Page 131 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

120 Chapter Four

relations/image manufacturing industries. Lippmann, then, unlike Dewey, did
not ignore disparities in the capacity to communicate; however, he “justified”
those disparities as being both necessary and good. 13
The “Chicago” theorists’ influence waned by the early 1930s, due not only
to Lippmann’s remarkable book, but also because it had become increasingly
difficult to sustain a posture of inevitable progress through advancing tech-
nology in the wake of World War I devastations and the onset of the Great De-
pression. The U.S. government’s psychological warfare activities of World
War I also contributed to the rise of a less idealistic, more pragmatic paradigm
in media scholarship. 14

Empiricism
The cadre of empirical scholars who redefined mainstream American schol-
arship in the 1930s eschewed speculating on how media might contribute to
community, democracy, enlightenment, or human betterment. They focused
instead on persuasion, psychological manipulation, and marketing. One
defining moment in this transition was in 1937 when a Rockefeller Founda-
tion grant set up the Princeton Radio Project with Paul Felix Lazarsfeld as di-
rector. The Project’s mandate was to study the possibilities for educational
and public service programming by commercial radio stations; its charter,
however, “explicitly forbade research that questioned the commercial basis of
broadcasting.” 15 Lazarsfeld’s Office of Radio Research soon moved to
Columbia University, where it was renamed the Bureau of Applied Social
Research.
A second defining moment was in 1939, when the Rockefeller Foundation
organized a “Communications Seminar,” whose participants included Lazars-
feld, Harold Lasswell, and psychologist Hadley Cantril (whose 1935 book,
The Psychology of Radio, perhaps inaugurated quantitative audience re-
search). In their interim report of 1940, the Seminar participants unabashedly
advocated war-related opinion management:

We believe . . . that for leadership to secure that consent will require unprece-
dented knowledge of the public mind and of the means by which leadership can
secure consent. . . . We believe . . . that we have available today methods of re-
search which can reliably inform us about the public mind and how it is being,
or can be, influenced in relation to public affairs. 16

World War II was certainly a boon to the by-then dominant “media-effects”
researchers, many of whom benefited from funds dispensed by the U.S. mil-
itary and intelligence services. Christopher Simpson lists the following,
among others, as eminent American communication/media scholars engaged