lOMoARcPSD|4374011

Baran Davis Chapter 2 - Summary Mass Communication

Theory
Theory Of Mass Communication (Kent State University)

StuDocu is not sponsored or endorsed by any college or university

Downloaded by Iqra Khan (iqra6647284@gmail.com)
 lOMoARcPSD|4374011

Baran & Davis

Chapter 2 – Establishing the Terms of the Debate over Media: The First Trends in Media
Theory – Mass Society and Propaganda Theories
Mass Society theory  perspective on society that emerged at the end of the 19th cent and was
especially influential through the first half of the 20th cent; many different theories sharing some
common assumptions about the role of media and society
 All-encompassing perspective on Western industrial society that attributes an influential
but largely negative role to media
 Views media as having the power to profoundly shape our perceptions of the social world
and to manipulate our actions (without our conscious awareness)
 Strengths:
o Speculates about important effects
o Highlights important structural changes and conflicts in modern culture
o Draws attention to issues of media ownership and ethics
 Weaknesses:
o Unscientific
o Unsystematic
o Promulgated (proclaim) by elites interested in preserving power
o Underestimates intelligence and competence of “average people”
o Underestimates personal, societal, and cultural barriers to direct media influence
Propaganda  no-holds-barred use of communication to propagate specific beliefs and
expectations (developed after WWI)
 Media is the focus of attention
 Propaganda theorists specifically analyze media content and speculate about its ability to
influence peoples’ thoughts and actions
 Seek to understand how to explain the ability for messages to persuade and convert
people to extreme viewpoints and engage in irrational actions
 Dilemma  Propaganda threatened US democracy, but censoring propaganda meant
imposing limitations that also went against communication freedom
White Propaganda  intentional suppression of potentially harmful information and ideas,
combined with deliberate promotion of positive information or ideas to distract attention from
problematic events
 Taking bad propaganda and making it good; silver lining
 Basis for strategic communication methods

MASS SOCIETY AND THE DEBATE OVER MEDIA

 Changes associated with new media in the first half of the last century were more
disruptive because people were less experienced at dealing with communication changes

Downloaded by Iqra Khan (iqra6647284@gmail.com)

 lOMoARcPSD|4374011

ASSUMPTIONS OF MASS SOCIETY THEORY

 Envy, discontent and fear often at the roots of mass society thinking  because afraid
that this new thinking would fundamentally change the social world
o To counter act this thinking = technology control
 Basic assumptions of mass society theories:
1) The media are a powerful force within society that can subvert essential norms and
values and thus undermine the social order. To deal with this threat media must be
brought under elite control
a. Ex: broadcast being put under control of the government
2) Media are able to directly influence the minds of average people, transforming their
views of the social world
a. Direct-effects assumption  the media, in and of themselves, can produce
direct effects

3) Once people’s thinking is transformed by media, all sorts of bad long-term

consequences are likely to result – not only bringing ruin to individual lives but also
creating social problems on a vast scale
4) Average people are vulnerable to media because in mass society they are cut off and
isolated from traditional social institutions that previously protected them from
manipulation
a. People learn specific social roles based on the accident of being born in a
certain place at a certain time
5) The social chaos initiate by media will likely be resolved by establishment of a
totalitarian social order
6) Mass media inevitably debase higher forms of culture, bringing about a general
decline in civilization (stems from time of Enlightenment)

Downloaded by Iqra Khan (iqra6647284@gmail.com)

 lOMoARcPSD|4374011

EARLY EXAMPLES OF MASS SOCIETY THEORY

1) Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft  (Tonnies) sought to explain the critical difference
between earlier forms of social organization and European society and proposed a simple
dichotomy
a. Gemeinschaft – folk community – bound together by strong ties of family,
tradition, rigid social roles; people here year for order and meaning provided by
the folk community
b. Gesellschaft – modern industrial society – bound together by weak social
institutions based on rational choices rather than tradition
2) Mechanical and Organic Solidarity  (Durkheim) compared folk communities to
machines with people as the cogs; machines were ordered and durable but people were
forced by a collective consensus to perform traditional social roles
a. Mechanical Solidarity  folk cultures bound by consensus and traditional social
roles
b. Organic Solidary  modern social orders bound by culturally negotiated social
ties
i. Characterized by specialization, division of labor, and interdependence

