Vroons 2005

02_057541_Vroons (JB-D) 22/9/05 1:28 pm Page 495
GAZETTE: THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR COMMUNICATION STUDIES

COPYRIGHT © 2005 SAGE PUBLICATIONS
LONDON, THOUSAND OAKS & NEW DELHI 0016-5492 VOL 67(6): 495–522
DOI: 10.1177/0016549205057541
www.sagepublications.com
COMMUNICATION STUDIES IN EUROPE

A Sketch of the Situation around 1955
Erik Vroons
Abstract / There is an abundance of literature published on the history of communication studies

in Europe, in a number of countries and taking various approaches. However, more pan-European
initiatives to take stock of earlier activities in the field are still seriously lacking, and even when
recognized as such, almost without exception focus on the development of the field since the 1960s.
In this article, Gazette’s 50th anniversary is embraced as an opportunity to investigate the still
incomplete genealogy of the European institutionalization of research in the field of communication.
In line with this journal’s raison d’etre, existing literature about the activities in the field during
the 1950s is made available to a wider audience.
Keywords / 1950s / communication studies / Europe / founding fathers / Gazette / history /

institutionalization / overview / press research
Introduction
In 1955, as some were still trying to find their way in the dark, others were
already recognizing and reaching out to each other in the dawn of a new and
synthesizing social discipline: communication research. While in the previous
30 years or so, an increasing number of scholars in the US had become inter-
ested in studying its processes and effects, the word ‘communication’ was still
rarely used in European academic circuits. There, a field of interest that has
since grown into such an extraordinarily lively area of research and theory was
still floundering.1
After the end of the Second World War, while Europe was in ruins and
nursing its wounds, great psychological interest in the functioning of the media
and their potential cultivating effects continued to develop in the US, where a
positivistic-empirical approach of the mass media of communication was
becoming institutionalized in those areas where academic, commercial and
political interests converged into applied social research. However, although the
studies were concerned with the issues of effect, the organizing commitment
that clearly asserted itself in the US postwar period was more aimed at theory
development. Thus, the shared historical commitment to pursue scientific
understanding of mass communication’s practical and policy aspects was trans-
formed by the achieved professionalism of social scientists into pursuits defined
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496 GAZETTE VOL. 67 NO. 6
by the conduct of research within the questions and canons of established social
science disciplines (Glander, 2000).
According to Everette E. Dennis (1988), there was little time for reflection
during the formative years of communication research. Spurred on by indus-
trial development, wartime propaganda efforts and the advent of high
technology, communication research was an enterprise on the move, looking for
new research questions, seeking funds, and with scholars eager to address the
great social questions. Only in the late 1970s, with the questioning of the utility
and value of the prevailing research traditions (e.g. Gitlin, 1978), were the roots
of communication studies themselves brought into focus.
Between 1984 and 1994, a series of seminars on the history of mass
communication research was organized at the Freedom Forum Media Studies
Centre (then called the Gannett Centre for Media Studies) at Columbia
University in New York, with the idea that ‘some then-living pioneers of the field
would be paired with contemporary critics to inquire into the purpose, meaning,
and impact of various research ventures now deemed as important to the building
of the field’ (Dennis, 1996: x). By questioning the funding of research projects
and the intentions of the field’s founders to concentrate on particular problems,
this ‘history-of-research-debate’ was approached from a broad perspective, and
the discussion included scholars, industry researchers and media professionals.
Taking a broad perspective, indeed – but the main focus of these seminars
was on the history of American academic communication research. For what
else?! Despite the role of Lazarsfeld and the involvement of other European
scholars such as Adorno, Lowenthal and Lewin, at its core, communication
research was an almost exclusively American enterprise. It was in the US that
the men so extensively referred to as the ‘founding fathers’ of the field pub-
lished their first academic works: activities that could be specifically defined as
research in ‘mass communications’ (see Delia, 1987).2 Before anywhere else, it
was in the US that these studies were institutionalized as a discipline among
others – sociology, social psychology, political studies and economics – and that
the methods of these more ‘traditional’ academics were fruitfully implemented
in the study of mass media. Although the American tradition of communication
research was influenced by pre-war contributions of European intellectuals, the
new technological applications of the media as such – all with their own
concerns – were first introduced and widely implemented in the US.
Indeed, both the media and these studies of communications coming from
America found their way further afield and proved to be influential, but what
was studying communications like in other parts of the world during the 1950s?
It is not the aim here to question the legitimacy of the plethora of monographs
published on the American history of media education and the studies of mass
communications.3 Instead, motivated by the organization of the First European
Communication Conference in Amsterdam (24–6 November 2005; see
www.ecc2005.nl/), in this article an effort is made that could add another
chapter to the genealogy of the field of interest by sketching the situation of
communication studies as it was in Europe 50 years ago. Besides the introduc-
tion of Gazette in 1955, what other activities can be recognized in this field at
that time, and who can be named as their originators?

VROONS: COMMUNICATION STUDIES IN EUROPE AROUND 1955 497
Foundation of Gazette and the International Association of

the Studies of the Press
Introduced, in 1955, as the ‘international professional periodical for the science
of the press’, Gazette was the very first journal with this interest in mind to be
published in Europe. Although it was acknowledged that the term ‘science of
the press’ had greatly outgrown its original and far too restricted meaning, it
was decided to retain this name because the study of the daily and periodical
press was still considered to be of prime importance and could provide a reliable
basis for the treatment of related subjects of social study.4 In connection to other
mass media such as radio, television and film, the editors particularly focused
on public opinion, propaganda and advertising. Founded to promote the inter-
national exchange of study and inform institutes and individual researchers of
the latest results and the methods used, Gazette also addressed itself to editors,
journalists, politicians, economists, advertising experts and ‘to all whose pro-
fession is connected with the extensive field of public relations’.5
Besides publishing up-to-date articles expressing the state of the art,
bibliographies formed an essential element in the first years of Gazette. Books
and articles printed in other periodicals were systematically collected to support
the completeness of the field. Retrospective summaries of literature and other
periodicals were also published from time to time in order to lead the reader’s
attention to older important works that had passed practically unnoticed
outside their own language region. Above all, Gazette wanted to be a forum for
the exchange of ideas on an international basis in order to provide an oppor-
tunity for the comparison of different conceptions in the field.6
When naming a few key figures in relation to Gazette, Kurt Baschwitz
should be mentioned first as one of its main initiators. As founder and basi-
cally only representative of the first Dutch Institute for the Science of the
Press in 1948, he was practically forced to have a certain outward focus, but
the fact that already in April 1951 he was helping to organize an inter-
national conference in Bad Godesberg (the centre for the representatives of
the German newspaper business at the time) also illustrates Baschwitz’s
mentality towards an international approach (Anschlag, 1990). Representa-
tives from different European countries had been invited to gather and
debate a possible stretch of the study’s interests towards other (electronic)
media and to consider public opinion and propaganda as problematic issues,
but on the agenda was also the foundation of organizational and institutional
bases for this discipline.
To give special emphasis to these concerns, the conference in Bad
Godesberg was concluded with the launch of the Internationalen Gesellschaft
für Publizistik, an international association for the field of study. The realiza-
tion of such an association would be in the hands of Folke Dahl (from Sweden),
Karl Weber (Switzerland) and Kurt Baschwitz, with Munster as the German
centre, and Amsterdam the centre of the international association for the studies
of ‘publicistics’.7
The founding of Gazette8 is the eventual result of the initiatives taken
during this international meeting of university lecturers, leading to a

unanimous decision on the part of the delegates from France, Great Britain,
Western Germany, Austria, Belgium and the US to invite the Press Institute
(hosted by the University of Amsterdam) to act as international editorial centre,
as it continues to be to this day. Besides the lecturers, a few affiliated
journalists and representatives of the Bonner Bundestagausschuss, a German
governmental committee for press, broadcasting and film, also took part in this
conference. Walter Hagemann should be named specifically here, for already in
1948 it was under his directorship that the Press Institute at Munster was
pleading for the publication of a professional periodical.
In the following year (May 1952), a group of around 20 scientists gathered
for a second international conference, this time organized by the Institut für
Publizistik at the University of Munster. Led by Walter Hagemann, this con-
ference was themed on ‘contributions of the studies of the press supporting the
process of European integration’. The main concerns debated were the import-
ance of promoting the idea of European togetherness on the one hand, and
avoiding the negative dimensions of propaganda on the other. Nevertheless, the
collective determination at this meeting was to put effort into bringing all
representatives of the field together.9
In line with these ideas, a group of European researchers gathered with
representatives from the US at a third annual conference in Amsterdam in
1953, organized by Kurt Baschwitz.10 Illustrating the still ambivalent position
of the academics towards the profession of journalism, here the focus was on
the education of journalists, both in and outside the university. Were journal-
ists not expected to be free reporters, independent and not institutionalized?
On the other hand, in what other way could the standards of journalism be
guaranteed? While this so-called journalistic ‘egg-dance’ (Hemels, 1972) con-
tinued, it was at least thought necessary to tighten the international relation-
ships within the field – directed by Baschwitz from his Institute in Amsterdam
– and work closely with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO).
The UNESCO Clearing House of the Department of Mass Communication
existed to collect, analyse and disseminate information, and to stimulate the
exchange of information on the use of the press, film, radio and allied media
for educational, scientific and cultural purposes. To this end, the Clearing
House collaborated with international organizations and research centres, and
with individual experts in the field of communication. Indeed, in 1956,
UNESCO organized an international expert meeting in Paris, discussing the
role of universities as providers of facilities for education and training in
journalism. Among other things, it was stated that ‘it is recommended that
universities and other educational institutions undertake the promotion of
research into problems of the press and other media of mass communication’
and also that ‘schools of journalism and other institutions concerned with pro-
fessional training should make available, upon request and on as wide a scale
as possible, the fruits of their experience, research results and publications’.
The meeting further stressed the importance of cooperation between the
industry and the educational institutions in the case of journalism.11
In 1954, no annual international conference was organized. However, the

