■ Understanding

Mass Communication
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■ Understanding
Mass Communication

Second Edition

Melvin L. DeFleur
University of Miami

Everette E. Dennis
Gannett Center for Media Studies,
Columbia University

With the assistance of

Margaret S. Hanus

Houghton Mifflin Company

Boston
Dallas Geneva, Illinois Lawrenceville, New Jersey Palo Alto
Cover photo by Michael Melford/Peter Arnold, Inc.

Part Opening photos: Part I: John Vachon/Farm Security Administration—Office

of War Information Collection. Courtesy Library of Congress. Part II: © John
Blaustein 1981/Woodfin Camp & Associates. Part III: © Ira Berger 1982/Woodfin
Camp & Associates. Part IV: © Jim Anderson 1980/Stock, Boston.

Copyright © 1985 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by
any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly per¬
mitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing by the Publisher. Requests for
permission should be addressed to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
One Beacon Street, Boston, MA 02108

Printed in the U.S.A.

ISBN: 0-395-35929-5
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 84-81983

CDEFGHIJ-M-89876
 I Contents

Preface ix

Part I The Nature of Mass Communication 1

Chapter 1 The Process of Mass Communication 2

Defining Mass Communication and Mass Media 5
Elements of Human Communication 12
Face-to-Face and Mass Communication Compared 21
Professional Communicators: Careers and Training 24
Summary 30

Chapter 2 The Development of the Mass Media 33

The First Media 33
Newspapers in America 40
American Magazines 52
Motion Pictures 55
Broadcasting 64
Summary 73

Chapter 3 The Continuing Revolution in Technology 76

What Is the Communication Revolution? 77
What Is the New Technology? 84
Social Consequences of the New Technology 97
Summary 99

Photo Essay I: Media Coverage of National Crises 102

Chapter 4 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 106

The Economic Environment 107
The Media as Businesses 111
Political Protections: The Constitutional Framework 123
Political Constraints: The Agents of Control 141
Summary 151
 ■ vi Contents

Part II The Communication Industries 155

Chapter 5 The Print Media 156
Forms, Functions, and Audiences 156
Newspapers 160
Magazines 181
Books 192
The Future of the Print Media 200
Summary 201

Chapter 6 The Electronic Media 204

Approaches to Broadcasting 204
Radio 222
Television 227
Cable TV: The Shape of Things to Come 244
Summary 249

Photo Essay II: A History of Special Effects in the Media 252

Chapter 7 The Movies 256

Defining Motion Pictures 256
Film as a Medium of Mass Communication 258
Film as an Industry 274
From Censorship to Social Responsibility 280
Evaluating Films: Criticism and Awards 283
Summary 286

Part III Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

289
Chapter 8 The Media’s Influence on Individuals 290
The Legacy of Fear 291
Early Research: A Belief in Maximum Effects 294
Beyond the Magic Bullet 306
Television and Children 315
Effects on Individuals: An Overview 324
Summary 327

Chapter 9 Effects of the Media on Society and Culture 331

Social Change: The Spread of Innovations 332
Setting the Agenda 341
Debates About Popular Culture 353
Summary 364

Photo Essay III: The Prevalence of Mass Media in Our Lives 368

Chapter 10 Indirect Effects of the Media 372

Media Portrayals as Representations of Reality 373
Theories of Indirect Influence 374
Analyzing Media Content 383
 Contents vii ■

Research on Media Models 386

Research on Meaning Theory 393
Summary 400

Chapter 11 Ongoing Concerns in Mass Communication Research 404

A Framework for Studying Mass Communication 405
“Who”: Studying Communicators 408
Says “What”: Assessing Content 411
Over What “Channel”: Studying the Medium 417
To “Whom”: Studying Audiences 422
With What “Effect": Measuring Influences on People 427
Summary 435

Part IV Media Support Systems 441

Chapter 12 The Media and the News Industry 442
What Is News? 442
Manufacturing the News 448
News Reporting: Changing Styles and Standards 456
Surveillance and Its Implications 468
Summary 470

Chapter 13 The Auxiliaries 473

The Role of the Auxiliaries 473
The Wire Services 475
The Syndicates 484
Measuring Services 489
Summary 501

Chapter 14 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 504

The Beginnings of Popular Music 506
America Enters the Jazz Age 520
The Phonograph and the Record Industry 527
Changing Styles of Popular Music 540
Summary 551

