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Mass Communication Theory – Baran & Davis

Chapter 1 – Understanding and Evaluating Mass Communication Theory

Overview of chapter → what separates an idea, a belief, or an assumption from a theory

DEFINING AND REDEFININF MASS COMMUNCATION

• Media theory has emerged as an independent body of thought in social science and
humanities
• Grand theory → theory designed to describe and explain all aspects of a given
phenomenon
o Try to explain entire media systems and their role in society
• Narrow theory → provide insight into specific uses or effects of media

Mass communication → when a source, typically an organization, employs a technology as a

medium to communicate with a large audience

Mediated communication → communication between a few or many people that employ a

technology as medium
• On a continuum that stretches from interpersonal comm. at one end to traditional forms
of mass comm. on the other
• Where different media fall along the continuum depends on the amount of control and
involvement people have in the communication process
• Message content is centrally controlled by media organizations

Interpersonal communication → communication between two or a few people, typically face-

toface

• More contemporary mass comm. = active audiences, media consumers having the power
to change messages, sharing perspectives on content

SCIENCE AND HUMAN BEHAVIOR

• Physical scientists = the dreamers, fixers and guardians o Physical science has allowed
us to gain increasing control over the physical world
• Social scientists = the naysayers, the Grinches of the world o Social scientists →
scientists who examine relationships among phenomena in the human or social world
▪ Society has a harder time accepting their theories and findings
▪ Reluctance, because of:
• Logic of Causality → when a given factor influences another even by way of an
intervening variable
• Causal relationship → when the alterations in a particular variable under specific
conditions always produce the same effect in another variable
Scientific Method → a search for the truth through accurate observation and interpretation of
fact
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• Logic of the scientific method is quite simple, but its application in the real world is
rather complicated
• If applied to systems that are well-isolated, stationary and recurrent (= rare) o Problems
with trying to study repeated observations b/c no two audiences, individuals, new stories
are the same
o Can put them in a laboratory, but then the environment is not realistic (people
don’t grow up in laboratories)

Hypothesis → a testable prediction about some event

Pioneers of mass communication – 1930s – said claims about bad effects of mass media should
not be accepted before making empirical observations
Empirical – capable of being verified or disapproved by observation

The implantation of the scientific method is difficult for those studying the social world for
four reasons:
1. Most of the significant and interesting forms of human behavior are quite difficult to
measure
2. Human behavior is exceedingly complex
a. Impossible to isolate single factors that serve as the exclusive cause of important
actions of human behavior
3. Humans have goals and are self-reflexive
a. We do not always behave in response to something that has happened, but in
response to something we hope or expect will happen
b. Constantly revise our goals
4. The simple notion of causality is sometimes troubling when it is applied to ourselves
a. Most of us are convinced that other people are much more likely to be influenced
by the media
b. Third-person effect → the idea that “media affect others, but not me”

DEFINING THEORY
Theory → any organized set of concepts, explanations, and principles of some aspect of human
experience
Many different definitions of theory

Four major categories of communication theory:

1. Postpositivism
2. Cultural theory
3. Critical theory
4. Normative theory
a. All four of these differ in:
i. Their goals
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ii. Their view of nature of reality, what is knowable and worth knowing
(ontology)
iii. Their view of the methods used to create and expand knowledge
(epistemology) iv. Their view of the proper role of human values
in research and theory building (axiology)

POSTPOSITIVIST THEORY
• Those in the physical sciences (physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc.)
• Postpositivist theory → theory based on empirical observation guided by the scientific
method o But this theory recognizes that humans and human behavior are not as
constant as elements of the physical world
o Overview → postpositivist communication theory is theory developed through a
system of inquire that resembles as much as possible the rules and practices of
what we traditionally understand as science
o Goals → explanation, prediction, control
o Ontology → accepts that the world, even the socla world, exists apart from our
perceptions of it; human behavior is sufficiently predicable to be studied
systematically
o Epistemology → knowledge is advanced through the systematic, logical search
for regularities and causal relationships employing the scientific method
▪ Advances come from intersubjective agreement → when members of a
research community independently arrive at similar conclusions about a
given social phenomenon
o Axiology → the objectivity inherent in the application of the scientific method
keeps researchers’ and theorists’ values out of the search for knowledge
▪ Fear that values could bias the choice and application of methods so
researchers would be more likely to get the results they want

CULTURAL THEORY
• Cultural theory → theory seeking to understand contemporary cultures by analyzing the
structure and content of their communication o Origin from hermeneutic theory → the
study of understanding, especially by interpreting action and text (began as the study of
the Bible)
• Goal → to understand how and why that behavior occurs in the social world
• Different forms of cultural theory – o Social hermeneutics → theory seeking to
understand how those in an observed social situation interpret their own lot in that
situation
o Interpretive theory → looks for hidden or deep meaning in people’s interpretation
of different symbol systems
▪ Seeks to interpret the meaning of texts for the agents that produce them
and the audiences that consume them
▪ Text → any product of social interaction that serves as a source of
understanding or meaning
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• Ontology → says that there is no truly “real,” measurable social reality o People
construct an image of reality based on their own preferences and prejudices and
interactions with others
• Epistemology (how knowledge is advanced) → relies on the subjective interaction
between the observer (researcher or theorist) and his or her community
• Axiology → embraces, rather than limits, the influence of researcher and theorist values

CRITICAL THEORY
• Start from the assumption that some aspects of the social world are deeply flawed and in
need of transformation
• Want to gain knwoeldge of that social world so they can change it
• Goal → inherently and intentionally political because it challenges existing ways of
organizing the social world and the people and instritutions that exercise power in it
• Critical theory → theory seeking transformation of a dominant social order in order to
achieve desired values o Assumes that by reorganizing society, we can give priority to
the most important human values
o Critical theorists study inequality and oppression o Theories
criticize
o Epistemology → argues that knowledge is advanced only when it
serves to free people and communities from the influence of those
more powerful than themselves
▪ Call this emancipatory knowledge o Ontology → there is a
‘reality’ that is apprehendable
▪ What is real and knowable in the social world is the product of
the interaction between structure and agency
• Structure → the social world’s rules, norms and beliefs
• Agency → how humans behave and interact within the structure
▪ Reality is constantly being shaped and reshaped by the dialectic (ongoing
struggle or debate) between the two
▪ When elites control the struggle they define reality
▪ When people are emancipated, they define reality through their behaviors
and interactions

• Social theorists see postpositivist and cultural theory as representational, meaning they
are articulations (word pictures) of other realities o Postpositivist = representations are
generalizable across similar realities o Interpretive theories = representations are local
and specific

NORMATIVE THEORY
• Normative Theory → theory explaining how a media system should be structured and
operate in order to conform to or realize a set of ideal social values
• Goal → set an ideal standard against which the operation of a given media system can be
judged
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• Ontology → argues that what is known is situational (what is real or knowable about a
media system is real or knowable only for the specific social system in which that media
system exits
• Epistemology → based on comparative analysis – we can only judge and understand the
worth of a given media system in comparison to the ideal espoused by the particular
social system in which it operates.
• Axiology → value-laden
• Theorists interested in the press’s role in a democracy would use normative theory

FLEXIBLE SOCIAL SCIENCE

Not all who call themselves social scientists adhere to the same standards for conducting
research or accepting evidence o Often blend categories as they work

MASS COMMUNICATION THEORY

Theories have evolved in part as a reaction to changes in mass media technology and the
rise of new mass media organizations that exploited this technology

OUR TRENDS IN MEDIA THEORY

• Past theory studied in distinct eras → now identity trends instead
• These trends trace the development of relatively stable perspectives on mass
communication

THE MASS SOCIETY AND MASS CULTURE TREND IN MEDIA THEORY

Latter half of the 19th century → industrial, rapid development, printing press created
newspaper/information spread o Theorists during this time fearful of cities because
of their crime, cultural diversity and unstable political systems
o Most theorists were elites who feared what they couldn’t understand
▪ Elites → people occupying elevated or privileged positions in a social
system
o Dominant theory to emerge → Mass Society Theory → perspective on Western,
industrial society that attributes an influential but often negative role to the media
▪ Contradictory theory – rooted in nostalgia for “golden age” that never
existed and scared of future
▪ The basic idea is that people who are socially isolated are especially
vulnerable to the appeals of extremist movements
▪ Regarded as a collection of conflicting notions developed to make sense of
what is happening whenever there is a large-scale and/or disruptive social
change
▪ All share one assumption – mass media are troublesome if not downright
dangerous
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▪ Essential argument → that media subvert and disrupt the existing social
order (but media can also be a solution to the chaos they create; can serve
as a powerful tool)
▪ Early mass society greatly exaggerated the ability of media to undermine
social order → because ultimately the media’s power resides in the freely
chosen use that audiences make of it

THE LIMITED-EFFECTS TREND IN MEDIA THEORY

• Argues that the influence from a mass media message on individual is limited or even
trivial. Media rarely directly influence individuals. Most people are sheltered from direct
propaganda manipulation
• Late 1930s/1940s – Paul Lazarsfeld – strong advocate of using postpositivism to provide
grounding for theory but it wasn’t enough to speculate, needed evidence
• 1950s – Lazarsfeld concludes that media not nearly as powerful as originally thought to
be o Limited effects theory → view of media as having little ability to directly influence
people. The dominant effect of media is to reinforce existing social trends and strengthen
the status quo
• 1960s – more theorists looked at limited effects theory and mass society theorists came
under attack for questioning hard scientific findings (Ex: Red Scare/Communism)

THE CRITICAL CULTURAL TREND IN MEDIA THEORY

• 1970s/1980s – postpositivist media research under fire from European researchers
• Reductionism → reducing complex communication processes and social phenomena to
little more than narrow propositions generated from small scale investigations
• Neo-Marxists → advocates of the social theory asserting that media enable dominant
social elites to maintain their power o left-wing social theorists argued that media enable
dominant social elites to consolidate and maintain their economic power
o form of critical theory (Neo-Marxist theory)
o 1960s – Neo-Marxists devolved school of social theory referred to as British
cultural studies → perspective focusing on mass media and their role in cultural
groups and in promoting a public forum in which definitions of the social world
are negotiated
▪ Focused heavily on mass media and their role in promoting a hegemonic
worldview and a dominant culture among various subgroups in the society
▪ This then formed critical cultural theory → an integration of critical
theory and cultural theory first attempted by British cultural studies
scholars
• Found that people often resist the hegemonic worldview (audience reception studies)
• Deterministic assumptions → assumptions that media have powerful, direct effects
• Cultural criticism → collection of perspectives concerned with the cultural disputes and
the ways communication perpetuates domination of one group over another o This was
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initially greeted with skepticism, but gradually established itself as a credit alternative to
limited effects

THE MEANING-MAKING TREND IN MEDIA THEORY

• Research moved to a focus on use of media rather than media effects
• Heart of meaning-making trend is the focus on active audience that uses media content to
create meaningful experiences
• When people use media to make meaning = significant results

SUMMARY
• All social theory is a human construction and that it is dynamic, always changing as
society, technology, and people change
• Social science is sometimes controversial because it suggests causal relationships
between things in the social world and people’s attitudes, values and behaviors → causal
relationships difficult to quantify in human behavior
• Four general categories of communication theory
1. Postpositivist (representational) → theory based on empirical observation guided
by the scientific method
2. Cultural theory (representational) → the study of understanding, especially by
interpreting actions and texts
3. Critical theory → seeks emancipation and change in a dominant social order
4. Normative theory → states how media systems can be ideally structured to
achieve valued objectives
• Our contemporary understanding of mass communication theory is the product of four
trends in theory development
1. Mass society trend is characterized by fears of media’s influence on “average”
people and optimistic views of their ability to bring about social good
2. Started when early postpositivist media research produced findings that led to the
formulation of limited-effects notion
3. Led by critical and cultural scholars – British cultural studies focused on the use
of media by social groups and on mass media’s role as a public forum in which
understanding of the social world is negotiated
4. Emergence of meaning-making perspectives – acknowledge that mass
communication can be powerful, or somewhat powerful, or not powerful at all,
because active audience members can use media content to create meaningful
experiences for themselves
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Baran & Davis

Chapter 2 – Establishing the Terms of the Debate over Media: The First Trends in Media
Theory – Mass Society and Propaganda Theories
Mass Society theory → perspective on society that emerged at the end of the 19th cent and was
especially influential through the first half of the 20th cent; many different theories sharing some
common assumptions about the role of media and society
• All-encompassing perspective on Western industrial society that attributes an influential
but largely negative role to media
• Views media as having the power to profoundly shape our perceptions of the social world
and to manipulate our actions (without our conscious awareness) Strengths:
o Speculates about important effects
o Highlights important structural changes and conflicts in modern culture o
Draws attention to issues of media ownership and ethics
• Weaknesses: o Unscientific
o Unsystematic
o Promulgated (proclaim) by elites interested in preserving power o
Underestimates intelligence and competence of “average people”
o Underestimates personal, societal, and cultural barriers to direct media influence

Propaganda → no-holds-barred use of communication to propagate specific beliefs and

expectations (developed after WWI)
• Media is the focus of attention
• Propaganda theorists specifically analyze media content and speculate about its ability to
influence peoples’ thoughts and actions
• Seek to understand how to explain the ability for messages to persuade and convert
people to extreme viewpoints and engage in irrational actions
• Dilemma → Propaganda threatened US democracy, but censoring propaganda meant
imposing limitations that also went against communication freedom
White Propaganda → intentional suppression of potentially harmful information and ideas,
combined with deliberate promotion of positive information or ideas to distract attention from
problematic events
• Taking bad propaganda and making it good; silver lining
• Basis for strategic communication methods

MASS SOCIETY AND THE DEBATE OVER MEDIA

• Changes associated with new media in the first half of the last century were more
disruptive because people were less experienced at dealing with communication changes
ASSUMPTIONS OF MASS SOCIETY THEORY
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• Envy, discontent and fear often at the roots of mass society thinking → because afraid
that this new thinking would fundamentally change the social world o To counter act
this thinking = technology control
• Basic assumptions of mass society theories:
1) The media are a powerful force within society that can subvert essential norms and
values and thus undermine the social order. To deal with this threat media must be
brought under elite control
a. Ex: broadcast being put under control of the government
2) Media are able to directly influence the minds of average people, transforming their
views of the social world
a. Direct-effects assumption → the media, in and of themselves, can produce
direct effects

3) Once people’s thinking is transformed by media, all sorts of bad long-term

consequences are likely to result – not only bringing ruin to individual lives but also
creating social problems on a vast scale
4) Average people are vulnerable to media because in mass society they are cut off and
isolated from traditional social institutions that previously protected them from
manipulation
a. People learn specific social roles based on the accident of being born in a
certain place at a certain time
5) The social chaos initiate by media will likely be resolved by establishment of a
totalitarian social order
6) Mass media inevitably debase higher forms of culture, bringing about a general
decline in civilization (stems from time of Enlightenment)
EARLY EXAMPLES OF MASS SOCIETY THEORY
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1) Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft → (Tonnies) sought to explain the critical difference

between earlier forms of social organization and European society and proposed a simple
dichotomy
a. Gemeinschaft – folk community – bound together by strong ties of family,
tradition, rigid social roles; people here year for order and meaning provided by
the folk community
b. Gesellschaft – modern industrial society – bound together by weak social
institutions based on rational choices rather than tradition
2) Mechanical and Organic Solidarity → (Durkheim) compared folk communities to
machines with people as the cogs; machines were ordered and durable but people were
forced by a collective consensus to perform traditional social roles
a. Mechanical Solidarity → folk cultures bound by consensus and traditional social
roles
b. Organic Solidary → modern social orders bound by culturally negotiated social
ties
i. Characterized by specialization, division of labor, and interdependence