energy initiated in previous meetings eventually resulted in the foundation of

Gazette in 1955, edited by Folke Dahl and Kurt Baschwitz.12
‘Publizistik’13
While closely related to the development of Gazette, Walter Hagemann started
to get involved in a crisis about the future of the science of the press in his home
country. Around 1955, a paradigmatic discussion about the framing of the field
was going on in Germany.14 It was the economist Karl Bücher who had intro-
duced the science of the press in Germany by founding its first Institut für
Zeitungskunde at the University of Leipzig in 1916, but although German
newspaper studies (Zeitungswissenschaft) had already developed into a broader
interest in the 1930s, the wounds of Nazism were still fresh at the beginning of
the 1950s, and all the contributions to the science of the press before 1933 had
been smothered. There was a great need to move forward and rebuild the
studies without the political connotations the field had with the past, a need to
focus on current affairs and appreciate information as communal knowledge.
A shared concern about the possible threat of Communism was another
motivation that could lead to the building of a new and successful platform for
these studies, it was thought.15
Renaming the studies of the press with the broader term ‘Publizistik’ – a
change of terminology that can be compared with the American use of the more
neutral sounding ‘mass communication’ instead of the more politically associ-
ated word ‘propaganda’ – could also lead to new areas of research that would
include both a broader sense of media and methods for study. With these
expectations in mind, just a few weeks before the official launch of Gazette, the
fourth conference of the International Association of the Studies of the Press
was organized by Professor Emil Dovifat in March 1955. The main topics of
discussion during this conference at the Institut für Publizistik (hosted by the
Free University of Berlin) – responsibilities of the press, security of free speech
and the possible downsides of opinion forming – all express a specific interest
in the potentially negative sides of political power.
Although not in the way Marshall McLuhan would later, in the 1960s,
declare that ‘the medium is the message’, and still with print as the almost
exclusive medium of interest, it was with the introduction of the electronic
media – radio in particular – that an academic awareness had been triggered
to formulate a rephrasing of the studies in the 1920s. Karl Jaeger (1926) coined
the term ‘Publizistik’ to replace the phrase Zeitungswissenschaft, indicating
awareness that instead of the newspaper/magazine as medium it was the
message that should be recognized as the key element of interest. Eventually,
this rephrasing would itself become a key element in the redefining of the
studies during the postwar years.
After the Second World War, the main institutes offering serious pro-
grammes in the field of the science of the press in Germany were the University
of Munich (Karl d’Ester), the University of Munster (Walter Hagemann) and
the aforementioned Free University of Berlin (Emil Dovifat).16 In Hamburg,
instead of reopening the department dealing with the studies of the press, the

Hans Bredow Institute for Radio and Television was established in 1950. Two
years after the birth of this institute, initiated by Dr Kurt Wagenführ, Gerhard
Maletzke got assigned to Studies of Broadcasting. The Institute also published
its own periodical, Rundfunk und Fernsehen (from 1951).17
In Munich, Karl d’Ester decided to reject the phrase ‘Publizistik’, but while
a debate about this position was going on, it was also widely agreed on that a
strict framing strategy for this type of study would be the best tactic to be taken
seriously and respected as an objective research programme. Instead of a
possible approach to sociology and its empirical research, the main concern was
to strengthen relationships with other institutes and create a national platform
in the field of research.18 Ironically, it was to be the sociologically trained Henk
Prakke from the Netherlands who helped to establish the German Association
for ‘Publizistik’ in Munster. As mentioned before, it was already agreed on, at
the international conference in Godesberg in 1951, that such an association
should be developed. But due to the paradigmatic struggle in Germany this
Association was not officially founded until 1962, seven years after the first
edition of Gazette, and six years after the birth of the journal Publizistik.
After a career at the Institute of Sociology, Groningen, Henk Prakke
became director of the Munster Institute für Publizistik in 1960. As the
successor of Walter Hagemann, Prakke strongly believed in the importance of
denying the existence of any borders that could possibly limit people and their
ideas. By pleading for a stronger cultural orientation, the use of social scientific
methods and the introduction of American literature, he not only changed the
course of the Munster Institute, but also sought to readjust the definition of
‘Publizistik’ as a discipline (Schütz, 2000). His motto, panta rhei (everything
flows), possibly explains his motivation to come to Germany in the first place,
in a time when close relations with this country were still mostly passive and
evasive. In 1957, Henk Prakke published his key work on communication in
our society, but it remains unclear what exactly he defined as the process of
communication here. Only in the 1960s would he come to a more formal theory
of this.19
Belgium and the Netherlands
Belgium
Kurt Baschwitz, Walter Hagemann and Henk Prakke: professors, academic
publishers, and active sources of inspiration for the development of inter-
national relations within the field of communication studies in the 1950s.
Basically, the same can be said about Nabor (Urbain) DeVolder, being the
pioneer and driving force behind the science of the press in Flanders and closely
related to the others mentioned before.20 In 1946, after years of debate, it was
DeVolder who took the initiative for the founding of an institute at the
University of Louvain. According to van Pelt (2000), the Norbertine Father
Emiel Valvekens had already made an earlier attempt in 1933 to create an
institute to raise the level of journalism in Flanders, but the threat of Nazism
eventually caused the delay. Since Louvain had a bilingual university at the

time, teaching in both French and Dutch, it was decided that the studies of the
press at its School for Political and Social Sciences should be offered in both
languages. While DeVolder was leading the Dutch section, Professor J. Vieujean
would take care of the teachings in French.
However, not long after being set up, the two courses went their separate
ways: at the French side of the university, a Section Spéciale des Techniques de
Diffusion et Relations Publiques was introduced in 1957.21 Already, around
1945, Roger Clausse had made a beginning with the studies of media and com-
munication at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in French – but a similar course
in Dutch at this institute would not be introduced before the middle of the
1960s. Meanwhile, DeVolder had found like-minded spirits in his Louvain
colleague Antoon Breyne and also in Theo Luykx, who had been leading the
studies in Ghent since 1951.22 The public function of journalism and its ethical
premises should be at the aim of research, they agreed. Propaganda and mass
manipulation in the light of Communism had been another theme of concern
shared worldwide at the time, as it was in Flanders. Like Prakke, DeVolder had
also had a relatively early introduction to the American literature published on
the studies of mass communications.
The Netherlands
In 1955, the Dutch Institute for the Science of the Press in Amsterdam had
been commissioned by the World Association for Public Opinion Research
(WAPOR) to compose a public opinion poll index covering the period
1947–51.23 Constituted in 1948 and led by Kurt Baschwitz, as mentioned
before, this first Dutch Institute introduced the science of the press within the
Faculty of Political and Social Sciences. It was not a main course, however, but
designed to support other studies at the so-called ‘seventh faculty’ of the
University of Amsterdam. The university was not interested in the education of
journalists as such, but appreciated the potential of communication theoretical
understanding to add to the already existing faculties of knowledge. According
to Goudsblom et al. (1998), a guiding principle of this ‘seventh faculty’ was to
create an elite ‘that should be capable to give actual shape and content’ to the
liberation force after the Second World War; a faculty that was aimed at sup-
porting a type of education that could lead to the social rebuilding of the
country, ‘with a potential employment in government, or possibly even
journalism’.24
Two years before succeeding Kurt Baschwitz in Amsterdam in 1958,
Professor Maarten Rooij published his now classic work about the social-
economic position of the industry of the press in the Netherlands, Het
Dagbladbedrijf in Nederland (Rooij, 1956). However, compared to Baschwitz,
he acknowledged to have a weaker background in this field of studies and
therefore Rooij decided to invite Maarten Schneider as a teacher in ‘history of
press, propaganda and public opinion’.25 They were of similar stature, but for
practical reasons – only one could lead the institute and his name came first in
the alphabet – Rooij was elected new Chair of the Institute, instead of Schneider
(Hemels, 1993).26