Photo Essay IV: Advertising and the American Dream 556

Chapter 15 Advertising and Public Relations 560

Advertising as Communication 560
The Advertising Industry 567
Criticism and Control of Advertising 577
Public Relations 584
Summary 592

Glossary 595

Index 611
 Preface

Americans are making more use of the media than ever be¬
fore. Television alone plays an increasing role in our lives. On
the average, a television set is tuned in more than seven hours
a day in an American home. We turn to the television for politi¬
cal and economic information as well as for entertainment. In
1984, for example, both of the televised debates between Presi¬
dent Reagan and presidential candidate Walter Mondale outdrew
the World Series. Even with television’s prevalence, newspapers,
books, magazines, and films remain enormously popular. In ad¬
dition, new aspects of mass communication confront us: VCRs,
digital discs, cable TV, satellite signals, and video rock. No one
can predict which of these innovations will survive, how they
will fit into our society as we move into the future, or how the
media will continue to influence us.
There are continuing concerns about the media’s role in our
society and their influence on our individual lives. Both collec¬
tively and individually, we have become enormously dependent
upon mass communication. The media and their related indus¬
tries are deeply established institutions in modern social life.
Yet, we are not really sure whether television presents too much
violence, whether there is too much emphasis on crime in the
press, whether pornography should be protected by the First
Amendment, whether reporters should have special rights to
keep their sources secret, or whether the news media sometimes
endanger national security.
It is toward all these issues that Understanding Mass Com¬
munications, Second Edition is addressed. This book is based
on our strong conviction that students can best understand
mass communication by studying it in its entirety—warts and
 x Preface

all. For that reason, we have organized the book into what we
feel is a logical sequence of parts, and chapters within those
parts, that look at both the operations and problems of the me¬
dia as well as their influences on our lives.

■ Organization Part I, “The Nature of Mass Communication,” consists of chap¬

ters 1 through 4. This part provides an overview of how com¬
munication and mediated communication take place, the
historical development of the media, their contemporary and fu¬
ture technology, and the constraints under which each operates.
Part II, “The Communication Industries,” encompasses chap¬
ters 5 through 7. This part is devoted to print, the movies, and
the electronic media in such a way that the student can under¬
stand not only the nuts and bolts of their daily operations, but
their financial bases, regulation, and general functions in
society.
Part III, “The Impact and Consequences of Mass Communi¬
cation,” includes chapters 8 through 11. This part takes the stu¬
dent through a half century of accumulation of social and
behavioral research studies and findings that help understand
the effects of the media on individuals, the impact of mass com¬
munication on our society and culture, and many of the more
subtle indirect effects of the media. A summary review of con¬
temporary directions in research shows where the cutting edge
of inquiry is currently headed.
Part IV, “Media Support Systems,” completes the picture. It
consists of chapters 12 through 15, which present the most sig¬
nificant aspects of the news industry, the auxiliary systems pro¬
vided by wire services, syndicates, rating industries, pollsters,
and market researchers. Also included is an in-depth analysis of
popular music and the recording industry. The final chapter re¬
views advertising and public relations.
Those who are familiar with our first edition will recognize
that this second edition has been considerably revised. The
guiding principle in making these revisions was to retain the
material on media history and other analyses that are not time-
bound, while bringing all other sections of the text completely
up to date.
There are also two new chapters that did not appear in the
first edition. These are Chapter 3, “The Continuing Revolution
in Technology,” and Chapter 14, “Popular Music and the Record¬
ing Industry”. Both represent attempts to make this the most
thorough text available, representing all important phases of our
contemporary mass media. In many respects a text analyzing
mass communication must face the same problems that con¬
front the media themselves. It is an area of constant change.
Some texts handle this problem by avoiding the issues. We
 Preface xi ■

chose not to do this, even though there is a certain danger in

writing about both high technology, which changes at a dizzying
pace, and popular music, which changes even faster! Neverthe¬
less, these are enormously significant aspects of understanding
mass communication and our decision was to set forth the sit¬
uation as it is today, with a view toward the future.