MASS SOCIETY THEORY IN CONTEMPORARY TIMES

• A small amount of mass society resonates today on three fronts:
o High culture proponents (Roger Scruton, 2000) o Opponents of media
concentration
▪ Concentration – ownership of different and numerous media companies
concentrated in fewer and fewer hands
o In social science circles with an increasingly uninterested and uninvolved
citizenry
▪ Agenda setting theory – media may not tell us what to think, but they do
tell us what to think about
▪ Spiral of silence theory – alternative points of view are spiraled into
silence in the face of overwhelming expression of a dominant view in the
media
▪ Cultivation analysis – a false “reality” is cultivated among heavy
television viewers by the repetitive, industrially created stories that
dominate the medium
▪ Framing – news conventions present a dominant interpretive background
for understanding events and policy
THE ORIGIN OF PROPAGANDA - no-holds-barred use of communication to propagate
specific beliefs and expectations
• Gradually this term came to refer to a certain type of communication strategy
• Ultimate goal: to change the way people act and to leave them believing that those
actions are voluntary, that the newly adopted behaviors, and the opinions underlying
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them, are their own o To do this, propagandists must change the way people conceive of
themselves and the social world, through media tools
o Propagandists rely on disinformation to discredit their opposition (false
information spread about the opposition to discredit it)
• Black, white and gray propaganda o Black propaganda – involving deliberate and
strategic transmission of lies o White propaganda – involving intentional suppression of
contradictory information and ideas, combined with deliberate promotion of highly
consistent information or ideas that support the objectives of the propagandist
o Gray propaganda – involved transmission of information or ideas that might or
might not be false; no effort to determine validity
• Propagandists hold elitist and paternalistic views about their audiences
• In WWI, beneficial use of propaganda became known as the engineering of consent
(office use of communication campaigns to reach “good” ends)

PROPAGANDA COMES TO THE UNITED STATES

•Years following WWI
•Behaviorism – John B. Watson
a. The notion that all human action is a conditioned response to external
environmental stimuli
i. Deal strictly with observable variables
ii. One central notion was conditioning – most human behavior is the result
of conditioning by the external environment
• Freudianism – Sigmund Freud
b. Freud’s notion that human behavior is the product of the conflict between an
individual’s Id, Ego and Superego
i. The self that guides action must be fragmented into conflicting parts
1. Ego – rational mind; control
2. Id – the egocentric pleasure-seeking part of the mind
3. Superego – the internalized set of cultural rules
• Behaviorism and Freudianism were combined to create propaganda theories that viewed
the average individual as incapable of rational self-control o Saw people as being highly
vulnerable to media manipulation
HAROLD LASSWELL’S PROPAGANDA THEORY
• First to use psychological theories and demonstrate how they can be controlled and
applied to politics
• He argued that propaganda was more than merely using media to lie to people in order to
gain temporary control over them, but that people need to be slowly prepared to accept
radically different ideas and actions (long conditioning process) o Master (or collective)
symbols – symbols that are associated with strong emotions and possess the power to
stimulate large-scale mass action
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• Scientific technology – an educated social science-based elite charged with protecting

vulnerable average people from harmful propaganda Science of democracy

WALTER LIPPMANN’S THEORY OF PUBLIC OPINION FORMATION

• Lippmann shared skepticism about the inability for the average person to make sense of
the world
• Lippmann believe that propaganda posed such a sever challenge that drastic changes to
our political system were required → a mechanism or agency was necessary to protect it
→ a scientific elite

REACTION AGAINST EARLY PROPAGANDA THEORY (Lasswell and Lippmann)

• Prominent critic of propaganda theory (John Dewey) → defender of public education as
the most effective means for defending democracy against totalitarianism o People can
learn to defend themselves if they are taught the correct defenses o Arguments based on
pragmatism – school of philosophical theory emphasizing the practical function of
knowledge as an instrument for adapting to reality and controlling it
o Dewey believed that communities, not isolated individuals, use communication to
create and maintain the culture that bonds and sustains them

MODERN PROPAGANDA THEORY – centered in critical theory

• Edward Herman – five filters to ensure powerful business and government stay that way:
o Ownership o Advertising o Sourcing
o Flack
o Media’s “belief in the miracle of the market”
• Richard Laitinen and Richard Rakos (1997) → say that modern propaganda is the control
of behavior by media manipulation and is facilitated by three factors:
o An uninformed audience
o Use of sophisticated polling and survey procedures o Incorporation of media
companies into mega conglomerates

LIBERTARIANISM REBORN
• A normative theory that sees people as good and rational and able to judge good ideas
from bad
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Baran & Davis

Chapter 3 – Normative Theories of Mass Communication
Digital natives → people who have lived their entire lives in an Internet-connected world
Are media still worthy of people’s trust?
Quote approval → granting news sources the right to approve their words and how they are
reported in advance of a story’s release
• Right to check over a reporter’s story before publication or airing to see if they were
satisfied with what they had said during the interview and how it was being reported
OVERVIEW
• 1st decade of twentieth century → clean up media and make it more respectable and
credible; watchword was professionalism
• Answer: Normative theory o describes an ideal way for a media system to be
controlled and operated by the government, authority, leader and public; more focused in
the relationship between Press and the Government than press and the audience
o describes an ideal way for a media system to be structured and operated; the way
things should be
• One type of normative theory focused on in this chapter is social responsibility theory o
A normative theory that substitutes media industry and public responsibility for total
media freedom on the one hand and for external control on the other
THE ORIGIN OF NORMATIVE THEORIES OF MEDIA
• Different extremists:
o Radical Libertarianism → the absolute belief in Libertarianism’s faith in a good
and rational public and totally unregulated media
▪ Libertarianism -- an extreme laissez-faire political philosophy advocating
only minimal state intervention in the lives of citizens
o First Amendment Absolutists → those who believe in the strictest sense that
media should be completely unregulated, “free press”
o Technocratic Control → direct regulation of media, most often by government
agency or commission (Harold Laswell and Walter Lippmann)
▪ media practitioners cannot be trusted to communicate responsibly or to
effectively use media to serve vital public needs – especially during time
of crisis or social upheaval o Those who want regulation:
▪ Based off of propaganda theories – threat from propaganda was so great to
people
▪ Based off of mass society theory – troubled by the power of media content
to undermine high culture with trivial forms of entertainment
THE ORIGIN OF LIBERTARIAN THOUGHT ON COMMUNICATION
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• Traced back to 16th century Europe – feudal aristocracies exercised arbitrary power
• Libertarian communication theory arose in opposition to authoritarian theory → a
normative theory that places all forms of communication under the control of a governing
elite or authorities
• Libertarians said that getting out from under authoritarian control, people would naturally
seek truth, engage in public debate and create a better life for themselves o Milton’s
self-righting principle → in a fair debate, good and truthful arguments will win out over
lies and deceit
• Three fundamental concepts underpinning the Founding Father’s belief in press freedom
(Keane, 1991)
1. Theology : media should serve as a form allowing people to deduce between good
and evil
2. Individual rights : press freedom is the strongest, if not the only, guarantee of
liberty from political elites
3. Attainment of truth : falsehoods must be countered; ideas must be challenged and
tested or they will become dogma
• US first nation to adopt Libertarian principles → Declaration and Bill of Rights o
Communication freedom: speech, press, assembly
▪ New limits however, still being placed on media and communication

LIBERTARIANISM
Strengths:
1. Values media freedom
2. Is consistent with U.S. media traditions
3. Values individuals
4. Precludes government control of media Weaknesses:
1. Is overly optimistic about media’s willingness to meet responsibilities
2. Is overly optimistic about individuals’’ ethics and rationality
3. Ignores need for reasonable control of media
4. Ignores dilemmas posed by conflicting freedoms (e.g. free press vs. personal privacy)
THE MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS: A NEW FORM OF RADICAL LIBERTARIANISM
Wanting to rekindle public support for Libertarian ideals, media practitioners developed a
cogent response to Progressive and Populist criticisms → argued that media should be
regarded as a self-regulating marketplace of ideas o Marketplace of ideas → the
notion that all ideas should be put before the public, and the public will choose the best
from that “marketplace”
o also called the Laissez-Faire Doctrine → the idea that government shall allow
business to operate freely and without official intrusion
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▪ Applied to mass media – if ideas are traded freely among people, the
correct or best ideas should prevail
▪ Supposed to work like this in the American market: someone comes up
with a good idea and then transmits it through some form of mass
medium. If other people like it, they buy the message. When people buy
the message, they pay for its production and distribution costs. Once the
costs are covered, the message producer earns a profit. If people don’t like
the message, they don’t buy it, and the producer goes broke trying to
produce and distribute it.
MARKETPLACE-OF-IDEAS THEORY
Strengths:
1. Limits government control
2. Allows “natural” fluctuations in tastes, ideals, and discourse
3. Puts trust in the audience
4. Assumes “good” content will ultimately prevail Weaknesses:
1. Mistakenly equates media content with more tangible consumer products
2. Puts too much trust in profit-motivated media operators
3. Ignores the fact that content that is intentionally “bought” is often accompanied by other,
sometimes unwanted content
4. Has an overly optimistic view of audiences’ media consumption skills
5. Mistakenly assumes audience-not-advertiser-is consumer
6. Definition of “good” is not universal (e.g., what is “good” for the majority might be bad
for the minority)

GOVERNMENT REGULATION OF MEDIA

• During the 1920s/1930s new normative theory of mass comm. emerged that rejected
Libertarianism and technocratic control o Yellow journalism
proved that self-regulation wasn’t enough
o Yellow journalism → journalism that is based upon sensationalism and crude
exaggeration
o FRC = regulation; debate over whether this protected or harmed

PROFESSIONAIZATION OF JOURNALISM
• 1923 – the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) adopted a set of professional
standards called The Canons of Journalism (later replaced with ASNE Statement of
Principles, 1975)
• Industry code of ethics began to formalize around the role of media – as a watchdog
guarding the public welfare
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• Muckrakers → crusading journalists who typically challenged the powerful on behalf of

those less so
• Fourth Estate → media as an independent social institution that ensures that other
institutions serve the public o Perspective assumes that once people are informed of
wrongdoing, incompetence, or inefficiency, they will take action against it

SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY THEORY OF THE PRESS: POSTWAR COMPROMISE

• 1942 – Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press – independent, commission split
between Libertarians and those that thought there needed to be some form of press
regulation o The Chicago School → social researchers at the University of Chicago in
the
1940s who envisioned modern cities as “Great Communities” made up of
hundreds of interrelated small groups
▪ Interested primarily in the relationship between communication and
society
▪ Pioneers of qualitative research methods of social investigation
▪ Approach to the study of media and communication would today be more
likely character sized as cultural studies
▪ Referred to as pluralistic groups – recognizing cultural and racial
diversity; the various segments defined by specific unifying characteristics
▪ Opposed marketplace-of-ideas notions
▪ Their view → protecting the right of expression was not equivalent to
providing it
o Hutchins Commission report – the Social Responsibility Theory of the Press →
emphasized the need for an independent press that scrutinizes other social
institutions and provides objective, accurate news reports
▪ Call for media to be responsible for fostering productive and creative
“Great Communities”
▪ Imposes a burden on media practitioners o Basic principles of Social
Responsibility Theory (McQuail, 1987):
▪ Media should accept and fulfill certain obligations to society
▪ These obligations are mainly to be met by setting high or professional
standards of informativeness, truth, accuracy, objectivity and balance
▪ In accepting and applying these obligations, media should be
selfregulating within the framework of law and establishes institutions
▪ The media should avoid whatever might lead to crime, violence, or civil
disorder or give offense to minority groups
▪ The media as a whole should be pluralist and reflect the diversity of their
society, giving access to various points of view and to rights of reply
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▪ Society and the public have a right to expect high standards of

performance, and intervention can be justified to secure the, or a, public
good
▪ Journalists and media professionals should be accountable to society as
well as to employers and the market
SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY THEORY
Strengths:
1. Values media responsibility
2. Values audience responsibility
3. Limits government intrusion in media operation
4. Allows reasonable government control of media
5. Values diversity and pluralism
6. Aids the “powerless”
7. Appeals to the best instincts of media practitioners and audiences
8. Is consistent with U.S. legal tradition Weaknesses:
1. Is overly optimistic about media’s willingness to meet responsibility
2. Is overly optimistic about individual responsibility
3. Underestimates power of profit motivation and competition
4. Legitimizes status quo

USING SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY THEORY TO GUIDE PROFESSIONAL

PRACTICE
Communication markets restrict freedom of communication by generating barriers to entry,
monopoly and restrictions upon choice, and by shifting the prevailing definition of
information from that of a public good to that of a privately appropriated commodity

LIMITATIONS OF PROFESSIONALIZATION
1. Professionals in every field, including journalism, are been reluctant to identify and
censure colleagues who violate professional standards
2. Professional standards can be overly abstract and ambiguous
a. Difficult to implement and enforce; codes of ethics vague on purpose
b. Video News Release (VNR) → report produced by an outside organization,
typically a public relations firm, that is distributed free of charge to television
stations
3. In contrast with medicine and law, media professionalization doesn’t include standards
for professional training and licensing
 lOMoARcPSD|7302818

a. Media practitioners unwilling to set requirements for professional training and

have strongly resisted efforts to license journalists → argue that that is a way of
controlling the press
b. Can see the issue here when blogging became huge and now with social media –
what makes a person a journalist, what makes their view or opinion worth being
heard?
4. In contrast with other professions, media practitioners tend to have less independent
control over their work
a. Given assignments, “following orders”
5. In the media industries, violation of professional standards rarely has immediate, directly
observable consequences
a. The results of unethical or incompetent media practices can be hard to see

THE DUAL RESPONSIBILITY MODEL

Dual Responsibility Theory → Revision of social responsibility theory delineating a role for
fiscal, as well as social, responsibility in news decision making (Adams-Bloom & Cleary)
• This theory is based on stakeholder theory → idea that companies should operate in the
best interests of all those who depend on them – their stakeholders

IS THERE STILL A ROLE FOR SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY THEORY?