In Nijmegen, a year before the foundation of the Dutch Institute for the
Science of the Press, a course in journalism was started in 1947, but did not
form part of the official university programme. Instead, the Catholic University
of Nijmegen intended that it should be a complement to a special university
education for a possible career in journalism. In the Department of Social and
Political Sciences, a special two-year programme was outlined for future jour-
nalists, with Leo Schlichting as one of its first teachers and main initiators. In
1948, it was the journalist Hans Hermans who was named reader in the science
of the press at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences there, but after his
sudden departure, two years later, it was Schlichting who eventually found
himself charged by the University of Nijmegen with ‘lecturing publicistics, for
as long as it was not officially labelled’. In contrast with his colleagues in
Amsterdam, Schlichting – also closely related to the academics in Flanders and
Germany – decided to remain loyal to the terminology of ‘publicistics’.27
France
Journalistic training and newspaper science were covered by separate insti-
tutions in France, although no doctrinal distinction could be drawn between
the two. At least it can be said that the profession of journalism itself has
close links with both fields. The council of the Institut Français de Presse
(IFP), a scientific research and teaching institute of the University of Paris
founded in 1953 (with its headquarters at the Fondation Nationale des
Sciences Politiques) consisted of both representatives of the university and of
the press, in equal numbers. This bipartisan structure, exemplifying the co-
operation essential to both, was institutionalized in 1935 and eventually won
general acceptance in the postwar period. The IFP’s main objectives were to
assemble data and to provide a channel for cooperation between the various
branches of university study involved. Newspapers, to whose generosity the
institute owed the major part of its funds, realized that such research helped to
maintain the rightful position of the press as one of the most important factors
in the life of nations.
Although they were not all focused on academic research, the following
French institutes can be named as being involved in journalism at the time:
Ecole Supérieure de Journalisme and Centre de Formation des Journalistes in
Paris, Ecole Supérieure de Journalisme in Lille and Centre International
d’Enseignement Supérieure du Journalisme in Strasbourg (founded in 1956).28
The main interests of study at these institutes during the 1950s, such as public
opinion, the professionalism of journalism and the press industry, and the rise
of electronic media (radio and television) in relation to its audience, were also
the dominant themes in articles contributed by French scholars to a variety of
periodicals.29
Although regularly teaching classes on the technological society and pro-
paganda, Bordeaux-based Jacques Ellul was never directly involved in the
establishment of the study of mass communications. However, he is mentioned
here as an influential publisher of literature contributing to this field of interest.
While Ellul’s The Technological Society appeared in 1954, one of the main

French contributors to the development of communication studies was

Fernand Terrou.30 Besides founding the science of the press at the Sorbonne
University, Terrou was also president of the Conseil Français des Sciences de
l’Information, a governmental body concerned with research into mass
communications.
Meanwhile, academics of other institutes also developed an interest in the
electronic media (Méadel, 2001). Associating with (psycho-)sociologists,
linguists,31 journalists and other people involved in the media, the Centre
d’Etudes de la Radio-Télévision – established in 1948 under Jean Tardieu and
Roger Blin – was one of the main institutes studying the fundamental aspects
of both radio and television. Initiated by the French Broadcasting and
Television Corporation, this institute served as a ‘forum’ for the exchange of
ideas on the functions and development of broadcasting. Moreover, it was a
‘training centre’ providing specialized instruction in the techniques of com-
munication by means of radio and television, and also a ‘laboratory’ where
teams of research workers studied clearly defined problems with an aim to put
their findings into practice in the planning/production of broadcasts.
Also, just to name one example of research activities and interests in the
area of information and communication in those days: in a survey commis-
sioned by UNESCO and Radio-Télévision France (RTF), Joffre Dumazedier
questioned the collective reception and possible cultural effects of television.
And as is asked still to this day, one of the concluding questions of this survey
was: What is the producers’ interest in these surveys, if they do not seem to
value the results in ways that might have been expected, based on the outcome
of these surveys (Dumazedier et al., 1955)?
All this being said, while Robert Escarpit – professor in literature from
Bordeaux – continued to lobby modestly for a study in mass media communi-
cations, it was not before 1972 that the Comité (Société, since 1974) Français
pour les Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication (SIC) would be
created on the initiative of Roland Barthes, Jean Myriat and Escarpit (see
Devèze, 2001).
Switzerland and Austria

Switzerland
In what was believed to be the one-way street of the message, symptomatic of
most European countries in the years running up to the Second World War, it
was felt necessary in Switzerland to use scientific methods in order to uplift
the moral and objective skills of journalists. During the so-called ‘pre-
institutionalized’ period (Saxer, 2005), while neglecting the public’s abilities to
be critical, this scientific concern for journalism was coined by two key figures:
Oskar Wettstein, organizing research of the press in Zurich in the first decades
of the 20th century, and Michael Bühler doing something similar, but more
focused on the practical education of journalists, in Bern. Around 1930,
Wettstein resigned from his university activities in order to continue a political
career, but found a capable substitute in Karl Weber. Indeed, Weber proved to

be a significant force in the prelude to a science of the press in Switzerland

(Meier, 2005: 125–36).
Following in the footsteps of these founders, Siegfried Frey can be named
as the most influential Swiss scholar in the field during the 1950s. Coming from
the Swiss Press Agency, he was involved in the University of Zurich, continu-
ing Karl Weber’s foundational work in journalism, and the University of Bern.
Besides having careers in both journalism and politics, Frey was announced in
Gazette (1956) as one of its main contributors, and also published in Publizistik
at the time. Continuing the credo ‘truth and objectivity’, his publications mainly
aimed at a traditional, historical understanding of the press and, as such, did
not so much contribute to a broader (theoretical) sense of media studies. An
approach more inclined towards the Anglo-American ‘communication research’
would only be established in Switzerland after his death, in the mid-1960s
(Meier, 2005: 137). Besides Professor Frey, there was Jacques Bourquin
lecturing at the School of Social and Political Sciences in Lausanne on mass
communication in modern society since 1951.
Meanwhile, in Bulletin (1956), a Swiss periodical for the Association of
Newspaper Publishers, some articles were dealing with the concern of the
possible competition of television and the questionable quality of its commer-
cials. In the first issue of Gazette, a series of Swiss dissertations on the press in
the period 1945–53 was published. Honouring the different national languages,
it included the following titles: Della Responsabilità civile in material di stampa
(Gianni Bolzani, 1953), Considérations sur la formation de l’opinion par la
presse, le cinéma, la radio et la télévision (Jaques Bourquin, 1951), and Die
Schranken der Pressefreiheit (Alfred Ernst, 1945).32
At the time, the International Press Institute (IPI) was based in Zurich. In
1955, it had brought out a series of publications on the problems connected
with the reporting of international news. Only by having access to an un-
obstructed flow of news, the IPI’s founders believed, could human beings in
various parts of the world ever hope to arrive at the mutual understanding
essential to peace. However, Daudt (1955) had objected to IPI research for
merely asking journalists about their opinion on the state of journalism. He
criticized the IPI for making too little use of the research methods developed
by the social sciences and also for neglecting the role of the reader in this.33
Austria
In Austria, the peculiarities of the media and journalism must be understood
within the context of the country’s political development after 1945. Accord-
ing to Dorer (2003) the social partnership, which sought to contain societal and
political conflicts, has had a tremendous effect on the nature of the media in
this country. With the Austrian government dictating a non-inquisitive
approach in its media policy, journalists and intellectuals were not encouraged
to be critical, reflective and objective. Wishing to distinguish from the Nazi
period, young journalists were trained within an American organized pro-
gramme during the allied occupation, which ended in 1955: on 15 May, a treaty
was signed that would make Austria officially independent.