Acknowledg¬ We wish to recognize the significant contributions made by Dr.

ments Timothy G. Plax, of the Rockwell International Corporation to
two of the theoretical formulations that are presented in this
edition. Dr. Plax, a noted specialist in speech communication,
worked closely with Professor De Fleur in preparing the first edi¬
tion of this text. Specifically, he made major contributions to the
original analyses of the biosocial theory of communication, now
summarized briefly in Chapter 1, and to the meaning theory of
mass communication, an extension of the biosocial theory, that
appears in Chapter 10.
In addition, we wish to acknowledge John R. Finnegan, Jr.,
of the University of Minnesota, who discussed many of the revi¬
sions of this work with Professor Dennis and who pretested
some of the material in his classes. Finally, we would like to
thank those who read the manuscript for their valuable com¬
ments and suggestions: John Cambus, California State Univer¬
sity, Hayward; Peter Costello, Adelphi University; Robert Main,
California State University, Chico; Zena Beth McGlashan, Uni¬
versity of North Dakota; Hubert Morehead, California State
University, Long Beach; Gail Myers, Trinity University;
Edgar Trotter, California State University, Fullerton; and Alan
Zaremba, Northeastern University.

M. D.
E. D.
■ Understanding
Mass Communication
■ The Nature of Mass
Communication
“When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a father scornful tone,
“it means what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

■ The Process of Mass

Communication 1
For many Americans, probably the majority, the mass media are
mainly a source of amusement. They turn to television for their
favorite quiz show, the newspaper for the sports pages, the radio
for popular music, a paperback book for a light novel, or the
movies for a space adventure. Generally, such recreational users
of the media do not worry much about the effects of mass com¬
munication on society or even on their own behavior. If they crit¬
icize the media, they complain that they can’t find enough of
their favorite TV content; they didn’t like the last movie they
saw; or they are bored by the news.
A more thoughtful segment of the public realizes how deeply
embedded the media are in modern life, and they are concerned
about how they influence us all. They want to understand fully
what our media are like, how they operate, what influences they
create, and how much control we actually have over them. Ob¬
viously, these are complex questions for which there are no
quick and easy answers. Understanding mass communication
requires a careful analysis of at least five major issues. These
are; (1) the historical development of the media in American so¬
ciety, (2) their present economic and political situation, (3) the
detailed nature of each of the distinct media, (4) their influences
on both individuals and society, and (5) how they are related to
a number of other industries. These five issues are the central
focus of the present book.
A good beginning point in trying to understand the nature of
 The Process of Mass Communication 3 ■

■ Americans live in a media-saturated society. Print, broadcasting,

and film bring a daily flood of news, music, and hundreds of other
types of content We have become dependent on our media in a
number of ways and it would be difficult to imagine contemporary
life without mass communication. (© Harvey Stein, 1984.)

mass communication in modern life is to try to imagine what

our lives would be like if all the mass media were to disappear
suddenly. We would have no television, newspapers, radio, mag¬
azines, or books. Gone would be the incredible flow of informa¬
tion and entertainment they provide—popular music, serious
drama, exciting sports events, soap operas, silly games, sym¬
phonies, advertising puffery, hobby articles, spy novels, and po¬
litical bombast—the list is almost endless. Some people might
say “good riddance” to a lot of it, but there is no denying that
the majority would miss it sorely.
Actually, life without the mass media would not only be pretty
dull but it might even be impossible as we know it. We are all
very dependent on mass communication.1 This dependency is
both social and personal. For example, the media are an indis¬
pensable link in the economic and industrial activities of our na¬
tion that provide jobs for millions of workers. Every industry
■ 4 The Nature of Mass Communication

that wants to sell goods or services is dependent on advertising.