• 1972 – FCC for the first time required local cable companies to provide local access
channels in an effort to serve pluralistic groups (local origination (or mandatory
access) rule)
• Observers believe that social responsibility theory will be given new strength by
emerging technologies that allow communities greater power to disseminate information

THE PUBLIC INTEREST IN THE INTERNET ERA

• Freedom of press now belongs to everyone (smart phones, blogging, video cameras, etc.)
• Internet news sites forcing a major reconsideration of the practice of journalism, social
responsibility and public interest
• Rosen (2009) – said Internet can great “Great Communities” built around information
and ideas
• Democratic public discourse consists of three spheres which are strictly policed by
traditional, mainstream media journalists (Rosen & Hallin)
1. Sphere of legitimate debate → issues recognized as legal by major established
actors of the American political process; most journalists think they are here
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a. Front pages of American newspapers, opinion sections, Sunday morning

television roundtables
2. Sphere of consensus → propositions that are seen as uncontroversial to the point
of boring, true to the point of self-evidence, or so widely held that they almost
universally lie within this sphere; journalists do not feel compelled to report on
items that fall here
a. “the American creed” - capitalism is good and the market serves all
Americans well
3. Sphere of deviance → journalists maintain order by keeping the deviant out of
the news (gatekeeping) entirely or identifying it within the news frame as
unacceptable, radical or just plain impossible
a. Disagreement with American’s two major political parties, disbelieve that
what benefits Wall Street benefits Main Street, views that are never
reflected in the news

NONPROFIT JOURNALISM
• American foundations and individual contributors
• Community-funded (Crowd-funded) Journalism → journalists propose projects online
to people who then contribute to hose they deem worthy

OTHER NORMATIVE THEORIES

• Five concepts of normative theories (William Hachten, 1992)
1. The Western Concept → combining aspects of Libertarianism and social
responsibility theory
a. There are no completely free media systems
2. The Development Concept → describing systems in which government and
media work in concert to ensure that the media aid the planned, beneficial
development of a given nation
a. For developing nations
b. Media and government officials work together to produce content that
meets specific cultural and societal needs
3. The Revolutionary Concept → describes a system in which media are used in
the service of revolution
a. Goals are to end government monopoly over information, build an
opposition to the existing government, destroy the legitimacy of an
existing government, bring down that government
4. The Authoritarian Concept → advocating the complete domination of media
by a government for the purpose of forcing those media to serve the government
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5. The Communism Concept → advocating the complete domination of media by

a Communist government for the purpose of forcing those media to serve the
Communist Party
• Now scholars arguing for a less category-based, more flexible approach to normative
theory: transitional media approach o this approach would be normative, making
media system change and adaption its primary orientation
o it would accept change and adaptation as a historical process occurring through
booth revolution and evolution o would be culturally open-minded
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Baran & Davis

Chapter 4 – The Media-Effects Trend
Payne Fund → first well-funded effort to comprehensively study media effects using
postpositivist methods
• How children were affected by movies
• Research, however, largely ignored (flawed methods)

OVERVIEW
• Media-Effects Trend → media effects on individuals, because of their importance,
should be the focus of research; postpositivist methods provide the best avenue of
inquiry o Paul Lazarsfeld – pioneer of survey research o Carl Hovland – pioneer of
experimental research
▪ Both found media lacked power to influence
• Functionalism → dominant in American social theory 1950s/1960s o Theoretical
approach that conceives of social systems as living organisms whose various parts
work, or function, together to maintain essential processes o Living organism
• Communication Systems Theory → theory that examines the mass communication
process as composed of interrelated parts that work together to meet some goal o
Understand media power in its larger role, macroscopic level

THE DEVELOPMENT OF POSTPOSITIVIST EFFECTS TREND

• Lazarsfeld & Hovland o Determined to conduct empirical research that might reveal
how media influence worked
o Argued that the scientific method provided means to understand social world and
control media’s power over society
o Found media not as powerful as mass society theory/propaganda theory suggested
▪ Typically, less important than social status or education
• Wilbur Schramm → designed the first doctoral program in mass communication in
America; founded University of Illinois' Institute of Communications Research

• Factors that combined to make development of the media effects trend possible:
1. The refinement and broad acceptance of empirical social research methods was
an essential factor in the emergence of media-effects trend
2. Empirical social researchers successfully branded people who advocated mass
society and propaganda notions as “unscientific”
3. Social researchers exploited the commercial potential of the new research
methods and gained the support of private industry
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4. The development of empirical social research was strongly backed by various

private and government foundations, most notably the Rockefeller Foundation
and the National Science Foundation
5. As empirical research demonstrated its usefulness, media companies began to
sponsor and eventually conduct their own empirical research on media
6. Empirical social researchers successfully established their approach within the
various social research disciplines – political science, history, social psychology,
sociology, and economics

FROM PROPAGANDA RESEARCH TO ATTITUDE-CHANGE THEORIES

WWII provided three important motivations for people interested in attitude-change
research
1. The success of the Nazi propaganda efforts in Europe challenged the democratic
and very American notion of the people’s wisdom
2. Needed to bind all types of people in the military (Yankee, southerner, city boy,
country girl, etc.) together to one cause
3. Convenience – lots of people to collect data from

Attitude-Change Theory
Strengths:
o Pays deep attention to process in which messages can and can’t have effects o Provides
insight into influence of individual differences and group affiliations in shaping media
influence
o Attention to selective processes helps clarify how individuals process information

Weaknesses:

o Experimental manipulation of variables overestimates their power and underestimates

media’s
o Focuses on information in media messages, not on more contemporary symbolic media
o Uses attitude change as only measure of effects, ignoring reinforcement and more subtle
forms of media influence

CARL HOVLAND AND THE EXPERIMENTAL SECTION

• With his background in behaviorism and learning theory, Hovland’s strength was in
identifying elements in media content that might influence attitudes and devise
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straightforward experiments employing controlled variation to assess the strength of

these elements
• Outcomes:
o Found that military propaganda not as powerful as had been assumed
▪ Conversions rare
▪ Typically reinforced existing attitudes
▪ The fact that the films produced little attitude change and that what
change did occur was influenced by people’s individual differences
directly contradicted mass society theory and its assumption that media
could radically change even strongly held beliefs and attitudes
o As time passed, factual knowledge decreased but attitudes toward the British
actually become more positive
▪ Time was a key variable in attitude change o One important variable
researchers studied = the presentation of one or two sides of a persuasive
argument - no difference in attitude change between the groups who had
listened to the two versions
▪ Two-sided presentation was more effective who people who had more
schooling
DO MASS MEDIA INFLUENCE THE WAY PEOPLE VOTE?
Lazarsfeld – believed theory must be strongly grounded in empirical facts
• Thought that mass society and propaganda theories were too speculative
• Liked the inductive approach to theory construction → an approach that sees research
beginning with empirical observation rather than speculation o This approach avoids
sweeping generalizations
o Middle-range theory → theory composed of empirical generalizations based on
empirical fact (emulates physical science)
• Study done near Sandusky, Ohio – focused attention on changes in voting decisions,
conducted interviews (early deciders, waverers, converts, crystallizers) o Findings
directly contradicted the outcome that propaganda theory might have predicted
o Could find little evidence that media influenced crystallizers, waverers or
converts
o Found that most important influence of mass media was to reinforce a vote choice
that had already been made = media unimportant during election campaigns? o
Did find that some of the hard core early decision makers were also the heaviest
users of media
▪ Could act as gatekeepers → in two-step flow, people who screen media
messages and pass on those messages and help others share their views
▪ Two-step flow → the two-step flow of communication model
hypothesizes that ideas flow from mass media to opinion leaders, and
 lOMoARcPSD|7302818

from them to a wider population. It was first introduced by sociologist

Paul Lazarsfeld et al. in 1944 and elaborated by Elihu Katz and Lazarsfeld
in 1955 and subsequent publications.
▪ Lazarsfeld called gatekeepers opinion leaders → those who pass on
information to opinion followers
▪ Labeled those who turned to opinion leaders for advice opinion followers

THE COMMUNICATION RESEARCH PROGRAM

o Founded by Hovland at Yale, funded by Rockefeller Foundation o Work centered on
variables central to attitude change
o Explored the power of the communicator and message attributes to cause changes in
attitude, and they examined how audience attributes mediated these effects o Examining
the communicator = source credibility → divided into trustworthiness and expertness
o Examining the content of the communication = two general aspects → the nature of the
appeal itself and its organization
o Examining audience attributes = looked at personal importance of the audience’s group
memberships and individual personality differences
▪ In persuasion research, individual differences refers to those personality
attributes or factors that render someone generally susceptible to influence

THE MEDIA EFFECTS TREND BECOMES DOMINANT o 1950s to 1990s =

persuasion research o This represented an important shift away from the concerns
about the role of propaganda in society and toward a focus on what happens when
people are exposed to broad range of media content
o Two interrelated sets of empirical generalizations emerged from the early research (from
surveys and experimental research):
1. The influence of mass media is rarely direct, because it is almost always mediated
by individual differences
2. The influence of mass media is rarely direct, because it is almost always mediated
by group membership or relationships
o These generalizations allowed construction of limited or minimal-effects theory → the
theory that media have minimal or limited effects because those effects are mitigated by a
variety of mediating or intervening variables o Limited or Minimal-effects theory
include these specific theories:
1. Individual Differences → argues that because people vary greatly in their
psychological makeup and because they have different perceptions of
things, media influence differs from person to person
 lOMoARcPSD|7302818

2. Social Categories → the idea that members of given groups or aggregates

will respond to media stimuli in more or less uniform ways
THE SELECTIVE PROCESS
o One central tenet of attitude-change theory is cognitive consistency → the idea that
people consciously and unconsciously work to preserve their existing views o People
seek out media messages consistent with the values and beliefs of those around them
o People try to preserve their existing views by avoiding messages that challenge them
o Cognitive dissonance → information that is inconsistent with a person’s already held
attitudes creates psychological discomfort, or dissonance
o Selective processes → exposure (attention), retention and perception; psychological
processes designed to reduce dissonance
o Selective exposure → the idea that people tend to expose themselves to messages that
are consistent with their preexisting attitudes and beliefs
o Selective retention → the idea that people tend to remember best and longest those
messages that are most meaningful to them
o Selective perception → the idea that people will alter the meaning of messages so they
become consistent with preexisting attitudes and beliefs
o These findings based on people’s use of a very different set of media and very different
forms of media content than we know today

INFORMATION-FLOW THEORY → theory of how information moves from media to

audiences that have specific intended effects (now known as information or innovation
diffusion theory) o From media to mass audiences
o Overall objective was to measure the effectiveness of media transmitting information to
mass audiences
o Source-dominated theory → theory that examines the communication process from the
point of view of some elite message source o Information originates with authoritative
or elite sources and then flows outward to “ignorant” individuals Information-Flow
Theory Strengths:
o Examines process of mass communication in real world o Provides theoretical basis for
successful public information campaigns o Identifies barriers to information flow
o Helps the understanding of information flow during crises
Weaknesses:
o Is simplistic, linear and source-dominated o Assumes ignorant, apathetic populace
o Fails to consider utility or value of information for receivers o Is too accepting of status
quo
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PERSONAL INFLUENCE: THE TWO-STEP FLOW THEORY → the idea the

messages pass from the media, through opinion leaders, to opinion followers o Middle-range
theory o Katz and Lazarsfeld
o Reported that opinion leaders existed at all levels of society and that the flow of their
influence tended to be horizontal rather than vertical Two-Step Flow Theory Strengths:
o Focuses attention on the environment in which effects can and can’t occur o Stresses
importance of opinion leaders in formation of public opinion o Is based on inductive
rather than deductive reasoning o Effectively challenges simplistic notions of direct
effects Weaknesses:
o Is limited to is time (1940s) and media environment (no television) o Uses reported
behavior (voting) as only test of media effects o Downplays reinforcement as an
important media effect o Uses survey methods that underestimate media impact o Later
research demonstrates a multistep flow of influence

JOSEPH KLAPPER’S PHENOMENISTIC THEORY

o Klapper was concerned that average people exaggerated the power of media o
Phenomenistic theory → theory that media are rarely the sole cause of effects and are
relatively powerless when compared with other social factors o Now referred to as
Reinforcement theory → stressing the theory’s view that media’s most common effect is
reinforcement
o Klapper’s generalizations about media:
o Mass communication ordinarily does not serve as a necessary and sufficient cause of
audience effects, but rather, functions among and through a nexus of mediating factors
and influences
o These mediating factors are such that they typically render mass communication as a
contributory agent, but not the sole cause, in the process of reinforcing existing conditions

Phenomenistic Theory
Strengths:
o Combines impressive amount of research into a convincing theory o Highlights role
of mediating variables in the mass communication process o Persuasively refutes
lingering mass society and propaganda notions Weaknesses:
o Overstates influence of mediating factors o Is too accepting of status quo
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o Downplays reinforcement as an important media effect o Is too specific to its time

(pre-1960s) and media environment (no television)

THEORIES OF THE MIDDLE RANGE AND THE FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS

APPROACH
Robert Merton (1940s-1950s) → empirical research, trained under Lazarsfeld o
Development of theories of the middle range → designed to explain only limited
domains or ranges of action that had been or could be explored using empirical research
o Merton’s description of middle-range theories:
1. Consists of limited sets of assumptions from which specific hypotheses are
logically derived and confirmed by empirical investigation
2. These theories do not remain separate but are consolidated into wide networks
of theory
3. These theories are sufficiently abstract to deal with differing spheres of social
behavior and social structure, so that they transcend sheer description or
empirical generalizations
4. This type of theory cuts across the distinction between microsociological
problems
5. The middle-range orientation involves the specification of ignorance. Rather
than pretend to knowledge where it is in fact absent, this orientation expressly
recognizes what must still be learned to lay the foundation for still more
knowledge
o Provided an ideal rationale and justification for continuing small-scale, limited-effects
studies → implied all of these small studies would at some point add up
o “Paradigm for functional analysis” → how an inductive strategy centered on the study of
social artifacts could eventually lead to the construction of theories that explained the
“functions” of these items
o Value-neutrality
o Manifest functions → intended and observed consequences of media use o Latent
functions → unintended and less easily observed consequences of media use
o Functional analysis widely adopted as a rationale for many mass comm. studies during
late 1950s/1960s o Charles Wright – identified classic four functions of the media:
1. Surveillance of the environment
2. Correlation of the parts of society in responding to the environment
3. Transmission of the social heritage from one generation to the next
4. Entertainment
o One of functionalisms’ primary problems – it rarely permits definitive conclusions to be
drawn from the overall functions or dysfunctions of media o Narcotizing dysfunction
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→ theory that as news about an issue inundates people, they become apathetic to it,
substituting knowing about that issue for action on it

Functionalism
Strengths:
o Positions media and their influence in larger social system o Offers balanced view of
media’s role in society o Is based on and guides empirical research Weaknesses:
o Is overly accepting of status quo
o Asserts that dysfunctions are “balanced” by functions
o Asserts that negative latent functions are “balanced” by positive manifest functions o
Rarely permits definition conclusions about media’s role in society

THE ENTERTAINMENT FUNCTION OF MASS MEDIA

o Functional analysis tends to produce conclusions that largely legitimize or rationalize the
status quo
o Harold Mendelsohn → instead of condemning television, argued that critics should
acknowledge that it performs its function very well and at a low cost o Said TV had a
limited and minor social role; found that critics had exaggerated effects
o Mass Entertainment Theory → theory asserting that television and other mass media,
because they relax or otherwise entertain average people, perform a vital social function
o Media’s “balancing” effect