By that time, publishing several works in the field of the science of the
press, Leonidas Martinides had contributed to Gazette. Meanwhile, Eduard
Ludwig was closely involved with the German periodical Publizistik. Until
1958, Ludwig was also director of the Institute of the Press in Vienna (founded
in 1946) and head of the Association for Newspaper Research (Gesellschaft für
Zeitungskunde) and the Academy for Press and Politics (Akademie für Presse
und Politik) prior to the Second World War.
The Institute for the Science of Journalism in Vienna published a series of
studies on newspaper management, with its first issue (1955) dealing with a
public opinion poll among the Viennese population about ‘the reader and their
newspaper’. This has gone down in history as the first opinion poll by sampling
method in Austria. It included questions such as: ‘do you read a newspaper,
what is it you read in it, how do you read, why, and do you believe it?’ That
same year, stressing the function it wanted to serve in this young research field,
it was mentioned in Gazette that a comparable poll had been organized in the
Netherlands at the time. From this it was concluded that the science of the press
in two so widely different countries was apparently principally interested in the
same questions.34
United Kingdom
Although new universities and polytechnics had been established in the late
1950s, the British university system still tended towards tradition and
conservatism in respect of new fields of study, a situation with significant
consequences for the emergence of communication and media studies in British
higher education. According to French and Richards (1994: 84–5), a very
noticeable feature of this emergence was the distinction between and the
difference in location of institutions in which teaching and research took place.
While the vast majority of undergraduate courses were established in the poly-
technics, these institutes proved to be slow to develop postgraduate work and
seemed unable to create research centres. By contrast, undergraduate work in
communication and media studies was slow to develop in the universities yet
major research centres were established during the period following the Second
World War (French and Richards, 1994: 82–102).35 Apart from a two-year
diploma course in journalism that ran at King’s College (University of London)
from 1922 to 1939 – but was not resumed after the war – there was no pre-
entry training of any kind for journalists in Britain before 1965. In an industry
such as the press – where practical and sober realism was sought and frequently
considered as the antithesis of academic, theoretical and reflective ideas – the
standard method to teach journalism was ‘on-the-job’ (Esser, 2003: 219).
This attitude towards practical learning can also be illustrated by the fact
that, although there was no university with an institutionalized interest in the
media of mass communication, the BBC had created its own research centre.
But apart from this Audience Research Department – which had in fact been
active since before the war36 – there was no institutional base for media research
and rather little had been published on this subject in the UK until the end of
the 1950s. In 1958, having been the head of analysis in the BBC’s Audience

Research Department, Joseph Trenaman, appointed to a new senior research

fellowship in television at Leeds University, started things off by studying the
role of television in the 1959 elections.37 At the time, Trenaman was already
involved in academic studies at Oxford, with an interest in communications,
and was also exploring the use of broadcasting as medium of education. With
that, he had helped to formulate the basis of the BBC’s educational policy since
1952.38
Television broadcasting was introduced in the UK soon after the Second
World War, but only attracted significant interest with the introduction of com-
mercial television in 1955. The controversy around this decision immediately
led to calls for research. And so, financed by the Nuffield Foundation (Oxford),
an independent research programme on the possible effects of television on
children was initiated under the leadership of Hilde Himmelweit, A.N.
Oppenheim and Pamela Vince (Himmelweit et al., 1958). With the emergence
of commercial television, market and advertising research was also developing
rapidly, but even before that – in relation to the press – studies of readership
assessment (circulation) for advertising purposes already existed.
Besides all this, there was already a tradition of enquiry into ‘mass culture’,
leading back to the critical investigation into literary taste by Queenie Dorothy
(Q.D.) and Frank Raymond (F.R.) Leavis – although students of the British
tradition of cultural studies generally seem to credit Richard Hoggart with
‘founding’ the movement. Broadening the application of literary studies to
include newspapers, magazines, popular music and so on, Hoggart examined
the interconnections between these media and the structures of individuals’
everyday lives.
Nordic Countries
Finland
Grounded in the German tradition of newspaper science (Zeitungswis-
senschaft), Finland was the first Scandinavian country to institutionalize
academic mass communication. In 1925, the Kansalaiskorkeakoulu (Citizen’s
College) was founded in Helsinki, with the ‘newspaper diploma’ awarded as
one of its three academic degrees, but journalism itself was not regarded as a
truly academic field (see Salokangas, 2003).39 But even before the establish-
ment of a field of research, it should be noted that some of the country’s great
historical figures contributed to early European ideas on freedom of expression
(Anders Chydenius in the 1760s) and press in society (Johan Wilhelm Snellman
in the 1840s) (Pietilä et al., 1990).
This being said, research in the field remained relatively modest and
consisted chiefly of a scattering of historical studies of the press, until the
1960s. By that time, Finland was connected to the founding of Gazette and
IAMCR as well as to the UNESCO-supported courses in the International Centre
for Advanced Training of Journalism in Strasbourg through an individual
activist, secretary-general of the Finnish Association of Magazine Journalists,
Osmo Mäkeläinen. A general shift towards Anglo-Saxon positivism could be

recognized in the course of the 1950s, but the more penetrating studies of the
press and public communication were still mainly employed outside the field,
by scholars in sociology and political science. Only in 1961 was the chair of
newspaper science updated into one of American-type mass communication
research (Pietilä et al., 1990; see also Hemánus and Nordenstreng, 1977).
Norway
In Norway, the first initiative in mass communication research was in the mid-
1950s. On 1 October 1955, a joint committee was appointed to survey the
material available relating to the Norwegian press in order to prepare for an
Institute of Journalism and Press Research.40 Initiated by press organizations,
newspaper proprietors and the government, such an Institute was installed at
the University of Oslo, but without examination rights or regular teaching in
mass communication. The research milieu was small and fragmented and,
according to Berg and Werner (1977: 385), the mainly empiric-analytic
research in the first years can be described as critical, individual and de-
limited. Most scholars decided to stay within the bounds of their own disci-
pline rather than working with more general issues of communication theory.
Nevertheless, despite its modest development, the Institute of Press Research
provided a stable centre within the sphere of mass communication research
in Norway.
Sweden
This inconspicuous start in the early 1950s can also be recognized in Sweden,
but the origins of press research date back to the early 20th century (Hulten
and Weibull, 1977). As in Finland, in most cases these studies were historical
descriptions of individual newspaper enterprises or literary analyses of news-
paper content, and had been carried out mostly on the initiative of individual
scholars or commissioned by publishers. Not surprisingly, the scientific value
of these studies varied a great deal.
The division of research into several institutions had also made its mark
on what happened in the different areas. In the early 1950s, in analyses of
electoral behaviour following the pattern of American studies, political
scientists began to enquire into the content and the consumption of newspapers
and radio. On the other hand, the tradition of literary text analysis and a bias
towards the press over the newly introduced electronic media are still strong
(partly explained by the fact that the press had been thought to play an
especially important part in the formation of public opinion through its party
political affiliation). In 1957, a joint conference of the European Society for
Opinion Surveys and Market Research (ESOMAR) and the World Association
for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) was held at Gothenburg. The subjects
discussed ranged from ‘the general function of marketing research, through
sampling problems to attitude scaling and motivation research’.41

Denmark
In Denmark, the term ‘mass communication research’ did not become common
until the late 1960s and even then there was still terminological uncertainty
about the studies (Grunwald and Sepstrup, 1977). From its very beginnings,
Danish research had taken place against a background of different frames of
reference, with different methods and incomparable aims. At business schools,
the modest volume of research produced since the 1930s mainly dealt with
advertising problems on a microeconomic level. At the universities, mass com-
munication research expanded with increasing strength in the 1960s, first
predominantly as empirically oriented studies of press history.
The Danish Press Museum and Archives in Copenhagen, founded in 1953,
had proved invaluable for the few interested in historical press research.
According to Torben Agersnap’s contribution in Gazette (1956), press research
had gained a real footing in Denmark in the course of the period after the
Second World War.42 And indeed, in 1952 a conference took place in
Copenhagen discussing the establishment of a School of Journalism for
advanced journalists from all Scandinavian countries. Being the domicile of the
training of Danish journalists since 1946, the school was set up at Arhus
University. Subsidized by the different Nordic governments, this new three-
month course (Nordisk Journalistkursus) was managed by a board of repre-
sentatives from the Scandinavian press organizations, and would teach its first
classes in 1958, with the Arhus-based Professor Troels Fink appointed as
director of the institute.
The field of research within language and literature studies had always
comprised subjects of a mass communication character, but spheres previously
marginal to linguistic and literary research began to attract much more interest
during the 1960s. Mainly due to the divided organizational conditions and
problems of an epistemological character, however, it was only in 1969 that a
special committee concerning the exploration of the means of mass com-
munication in Denmark was appointed.43
Southern Europe
Italy
In October 1956, the first International Congress of Press Historians was held
at Trieste. Convened on the initiative of Professor A.M. Ghisalberti (Rome), it
was eventually his secretary, Professor Gaeta (Trieste), hosting the conference.
And here it was found once again that the scientific approach to the press was
represented by two main currents of thought: the sociological trend that
studied the press and other means of mass communication as being a social
phenomenon, and, on the other hand, the approach that confined itself to
exclusive study of the history of the press.44 Although these two currents
clashed, a resolution was accepted for which the required preparatory work
was to be entrusted to the Dutch Institute for the Science of the Press, in
Amsterdam. This was mainly because it was thought important that a European

