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LAZARSFELD, PAUL F.
LAZARSFELD, PAUL F. (1901-1976) was perhaps the most influential mass
communication scholar during the 1940s and 1950s. Through his Bureau of
Applied Social Research at Columbia University, Lazarsfeld and his colleagues
researched how people use the mass media to make important decisions. His
research gave rise to the "two-step" theory of the flow of mass communication.
Lazarsfeld was born in Austria in 1901. He fled Nazi Germany in 1933,
leaving his position at the University of Vienna Psychological Institute. In 1939,
he joined the Columbia University faculty.
Though he examined such topics as unemployment, education and psychol-
ogy, mathematical sociology, and market research, Lazarsfeld likely will be best
remembered for his work on two groundbreaking studies of voting behavior.
One was in 1940 with Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet in Erie County, Ohio,
which led to the book The People's Choice. Then, in 1948, he and Berelson
and William McPhee did a study in Elmira, New York, called Voting: A Study
of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign. Both showed limited effects
of mass media. In 1955, he collaborated with Elihu Katz on the book Personal
Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communication. This
was an in-depth analysis of the two-step flow concept, which says that messages
pass from the media through opinion leaders to opinion followers. (See also
The People's Choice.)
SOURCE: Ann K. Pasanella, The Mind Traveler: A Guide to Paul F. Lazarsfeld's
Communication Research Papers, 1994.
Wayne Wanta

LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS is a group, founded in 1920, that works to
educate women and the general public about the political process. Today it aims
to present unbiased political information, such as polling locales and information
sheets on political candidates, during elections. It has become a major source
of political information for the public, especially in local elections. It is a na-
tional organization.

SOURCE: Jay M. Shafritz, The HarperCollins Dictionary of American Government and
Politics, 1992.
Jacqueline Nash Gifford

LEAK is a term used to define the purposeful disclosure of sensitive information
to the public, generally through the mass media. Two classic situations involving
disclosure of sensitive information are the release of government documents and
information in the Pentagon Papers case and in the Watergate affair, both during
the Nixon administration. Those cases, as well as the more recent controversy
over leaks in the investigation of President Clinton, obscure the fact that leaks
are a staple of news coverage and occur every day. Most pieces of information
attributed to anonymous sources are probably leaks.