Mass Entertainment Theory

Strengths:
o Stresses media’s prosocial influence
o Provides a cogent (clear, logical, convincing) explanation for why people seek
entertainment from media Weaknesses:
o Is too accepting of the status quo o Paints negative picture of average people and their
use of media
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SYSTEMS THEORIES OF COMMUNICATION PROCESSES

o System → consists of a set of parts that are interlinked so that changes in one part
induce changes in other parts o Can be goal-directed
o Capable of monitoring the environment and altering their operations in response
to environmental changes
o Began during WWII

THE RISE OF SYSTEMS THEORIES

o Cybernetics → the study of regulation and control in complex systems o
Investigates how communication links between the various parts of a machine
enable it to perform very complex tasks and adjust to changes taking place in its
external environment
o Emerged as new field during WWII – because of its use in designing
sophisticated weapons
o Feedback Loops → ongoing mutual adjustments in systems
▪ Enable sources to monitor the influence of their messages on
receivers
(receivers can also influence sources)
o Communication Systems → systems that function primarily to facilitate
communication
MODELING SYSTEMS
o System attributes:

o Model → any representation of a system, whether in words or diagrams

▪ Key attributes: interdependence and self-regulation o Goal-
oriented → constantly seek to serve a specific overall or long-term purpose

ADOPTION OF SYSTEMS MODELS BY MASS COMMUNICATION THEORISTS

o System models replaced the transmissional model → the view of mass media as
mere sends or transmitters of information o Because of the addition on feedback loops

Systems Theory
Strengths:
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o Can be conceptualized as either micro-or macro-level theory

o Represents communication as a process o Can be used to model a limitless variety of
communication processes o Moves mass communication theory beyond simple linear-
effects notions Weaknesses:
o Has difficulty assessing causal relationships o Is often too simplistic to represent
complex communication patterns o Is perceived by some as overly mechanistic and
dehumanizing
o Focuses attention on observable structures, ignoring the substance of communication
o Is unparsimonious (not frugal)
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Baran & Davis

Chapter 5 – The Emergence of the Critical Cultural Trend in North America
OVERVIEW
• 1950s and 1960s
• Media effects theory → focused on whether specific types of media content could have
an immediate and direct effect on individuals’ specific thoughts and actions o But then
apparent that you could study mass comm. in other ways → cultural studies and critical
theory
• Theory can focus on changes in culture, on how shared understanding and social norms
change
• Critical cultural theory → argues that media might have the power to intrude into and
alter how we make sense of ourselves and our social world
• Culture → the learned behavior of members of a given social group

THE CRITICAL CULTURAL THEORY TREND

• Microscopic interpretive theories → focus on how individuals and social groups use
media to create and foster forms of culture that structure everyday lives o Borderline
between textual and social research o Referred to as cultural studies theories
• Macroscopic structural theories → focus on how media institutions are structured
within capitalist economies o Focus attention on the way social elites operate media to
earn profits and exercise influence in society
o Hegemonic culture → culture imposed from above or outside that serves the
interests of those in dominant social positions
o Set of theories is called political economy theory → focus on social elites’ use of
economic power to exploit media institutions
MACROSCOPIC VS. MICROSCOPIC THEORIES
• Cultural studies theories are less concerned with the long-term consequences of media for
the social order and more concerned with looking at how media affect the lives of groups
of people who share a culture o Microscopic (micro-level) → deemphasize larger issues
about the social order in favor of questions involving the everyday life of groups of
average people
▪ Researchers prefer to interpret what is going on in the world immediately
around them
▪ Intrigued by the mundane, everyday life o Macroscopic (political
economy theories) → less concerned with developing detailed
explanations of how individual or groups are influenced by media and
more interested with how the social order as a whole is affected
▪ Troubled by the narrow focus of microscopic theories
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▪ Want to assess the overall consequences to the social order when

industries (media) become a major part in national economies
▪ Want to know if media are intruding into or disrupting important,
largescale social processes
CRITICAL THEORY → theories openly espousing certain values and using these values to
evaluate and criticize the status quo, providing alternative ways of interpreting the social role of
mass media
• Seek social change that will implement their values
• Raises questions about the way things are and provides alternate ways of interpreting the
social role of mass media
• Often analyzes specific social institutions, probing the extent to which valued objectives
are sought and achieved Critical Theory Strengths:
• Is politically based, action-oriented
• Uses theory and research to plan change in the real world
• Asks big, important questions about media control and ownership Weaknesses:
• Is too political; call to action is too subjective
• Typically lacks scientific verification; based on subjective observation
• When subjected to scientific verification; often employs innovative but controversial
research methods

COMPARING THE MEDIA THEORY TRENDS

• Qualitative methods → research methods that highlight essential differences (distinctive
qualities) in phenomena
• Epistemologically, knowledge is created or advanced through discourse involving
proponents of contrasting or opposing theoretical positions
• Post positivist researchers find cultural theories hard to accept

THE RISE OF CULTURAL THEORIES IN EUROPE

• Never widely accepted by social researchers in Europe
• European social research characterized by grand social theories → highly ambitious,
macroscopic, speculative theories that attempt to understand and predict important trends
in culture and society
Marxist theory → theory arguing that the hierarchical class system is at the root of all
social problems and must be ended by a revolution of the proletariat (working-class
people)
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Cultural Studies Theory

Strengths:
• Provides focus on how individuals develop their understanding of the social world
• Asks big, important questions about the role of media for individuals
• Respects content consumption and sharing by media users Weaknesses:
• Has little explanatory power at the macroscopic level
• Focuses too narrowly on individuals compared with societal role of media
• Typically relies on qualitative research; is based on unsystematic subjective observations
MARXIST THEORY
• Karl Marx
• Later part of 19th century
• Media one of many modern technologies that must be controlled and used to advance
Communism
• Argued that hierarchical class system was the root of all social problems and must be
ended by a revolution of the workers
• Believed that elites dominated society primarily through their direct control over the
means of production (base or substructure of society)
• Elites also maintained themselves in power through their control over culture or
superstructure of society
• Marx saw culture as something elites freely manipulated to mislead average people and
encourage them to act against their own interests
• Ideology → ideas present in a culture that mislead average people and encourage them to
act against their own interests
• only realistic hope for social change was a revolution in which the masses seized control
of the base (means of production)

NEO-MARXISM
•deviate from classic Marxist theory in one important respect – focus concern on the
superstructure issues of ideology and culture rather than on the base
TEXTUAL ANALYSIS AND LITERARY CRITICISM
• humanists saw texts as a civilizing force in society
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• literary canon part of what theorists referred to as high culture → set of cultural artifacts
including music, art, literature, and poetry that humanists judge to have the highest value
humanists attempt dot make them accessible to more people
• long-term goal: to preserve and gradually raise the level of culture – to enable even more
people to become humane and civilized
• Hermeneutic theory → a member of the social subjectivist paradigm where meaning is
inter-subjectively created, in contrast to the empirical universe of assumed scientific
realism
THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL → Group of neo-Marxist scholars who worked together in the
1930s at the University of Frankfurt
• the original source of what is known as Critical Theory
• celebrated high culture while denigrating mass culture
• culture industries → mass media that turn high culture and folk culture into
commodities sold for profit
DEVELOPMENT OF NEO-MARXIST THEORY IN BRITAIN
• 1960s/1970s – two schools of neo-Marxist theory emerged in Great Britain:
1. British cultural studies → combines neo-Marxist theory with ideas and research
methods derived from diverse sources (literary criticism, linguistics,
anthropology, history)
a. Attempted to trace elite domination over culture
b. Hermeneutic attention is shifted from the study of elite cultural artifacts to
the study of minority group “lived culture” and the way that media are
used by groups to enhance their lives
2. Political economy theory
3. Pluralistic public forum → in critical theory, the idea that media may provide a
place where the power of dominant elites can be challenged
4. Structuralist view → elite control over the superstructure through repressive and
ideological state apparatuses
5. Culturalist view → culture is the site of social struggle and a place where change
occurs
a. Repressive state apparatuses – when culture
becomes too free, elites enforce their ideology
through that part of the superstructure
b. Ideological state apparatuses British Cultural
Studies Strengths:
• Asserts value of popular culture
• Empowers “common” people
Empowers minorities and values their culture
• Stresses cultural pluralism and egalitarianism Weaknesses:
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• Is too political; call to action is too value-laden

• Typically relies on qualitative research; is based on unsystematic subjective observation
Can overlook subtle, indirect ways that elites control media and audience reception

POLITICAL ECONOMY THEORY

• Study elite control of economic institutions, such as banks and stock markets, and then
show how this control affects many other social institutions
• Investigate the means of production by looking at economic institutions
• Examine how economic constraints limit or bias the forms of mass culture produced and
distributed through the media Political Economy Theory Strengths:
• Focuses on how media are structured and controlled
• Offers empirical investigation of media finances and industry structure
• Seeks link between media content production, media structure, and media finances
Weaknesses:
• Has little explanatory power at microscopic level
• Is not concerned with causal explanation; is based on subjective analysis of industry
structure and finances
• Is not concerned with audience reception or media use

THE DEBATE BETWEEN CULTURAL STUDIES AND POLITICAL ECONOMY

THEORISTS
•Rivalry between the two
•Political economists slow to acknowledge that cultural changes can affect economic
institutions
• Cultural studies theorists tend to ignore the larger social and political context in which
media operate -- focus instead on how individuals and groups consume popular culture
content
• Political economy theorists have remained concerned with the larger social order and
elites’ ownership of media
CULTURAL STUDIES: TRANSMISSIONAL V. RITUAL PERSPECTIVES
• James Carey → found that effects theories focus on the transmissional of accurate
information from a dominant source to passive receivers, whereas cultural studies is
concerned with the everyday rituals people rely on to structure and interpret their
experiences
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• Transmissional Perspective → view of mass communication as merely the process of

transmitting messages from a distance for the purpose of control
• Ritual Perspective → view of mass communication as the representation of shared belief
where reality is produced, maintained, repaired and transformed o Directed not toward
the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time
RESEARCH ON POPULAR CULTURE IN THE UNITED STATES
• Focus much attention on television and now Internet as premier media of the electronic
era
• Audience interpretations of content are likely to be quite diverse o Multiple points of
access → idea that some people make interpretations at one level of meaning, whereas
others make their interpretations at others
• Larry Grossberg – combines popular culture approach with neo-Marxist theory
• Serious study of popular culture poses a direct challenge to mass society theory,
limitedeffects perspective and notions of high culture for server reasons:
1. Grant a respect to average people that is absent from mass society and
limitedeffects thinking
2. Challenge high culture’s bedrock assumption of the inherent quality of
highculture artifacts like symphonies and opera
3. Open the possibility of media effects that are consumer-generated or allowed

CRITICAL FEMINIST SCHOLARSHIP

• Adopted Carey’s ritual perspective (communication is directed not toward the act of
imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs) rather than the effects
trend’s causal model
• Culture’s ongoing and systemic sexism motivated the research Four general approaches
to feminist critical scholarship:
1. Images and representations approach → what kinds of images of women are in
the media and what do they reveal about women’s position in the culture?
2. Recovery and reappraisal approach → how have women managed to express
themselves in a male-dominated culture?
3. Reception and experience approach → focused on female media consumers’
experiences and perceptions
4. Cultural theory approach → focuses on the organization and production of culture
Psychoanalytic theory → all human thought and action is driven by inner
psychological and emotional factors, often outside of people’s awareness

MARSHALL MCLUHAN: THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE AND THE MASSAGE

• Profound understanding of electronic media
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• All media from the phonetic alphabet to the computer, are extensions of man that cause
deep and lasting change in him and transforms his environment
• Changes in communication technology inevitably produce profound changes in both
culture and social order
• Technological determinist → a person who believes that all social, political, economic,
and cultural change is inevitably based on the development and diffusion of technology

HAROLD INNIS: THE BIAS OF COMMUNICATION

• Linkages between communication media and the various forms of social structure found
at certain points in history
• Written word-based empires expanded to the limits imposed by communication
technology
• Bias of communication → communication technology makes centralization of power
inevitable o Because of bias – the people and the resources of outlying regions that he
called the periphery are inevitably exploited to serve the interests of the elites at the
center

MCLUHAN: UNDERSTANDING MEDIA

• Explained his vision of the implications of the spread of electronic media:
o The medium is the message (and massage) → new forms of media transform
(massage) our experience of ourselves and our society, and this influence is
ultimately more important than the content of specific messages
o Global village → new form of social organization emerging as instantaneous
electronic media tie the entire world into one great social, political, and cultural
system
o The Extensions of Man → media literally extend sight, hearing, and touch
through time and space
• McLuhan became one of the first pop culture gurus of the 1960s
• Academic criticism however – found his ideas too diverse and inconsistent
McLuhanism
Strengths:
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Is comprehensive
• Is macroscopic
• Resonated with the general public in the 1960s and 1970s
• Elevates cultural value of popular media content
• Anticipates a future in which media play a central role in fostering community
• Enjoys longevity as a result of introduction of new electronic media Weaknesses:
• Can’t be verified by effects research
• Is overly optimistic about technology’s influence
• Ignores important effects issues
• Calls for nonlinear thinking, the value of which is questioned
• Is overly apologetic of electronic media
• Questions the value of literacy and argues for its inevitable decline
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Baran & Davis

Chapter 6 – Theories of Media and Human Development: Children and Adolescents
People (and children) now exposed to more media than ever
• Children begin watching TV at age three
• Form relationships with characters on TV/online before they even meet friends in school
• Children and young adults live in a world where F2F communication with others is
supplemented by and interwoven with a broad range of mediated communication

OVERVIEW
• Technological advance of television (growth from WWII) → economy could mass
produce items and people had leisure time/extra money to purchase o This lead to a need
to advertise
• Media research that media was having an effect on people (television effects) → young
people were increasingly being socialized away from parents’ influence (Bronfenbrenner,
1970)
• Social Cognitive Theory → theory of learning through interaction with the environment
that involves reciprocal causation of behavior, personal factors, and environmental factors
• Social scientists developed several different perspectives on the effects of television
violence: catharsis, social learning, social cognitive theory, aggressive cues, and priming
effects
• General Aggression Model (GAM) → model of human aggression that argues that
cognition, affect, and arousal mediate the effects of situational and individual personal
variables on aggression
• Critical cultural scholars have taken an interest in issues of young people’s development
→ their relationship between their increased media consumption and the
commercialization and adultification of childhood o Adultification of childhood →
when children’s values as consumers trumps their value as people, threatening their
physical, psychological, social, emotional, and spiritual development

Social Cognitive Theory

Strengths:
• Demonstrates causal link between media and behavior
• Applies across several viewer and viewing situations
• Has strong explanatory power (e.g., rejects catharsis, stresses importance of
environmental and content clues) Weaknesses:
Laboratory demonstration raises questions of generalizability
• Experimental demonstration might overestimate media power
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• Has difficulty explaining long-term effects of media consumption

• Underestimates people’s active use of media messages
• Focuses too narrowly on individual rather than on cultural effects

FOCUS ON CHILDREN AND VIOLENCE

• 1960s race riots = development of the Kerner Commission in 1967 and the National
Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence in 1968
• Federal gov’t developed the Surgeon General’s Scientific Advisory Committee on
Television and Social Behavior in 1969 → purpose was to commission a broad range of
research on TV effects that might determine whether television could be an important
influence on children’s behavior o Result = industry agreed to a self-imposed family
viewing hour in which violent content was ostensibly minimized and all three broadcast
TV networks tightened their programming to show less violence