bibliography of the press in all its aspects should be created and the initiative
for this was already being taken by Gazette in its first year of publication, a
year before this conference.45 Meanwhile, Francesco Fattorello of the Instituto
Italiano di Pubblicismo in Rome was mainly concerned with questions of
public opinion and the functioning of the science of the press. He was also a
prominent contributor to Publizistik.46
As in other countries, the Church has always had a great interest in studies
of the media in Italy. Associated with civil and religious involvement, a sense
of community and an increased potential growth, the influence of the Catholic
vision on research resulted in a stress on the educational functions of the media,
specifically television. While leftist intellectuals reacted most hostilely to this
medium, reinforcing the anxieties over the potential effects of ‘massification’,
the Church feared television for its potential to perpetuate an individuality
that contrasted with the leading morality. At the same time, however, there
existed a Catholic awareness that television could serve as an apparatus for
evangelization. The encyclical Miranda Prorsus, published in 1957, was the
first encyclical letter to deal with the cinema, radio and television, expressing
this profound ambivalence of the Church towards media development.47
While the Higher Institute of Social Psychology in Turin (1951) had a chair
of communications psychology, and some activities at some other universities
in the field of public opinion and propaganda could be recognized, the first
empirical research in the field was carried out at the Agostinio Gemelli Institute.
Established in 1960 for the experimental study of social problems, the
Institute’s journal (IKON) published the findings of the first investigations and
it progressively became an important instrument through which the newly born
field of study in Italy made contact with the experience of research conducted
in other countries.
One of the principal characteristics of the early empirical research carried
out by the Gemelli Institute was a normative and social-psychological approach.
According to Mancini (1986: 111), ‘normativism is connected with a trend
towards macro-sociological approaches that are applied to the mechanisms of
legitimation and deligitimation of the political system through the media’. It
has been stated that in this highly politically involved mode of research, specific
empirical data were deployed in support of its hypotheses, while possibly
neglecting others.
In close relation with the Italian Broadcasting Company (RAI), which had
its own Audience Research Department, studies were published on the cogni-
tive effects of mass communication and its role in the process of socialization,
with particular attention to violence in programmes. Many of the same scholars
were involved in both this research office and the Gemelli Institute, thus
guaranteeing a similarity of methodology and approach. Unfortunately, it was
not before the late 1960s that many texts on mass communication from outside
Italy were translated (mostly published in Il Servizio Opinioni). Besides the fact
that only a few Italian studies have been translated and therefore not widely
disseminated to other countries, a problem of circulation of research within the
Italian intellectual community itself has also been recognized (Mancini,
1986).48

Spain
In Spain, under the Franco regime, a state-controlled school for journalists had
been established in 1941, two years after the Spanish Civil War. This Official
Institute of Journalism was created to train journalists and, at the same time,
to control access to the profession. After some debate in the years before, it
was eventually decided that a course in journalism should not depend on the
university authorities, but more strictly on political cadres. With sections in
both Madrid and Barcelona (by 1952) and led by the Minister of Information
and Tourism, this Official Institute of Journalism was the only centre from
which access to the profession could be gained. Having no connection to the
education or university system, Don Juan Aparcio Lopez had been appointed
as director of this school, and as such was the director-general of the press. In
total, about 50 people – mostly practising journalists – were teaching under the
subdirection of Don Juan Beneyto in Madrid and Don Claudio Colomer Marqués
in Barcelona. After passing a scientific and practical examination, the students
could call themselves periodista (journalist) and would be officially listed as
professional (Registro Oficial de Periodistas). The course was expected to create
‘a complete view of the Spanish reality, both cultural and economic, and an
interpretation of the different social characteristics of contemporary Spain’.49
The teachers had officially sworn to be loyal to the regime and its ideo-
logical principles. In 1958, with the Institute of Journalism established in
Pamplona after a lobby by Catholic groups, this political bias continued, but
at least journalism became integrated within the university system in Spain
(Alvarez, 1994: 48–9).50 Its first director, Antonio Fontán, was a full professor
of Latin, but he also had the title of journalist. Most teachers were brought in
from other schools, especially from the humanities, in its first years of existence.
Two years later (1960), the Church’s Institute of Journalism was established in
Madrid, stating that – as in Italy and other countries – Catholicism was closely
related to the studies of the media in Spain (initiator Angel Herrera, once
involved in the Catholic newspaper El Debate, was later ordained a priest).
Besides El Debate, which could be considered as the first contributor to the
studies of journalism before the Franco regime, the periodical Gaceta de la
Prensa Española (since 1942) was also interested in (inter)national communi-
cation research developments (Barrera and Vax, 2003).
Portugal
As in Spain, the political dictatorship has had a strong negative influence in
Portugal, on the cultural arena in general and the education system in par-
ticular. According to the Salazar regime, the people should be educated as a
passive and non-participatory mass in political life. Higher education was far
from a priority for the regime. Not surprisingly, development of the social
sciences and humanities was not favoured in this country at the time. In 1940,
a first attempt in terms of journalistic training was made by the National
Journalists’ Union (founded in 1934), but due to interference from the regime,
never actually materialized. Only after the Revolution was the first university

communications programme set up, by the Faculty of Human Sciences of the

Universidade Nova in Lisbon in 1979. Duarte Adriano Rodrigues (who
acquired his PhD at the University of Louvain) developed the programme and
would head the Communication Department (Pinto and Sousa, 2003: 174).51
Greece
During the mid-1950s in Greece, while journalists were trained ‘on the job’ in
newspaper offices, some professional circles considered that it would be desir-
able to set up a school attached to a university. In 1952, Professor Kenneth
Olson of the North-Western University gave a series of private lectures over a
period of several weeks in Athens. However, during this time, Greece was also
in the middle of a civil war and the first actual research activities in the field
of communication in Greece did not start until the mid-1980s, at the Depart-
ment of Political Science and Administrative Law of the National Kapodistrian
University of Athens.52
Contributions from ‘the Periphery’

Although in many Central European countries, the institutionalization of the
studies of communications and the press was realized only years after the first
publication of Gazette (in Albania, no journalism education or training was
available and in Romania, a training in journalism was part of the Communist
Party’s higher school, the Stafan Georgiu Academy in Bucharest), it is worth-
while to take note of the beginnings in the peripheral regions of the field. There
has been, of course, a fundamental difference in the role of empirical research
between capitalist and socialist societies.53
Poland
In Poland, the Zaklad Badan Prasoznawczych (ZBP) was established in 1954,
an Institute for Press Research aiming to coordinate national activities in this
field. In its managing role, this institute decided on the most important interests
to be studied and on the publication of research, either in book form or as an
article in one of the many periodicals with an interest in the press existing at
the time.54 After years of propagandist media reporting on events from the
Polish Communist Party’s point of view, the press became somewhat more
objective and pluralistic in the late 1950s. This is not to say that the tension
between ideology and objectivity had been resolved, but at least it seemed there
was some space created to juxtapose different points of view, paving the way
to more open and serious press research.
Czechoslovakia55
In the Slovakian city of Bratislava, a professorial chair for journalism was
founded at its Comenius University in 1952. But back in 1928, the Free School
for Political Studies had already been established in Prague, specializing in the

education of journalists and the study of newspapers. During the interbellum,

other media also had been researched in Czechoslovakia (books, religious folk
songs, theatre, paintings and new media such as film and radio), but it was
never attempted to unite these studies into a way that could lead to a systematic
mass communications approach. Instead, with the German science of the press
as the example, only the institutional historical development of journalism was
taken up seriously and, therefore, the history of the reception of media content
or actual effects of typographical modernization around the end of the 19th
century had been widely neglected (see Sekera and Kopecká, 2003).
Of course, this situation is also explained by the methodological isolation
of historical interpretations of the press in the countries influenced by
Communism. While it was in the role of the press to inform and propagate, to
agitate and to organize the people, all literature and culture had to be studied
in the frame of national-emancipating ideologies, so it was difficult to be
critical.56 With the Communist Information Agency57 still active, it is particu-
larly striking that in 1956 a periodical of the International Organization of
Journalists (The Democratic Journalist) was based in Prague.58
Also in 1956, the translation of the first two issues of Novinarsky sbornik
(Journalism Almanac), a new Czechoslovak journal on the science of the
press at the time, had been realized. Reviewed in Gazette, the articles of a
theoretical content were described as of no use since they were strictly based on
dialectical materialism. Although being dedicated to the theory of journalism,
it was thought unimaginable that the authors of these articles could make state-
ments from scripts other than those ordered by Communism. On the other
hand, articles on the practical aspects of journalism (editing) were considered
‘not to be any worse’ than similar studies in the West.59
Hungary
Hungary did not have an independent course for the study of the media of mass
communication in the 1950s. Historical press research did exist, but always as
a secondary interest to other disciplines (literature, history, political studies,
etc.). Although István Hajnal and József Balogh were influential advocates for
a documentation of the history of information in the 1920s, they did not worry
much about its institutionalization.60 After 1945, as in other Central European
countries, all activities that could be recognized as contributions to the science
of the press had to be dissolved. While journalism education in the universities
was suspended after 1956, partly as punishment for the participation of
journalists in the anti-Communist uprising, it was only during the 1960s that
the research could steadily normalize and Centres for Communication Studies
be developed (Hiebert and Gross, 2003).61
Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia had its first department of journalism at the Ljubljana Institute of
Sociology in 1962 and a Yugoslav professional – rather than scientific – journal
in the field, Novinarstvo (Journalism), was published in Belgrade two years

