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Cultural Studies and the Political Economy of Media Scholarship 121

in propaganda and psychological warfare research for or with the military
during World War II: Harold Lasswell, Hadley Cantril, Rensis Likert,
Leonard Doob, Wilbur Schramm, Leo Lowenthal, Paul Felix Lazarsfeld,
Frank Stanton, George Gallup, Elmo Roper, Ithiel de Sola Pool, Daniel
17
Lerner, Edward Shils, Carl Hovland, Louis Gutman, Robert Merton —a ver-
itable Who’s Who of American media studies. Conservative media scholar
Everett Rogers agrees—albeit sans Simpson’s critical edge:

An invisible college of communication scholars came together in Washington,
D.C. They met in formal conferences and informally in carpools. Communica-
tion was considered crucial in informing the American public about the nation’s
wartime goals. . . . Communication research initially focused on studying the ef-
fects of communication. This consensus about the role of communication hap-
pened during World War II, and it happened mainly in Washington, D.C. . . .
World War II thus created the conditions for the founding of communication
study. 18
Through the 1950s and into the 1960s, government-sponsored research on
attitude and opinion change and on the art of propaganda continued apace as
CIA and State Department money, always unacknowledged publicly and of-
ten laundered by the Carnegie and Ford foundations, poured into university
think tanks. Government funding accounted for over three-quarters of the
revenue at Lazarsfeld’s Bureau, at Cantril’s Institute for International Social
Research (Princeton), at de Sola Pool’s Center for International Studies
(MIT), and at “similar research shops.” 19
Given their martial orientation and their scholarly fixation on persuasion,
it might at first seem surprising that the sole media “law” these eminent re-
searchers could come up with was the law of minimal media effects, “discov-
ered” by Paul Felix Lazarsfeld and elaborated by many mainline researchers
over succeeding decades. In his seminal study of the 1940 U.S. presidential
election campaign, The People’s Choice, Lazarsfeld declared that “conver-
sion” (as opposed to “reinforcement” and “activation”) was the sole indictor
of strong media effects. Since few voters in his panel of Erie County, Ohio
voters deviated from their initial voting intentions during the course of the
campaign preceding the landslide Roosevelt victory, a “law” of minimal ef-
fects was declared. 20 Lazarsfeld explained the “law” partly by proposing a
two-step flow theory of mass communication, subsequently elaborated in Per-
sonal Influence by Lazarsfeld and his one-time research assistant, Elihu
Katz. 21
Researcher Deborah Lubken suggests that “the first chapter of Personal In-
fluence has contributed, perhaps more than any other book, to the orthodox
history of mass communication research in general.” 22 Likewise, Jefferson