MASS SOCIETY THEORY IN CONTEMPORARY TIMES

 A small amount of mass society resonates today on three fronts:
o High culture proponents (Roger Scruton, 2000)
o Opponents of media concentration
 Concentration – ownership of different and numerous media companies
concentrated in fewer and fewer hands
o In social science circles with an increasingly uninterested and uninvolved
citizenry
 Agenda setting theory – media may not tell us what to think, but they do
tell us what to think about
 Spiral of silence theory – alternative points of view are spiraled into
silence in the face of overwhelming expression of a dominant view in the
media
 Cultivation analysis – a false “reality” is cultivated among heavy
television viewers by the repetitive, industrially created stories that
dominate the medium
 Framing – news conventions present a dominant interpretive background
for understanding events and policy

Downloaded by Iqra Khan (iqra6647284@gmail.com)

 lOMoARcPSD|4374011

THE ORIGIN OF PROPAGANDA - no-holds-barred use of communication to propagate

specific beliefs and expectations
 Gradually this term came to refer to a certain type of communication strategy
 Ultimate goal: to change the way people act and to leave them believing that those
actions are voluntary, that the newly adopted behaviors, and the opinions underlying
them, are their own
o To do this, propagandists must change the way people conceive of themselves and
the social world, through media tools
o Propagandists rely on disinformation to discredit their opposition (false
information spread about the opposition to discredit it)
 Black, white and gray propaganda
o Black propaganda – involving deliberate and strategic transmission of lies
o White propaganda – involving intentional suppression of contradictory
information and ideas, combined with deliberate promotion of highly consistent
information or ideas that support the objectives of the propagandist
o Gray propaganda – involved transmission of information or ideas that might or
might not be false; no effort to determine validity
 Propagandists hold elitist and paternalistic views about their audiences
 In WWI, beneficial use of propaganda became known as the engineering of consent
(office use of communication campaigns to reach “good” ends)

PROPAGANDA COMES TO THE UNITED STATES

 Years following WWI
 Behaviorism – John B. Watson
a. The notion that all human action is a conditioned response to external
environmental stimuli
i. Deal strictly with observable variables
ii. One central notion was conditioning – most human behavior is the result
of conditioning by the external environment
 Freudianism – Sigmund Freud
b. Freud’s notion that human behavior is the product of the conflict between an
individual’s Id, Ego and Superego
i. The self that guides action must be fragmented into conflicting parts
1. Ego – rational mind; control
2. Id – the egocentric pleasure-seeking part of the mind
3. Superego – the internalized set of cultural rules
 Behaviorism and Freudianism were combined to create propaganda theories that viewed
the average individual as incapable of rational self-control
o Saw people as being highly vulnerable to media manipulation

Downloaded by Iqra Khan (iqra6647284@gmail.com)

 lOMoARcPSD|4374011

HAROLD LASSWELL’S PROPAGANDA THEORY

 First to use psychological theories and demonstrate how they can be controlled and
applied to politics
 He argued that propaganda was more than merely using media to lie to people in order to
gain temporary control over them, but that people need to be slowly prepared to accept
radically different ideas and actions (long conditioning process)
o Master (or collective) symbols – symbols that are associated with strong emotions
and possess the power to stimulate large-scale mass action
 Scientific technology – an educated social science-based elite charged with protecting
vulnerable average people from harmful propaganda
 Science of democracy

WALTER LIPPMANN’S THEORY OF PUBLIC OPINION FORMATION

 Lippmann shared skepticism about the inability for the average person to make sense of
the world
 Lippmann believe that propaganda posed such a sever challenge that drastic changes to
our political system were required  a mechanism or agency was necessary to protect it
 a scientific elite

REACTION AGAINST EARLY PROPAGANDA THEORY (Lasswell and Lippmann)

 Prominent critic of propaganda theory (John Dewey)  defender of public education as
the most effective means for defending democracy against totalitarianism
o People can learn to defend themselves if they are taught the correct defenses
o Arguments based on pragmatism – school of philosophical theory emphasizing
the practical function of knowledge as an instrument for adapting to reality and
controlling it
o Dewey believed that communities, not isolated individuals, use communication to
create and maintain the culture that bonds and sustains them

MODERN PROPAGANDA THEORY – centered in critical theory

 Edward Herman – five filters to ensure powerful business and government stay that way:
o Ownership
o Advertising
o Sourcing
o Flack
o Media’s “belief in the miracle of the market”

Downloaded by Iqra Khan (iqra6647284@gmail.com)

 lOMoARcPSD|4374011

 Richard Laitinen and Richard Rakos (1997)  say that modern propaganda is the control
of behavior by media manipulation and is facilitated by three factors:
o An uninformed audience
o Use of sophisticated polling and survey procedures
o Incorporation of media companies into mega conglomerates

LIBERTARIANISM REBORN
 A normative theory that sees people as good and rational and able to judge good ideas
from bad

Downloaded by Iqra Khan (iqra6647284@gmail.com)