TELEVISION VIOLENCE THEORIES

• Link between media violence and aggression

CATHARSIS → also called sublimation; the idea that viewing mediated aggression sates, or
reduces, people’s natural aggressive drives
• The idea that viewing violence is sufficient to purse or at least satisfy a person’s
aggressive drive and therefore reduce the likelihood of aggressive behavior
• Weaknesses: common sense and your own media consumption
• Social scientists would learn → certain presentations of mediated violence and aggression
can reduce the likelihood of subsequent view aggression (but catharsis is not the reason
why)
▪ Viewers learn that violence might not be appropriate in a given situation
(cultural norms/expectations)

SOCIAL LEARNING → encompasses both imitation and identification to explain how people
learn through observation of others in their environments
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Humans learn from observation

• Imitation → the direct reproduction of observed behavior
• Identification → a special form of imitation that springs from wanting to be and trying to
be like an observed model relative to some broader characteristics or qualities
• First look at observation – Miller and Dollard (1941) → said that imitative learning
occurred when observers were motived to learn and given positive reinforcement for
behavior (traditional stimulus-response approach)

SOCIAL COGNITION FROM MASS MEDIA

• Operant (or traditional) learning theory → asserts that learning occurs only through
the making and subsequent reinforcement of behavior o People learn new behaviors
when they are presented with stimuli (something in their environment), make a response
to those stimuli, and have those responses reinforced either positively (rewarded) or
negatively (punished)
o New behaviors are learned and added to people’s behavioral repertoire (the
learned responses available to an individual in a given situation)
• Weaknesses:
o This is an inefficient form of learning
▪ Negative Reinforcer → a particular stimulus whose removal, reduction, or
prevention increases the probability of a given behavior over time
o We do not learn in only operant manner
▪ Modeling → the acquisition of behaviors through observation
• Learning from observation of the environment is the basis for social cognitive theory →
things experienced in an environment (mass media) can affect people’s behaviors, and
that effect is influenced by various personal factors specific to those people and their
situations
• Social cognition through the use of media representations operates in one of more of
three ways:
1. Observational Learning → when the observation of a behavior is sufficient
to learn that behavior
2. Inhibitory Effects → the effects of seeing a model punished for a behavior,
thus reducing the likelihood that the observer will engage in that behavior
3. Disinhibitory Effects → the effects of seeing a model rewarded for a
prohibited or threatening behavior, thus increasing the likelihood that the
observer will engage in that behavior
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• Vicarious Reinforcement → reinforcement that is observed rather than directly

experienced o Central to social cognition
Reinforcement Contingencies → the value, positive or negative, associated with a given
reinforcer o Behavioral hierarchy – after seeing a behavior rewarded or punished, tells
us where to place the observationally learned behavior in our own hierarchy
• Social Prompting → demonstration of previously learned behavior when it is observed
as socially acceptable or without restraints o e.x.: running into a burning building to save
someone
• Bandura (1965) social learning experiment – Bobo doll

AGGRESSIVE CUES → information contained in media portrayals of violence that suggests

(or cues) the appropriateness of aggression against specific victims
• One direct outgrowth of social cognitive theory
• Berkowitz (1965) study on college students/shocking -- results:
o Viewers’ psychological state can lead them to respond to cures in programs that
met the needs of that state
o Viewers who see justified violence not only learn the behavior but also learn that
it can be a good or useful problem-solving device (disinhibition)
o Cues associated with an on-screen victim can disinhibit viewers toward
aggression against similar people in the real world
• Aggressive sues supported by contemporary thinking on priming effects
• Priming Effects → the idea that presentations in the media heighten the likelihood that
people will develop similar thoughts about those things in the real world
• Cognitive-Neoassociationistic Perspective → frequent viewing of violent media
portrays primes particular constructs, making them more likely to be used in behavioral
decisions
• Media viewed:
o Aggressive cues → media portrays cue viewers to consider women likely or
appropriate targets of violence
o Priming effects & cognitive-neoassociationistic perspective → media
representations of women as victims of violence heighten the likelihood that
viewers, when confronted by real-life women, will have similar thoughts about
them
• Desensitization → the idea that habitual consumption of mediated violate will mitigate
or reduce anxious arousal in response to depictions of violence
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THE CONTEXT OF MEDIATED VIOLENCE

Bandura (1994) said that the accumulated knowledge of social cognitive theory
concluded that TV viewers: “acquire lasting attitudes, emotional reactions, and
behavioral proclivities towards persons, places, r things that have been associated with
modeled emotional experiences” (p. 75)
• Potter (1997) identified seven important contextual variables (the information or context
surrounding the presentation of mediated violence) – in terms of modeling behavior
1. Reward/Punishment
2. Consequences
3. Motive
4. Realism
5. Human
6. Identification with media characters
7. Arousal

THE THEORY OF TELEVISION VIEWING

• Active Theory → view of television consumption that assumers viewer comprehension
causes attention and, therefore, effects (or no effects) o Viewers in general are actively
and consciously working to understand television content
o Viewing Schema → interpretational skills that aid people in understanding media
content conventions
o the active theory looks at children as active, with media pushing on them
• Active-Audience Theories → theories that focus on assessing what people do with
media; audience-centered theories o Argue that average audience members can routinely
resist the influence of media content and make it serve their own purposes
o Another way to look at this kind of theory → viewers are indeed active, but they
are active in using violent content in support of the increase in their subsequent
levels of aggression
o Downward spiral model → model of media influence suggesting that
individuals tend to seek out violent media that is consonant with their aggressive
tendencies

THE DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE → the view of learning from media that specifies
different intellectual and communication stages in a child’s life that influence the nature of
media interaction and impact
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• Important aspect of people’s power to deal with television is their ability to comprehend
it at different stages in their intellectual development
• Empowered child model → television effects research that assumes that children
eventually become competent, self-aware users of television
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Developmental Perspective
Strengths:
• Provides an age-based perspective on media effects
• Respects children as competent, self-ware media consumers able to moderate media
influence
• Offers evidence of the eventual reduction of harmful effects and increase in positive
media influence Weaknesses:
• Misused to justify arguments that as kids get older, likelihood of negative effects declines
• Overestimates children’s competence and self-awareness as media consumers in
moderating media influence
• Does not sufficiently appreciate role of media use in disrupting or otherwise influencing
development

VIDEO GAMES REIGNITE INTEREST IN MEDIA VIOLENCE

• The link between television and viewer aggression is accepted by all but the most ardent
media defenders
• Most recent media violence research has focused on video games (social cognitive
theory, player aggression) o This is driven by four factors:
1. The amount of video game play that children engage in
2. The “presence” of video games in high-profile school shootings
3. Sheer brutality
4. The video games interactivity; that is, players are much more involved in
the on-screen activity than are television viewers (participants, not
observers)
• Konijn, Bijvank & Bushman (2007) examined the issue of games’ psychological and
emotional interactivity by differentiating between two types of identification:
1. Similarity Identification → observer identifies with a character because
they share some salient characteristic
2. Wishful Identification → observer desires to emulate the character,
either in general or specific terms

GENERAL AGGRESSION MODEL (GAM)

• Anderson & colleagues – developed GAM from social cognitive theory
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• GAM → a model of human aggression that argues that cognition, affect, and arousal
mediate the effects of situational and individual personal variables on aggression

• GAM has two parts:

o Episode → when a person is in a social situation and can behave either with our
without aggression toward another ▪ Inputs can include:
• Situation Factors → that might increase of inhibit aggression (an insult in front of your
parents vs. an insult not in front of your parents)
• Person Factors → include all the characteristics a person brings to the satiation
(personality traits, attitudes, genetic predispositions)
• Routes → include the person’s present internal state, its affect, cognition, or arousal o
Affect → the mood and emotion
o Cognition → the accessibility of aggressive concepts or behavior scripts
(how easily primed)
o Arousal → the level of physical and psychological excitement the person
feels at the moment Outcomes → what ultimately happens in the
encounter
o Developmental/Personality Processes → the aggression-related
knowledge structures brought to that situation
o Media enter the model as part of a person’s developmental/personality

processes General Aggression Model (GAM) Strengths:

• Provides a comprehensive overview of media-human aggression link
• Incorporates a wide variety of personal and situational variables
• Applies across several media user and media use situations
• Explains both short-term and long-term effects Weaknesses:
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• Number and variety of elements and linkages make empirical investigation and validation
impossible
• Declines in real-world youth violence suggest model overstates media include on
aggression
• Does not explain research showing no link between media violence and subsequent
aggression
• Reliance primarily on laboratory research reinforces experiments’ built-in bias toward
strong effects

MEDIA AND CHILDREN’S DEVELOPMENT

• Superpeer theory → media serve as powerful best friends in sometimes making risky
behaviors seem like normative behavior
• Advertising impact on children development → research indicates that children younger
than 7/8 cannot distinguish between program and advertising content
• Critical cultural studies researchers concerned about influence of media on childhood and
adolescence o Early window → the idea that media allow children to see the world
before they have the skill to successfully act in it
o Steinberg (2011) argues that effects research on young people’s development is of
limited value in the face of kinderculture (the corporate construction of
childhood)
o Objectification theory → theory arguing that females internalize others’
perspective as a primary view of their physical selves
• Critical research and theory’s ultimate goal = social change
Active-Audience theories
 Early researchers of media audience research focused on describing audiences and if the
media had direct effects
 Active-audience theories – do not attempt to understand what the media do to people, but
rather, focus on assessing what people do with the media
 Audience-centered theories, as opposed to source-dominated theories
 Theories the first to make studying audience activity a priority
 People put specific media and specific media content to specific use in the hopes of
having some specific need or set of needs gratified
 The theories in this chapter are microscopic and have limited concern for the larger social
order in which media operate
 Ask: why do people seek information from media or how do they cope with the flow of
content from those media? Why do people seek entertainment and what purposes does it
serve for them?
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Active Audience Research

 1940s researchers began to gradually study an active, gratifications-seeking audience
(Herzog, Merton, Lazarsfeld, Stanton)
 Lazarsfeld and Stanton (1942) – how media organize lives and experiences
 Lazarsfeld and Stanton (1942) – produced a series of books and studies that looked at
how audiences used media to organize their lives and experiences
 Herta Herzog – credited with originator of U&G approach (although not the label)
 Did not try to measure the influence – satisfied with only assessing reasons and
experiences
 Motivations and gratifications of daily serial listeners (radio → popular quiz show, soap
opera listeners; wanted to understand why so many housewives were attached to radio
soap operas)
 Listening as an emotional release
 Enjoyment and wishful thinking
 Advice obtained Active Audience Research
 Wilbur Schramm (1954) – What determines which offerings a mass communication will
be selected by a given individual?
 Fraction of Selection – how individuals make media and content choices based on
expectation of reward and effort required

 People weigh the level of reward (gratification) they expect from a given medium or
message against how much effort they must make to secure that reward
 We all make decisions about which content we choose based on our expectations of
having some need met

Limitations
 How could researchers keep this research object, as individuals could self-report
hundreds of different gratifications
 Qualitative methods suggested, but postpositivist researchers didn’t see value in studying
subjective explanations and thought the only thing they needed to know about audiences
were its size and demographics
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 Thought studying this would only satisfy curiosity, not deliver measurable and definitive
answers
 Things that advertisers wanted to know
 Social scientists thought they must observe how people have been conditioned through
exposure to stimuli in past situations – to understand what really motivates people
(experiments, survey measurements, would be very costly)
 Postpositivists criticized early active-audience research as too descriptive
 Just took people’s reasons for using media and put them in arbitrary media categories (ex:
three categories, why not five?)

Confusion: Media function or media use?

 1960s – Active and grat-seeking audience research confused with functional analysis
 Functionalism is not concerned with individuals; it is concerned with overall functions
for society that are served by mass media
 Failure to adequately differentia media uses from media functions hurt the design of these
studies
 Also confusion on levels of analysis – focus of research attention, ranging from
individuals to social systems Uses-and-Gratifications Approach
 First revival – traced to three developments in research
1. New survey research methods and data analysis techniques – developed
questionnaires that allowed for people’s reasons for using media to be measured
more systematically; factor analysis; computers for survey methods now available
2. People’s active use of media might be an important mediating factor making
effects more or less likely – argued that a member of an active audience can
decide whether certain media effects are desirable and set out to achieve those
effects
 Your conscious decision to actively use this book is a necessary (mediating) factor that
must occur so that the intended effect can take place
3. Effects research focusing too much on negative – researchers knew a lot about
television violence in small segments, but less about how most people were
seeking to make media do things that they wanted
 Second revival – new media technologies and Internet applications
 Three characteristics of computer-mediated mass communication for uses and grats
researchers to examine
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1. Interactivity – the degree to which participants in the communication process

have control over, and can change roles in their mutual discourse
2. Demassification – the ability of the media user to select from a wide menu (we
can select from a lot to tailor to our needs)
3. Asynchroneity – mediated messages may be staggered in time (read email at
different times) The Active Audience
 Critics of U&G say it exaggerates the amount of active use Blumler (1979) identified
difficulty in defining activity
 Utility – media may have many uses for people, and people can put media to those uses
 Intentionality – consumption of media content can be directed by people’s prior
motivations
 Selectivity – people’s use of media might reflect their existing interests and preferences
 Impervious to influence – audience members are often obstinate, they might not want to
be controlled by anyone or anything, even my mass media. Audience members actively
avoid certain types of media influence
 Studied content and media-use-patterns, not what users did with the content once they
chose it
 Need to distinguish between activity (what the audience does) and activeness (the
audience’s freedom in choice – Avatar example) – and see active audience as a relative
concept.
Uses-And-Gratifications Model
 U&G - approach to media study focusing on the uses to which people put media and the
gratifications they seek from those uses
 Five elements (Katz, Blumler & Gurevitch, 1974)
1. The audience is active and its media use is goal-oriented
2. The initiative in linking need gratification to a specific media choice rests
with the audience member
3. The media compete with other sources of need satisfaction – media and
their audience are part of the larger society
4. People are aware enough of their own media use, interests, and motives to
be able to provide researchers with an accurate picture of that use
5. Value judgements regarding the audience’s linking its needs to specific
media or content should be suspended - we each construct our own
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meaning of content, and that meaning ultimately influences what we think

and do (ex: I watch reality TV, don’t judge) Uses-And-Gratifications
Model
 What other things in the environment influence the creation or maintenance of the
audience members’ needs and their judgments of which media use will best meet those
needs?
 Social situations can: (Katz, Blumler & Gurevitch, 1974)
1. Produce tensions and conflicts, leading to pressure for their easement through media
consumption (ex: reading diet advice and watching sitcoms on tv struggle with the
same things you are)
2. Create an awareness of problems that demand attention, information about which
might be sought in the media (see what popular people are doing and go to media to
learn how to be like them)
3. Impoverish real-life opportunities to satisfy certain needs, and the media can serve as
substitutes or supplements (don’t have the money to go out, stay in and connect with
people on SNS)
4. Elicit specific values, and their affirmation and reinforcement can be facilitated by the
consumption of related media materials (ex: reinforces attitudes toward partying if in
college)
5. Provide realms of expectations of familiarity with media, which must be met to
sustain membership in specific social groups (staying up to date with popular tv
shows)
Uses and Gratifications Theory
Strengths:
• Focuses attention on individuals in the mass communication process
• Respects intellect and ability of media consumers
• Provides insightful analyses of how people experience media content
• Differentiates active uses of media from more passive uses
• Studies the use of media as part of everyday social interaction
• Provides useful insight into adoption of new media Weaknesses:
• Too often mistakenly associated with functionalism, which can create a bias
toward the status quo
• Cannot easily address the presence or absence of effects
• Many of its key concepts are criticized as unmeasurable
• Is too oriented toward the micro-level
• Media gratifications are often not associated with effects Entertainment Theory
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 Examines key psychological mechanism underlying audience use and enjoyment of

