politically interested and converted', as shown
for example in Lazarsfeld's research
'mass media campaigns against racial prejudice tend to be unsuccessful', as
demonstrated in Kendall and Woolf's analysis of reactions to anti-racist cartoons. The
cartoons featured Mr Biggott whose absurdly racist ideas were intended to discredit
bigotry. In fact 31% failed to recognise that Mr Biggott was racially prejudiced or that
the cartoons were intended to be anti-racist (Kendall & Wolff (1949) in Curran
(1990)).
'effects vary according to the prestige or evaluations attaching to the communication
source', as demonstrated by Hovland
'the more complete the monopoly of mass communication, the more likely it is that
opinion change in the desired direction will be achieved' - as in totalitarian societies,
such as Nazi Germany, for example
'the salience to the audience of the issues or subject matter will affect the likelihood of
influence: "mass communication can be effective in producing a shift on unfamiliar,
lightly felt, peripheral issues - those that do not much or are not tied to audience
predispositions"' (from Berelson and Steiner (1964)). This is also supported by the
recent research of Hügel et al, who confirm other studies' findings that media agendasetting effects are limited to unobtrusive issues. (Hügel et al (1989))
'the selection and interpretation of content by the audience is influenced by existing
opinions and interests and by group norms', as suggested by Hovland's research
'the structure of interpersonal relations in the audience mediates the flow of
communication content and limits and determines whatever effects occur', as
suggested by Katz and Lazarsfeld's research.
Powerful effects
• Schramm (1982) points to three powerful effects which the media
can exert and which are pointed to by the research of the Columbia
Bureau:
• the media can confer status on organisations, persons and policies.
As Schramm suggests, we probably work on the assumption that if
something really matters then it will be featured in the media; so, if it
is featured in the media, it must really matter;
• the media can enforce social norms to an extent. The media can
reaffirm social norms by exposing deviation from the norms to public
view - this connects with British research by Cohen into folk devils
and moral panics;
• the media can act as social narcotics; sometimes known as the
narcotising dysfunction, this means that because of the enormous
amount of information in the media, media consumers tend not to be
energised into social action, but rather drugged or narcotised into
inaction.
Violence and Delinquency
• As mentioned above, the empiricist vein of research in
the US was funded to a large extent by major
corporations concerned to investigate the influence of
their advertising and public relations and by political
parties which wished to devise the most effective
campaigns. Another important impetus came from the
government which responded to widespread public
concern about media (especially film and then, later,
television) portrayals of violence and their possible link
with juvenile delinquency. The nature of the assumed
links was then and continues to be unclear and
confused.
Klapper (1960) reduced the assumptions to
six basic forms:
Mass media messages containing the portrayal of
crimes and acts of violence can
• be generally damaging
• be directly imitated
• serve as a school of crime
• in specific circumstances cause otherwise
normal people to engage in criminal acts
• devalue human life
• serve as a safety valve for aggressive impulses
Cultural effects - Marxist approach
• The Marxist view is referred to by a variety
of terms. Fairly common are the terms
'critical' and 'radical'. In Britain and Europe
Marxist approaches to the mass media
and, more generally, to culture as a whole
('cultural studies') were dominant from the
mid '60s to the mid 80s (approximately).
Although less dominant now, Marxism still
colours much media research.
• Generally, the Marxian view of media influence depends on an
understanding and elaboration of the operation of the notion of
ideology. Although perhaps in everyday parlance, the term 'ideology'
refers to a set of (especially 'political') beliefs and values which is not
necessarily related to any particular social class (for example:
Marxist ideology, Anglican ideology, proletarian ideology,
Conservative ideology, socialist ideology, free market ideology), in
the Marxian literature the term is generally used in an entirely
negative sense to refer to a supposedly dominant ideology which
supports the interests of the dominant class. Various thinkers
(Mannheim, for example) have examined ideology from a classneutral point of view, but it is this crucial notion of domination which
is central to the Marxian understanding of ideology. Ideology is seen
as a tool of the dominant classes, misleading and illusory.
The Frankfurt School
• An important source of the left-wing critique of mass culture is the
Frankfurt School. Developing Marx's view that the dominant class in
society not only owns the means of material production, but also
controls the production of the society's dominant ideas and values
(dominant ideology), the ‘critical theorists’ of the Frankfurt School
examined the industrialisation of mass-produced culture and
examined the economic imperatives behind what they dubbed the
'culture industries'. They saw the products of the culture industries
as providing the ideological legitimation of existing capitalist
societies and were the first to recognise the importance of the
culture industries as significant agents of socialisation. Thus, what is
sometimes referred to as 'vulgar Marxism' was developed by the
Frankfurt School theorists beyond its rather mechanistic materialism
and economic determinism to include consideration of culture as a
vehicle of ideology, as well as a critique of science and technology
as tools of social domination within capitalism.
Cultural effects - literary criticism
• This is generally a deeply pessimistic view of the
supposed triviality of mass culture, which is seen
as irredeemably commercial, and the pernicious
effects of media systems, which are seen as
permeated by lies and deceit. It dates back at
least as far as Matthew Arnold's warnings in
Culture and Anarchy of 1869 of the extension of
'philistine culture', which he considered to be
spreading with the development of literacy and
democracy.
The Leavisites
• Perhaps the strongest attack among British critics who
present this view of mass culture are the 1930s to 1960s
literary critics, Frank and Queenie Leavis. They saw the
only salvation from mass culture as lying in the 'Great
Tradition' of Shakespeare, Donne, Wordsworth, Keats
and so on. Contemporary America seemed to fill Frank
Leavis with dread:
“.... the vision of our imminent tomorrow in today's America:
the energy, the triumphant technology, the productivity,
the high standard of living and the life-impoverishment the human emptiness, emptiness craving alcohol - of
one kind or another.” Leavis FR (1962)