later. Shortly after these beginnings, however, further developments in the com-
munication field were frozen because of political and ideological pressures upon
the universities of Belgrade, Ljubljana and Zagreb in the years 1972–5, which
resulted from attempts to control competing nationalistic demands. According
to Splichal (1989: 345), the first empirical communication studies were pub-
lished as late as 1969. While the beginnings of communication science in
Yugoslavia were mainly based on communication theories developed in the US,
a ‘revised’ development was closely related to orthodox Marxist theories and
dominant Yugoslav political ideology. Marx, Engels and Lenin were the only
relevant foreign authors whose complete works had been translated into at least
one Yugoslav language (Splichal, 1989: 348).
Conclusion
According to Diane Crane (1976), the development of a paradigm relates to
the changes in communication relations within a ‘scientific community’. These
develop from primary informal contacts among a small number of fellow
researchers to the recruitment of new collaborators (particularly from their
students), through an exponential growth in publications and new members in
the field, to the final stages of specialization and exhaustion, in which the
declining number of new publications and researchers marks the end of one
paradigm and makes way for the development of an alternative.
In this article, an effort has been made to describe the formative stage in
the studies of communications in Europe. It is clear that circumstances sur-
rounding the Second World War were highly significant in the institutionaliza-
tion of media education and mass communication research, as in the shaping
of a dominant paradigm. Being organs of public opinion, the media were
thought to be thoroughly and systematically investigated on their positions,
functioning and production of meaning. Still lacking the Marxist influence so
typical of the following decades, there was a growing agreement that these ways
of communicating to the masses had to be closely monitored by specialists in
all the disciplines that contribute to the different sectors of knowledge about
communication in a quest for freedom, truth and objectivity. Aware of the
media’s potential – either for good or for bad – this was an agreement that was
also supported by the media organizations, eventually resulting in the founding
of the International Association for Mass Communication Research (IAMCR) in
1957.
Of course, we should be aware that the field of communications studies has
changed dramatically over time and that in the last 50 years it has found new
directions, interests, methods and theories. However, giving credit to the
‘founding fathers’ should be a reminder that studying communications may be
undertaken by the many but is initiated by the few. Indeed, to use the words
of Wilbur Schramm (1963: 2): it was still a crossroads where many had passed,
but few had tarried in those days. Executed by a small group of people, the
academic activities in the field of communications during the 1950s were the
first sparks of energy leading to international cooperation and the wide expan-
sion of research. Most of these activities were still focused on national issues,

but according to the temperature of the time, initiatives all over the continent
pointed to closer relations between European countries and beyond.62
The establishment of a new scientific journal indicates a changing or
increasing interest for a certain field of research. Being a periodical to promote
the international exchange of research in what would now be recognized as
communication studies, Gazette’s 50th anniversary has been honoured here
with the reference to the European beginnings of these studies. It was Kurt
Baschwitz who introduced and led the very first academic journal published
in Europe from the Amsterdam Institute of Press Science in 1955. Moreover,
in combining both press historical and social-empirical interests, and in stress-
ing the significance of the audience in the communication process, Baschwitz
has also been a leading force in directing the academic interests in this field
towards its current status: a discipline among other social sciences.
In comparison to the US, some European countries had similar interests in
empirical studies coming from the media industry,63 while others had their
focus on the organizational position of ‘publicistics’, and in some regions the
importance of studying the media was not yet felt at all during the 1950s. This
undecided attitude towards a more empirical approach in the studies of the
press (followed by research of other media) can be explained by the fact that
Europe had to overcome a shock in the postwar years. Indeed, when under-
stood as both a description and interpretation of different forms, content and
functioning of the media or as analysed from a cultural, social, political and
scientific perspective, it can be concluded that the now richly seeded field of
communication studies – whether or not there is a potential saturation has to
be debated, I would suggest – was still an unploughed arable land in Europe
during the 1950s.
The rebuilding of the science of the press still mainly depended on the older,
more traditional forces in the field. Apparently, the principal values of the
investigator proved to play a significant role in the choice of problem and
question to be asked. It was hard for academics to break through the boundaries
of their discipline, and so most with an interest in the media of mass com-
munication decided to stay a scholar within the more traditional fields of
research.64 Whatever the case, developments of theories and theoretical
analyses were limited and theoretical speculations have been neglected. At the
most, it can be said there were (national) theoretical impulses, with historical
premises in the European past or a more sociological approach as was common
in American communications studies. But a consistent system of concepts, defi-
nitions and methods in order to come to an objective theory of the science of
the press was seriously lacking.
Also, a distinction must be made between those schools whose principal
concern was to provide an academic training covering the major communi-
cation media as a whole, and those seeking primarily to provide a technical and
practical grounding for prospective journalists. Most of the universities that
offered courses on mass communication or the press, however, thought these to
be a useful background adjunct to their degree courses in political or social
science, law, arts or philosophy, for prospective politicians, diplomats, teachers,
lawyers, etc. In the end, sociopolitical interests have been given extensive

consideration in analysing the processes of mass communication in Europe,

where the media have always been understood as agencies of cultural
formation.65
Taking all this into consideration, it can still be said that there was a shared
line of thought: mass communications’ close relation to the economic, political
and cultural communal situation was acknowledged on both sides of the
Atlantic. And even if the more ‘architectonical’ works produced in the US at
the time had not yet echoed around the European academy, the motto of
Gazette in 1955 – ‘facts and no phrase-mongering’ – clearly illustrates that it
was desired that everything possible should be done in the field of communi-
cation to improve the status of the research worker by using the most reliable
methods of investigation and analysis. In order to avoid excessive dispersion of
efforts and duplication of work, to increase facilities for documentation and
investigation, and to enable each category of research to give its highest yield,
it had become clear that the organization of a regular system of exchanges and
contacts was indispensable. No matter in what key, this canonized melody of
the 1950s was a shared expression for the securing of a public space, a responsi-
bility for an ever growing rhythm of international communications.
Notes
I would like to thank Els de Bens, Joan Hemels, Svennik Høyer, Karol Jakubowicz, Klaus Bruhn
Jensen, Jan Jirak, Knut Lundby, Gianpietro Mazzoleni, Denis McQuail, Werner A. Meier, Kaarle
Nordenstreng, Winfried Schulz, Slavko Splichal and Liza Tsaliki for their contributions to this
article. Also, special thanks to Cees Hamelink for having so much confidence in me.
1. See also the UNESCO (1956) publication, ‘Current Mass Communication Research, 1: Register
of Mass Communication Research Projects in Progress and in Plan; Bibliography of Books and
Articles on Mass Communication Published since 1 January 1955’.
2. Being described as such by others, Wilbur Schramm introduced Paul Lazarsfeld, Harold
Lasswell, Carl Hovland, and Kurt Lewin as the four men that have usually been considered
the ‘founding fathers’ of communication research in the US, individuals with backgrounds in
either psychology, sociology or political science. However, according to others, Lewin’s
influence in America is primarily based in the areas of social psychology and his influence
within the growing community of communication researchers relatively insignificant.
3. See http://spot.colorado.edu/~craigr/history_bib.htm for a list of key sources referring to the
history of communication research in the US, edited by Robert T. Craig, University of Colorado
at Boulder, September 2000. Gazette had also published an overview of American research in
its first issue (Vol. 1, 1955: 243–7).
4. See also the article by Jan Wieten for a closer reading (this issue, pp. 523–30).
5. Gazette, ‘Introduction’, Vol. 1: 1–3.
6. The headings in the bibliography included the following: bibliographies/yearbooks/dictionar-
ies, general information, history, biographies/memoirs/anthologies, press in fiction, law/court/
relations to government, production and management, personnel, education/training organiz-
ation, editing, writing/readability/semantics, advertising/public relations, structure of mass
media, influence of mass media, public opinion and propaganda, mass psychology (Gazette,
Vol. 1: 60–83).
7. However, the studies of ‘publicistics’ in an international context were not clearly defined at
the time.
8. According to Wieten (this issue, pp. 523–30), Baschwitz still referred to it as Publica, rather
than Gazette in the period of preparation of this new international journal.
9. While only four countries had been represented in Bad Godesberg (the Netherlands,