entertainment-oriented media content (Zillman)
 Seeks to conceptualize and explicate key psychological mechanisms underlying
entertainment and to differentiate entertainment processes from those that underlie
media’s role in information, education, or persuasion
 Audience member do voluntary control their selection of entertainment content, there are
often underlying psychological processes they don’t consciously control
 Entertainment theory integrates findings from research examining the effects of many
different types of entertainment content: horror, comedy, conflict, suspense, sex,
affecttalk, sports, music, videogames Media choices:
 Hedonistic motivations – choosing content to maintain and maximize pleasure and
diminish and minimize pain
 Eudaimonic motivations – choosing content that provides opportunities for personal
insight, self-reflection, and contemplation
 Parasocial interaction – interaction between audience members and characters in media
content
Entertainment Theory
 Sub theories created:
 Mood Management Theory – predominant motivation for using entertainment media is to
moderate or control moods
 Individuals seek our media content that they expect to improve their mood (as it relates to
levels of arousal, avoid boredom and stress)
 Four types of media content relevant to mood management:
 Excitatory potential – the ability of content to arouse or calm emotion – to get us excited
or to reduce stress
 Absorption potential – the ability of content to direct our thoughts away from things that
induce a negative mood or toward other things that induce positive feelings
 Semantic affinity – the degree to which entertaining content involves things that are
similar to the things that are inducing a bad mood
 Hedonic value – the potential that content has to induce positive feelings
 Mood management theory can help explain why our efforts to manage our moods can fail
or why media content can be entertaining
 We don’t have to be consciously aware of content attributes – can be guided by our
feelings about content
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 Mood management theorists don’t necessarily expect audience members to be able to

report how they use content to manage moods (no surveys) – use experiments
 Also important to differentiate between moods that tend to endure over long periods of
time and temporarily induced changes in feelings
Entertainment Theory
Strengths:
• Stresses media’s prosocial influence
• Assesses cognitive, affective, and behavioral effects
• Provides cogent multivariate explanations for why people seek entertainment
from media
• Is grounded in an expanding body of empirical media-effects research
• Provides a useful basis for conducting experiments Weaknesses:
• Tends to accept status quo uses of entertainment media as a starting point for
research
• Has so far found effects that are mostly limited and minimal
• Tends to ignore and doesn’t provide a good basis for assessing cumulative effects
Tends to consider entertainment effects in isolation from other types of effects Reception
Studies
 British cultural studies researchers
 Audience-centered theory that focuses on how various types of audience members make
sense of specific forms of content (Hall)
 Any media content can be regarded as text made up of signs
 Must be able to interpret signs and their structure in order to read texts
 Polysemic – media texts as fundamentally ambiguous and legitimately interpretable in
different ways
 Message producers have an intended or dominant reading that reinforces the status quo
 Disagree and come up with a negotiated meaning and oppositional decoding
 Negotiated meaning – when an audience member creates a personally meaningful
interpretation of content that differs from the preferred reading in important ways
 Oppositional decoding – when an audience member develops interpretations of content
that are in direct opposition to a dominant reading
 Feminist Reception Studies - Radway (1984/1991) – shift away from exclusive focus on
textual analysis and toward an increased reliance on reception studies
 Content analysis on romance novels
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 Readers used these as a silent rebellion against male domination; an escape

 Readers rejected the preferred reading and engaged in negotiated or oppositional
decoding Reception Studies Strengths:
• Focuses attention on individuals in the mass communication process
• Respects intellect and ability of media consumers
• Acknowledges range of meaning in media texts and the likelihood of many different
interpretations
• Seeks an in-depth understanding of how people interpret media content
• Can provide an insightful analysis of the way media content is interpreted in everyday
social contexts Weaknesses:
• Is usually based on subjective interpretation of audience reports
• Doesn’t address presence or absence of effects
• Uses qualitative research methods, which preclude causal explanations
• Has been too oriented toward the micro level (but is attempting to become more
macroscopic)
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Baran & Davis – Chpt. 8: Theories of Media Cognition and Information Processing
Chapter focus: microscopic-level theories of how individuals gather, process, and evaluate the
flow of information, much of it from the media, that they continuously encounter
• Early research by cognitive psychologists → rejected behaviorist notions that people
simply react to stimuli in their environments and later use their cognitions to justify their
responses
Information-Processing Theory
• A means of understanding how people deal with sensory information; the theory is based
on the idea that humans process the information they receive, rather than merely
responding to stimuli
• Stemming from systems theory metaphors
• Theory assumes that individuals operate like complex bio-computers, with certain builtin
information-handling capacities and strategies
• Each day process numerous media, and only process a tiny fraction
• We are not information handlers, but information avoiders – screening out irrelevant or
useless information
• Cognitive processes : the performance of a cognitive activity or a processing and
movement that affects the mental contents of a person such as the process of thinking or
the cognitive operation of remembering something
• Consciousness : acts as a supreme overseer of this cognitive activity but has very limited
and typically indirect control over it o Theory recognizes the limitations of conscious
awareness o Provides an objective perspective on learning
• Recognizes that we have limited cognitive resources – idea that as more resources are
directed toward one task, another will suffer (ex: multi-tasking)
• Mistakes made in processing are routine outcomes from a particular cognitive process or
set of processes, not personal errors caused by personal failings Information Processing
Theory Strengths:
• Provides specificity for what is generally considered routine, unimportant behavior
• Provides objective perspective on learning; mistakes are routine and natural
• Permits exploration of a wide variety of media content
• Produces consistent results across a wide range of communication situations and settings
Weaknesses:
• Is too oriented toward the micro-level
• Overemphasizes routine media consumption
• Focuses too much on cognition, ignoring such factors as emotion
Processing Television News
• Information frequently presented in ways that inhibit rather than facilitate learning
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• Orienting response – humans’ instinctive reaction to sudden or novel stimulus (triggering

responses on television to attract viewer attention)
• All too often, the visual information is so powerful that it overwhelms the verbal

Schema Theory
• Information-processing theory arguing that memories are new constructions constructed
from bits and pieces of connected experiences and applied to meaning making as
situations demand (Sir Frederic Bartlett, 1932)
• Schema – cognitive structures built up as people interaction with the environment in
order to organize their experience
• Scripts – form of schema, a standardized generalized episode; people understand what
they see and hear by matching those inputs to scripts
• Schemas serve four important functions for news consumers:
1. They determine what information will be noticed, processes, and stored so
that it becomes available for later retrieval from memory
2. They help people organize and evaluate new information, fitting it into
their already-established perceptions. People do not have to construct new
concepts when familiar information is presented in the news
3. They make it possible for people to go beyond the immediate information
presented in a news report, helping them fill in missing information
4. They help people solve problems because they contain information about
likely scenarios and ways to cope with them (they serve as scripts)
• Voters bring several well-formed schemas to their interpretation of political news
(Graber, 1988) o Simple Situation Sequences – people do not process news stories
to remember precise details; instead, they condense the account to their bare
essentials to
understand what they mean in specific contexts
o Cause-And-Effect Sequence – people link reported situations to their likely
causes o Person Judgements – people easily process news about individuals in
terms of their demographic groups because they have built schemas about human
nature, goals, and behaviors
o Institution Judgements – just as people have schemas for the behavior of
individuals, they have schemas for the way institutions are supposed to operate
o Cultural Norms and American Interests – people have a general “the American
way” schema that includes the construction that democracy is the best form of
government for the United States and for the world as a whole
o Human Interest and Empathy – people interpret reports in terms of self-perception
• Schema-Inconsistent Advertising – advertising that intentionally violates people’s
expectations of that form of content
Schema Theory
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Strengths:
• Focuses attention on individual cognitive processing in the mass communication process
• Respects the information-processing ability of media consumers
• Provides specificity in describing the role of experience in information processing
• Provides exploration of a wide variety of media information
• Provides consistent results across a wide range of communication situations and settings
Weaknesses:
• Too oriented toward micro-level
• Suffers from label confusion
• Insufficiently accounts for neurological influences
• More research is needed to understand the processes involved in schema formation and
change
Hostile Media Effect (HME)
• Idea that partisans see media as less sympathetic to their side, more sympathetic to the
opposing side, and generally hostile to their point of view
• Is a perceptual theory of mass communication that refers to the tendency for individuals
with a strong preexisting attitude on an issue to perceive media coverage as biased
against their side and in favor of their antagonists’ point of view. Partisans from opposite
sides of an issue will tend to find the same coverage to be biased against them
Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM)
• Model of information processing that seeks to explain the level of elaboration, or effort,
brought to evaluating messages
• Devoted to how people interpret and react to persuasive messages
• Richard Petty and John Cacipppo (1986)
• Not everyone is willing or able to process information in a way that will get them to the
correct attitude, at least not all the time. Sometimes the easier, more automatic route to
their opinion.
• Peripheral Route – information processing that relies on cues unrelated to the issue at
hand
o Heuristics – simple decision rules that substitute for more careful analysis of
persuasive messages
• Central Route – information processing characterized by heightened scrutiny of
information related to the issue at hand
• Heuristic-Systematic Model - dual-process model of information processing that argues
for the parallel operation of systematic and heuristic processing o If the two processes
produce a judgement that is congruent or similar, the outcome is additive
▪ It produce more stable attitude change that is a better predictor of later
behavior
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o If they are incongruent or in opposition, systematic processing attenuates or

diminishes the strength of the heuristics
o When information or arguments under consideration are ambiguous, heuristics
tend to bias the information processing
• Holbert, Garrett, & Gleason – new media on ELM theory o Traditional media = push
media o New media = pull media (audience members pull from information they seek) o
Motivation = audience members who want to consume politically persuasive media
messages Elaboration Likelihood Model Strengths:
• Focuses attention on individuals in the mass communication process
• Respects intellect and ability of media consumers
• Provides specificity in describing process of information processing
• Provides exploration of a wide variety of media information
• Provides consistent results across a wide range of communication situations and settings
Weaknesses:
• Too oriented toward micro-level
• Dismisses possibility of simultaneous, parallel information processing
• Sacrifices testable causal relationships in favor of multiple cues present in messages
Less useful in explaining persuasive effects of entertainment media

Narrative Persuasion Theory

• Idea that absorption into a media narrative is a key mechanism in the story’s power to
influence real-world beliefs and behaviors
• Transportation – when a person’s mental systems and capacities become focused on the
events in a media narrative o Perceived similarity and empathy, involved in
transportation, are more closely connected to identification
o A transported viewer

Narrative Persuasion Theory

Strengths:
• Focuses attention on individuals in the mass communication process
• Can enrich the elaboration likelihood model
• Respects people’s cognitive processing of entertainment content
• Provides exploration of a wide variety of media information
• Provides a model for the construction of prosocial content
• Accounts for the operation of affect and cognition Weaknesses:
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• Too oriented toward micro-level

• Has not demonstrated that effects of entertainment content are enduring and significant
• More needs to be known about the factors that enhance or percent narrative persuasion
effects

The Extended Elaboration Likelihood Model (E-ELM)

• Absorption in a narrative and response to its characters in a narrative enhance
persuasive effects and suppress counterarguing if the story’s implicit persuasive
content is counterattitudinal o Entertainment-education (EE) – occurs when prosocial
messages are imbedded in popular media content
• Entertainment Overcoming Resistance Model – entertainment media features can
facilitate involvement with characters and/or narrative involvement leading to
storyconsistent attitudes or behaviors b overcoming various forms of resistance
Involvement with characters :
o Identification – emotional and cognitive process in which individuals take on the
role of a narrative’s character
o Wishful identification – occurs when individuals want to be like, desire to
emulate, and look up to the character
o Similarity – Homophily, the degree to which individuals think that they are
similar to a character
o Parasocial interaction – individual’s interaction with a narrative’s character
forming a “pseudo-relationship”
o Liking – individual’s positive evaluations of a narrative’s characters; it is
sometimes called affinity or social attraction

The Delay Hypothesis

• Idea that media effects can occur over time as people engage in information processing
and recall, often leading to incorrect cognitions o Subsequent effect might be a delayed
drip – delayed cumulative effect o Delayed drench – a delayed large effect
• Sleeper Effect – idea that attitude change not immediately measurable after reception of
a persuasive message might occur over time as recipients forget factors typically
influencing persuasion
• Contends that there is a fundamental difference between attitude change based on a
persuasive message (where attention is on the argument being made) and that produced
by narratives
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Affective Intelligence, Motivated Reasoners, and the Backfire Effect

• Affective Intelligence – idea that affect (emotion) and reason beneficially work in
concert in information processing
• Motivated Reasoning – idea that affect (emotion) and reason work in concert in
information processing, but not necessarily beneficially as individuals are
psychologically motivated to maintain and find support for existing evaluations
• Backfire Effect – people who receive unwelcome, correcting information not only resist
that challenge to their views, they come to hold their original, erroneous position even
more strongly
The Neuroscience Perspective
• Views information processing as a complex system of interlinked and interdependent
relationships of people’s biological and social environment Five areas of interest:
1. Attention
2. Emotion
3. Learning and Memory
4. Motivation
5. Perception Strengths:
• Focuses attention on individuals in the mass communication process
• Brings clarity to the nature/nurture debate
• Enriches traditional notions of communication activity
• Shows the value of automatic, unconscious information processing Accounts for the
operation of affect and cognition

Weaknesses:
• Too oriented toward micro-level
• Can lack specificity, especially if the environment can refer to everything
• Can appear overly deterministic
• Usefulness for understanding important aspects of media influence needs to be
demonstrated
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Baran & Davis – Chpt. 9: Theories of the Effect of Media on Society

