Page 246 - Culture Society and the Media

236 POLITICAL EFFECTS
unaltered the seemingly unyielding system of social stratification. Some
Europeans have wondered why this should have been so and whether mass
communication has played some part in dampening radical impulses among even
the working-class ‘victims’ of inequality. The United States, however, is a
society in which the clash of fundamentally opposed ideological and political
options has always seemed muted and as if overridden by the appeal of the
American dream of equality of opportunity for all. Yet in the latter part of the
post-war period, one societal sub-sector after another has been disturbed by
unpredictable surges of social change. Even media scholars are accustomed to
describe the 1960s and 1970s as a period of ‘America in political and social
transition’ (Becker and Lower, 1979), mentioning such changes in this
connection as the decline of the cities, the nation’s involvement in and
extrication from the Vietnam war, the emergence of unconventional life-styles
and sexual mores, and an ever-deepending erosion of confidence in government.
Quite different formulations of the social and political role of mass
communication seem to be connected to this contrast. In Europe, academics of a
Marxist and radical bent typically regard the mass media as agencies of social
control, shutting off pathways of radical social change and helping to promote
the status quo. In the United States, however, such formulations permeate the
literature less pervasively, and the mass media are more often seen either as
partial cause agents of social change; or as tools that would-be social actors can
use to gain publicity and impetus for their pet projects of change; or as
authoritative information sources, on which people have become more
dependent as the complexities of social differentiation and the pressures of a
rapidly changing world threaten to become too much for them (DeFleur and Ball-
Rokeach, 1975). On the whole, a social change perspective is more suited to the
conduct of mass media effects research than is a social control perspective.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF STUDIES OF
POLITICAL COMMUNICATION EFFECTS

Research into political communication effects has undergone at least two major
shifts of direction since its inception. In an initial phase, which lasted from
approximately the turn of the twentieth century to the outbreak of the Second
World War, the mass media were attributed with considerable power to shape
opinion and belief. In the second period, from approximately the 1940s to the
early 1960s, they were believed to be largely impotent to intitiate opinion and
attitude change, although they could relay certain forms of information and
reinforce existing beliefs. And in the current third stage, the question of mass
media effects has been reopened; certain previously neglected areas of possible
effect are being explored; and a number of freshly conceived roles for
communication factors in the political process are being elaborated.