Switzerland, Sweden and West Germany), at this next conference in Munster, 20–4 May 1952,
representatives of seven states were involved. A group of around 100 students also partici-
pated in the conference. Other themes discussed included: the growing production and organiz-
ation of the press and broadcasting as well as the rise of interest in film and broadcasting
studies.
10. Whitsuntide, 1953.
11. International Expert Meeting on Training for Journalism, UNESCO House, Paris, 9–13 April
1956 (UNESCO/MC/28, Paris, 23 May 1956). Among the participants were a variety of
directors of schools and centres for journalism in Europe: Professor Juan Beneyto (Madrid),
Professor Troels Fink (Arhus), Professor Walter Hagemann (Munster), Mr Raymond Manévy
(Paris), Mr Jiri Pilar (Prague), Mr Norman Robson (London), Mr Maarten Rooy (Amsterdam),
Mr M. Stijns (Brussels), Mr Fernand Terrou (Paris), Mr Antonio Gonzalez (Santander), Mr R.
Hennart (Lille), Professor M. Kafel (Warsaw), Mr A. Gaspard (representing the International
Press Institute) and Mr C. Bellanger (International Federation of Newspaper Editors and
Publishers). The UN was represented by the director of the United Nations Information Centre,
Mr D. Blickenstaff.
12. Folke Dahl was librarian at the Gothenburg City and University Library and has written many
articles on the history of the press in Western Europe. He also compiled a bibliography on
Dutch newspapers.
13. In this article, the word ‘Publizistik’ is used as such when referring to the academic discipline
in the German-language area, and in italics when referring to the similarly named German
journal, Publizistik.
14. See the first issue of Publizistik (1956) for a chronology of the science of the press in the period
1945–55 in Germany (Publizistik 1[1]: 108–10).
15. After the war, as it was now in Communist territory, the Leipziger Institute re-established itself
as a faculty of journalism, led by Dr Hermann Budzislawski. See also Hermann (1962).
16. In 1953, Professor Hagemann’s assistant, Wilmont Haacke, would become Professor in
Wilhelmshaven, and in 1954 Hans Braun would become the successor to Karl d’Ester. Other
relevant institutes included: Westfällisches-Niederrheinisches Institut für Zeitungsforschung in
Dortmund and Institut für Publizistik in Heidelberg. Other celebrated scientists of the (late)
1950s and the 1960s in Germany include: Kurt Koszyk, Fritz Eberhard, Elisabeth Noelle-
Neumann, Harry Pross, Walter J. Schütz, Otto Roegele and Franz Ronneberger. Until 1959,
Hagemann was also president of the German Association of Film and Television Science.
17. Hans Bredow was secretary of the National Postal Authority and became persona non grata
during the Nazi regime. He died in 1959. Maletzke would later prove to be one of the most
influential figures in German communication studies, introducing social psychology to the
research of the media, but was not yet recognized at the time. According to Hemels, the recog-
nition of Maletzke for his contributions to communication studies did not seriously emerge
until the beginning of the 1990s (Hemels, pers. comm., 1 June 2005).
18. The production of a comprehensive handbook for ‘Publizistik’ was widely discussed at the
time, but was not published until 1968 by Emil Dovifat.
19 See Prakke’s (1957) De Samenspraak in onze Samenleving. See Kutsch (2000) for a biography
of Henk Prakke.
20. Again, Prakke can be praised for bringing people together, for it was he who introduced the
works of DeVolder (1952) to the German research field in 1959.
21. According to van Pelt (2000: 102), from this the Centre des Techniques de Diffusion
(CETEDI) – which was later formed into the contemporary Département de Communication
– was created at the then independent Université Catholique de Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve
in 1961.
22. The master’s degree ‘Press and Communication’ at the University of Ghent would only be
developed in 1962 by Theo Luykx, within the Faculty of Law.
23. Gazette (Vol. 1, 1955). This index was supposed to be a continuation of Hadley Cantril’s
‘Public Opinion 1935–1946’.
24. Professor J. Hemels is currently preparing a work on the history of the field of communication
research in the Netherlands. Some of the details mentioned here are based on a draft
manuscript of his work.

25. Press, propaganda and public opinion have always been core issues of study at the Institute
of the Press in Amsterdam, but Schneider would only get an official position in 1966 (Joan
Hemels, pers. comm., 1 June 2005).
26. According to Schneider (1993), this formality has never been the cause of any animosity
between the two (cited in Hemels, 1993).
27. The number of students on the course in its early days varied from about 50 down to 12,
generally divided equally between university students and young journalists. A greater partici-
pation was not encouraged by the university, for it aimed at an elite corps of people with an
interest in journalism.
28. The Centre de Formation des Journalistes was not a research institute. Nevertheless, founded
on the initiative of individuals from the French resistant press led by Philippe Viannay, it
sometimes dealt with subjects closely bound up with the scientific studies of the press; the
Centre International d’Enseignement Supérieure du Journalisme was supported by UNESCO.
In the first issue of Gazette, the Catholic-based Ecole Supérieure de Journalisme in Lille
announced it would organize an international meeting of journalism students in March/April
1955. The director of this institute at the time was M. Robert Hennart.
29. For example, in 1956, Cahiers d’Etudes de Radio-Télévision included articles by Wladimir
Porché (‘Le Role de la radio-télévision dans l’évolution de la connaissance’) and Jacques
Warnant (‘Un an de recherche sur la radio et l’enfant’) (issues 7 and 8, 1956); other articles
on similar themes also appeared in the journal Etudes de Presse (published by the IFP between
1946 and 1963). Meanwhile Claude Bellanger and Raymond Manévy (president of the Centre
de Formation des Journalistes in Paris) also contributed to both Gazette and Publizistik during
this period. In 1945, Manévy had also published a study on the press between the two world
wars: Histoire de la Presse, 1914 à 1939.
30. Ellul was not just a social critic but a theologian and activist in church and community. One
of his favourite themes was the ambivalence of technological progress.
31. By the 1950s, scholars had already begun to analyse the relationship between text and reader,
both as collaboration and complicity and as conflict. In the literary text, writing and reading
constitute a joint presence, with two distinct intentions: the writer’s and the reader’s. Viewed
from this perspective, as analysed by Sartre in Qu’est-ce la littérature (1948), the reader has
faith in the writer and his fictional world, and in his own imaginative simulation, as part of a
reciprocal pact. For Blanchot (1955), this duality of intention engenders a conflict, which
circumscribes a literary space inside which the reader tends to eliminate the writer.
32. Gazette, Vol. 1: 211–12.
33. Gazette, Vol. 1: 35–9. Within the space of a few years, three surveys by the IPI, mainly
concerned with professional problems, had appeared: ‘Improvement of Information: The News
from Russia and the News from the Middle East’; ‘As Others See Us: Research in the Flow of
the News’; and ‘The Government and the Press’ (a work still in progress at the time). Moreover,
an IPI report on current affairs had appeared every month since May 1952. According to Daudt
(1955) ‘the results of research carried out in this way [were] too largely composed of series of
meaningless pronouncements of journalists’.
34. As reported by L. Martinides in Gazette (Vol. 1, 1955: 46). This message continued by stating:
‘It is interesting to note that a student of the “Instituut voor Perswetenschap aan de Universiteit
van Amsterdam”, Keizersgracht 604, Amsterdam, used practically the same questions –
without knowing anything of the Viennese poll – in a ballot for readers of a small town
newspaper. Return 11%=2.600; total circulation 11.783. In each copy of the paper, two
questionnaires were inserted, one for husband and one for wife – so actually N was 23.566.’
The next studies in newspaper management (Studien zur Zeitungsbetriebslehre) would contain
data on the economic position of the Austrian press, research on classified advertisements and
the problem of press law and reform proposals.
35. According to these authors (French and Richards, 1994: 83), in the late 1940s there was a
vast increase in the demand for higher education, which the universities were unable to satisfy
and many students undertook their studies in technical colleges and similar institutions both
for the degrees of the University of London and for higher professional qualifications.
36. According to Denis McQuail, the BBC had for long been conducting routine audience measure-
ment by surveys of radio listeners and from 1950 onward had been conducting experimental