Chapter focus: macroscopic-level theories; deal with how we use mass communication to
interact with and shape the institution that shape our realities and shape our everyday lives
• Concerned with aggregates rather than individuals o Aggregates : a combined whole that
is formed by the gathering together of all the particular elements Agenda Setting
• The idea that media don’t tell people what to think, but what to think about
• Bernard Cohen (1963)
• Implies a direction of influence from media to audience; implies causality
• Kinder and Iyengar tested agenda-setting and examined agenda-setting, vividness of
news reports, positioning of stories, and priming
• Priming – the idea that media draw attention to some aspects of political life at the
expense of others
• Agenda setting has an important macro-level implication: Agenda-building: a collective
process in which media, government, and the citizenry reciprocally influence one another
in areas of public policy o Presumes cognitive effects, an active audience, and societal-
level effects o Basic premise: media can profoundly affect how a society (or nation or
culture) determines what are its important concerns and therefore can mobilize its various
institutions toward meeting them
• McCombs – linking agenda-setting to framing o Framing – idea that people use sets of
expectations to make sense of their social world and media contribute to those
expectations
• McCombs – called new theory Second-Order Agenda-Setting: the idea that media set the
public’s agenda at a second level or order – o the attribute level (how we think about it)
o where the first order was the object level (what to think about)
• Jung Moon –combined agenda setting and hierarchy-of-effects model o Hierarchy-of-
effects model – practically theory calling for the differentiation of persuasive effects
relative to the time and effort necessary for their accomplishment
▪ most basic level it argues that people move through a series of stages
between their initial awareness or an issue and any subsequent, ultimate
behavior toward it
▪ modeled as the C-A-B sequence: persuasion model that assumes cognitive
effects (C) lead to affective effects (A) which lead to behavioral effects
(B)
Agenda-Setting
Strengths:
• Focuses attention on audience interaction with media
• Empirically demonstrates links between media exposure, audience motivation to seek
orientation, and audience perception of public issues
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• Integrates a number of similar ideas, including priming, story positioning, and story
vividness Weaknesses:
• Has roots in mass society theory
• Is most applicable to (and often limited to) studies of news and political campaigns
Direction of agenda-setting effect is questioned by some

The Spiral of Silence

• Idea that people holding views contrary to those dominant in the media are moved to
keep those views to themselves for fear of rejection
• Form of agenda-setting, but on a societal-level
• Because of people’s fear of isolation or separation from those around them, they tend to
keep their attitudes to themselves when they think they are in the minority
• Noelle-Neumann (1973) identified three characteristics of the news media that produce
this scarcity of perspective:
1. Ubiquity – the media are virtually everywhere as sources of information
2. Cumulation – the various news media tend to repeat stories and perspectives
across their different individual programs or editions
3. Consonance – the congruence, or similarity, of values held by journalists
influences the content they produce Strengths:
• Has macro-and micro-level explanatory power
• Is dynamic
• Accounts for shifts in public opinion, especially during campaigns
• Raises important questions concerning the role and responsibility of news media
Weaknesses:
• Has overly pessimistic view of media influences and average people
• Ignores other, similar explanations of silencing
• Ignores possible demographic and cultural differences in the silencing effect
• Discounts power of community to counter-act the silencing effect
News Production Research
• The study of how the institutional routines of news production inevitably produce
distorted or biases content
• W. Lance Bennett (1998) summarized four ways in which current news production
practices distort or bias news content:
1. Personalized News – helps people relate to and find relevance in remote events
2. Dramatized News – news that is attractively packaged
3. Fragmented News – snapshots of the social world
4. Normalized News – normalizing potential threats to the status quo
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• Gayle Tuchman (1978) – found that reporters engage in objective rituals: have set
procedures for producing unbiased news stories that actually introduce bias o The term
for professional practices designed to ensure objectivity that are implicitly biases toward
support of the status quo Strengths:
• Provides recommendations for potentially useful changes in news production practices
• Raises important questions about routine news production practices
• Can be used to study production of many different types of news
• Can be combined with studies of news uses and effects to provide a comprehensive
understanding of news Weaknesses:
• Focuses on news production practices but has not empirically demonstrated their effect
• Has pessimistic view of journalists and their social role
• Has been ignored and rejected as impractical by practicing journalists
• Needs to be updated since journalistic practices are being radically altered by the Internet
and social media

Media Intrusion Theory

• Idea that media have intruded into and taken over politics to the degree that politics have
become subverted (Davis, 1990)
• A loosely connected set of assumptions
• Assumes that the political system operates best when a responsible and informed political
elite mediates between the public and its elected leaders
• One worry is that many social groups that typically develop these leaders are losing
membership and influence o A decline of social capital: the Influence potential leaders
develop as a result of membership and participation in social groups

Media Intrusion Theory

Strengths:
• Explains how media may be disrupting important social institutions
• Provides a critical analysis of the operation of news media organization during elections
Explains why political parties have been losing control over political primaries
Weaknesses:
• Focuses on operation of news media but has not empirically demonstrated its effect
• Has overly pessimistic views of news media and their social role
• Focuses too much on intrusion into politics
• Assumes that political parties should dominate politics
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Information (Innovation) Diffusion Theory

• Theory that explains how innovations are introduced and adopted by various
communities
• Everett Rogers (1962)
• Meta-Analysis – identifies important consistencies in previous research findings on a
specific issue and systematically integrates them into a fuller understanding
• Rogers showed that when new technological innovations are introduced, they pass
through a series of stages before being widely adopted o First, most people become
aware of them, often through information from mass media
o Second, the innovations will be adopted by a very small group of innovators
▪ Early Adopters – in information/innovation diffusion theory, people who
adopt an innovation early, even before receiving significant amounts of
information
o Third, opinion leaders learn from the early adopters then try the innovation
themselves
o Fourth, if opinion leaders find the innovation useful, they encourage their friends
– the opinions followers o Finally, after most people have adopted the
innovation, a group of laggards, or late adopters, makes the change
• Change agents – those who directly influence early adopters and opinion leaders
Strengths:
• Integrates large amount of empirical findings into useful theory
• Provides practical guide for information campaigns in United States and abroad
• Has guided the successful adoption of useful innovations in the United States and abroad

Weaknesses:
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Is linear and source-dominated

• Underestimates power of media, especially contemporary media
• Stimulates adoption by groups that don’t understand or want the innovation Social
Marketing Theory
• Collection of middle-range theories concerning the promotion of socially valuable
information
• Tries to integrate marketing ideas, principles, tools, techniques and socially beneficial
concepts to promote communication and benefit society
• Source-dominated
• Several key features:
o Methods for inducing audience awareness of campaign topics – make sure people
are aware of the idea’s existence
o Methods for targeting messages at specific audience segments most receptive or
susceptible to those messages
o Methods for reinforcing messages within targeted segments and for encouraging
these people to influence others through F2F communication
o Methods for cultivating images and impressions of people, products, or services o
Methods for stimulating interest and inducing information seeking by audience
members
o Methods for inducing desired decision making or positioning o Methods for
activating audience segments, especially those who have been targeted by the
campaign
• One of the simplest social marketing theory is the hierarchy-of-effects model – assumes
that it is important to differentiate a large number of persuasion effects; permits a stepby-
step persuasion strategy Strengths:
• Provides practical guide for information campaigns in US and abroad
• Can be applied to serve socially desirable ends
• Builds on attitude change and diffusion theories
• Is accepted and used by media campaign planners Weaknesses:
• Is source-dominated
• Doesn’t consider ends of campaigns
• Underestimates intellect of average people
• Ignores constraints to reciprocal flow of information
• Can be costly to implement
• Has difficulty assessing cultural barriers to influence
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Media System Dependency Theory

Idea that the more a person depends on having needs gratified by media use, the more
important the media’s role will be in the person’s life, and therefore, the more influence
those media will have
• DeFleur and Ball-Rokeach (1975) – theory assertions:
1. The basis of media influence lies in the relationship between the larger social
systems, the media’s role in that system, and audience relationships to the media
2. The degree of audience dependence on media information is the key variable in
understanding when and why media messages alter audience beliefs, feelings, or
behavior
3. In our industrial society, we are becoming increasingly dependent on the media
(a) to understand the social world, (b) to act meaningfully and effectively in
society, (c) for fantasy and escape
4. The greater the need and consequently the stronger the dependency, the greater
the likelihood that the media and their messages will have an effect An
individual’s level of dependency is function of:
1. The number and centrality (importance) of the specific information-delivery
functions served by a medium
2. The degree of change and conflict present in society Strengths:
• Is elegant and descriptive
• Allows for systems orientation
• Integrates microscopic and macroscopic theory
• Is especially useful in explaining the role of media during crisis and social change
Weaknesses:
• Is difficult to verify empirically
• Meaning and power of dependency are unclear Lacks power in explaining long-term
effects

The Knowledge Gap

• Systematic differences in knowledge between better-informed and less-informed
segments of a population
• Preexisting gap between segments of the population that is exasperated by audience and
media factors
• Constant gap
• Digital divide – the lack of access to communication technology among people of color,
the poor, the disabled, and those in rural communities Strengths:
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• Identifies potentially troublesome gaps between groups

Provides ideas for overcoming gaps
• Presumes reciprocity and audience activity in communication
• Is grounded in systems theory Weaknesses:
• Assumes gaps are always dysfunctional; not all researchers agree
• Limits focus to gaps involving news and social conflicts Can’t address fundamental
reasons for gaps

Cultivation Analysis
• Theory that television “cultivates” or creates a worldview that, although possibly
inaccurate, becomes the reality because people believe it to be so
• George Gerbner
• Violence index – annual content analysis of a sample week of network television
primetime fare demonstrating how much violence is present
• Cultural Indicators Project – periodic examinations of television programming and the
conceptions of social reality cultivated by viewing
• Cultural indicators research made five assumptions:
1. Television is essentially and fundamentally different from other forms of mass
media
2. The medium is the “central cultural arm” of American society
3. The substance of the consciousness cultivated by TV is not so much specific
attitudes and opinions as more basic assumptions about the ‘facts’ of life and
standards of judgement on which conclusions are based
4. Television’s major cultural function is to stabilize social patterns, to cultivate
resistance to change
5. The observable, measurable, independent contributions of television to the culture
are relatively small
a. Ice-Age Analogy – idea that the degree of television’s influence is less
critical than the direction of its steady contribution

The Products of Cultivation Analysis

• Cultivation researchers depend on a four-step process:
1. Message system analysis – detailed content analyses of television programming
to assess its most recurring and consistent presentations of images, themes,
values, and portrayals
2. Formulation of questions about viewers’ social realties
3. Survey the audience
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4. Comparing the social realities of light and heavy viewers What is television’s
contribution?
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o Cultivation – television’s contribution to the creation of a culture’s framework or

knowledge and underlying general concepts
o Cultivation occurs in two ways:
1. Mainstreaming – the process especially for heavy viewers, by
which television’s symbols monopolize and dominate other
sources of information and ideas about the world
2. Resonance – when viewers see things on television that are
congruent with their own everyday realities
o The effects manifest in two ways:
1. First-order cultivation – viewers’ estimates of the occurrence of
some phenomenon; probability judgements
2. Second-order cultivation – attitudes and beliefs that are formed as
a result of viewers’ probability judgements Gerbner’s 3 B’s of
Television:
1. Television BLURS traditional distinctions of people’s viewers of
their world
2. Television BLENDS their realities into television’s cultural
mainstream
3. Television BENDS that mainstream to the institutional interests of
television and its sponsors Strengths:
• Combines macro- and micro-level theories
• Provides detailed explanation of television’s unique role
• Enables empirical study of widely held humanistic assumptions
• Redefines effect as more than observable behavior change
• Applies to a wide variety of effects issues
• Provides basis for social change Weaknesses:
• Early research had methodological limitations
• Assumes homogeneity of television content
• Focuses on heavy users of television
• Is difficulty to apply to media used less heavily than television

Media Literacy
The ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages
Media literacy movement based on insights:
o Audience members are indeed active, but they are not necessarily very aware of
what they do with media (uses and grats)
o The audience’s needs, opportunities, and choices are constrained by access to
media and media content (critical cultural studies)
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o Media content can implicitly and explicitly provide a guide for action (social
cognitive theory, schema theory, cultivation, social construction of reality,
symbolic interaction, framing)
o People must realistically assess how their interaction with media texts can
determine the purposes that interaction can serve for them in their environments
(cultural theory) o People have differing levels of cognitive processing ability,
and this can radically affect how they use media and what they are able to get from
media (informationprocessing theory and knowledge gap)
Two Views of Media Literacy
• Art Silverblatt (1995) – identified five elements of media literacy:
1. An awareness of the impact of the media on the individual and society
2. An understanding of the process of mass communication
3. The development of strategies with which to analyze and discuss media messages
4. An awareness of media content as a text that provides insight into our
contemporary culture and ourselves
5. The cultivation of an enhanced enjoyment, understanding, and appreciation of
media content
• Potter (1998) – describes several foundation ideas supporting media literacy:
1. Media literacy a continuum, not a category
2. Media literacy needs to be developed
3. Media literacy is multidimensional - we interact with media messages in four
ways, and do so with varying levels of awareness and skill
a. The cognitive domain refers to mental processes and thinking
b. The emotional domain is the dimension of feeling
c. The aesthetic domain refers to the ability to enjoy, understand, and
appreciate media content from an artistic point of view
d. The moral domain refers to the ability to infer the values underlying the
messages
4. The purpose of media literacy is to give us more control over interpretations
• Media literacy intervention – an effort to reduce harmful effects of the media by
informing the audience about one or more aspects of those media
Baran & Davis – Chpt. 10: Media and Culture Theories: Meaning-Making in the Social World
Chapter focus: media theory is changing; new media theories; theories here explain that as we
move through the many different situations that structure our everyday lives, our sense of
ourselves undergoes continual change, as does our understanding of others
• Micro-level cultural theories – examine the everyday use of media by individuals and
local communities
• Macro-level cultural theories – look at media’s role in the larger social order
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• Culture-centered – theories that study culture as a primary means of understanding the

social world and the role media play in it
• Meaning Making Theories – focused on understanding the way media influence how we
make sense of the social world and our place in it – how we make meaning
Symbolic Interactionism → Theory that people give meaning to symbols and that those
meanings come to control those people
• Symbolic interactionists are strong believers in the power of individuals to have a
significant level of control over culture and their social world
• Early name was social behaviorism – view of learning that focuses on the mental
processes and the social environment in which learning takes place
• Humans are socialized in ways that permit more or less conscious interpretation of
stimuli and planned responses
• Microcosm of society – each of us learns many different social roles through interaction
with others; our actions are constantly being subtly “conditioned” by others, while at the
same time we are affecting their actions
• Symbols – in general, arbitrary, often abstract representations of unseen phenomena o
We use symbols to create our experience of consciousness (mind), our understanding of
ourselves (self), and our knowledge of the larger social order
(society) o Symbols mediate and structure all our experience because they
structure our ability to perceive and interpret what goes on around us
• Symbolic interactionism posits that our actions in response to symbols are mediated (or
controlled) largely by symbols
Pragmatism and the Chicago School
• Pragmatism – philosophical school of theory emphasizing the practical function of
knowledge as an instrument for adapting to and controlling reality o Mead tried to find
a middle ground between idealism and behaviorism
▪ Idealism – argued that people are dominated by culture
▪ Behaviorism – argues that all human action is a conditioned response to
external stimuli
• Many of the most productive symbolic interactionists became known as →
Chicago School (Chpt. 3)
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Current Applications of Symbolic Interactionism

