Page 88 - Historical Dictionary of Political Communication in the United States

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LASSWELL, HAROLD (1902-1978) was an important media scholar from
the 1920s to the 1970s. A faculty member at Yale, Lasswell served on the
Commission on Freedom of the Press, better known as the Hutchins Commis-
sion, and as director of War Communication Research at the Library of Con-
gress. He conducted extensive research in the propaganda of World War I and
World War II. Language of Politics, which came out of the World War II
propaganda analysis work, remains one of the definitive books on content anal-
ysis.
In his book Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927), Lasswell noted
that media messages can serve as magic bullets, swaying the masses toward
almost any point of view. Lasswell believed that individuals were extremely
vulnerable to messages transmitted by the mass media, which were "the new
hammer and anvil of social solidarity." Lasswell believed that for propaganda
to be most successful, however, individuals had to be prepared slowly over time
to accept new and radical ideas.
Lasswell also provided mass communication scholars with several important
models with which to work. He noted that the study of communication aims to
answer "who says what to whom through what channel with what effect." Thus,
mass communication researchers could analyze the communicator, the content,
the audience, and the actual responses by media consumers. He also argued that
the study of politics involved the questions of "who gets what, when, how."
Lasswell categorized the three activities of communicators as the surveillance
of the environment, the correlation of society's response to the environment,
and the transmission of social heritage.

SOURCE: Stanley J. Baran and Dennis K. Davis, Mass Communication Theory: Foun-
dations, Ferment, and Future, 1995.
Wayne Wanta