and survey research into educational radio broadcasting for adult listeners. The main objects
of enquiry were into comprehension, attitude changes and audience interests and choices (‘A
Note on Communication Research in the UK in the 1950s’, by Denis McQuail, May 2005,
unpublished, available on request).
37. Also known as the Granada Television Research Fellowship. Granada, the northern indepen-
dent television contractors, endowed the post to Leeds University in order to establish some
facts about the impact of television: its effects on tastes, behaviour, habits, methods and
thinking. Unfortunately, Joseph Trenaman died only two years after accepting the Leeds chair,
in 1961, at the age of 51.
38. Other names associated with the BBC’s Audience Research Department include P.E. Vernon,
Robert Silvey, William Belson and Brian Emmett (‘A Note on Communication Research in the
UK in the 1950s’, McQuail, May 2005, unpublished).
39. This changed in 1960, when the college moved to Tampere and was given university status.
Yet, since 1947 the college already had a professor’s chair in journalism, but because of the
lack of available competence, it was not filled until 1956. In the first 40 years, no more than
six students got the degree each year.
40. According to Svennik Høyer (pers. comm., 5 April 2005), the first university position in press
research was filled in 1955. However, based on an announcement by Per Torsvik (1957) the
founding of this institute must have been in or around 1957 (Gazette, Vol. 3, 1957: 247–8).
41. Gothenburg, Sweden, August 26–30 (Gazette, Vol. 3, 1957: 336).
42. Gazette, Vol. 2, 1956: 197–210. According to the literature drawn on for this article, other
Danish press researchers of that time include: Ejler Alkjaer and Svend Jensen (The Printing
Industry in Denmark, 1956), Martin Andersen (The Daily Newspaper, 1953), Max Kjaer-
Hansen (The Demand for Newspapers in Copenhagen, 1955), Ulf Kjaer-Hansen (‘The Daily
Newspaper in Denmark 1945–1955’, 1956) and Arne Rasmussen (‘The Cost of Advertising
in Denmark’, 1956). Professor Troels Fink (Arhus) was the Danish correspondent for Gazette
in its initial years. See also Gazette (Vol. 3, 1957: 336) on the Scandinavian Journalists School
in Arhus.
43. The initiative was taken by the Danish Social Science Research Council and the Danish
Research Council for the Humanities. On the initiative of the committee, MediaForsk was set
up in 1973 as a research secretariat, and with the Danish Department of Nordicom, Denmark
has engaged actively in the worldwide documentation of mass communication research. In the
1970s, an Institute of Press Research was established at the Danish School of Journalism.
44. In Perugia, in 1939, the Centre of Demodoxalogy was established. Orano, Piccioni, Perini-
Bembo and other scholars all played a leading role in this. They witnessed the acceptance of
journalism as the science and art of public opinion. It was therefore thought that the history
of journalism should not be confounded with the history of the press. Journalism was to be
considered a social-psychological phenomenon, distinguished from the instrumental notion of
journalism.
45. This conference was attended by press historians from the following countries: Italy, France,
Portugal, Belgium, Hungary (emigrants), Sweden, the UK, Austria, the Netherlands and the
USA (Gazette, Vol. 2, 1956: 245).
46. For example, see Fattorello’s questioning of the history of the science of the press in Publizistik,
Vol. 2, 1957: 373–6.
47. See Gundle (1986: 587–60) for a summary of Catholic positions on the theme of the mass
media in the 1950s. For the impact of cultural, ideological and scientific factors on Italian
mass communication research, see also Mancini and Wolf (1990) and Giglioli (1994).
48. Rather than radio, as in many other western countries, television positioned itself as primary
medium soon after its introduction in Italy. The first Italian communication researchers
include, among others, Francesco Alberoni, Gianfranco Bettetini, Maria Angela Croce,
Francesco Fattorello, Cesare Musatti, Assanto Quadrio and Franco Rositi.
49. Publizistik, Vol. 2, 1957: 365–7. Beneyto was also a prominent contributor to Gazette.
Literature within the institute included: theory and history of the Nationalist Party, general
political history, economy, writing, and in the second year, sociology, Catholic religion, press
rights and theories of public opinion. Besides all that, some more specific seminars were
organized.

50. From this institute also originates the first research works and systemized scientific studies on
communication by means of the publication of the Cuadernos de Trabajo in 1963. It was the
first training centre in journalism concerned with promoting the theoretical and academic
aspects of journalism in Spain.
51. The lack of interest in higher education in general can also be illustrated by the fact that, in
1960, among people aged 18–22 only 3.9 percent attended a university in Portugal, of which
no more than 6.4 percent studied social sciences.
52. Liza Tsaliki (pers. comm., 27 April 2005).
53. Splichal (1989) has questioned if the development of communication science on the periphery
– specifically in Yugoslavia – is most appropriately regarded as an a-theoretical accumulation
of findings, lacking any theoretical (paradigmatic) significance, or as an attempt to ‘sharpen’
a specific paradigm or theory in order to account for the specific social context (indigeniza-
tion). He concluded that the development of disciplines on scientific peripheries is not mainly
determined by indigenous cognitive or theoretical challenges, but is based instead on the model
of growth in more developed countries, mediated by exogenous local factors, such as decisions
made outside the scientific sphere.
54. For example, Kwartalnik Prasoznawczy (Press Research Quarterly, Warsaw, since 1957),
Prasoznawstwo (Science of the Press, Warsaw, since 1956), Biuletyn Naukowy (Scientific
Publications) and Biuletyn Informacyjny (Internal Bulletins of the Institute). For a complete
list, see Publizistik, Vol. 2: 1957: 247–9.
55. Czechoslovakia is now two independent nations, Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
56. In the Soviet tradition, journalism was always approached as a specific offspring of literature.
57. Established in Bucharest, 1947.
58. In 1956, The Democratic Journalist also included a report on the resolutions and recommen-
dations produced at the International Meeting of Journalists in Helsinki, that same year.
59. L. Turksma (Gazette, Vol. 2, 1956: 180–1) also stated that ‘it is highly regrettable that we
only got the translation of the articles, and not of the book reviews’. Articles of Novinarsky
sbornik included: ‘Some Remarks on the Development of Newspaper Research and Journal-
ism’ (Vladimír Kalina); ‘The Attention of the Reader’ (František Hyhlík); ‘The Education of
Journalists in Schools in the Soviet Union and the People’s Democracies’ (Vladimír Klimes);
‘New Programme of Journalism at the Party High School, Moscow’ (Jan Vencovský). Head of
the journalistic research institute of Prague, Mr Ladislav Mareda, also contributed to the
Novinarsky sbornik.
60. According to Balázs Sipos (2003), István Hajnals’ activities had even influenced the ideas of
both Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan.
61. The Hungarian revolution against Soviet oppression began 23 October 1956.
62. For example, Gazette not only published articles from European scholars, it also developed
close relations with institutions from countries such as Pakistan and Indonesia.
63. There was, however, an intrinsic conflict for many of the researchers drawn to communication
research between the demands of science as practised within their maturing disciplines and
the political commitments implicit in much of the work on communication. Soon after the
Second World War, for most communication researchers the commitment to science became
detached from the commercial and political interests that had generated the basic research in
the first place. By the end of the 1950s, research problems were more likely to test theoretical
hypotheses than assess the social effects of public communication. See also Delia (1987: 59).
64. Besides Hanno Hardt (1979), see also Kurt Lang (1996) on the European roots of communi-
cation research. According to Hardt (2002), the publication of Sociology by the Fisher lexicon
in 1958 only referred to the mainly American literature in social psychology and not to the
science of the press and their contributions to the studies of the media in Germany. On the
other hand, in Sweden, studies taking an empirical approach increased during the 1950s.
The first statistical studies of radio audiences in that country – initiated by the Swedish
Broadcast Corporation – had already been carried out in the late 1940s. Even when not
seriously institutionalized, apparently there existed a wish – both among researchers and
within the industry – to clarify the range of individual media.
65. For a full description of all the institutes and courses in the training of journalism in Europe
and the rest of the world in the 1950s, see UNESCO (1958).

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Erik Vroons graduated in media studies at the University of Amsterdam in

2001 (MA). Professor Cees Hamelink was his thesis advisor. In the winter of
1999/2000, Vroons assisted Professor Todd Gitlin on his book Media Un-
limited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives (2001),
at the New York University. He has since been involved in various research
projects within the Department of Communication Science at the University of
Amsterdam.
Address Tilanusstraat 81 (Huis), 1091 BG, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
[email: erik.vroons@gmail.com]

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02_057541_Vroons (JB-D) 22/9/05 1:28 pm Page 495

GAZETTE: THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR COMMUNICATION STUDIES

COMMUNICATION STUDIES IN EUROPE

Abstract / There is an abundance of literature published on the history of communication studies

Keywords / 1950s / communication studies / Europe / founding fathers / Gazette / history /

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496 GAZETTE VOL. 67 NO. 6

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VROONS: COMMUNICATION STUDIES IN EUROPE AROUND 1955 497

Foundation of Gazette and the International Association of

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VROONS: COMMUNICATION STUDIES IN EUROPE AROUND 1955 499

energy initiated in previous meetings eventually resulted in the foundation of

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Belgium and the Netherlands

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French contributors to the development of communication studies was

Switzerland and Austria

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be a significant force in the prelude to a science of the press in Switzerland

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Research Department, Joseph Trenaman, appointed to a new senior research

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VROONS: COMMUNICATION STUDIES IN EUROPE AROUND 1955 511

communications programme set up, by the Faculty of Human Sciences of the

Contributions from ‘the Periphery’

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education of journalists and the study of newspapers. During the interbellum,

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VROONS: COMMUNICATION STUDIES IN EUROPE AROUND 1955 515

consideration in analysing the processes of mass communication in Europe,

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