• Summary of Mead’s work relevant for media research:
1. Cultural symbols are learned through interaction and then mediate that interaction
2. The “overlap of shared meaning” by people in a culture means that individuals
who learn a culture should be able to predict the behaviors of others in that culture
3. Self-definition is social in nature; the self is defined largely through interaction
with the environment
4. The extent to which a person is committed to a social identity will determine the
power of that identity to influence his or her behavior
• Faules and Alexander (1978) offered three fundamental propositions on symbolic
interaction and communication o Defined communication as symbolic behavior that
results in various degrees of shared meaning and values between participants
1. People’s interpretation and perception of the environment depend on
communication
2. Communication is guided by and guides the concepts of self, role, and
situations, and these concepts generate expectations in and of the
environment
3. Communication consists of complex interactions “involving actions,
interdependence, mutual influence, meaning, relationship, and situational
factors”
• Definitions necessary in symbolic interaction theory:
o Sign – any element in the environment used to represent another element in the
environment
▪ Classified in two ways:
• Natural Signs – things occurring in nature that represent something else in nature
• Artificial Signs – elements that have been constructed to represent something else in the
social world
o Signals – artificial signs that produce highly predictable responses o Symbols –
artificial signs for which there is less certainty of response Strengths:
• Rejects simple stimulus-response conceptualizations of human behavior
• Considers the social environment in which learning takes place
• Recognizes the complexity of human existence
• Foregrounds individuals’’ and the community’s role in agency
• Provides basis for many methodologies and approaches for inquiry Weaknesses:
• Gives too little recognition to power of social institutions
• In some contemporary articulations, grants too much power to media content
*Note: symbolic interaction defines signs and symbols in precisely the opposite way as does
social-construction-of-reality theory
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Social Constructionism → school of social theory that argues that individuals’’ power to
oppose or reconstruct important social institutions is limited
• Questions the amount of control individuals have over culture
• Social Construction of Reality – theory that assumes an ongoing correspondence of
meaning because people share a common sense about its reality
• Assumes that audiences are active → actively process information, reshape it, and store
only what serves culturally defined needs
• Phenomenology – theory developed by European philosophers focusing on individual
experience of the physical and social world
• Typifications – “mental images” that enable people to quickly classify objects and
actions and then structure their own actions in response o Operate to some extent like
stereotypes
o Similar to Mead’s idea of symbols and the notion of schemas in
informationprocessing theory
▪ Differs from these in emphasizing that these elements of culture can be
beyond our conscious control
• Symbol – in social construction of reality, an object that represents some other object
• Signs – in social construction of reality, objects explicitly designed to serve as an index
of subjective meaning
• Berger and Luckmann (1966) – Typification Schemes – collections of meanings assigned
to some phenomenon, which come from a social stock of knowledge to pattern
interaction with the environment and things and people in it o Whoever has the
greatest influence over a culture’s definition of its symbols and signs has the greatest influence
over the construction of the typification schemes individuals use to pattern their interactions
Strengths:
• Rejects simple stimulus-response conceptualizations of human behavior
• Considers the social environment in which learning takes place
• Recognizes the complexity of human existence
• Foregrounds social institutions’ role in agency
• Provides basis for many methodologies and approaches to inquiry Weaknesses:
• Gives too little recognition to power of individuals and communities
• In some contemporary articulations, grants too much power to elites who control media
content
Framing and Frame Analysis
• Roots in symbolic interaction and social constructionism
• The expectations we form about ourselves, other people, and our social world are central
to social life
• Expectations are social constructed:
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1. Expectations are based on previous experience of some kind, whether derived

from a media message of direct personal experience (we aren’t born with them)
2. Expectations can be quite resistant to change, even when they are contradicted by
readily available factual information
3. Expectations are often associated with and can arouse strong emotions such as
hate, fear, or love
4. We typically are not consciously aware of our expectations and so can’t make
useful predictions about how we will feel or act in future situations based on these
expectations
5. Expectations guide our actions without our conscious awareness, especially when
strong emotions are aroused or there are distractions that interfere with our ability
to focus our attention and consciously interpret new information available in the
situation
• Goffman (1974) – Frame Analysis – how people use expectations to make sense of
everyday life o Argued that we constantly and often radically change the way we define
or typify situations, actions, and other people as we move through time and space
o Frame – a specific set of expectations used to make sense of a social situation at a
given point in time
▪ Individual frames spread along a continuum from those structuring our
most serious and social significant actions to playful, trivial actions
▪ Downshift or Upshift – to move back and forth between serious and less
serious frames
▪ Framing involves shifting expectations
▪ Social Cues – information in the environment that signals a shift or
change of action
o Media and framing = ads are hyperritualized representations of social actions
▪ Hyperritualized representations – media content constructed to highlight
the most meaningful actions
o Individuals can reframe but tend to maintain the impression that our experiences
are quite consistent and routine – we do this by firmly committing our self to our
dominant reality
▪ Primary or Dominant Reality – the real world in which people and events
obey certain conventional and widely accepted rule
Strengths:
• Focuses attention on individuals in the mass communication process
• Micro-level theory but is easily applicable to macro-level issues
• Is highly flexible and open-ended
• Is consistent with recent findings in cognitive psychology Weaknesses:
• Is overly flexibly and open-ended (lacks specificity)
• Postpositivists and critical culture researchers have different versions of this theory
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• Causal explanations are only possible when there is a narrow focus on framing effects
Assumes individuals make frequent framing errors; questions individuals’ abilities

The Development of Theory of Frames and Framing

• Scholars took Goffman’s framing theory and expanded it to create a conceptual
framework that considers:
1. The social and political context in which framing takes place
2. How journalists develop and impose frames on ambiguous events to create news
stories
3. How news readers learn and apply frames to make sense of news
4. The long-term social and political consequences of news media frames
• Postpositivist Researchers look at framing as → focus on identifying and measuring
specific effects of certain types of frames on audiences or readers o Have identified
“generic” frames that are frequently found in news stories:
conflict or contest frames, horse-race frames, strategic frames, economic frames,
moral frames, thematic frames, and episodic frames
o Say that critical cultural frames are too abstract and can’t be studied
systematically
• Critical Cultural Researchers look at framing as → focused on elite control over
framing, how social movements use frames to advance their goals, and how people’s
understanding of the social world is shaped by frames learned from media o Say that
elite domination of framing is often neglected by postpositivist researchers
• William Gamson (1989) – interest is in the ability of activist movements to bring about
social change (social constructionist view) o Believes social movements have the ability
to generate and promote alternate frames that can bring about important change in social
order
• Robert Entman (2004) – cascading activation – perspective on framing theory that posits
a framing hierarchy in public discourse, with powerful public officials at the top and the
press at the lowest level
Effects of Framing on News Audiences
• Most common finding → exposure to news coverage results in learning that is consistent
with the frames that structure the coverage
• News coverage can strongly influence the way news readers or viewers make sense of
news events and their major actors
• News coverage is framed to support the status quo, resulting in unfavorable views of
movements

Postpositivist vs. Critical Cultural Approaches to Framing

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• Limitations to framing = ambiguity, limited scope, and inconsistency

• Some scholars say there are multiple framing theories that need to be combined into one
• Postpositivist – primarily interested in framing theory as a new and potentially more
useful way to understand and predict media effects o See framing research as closely
related to the theories of media cognition and information processing
o Want to know if certain types of frames can affect how event information is
processed and whether exposure to framed content will have specific effects
o Not interested in the origin of frames or why journalists choose certain frames to
present events
o Not concerned about elite control over framing o Focus on the effects of specific
frames
o Conduct quantitative research using experiments and surveys
• Critical Cultural – reject the narrow focus of framing effects research o Conduct
qualitative research using field studies, content analysis, in-depth interviews or focus
group research
o Research focuses on framing contests in which elites are pitted against social
movements in an effort to shape public understanding of certain aspects of the
social world

Media as Culture Industries: The Commodification of Culture

• Comes from critical cultural studies
• Commodification of Culture – the study of what happens when culture is mass produced
and distributed in direct competition with locally based cultures o Media are industries
specializing in the production and distribution of cultural commodities
o Elites disrupt everyday culture
• What are the consequences of lifting bits of the culture of everyday life out of their
context, repackaging them, and then marketing them back to people?
1. When elements of everyday culture are selected for repacking, only a very limited
range is chosen, and important elements are overlooked or consciously ignored
a. Small minority groups likely ignored; culture practiced by large segments
of the population will be emphasized
2. The repackaging process involves dramatization of those elements of culture that
have been selected
3. The marketing of cultural commodities is undertaken in a way that maximizes the
likelihood that they will intrude into and ultimately disrupt everyday life
4. The elites who operate the cultural industries generally are ignorant of the
consequences of their work
5. Disruption of everyday life takes many forms – some disruptions are obviously
linked to consumption of especially deleterious content, but other forms are very
subtle and occur over long periods
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a. Disruption ranges from propagation of misconceptions about the social

world to disruption of social institutions Strengths:
• Provides a useful critique of commodification of culture by media
• Identities problems created by repackaging of cultural content
• Identifies many subtle ways that advertising intrudes into everyday culture Weaknesses:
• Argues for, but does not empirically demonstrate, effects
• Has overly pessimistic view of media influence and the ability of average people to cope
with cultural commodities
• Needs to be altered to take into account commodification of culture by new media

Advertising: The Ultimate Cultural Commodity

• Advertising packages promote messages so they will be attended to and acted on by
people who often have little interest in and often no real need for most of the advertised
products or services
• Intended to encourage consumption that serves the interest of product manufacturers but
may not be in the interest of individual consumers
Baran & Davis – Chpt. 11: The Future of Media Theory and Research
Chapter focus: summarize the insights that cultural and effects theories are providing about new
media, and consider the serious challenges that media researchers face as they study these new
technologies
• Efforts to reconceptulatize and reform journalism
• Citizen journalists – direct involvement of ordinary citizens in news production and
distribution
• Journalism reform efforts are one type of problem-solving research

New Media Theory and Research: Challenges and Findings

• Challenges:
o Human relationships are being altered by new media o Television viewing no
longer takes place on television sets
• Findings:
o New mediated communication environment

Internet Addiction, Depression, Distraction, and Atomization

• The coming of mass communication would mean profound alterations for the status quo
• Internet addiction and depression = both functions of abnormal or excessive use of the
new communication technologies
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1. Internet Addiction – spending 40 to 80 hours per week online, with individual sessions
as long as 20 hours
a. Brains rewire
2. Depression – depressed students were most intense Web users
a. Quickly switching between websites reflects anhedonia an inability to experience
emotions, as Web users desperately look for emotional stimulation
i. Anhedonia – inability to feel pleasure
b. Facebook Depression – depression that develops when a great deal of time is
spent on social media sites leading to exhibition of classic symptoms of
depression
c. FOMO (fear of missing out) – inability to disengage from social networking for
fear of missing something
3. Distraction – deals with more typical, everyday use
a. Issue of distraction deals with how our use of technology influences our
interaction with the larger world and the people in it when we do leave the screen
b. Time spent with digital devices deprives our brains of needed downtime
c. Transactive Memory – when the memory of the group benefits from each
individual’s contribution (nobody remembers everything)
d. Constant connection is rewiring our brains; our experience of the world is not
deficient, but different
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i. Neural plasticity – the brain’s physical adaptation to the sensory stimuli it

receives
e. Young generations are actually wired to respond to technology in a different
manner
4. Atomization – disconnecting individuals from one another and their communities
a. The data the Web gathers is collected by algorithms – sets of data that, when
combined, determine what content people see on the Internet
b. Cookie – an identifying code added to a computer’s hard drive by a visited
website
c. Filter Bubble – the ecosystem of information created by Web algorithms for each
individual
i. Determines what ads, news and information you see Computer-
Mediated Communication
• Arrival of new communication technologies
• Communication Science – perspective on research integrating all research approaches
grounded in quantitative, empirical, and behavioral research methods (postpositivist
media researchers); never took hold o Intra-individual communication – communication
occurring within the person her
– or himself o Interpersonal communication – communication between two or
small groups of people
• Nadkarni & Hofmann = dual-factor motel of Facebook (FB) use – social networking site
use is primarily motivated by the need to belong and the need for self-presentation o FB
use is primarily motivated by two basic social needs:
1. The need to belong – intrinsic drive to affiliate with others and
gain social acceptance
2. The need for self-presentation – the continuous process of
impression management
• Zywica & Danowski (2008) = idealized virtual identity hypothesis – tendency for
creators of social network site profiles to display idealized characteristics that do not
reflect their actual personalities o Actually happens far less than people think (Back)
• Back (2010, p. 372) = extended real-life hypothesis – people use social networking sites
to communicate their real personality o Users do not create idealized virtual identities
because:
▪ Online social network profiles include information about one’s reputation
that is difficult to control
▪ Friends provide accountability and subtle feedback on one’s profile
• Identity is constructed and maintained through interaction with others
• Online or off we present ourselves based on who others think we are, which itself is
based on the responses from others that we have already received
• SNS users use the power of selection to present not false, but hoped-for identities
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• Communication technologies connecting us to the world as they disconnect us from each

other o “Internet Paradox”
• Health and well-being perspective → neural plasticity and vagal tone – strength of the
body’s connection between the heart and brain by way of the vagus nerve

Health Communication – Employing various forms of communication to inform and influence

people’s decisions that enhance health
• Use of information shared on SNS sites to improve health outcomes

Journalism’s Disruptive Nature

• Functional Displacement – when the functions of an existing medium are replaced by a
newer technology, the older medium finds new functions
• Hamsterization of Journalism – Expecting reports to report, write, blog, tweet, shoot
video, sift the web, and produce more news without time and training (Jay Rosen)
• Native Advertising – Branded or sponsored online content that takes the form of a
fulllength story or article o Takes the form and tone of the host site Reconceptualizing
and Reforming Journalism
• Examining the notions that journalists use to guide and justify their work
• News Reality Frames – news accounts in which interested elites involve journalists in
the construction of news drama that blurs underlying contextual realties o Rise of public
relations as an increasingly important profession has served to institutionalize this control
over framing
• Goffman (1979) observed that most news is about frame violations; that’s what makes
news newsworthy
• Framing research implies that there is a symbiotic relationship between journalists who
use frames supporting the status quo and news consumers who typically want to be
reassured that the status quo will endure and disruptions are only temporary
• Participatory News – news that reports how citizens routinely engage in actions that
have importance for their communities (Gans, 2003)
• Explanatory Journalism – news answering “why” questions (Gans, 2003) o Offering
frames for major events
• Collection Action Frames – news frames highlighting positive aspects of social
movements and the need for and desirability of action (Gamson, 2001) o To be
effective, frames should offer three components:
▪ Injustice – need to reveal an existing harm or wrong
▪ Identity – identify specially who is doing the harm and who is being
harmed
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▪ Agency – explain the possibility of collection action to address the

injustice
• One of the leading efforts to reform journalism = public journalism or civic journalism o
Citizen journalism – any journalism practice that is performed by non-journalists

A New Media Literacy

• Parental Mediation Theory – theory of active parent involvement in the full array of
children’s media experiences o Clark argues that the parental mediation strategies that
were effective with children’s television viewing need to be augmented in the digital age
with a fourth strategy (co-viewing)
▪ Active Mediation – talking with children about television content as a
media literacy strategy
▪ Restrictive Mediation – setting rules and limits on children’s television
consumption as a media literacy strategy
▪ Co-viewing – watching television with children as a media literacy
strategy
• Sora Park – social inclusion and exclusion – related to knowledge gap theory o Social
Inclusion – the ability to exercise control over the environment or resources that one
might have in various dimensions of life
o Social Exclusion – a state where one cannot participate in key societal activities
• Interactivity is the central characteristic differentiating digital media from traditional
mass media
• Digital media literacy must include device literacy as well as content literacy