The media are also large industries in their 'own right and pro¬
vide both employment and investment opportunities for many
Americans. Mass communication has also become a central part
of American politics. Candidates gain exposure for themselves
and their ideas through the use of the media. In fact, it would
be dreadfully cumbersome to elect a president these days if can¬
didates had to travel around the country making speeches from
tree stumps and railroad platforms. The list of media-dependent
aspects of modern society includes not only entertainment, eco¬
nomics, and politics but education, science, religion, charities,
agriculture, transportation, and almost everything else. In other
words, in one way or another, and to a greater or lesser degree,
almost every major activity in modern life depends upon the use
of the media of mass communication.
At a more personal level, mass communication is woven into
our day-to-day existence. We listen to the radio as a background
for many kinds of work and recreation. We look to the news¬
paper for all kinds of consumer information, from the best buys
at the supermarket and the used-car lot to stock market quota¬
tions and job openings. During the day millions of people follow
the latest adventures of their favorite serial. At night they con¬
tinue to use movies, television, and other media for entertain¬
ment. Magazines and books bring us specialized information
needed for school, hobbies, or for understanding public affairs
in depth. In other words, as individuals we use the mass media
in dozens of ways every day to gratify our needs for entertain¬
ment and enlightenment or for simple and practical purposes.
But there is another, darker side to this dependency. Critics
of the media tell us that mass communication can do things to
us that we really do not want it to. Some say that it makes us
more violent, weakens our moral character, shapes our beliefs,
attitudes, and opinions, leads us to buy things we do not need,
and influences many of the decisions that we think we make in¬
dependently. Others are more positive. They say that the media
enrich our lives and bring us all closer together, provide us with
satisfying entertainment that relieves stress, and make us more
aware of important public issues and problems. Most of us sus¬
pect that all these claims are true and that the media have both
positive and negative effects—not only on us but on our neigh¬
bors, our friends, and beyond them, the nation and even the
world. But in spite of the controversies, we like our television
set, our newspaper, and our other media. We would not want to
part with them even if some of their effects were worrisome. The
problem is to try to understand the media so that we can sort
out the good from the bad and the powerful from the trivial.
 The Process of Mass Communication 5 ■

Only then can we know what to accept and what to ignore. In

this book we try to develop the means by which those goals can
be reached. We deal not only with mass communication as a pro¬
cess but also with the purposes, products, and effects of the

I
media.

Defining Mass At first glance a careful definition of mass communication may

Communication not seem necessary. After all, we know from common knowledge
what a movie or a newspaper is, or a television set. But when we
and Mass Media
use film, print, or broadcasting to communicate with large au¬
diences, what is actually happening? Do all the media operate
according to the same underlying principles of communication,
or is each one different? Also, are the principles underlying
mass communication different from those for a face-to-face con¬
versation between two people?
We cannot define mass communication in a quick and simple
way because it includes many technologies, groups, kinds of
content, types of audiences, and effects. To develop a good defi¬
nition, we must take all these aspects into account and proceed
one step at a time, describing each major feature before pulling
them together into an overall definition of mass communication.
The first step is to note that mass communication is a process.

I Mass
Communication as
Any process consists of a series of stages or steps by which
something is transformed during a set of distinctive operations.
a Process A good example is human digestion: in this process food is op¬
erated on at various stages by specific parts of the body and
transformed into the energy necessary for survival. Although
mass communication has little to do with digestion, it too is a
process with several stages. We can distinguish five distinct
stages that make up the process of mass communication.

1 A message is formulated by professional communicators.

2 The message is sent out in a relatively rapid and continuous
way through the use of media (usually print, film, or
broadcasting).
3 The message reaches relatively large and diverse (that is,
mass) audiences, who attend to the media in selective ways.
4 Individual members of the audience interpret the message in
such a way that they experience meanings that are more or
less parallel to those intended by the professional
communicators.
5 As a result of experiencing these meanings, members of the
audience are influenced in some way; that is, the communi¬
cation has some effect.
■ 6 The Nature of Mass Communication

■ Professional Communicators. The first £tage in mass com¬

munication occurs when a message is shaped into a form suit¬
able for transmission by one of the mass media. The types of
content, intended audiences, and purposes of the messages vary
greatly. Usually the message is shaped by specialists who make
their living working for some part of the communications indus¬
try. These are the professional communicators—the producers,
editors, reporters, and so on, who originate, edit, and dissemi¬
nate news, entertainment, dramas, and other content.
Professional communicators depend on a host of groups to
help formulate and disseminate their messages. Creative people
—artists, composers, authors, directors, and actors—shape
messages into specific forms for eventual transmission. Techni¬
cians operate the mechanical and electronic aspects of the me¬
dia. Sponsors trying to sell their products supply the funds to
finance the communicators. Other auxiliary groups supporting
the professional communicators include agencies that prepare
commercial advertising, wire services that provide news reports,
and polling groups that tell communicators how many people
they are reaching.
The purposes of all these people vary. Some may be motivated
by their salaries; others by the chance to enhance their reputa¬
tions, by love of their work, a desire for excellence, a belief in the
message they’re communicating, or most likely, a combination
of these motives. In the United States, however, this variety of
individual goals is overshadowed by one fact: most of these
people work for organizations with one overriding goal—to make
money. With few exceptions, the organizations that control
American mass communications are private businesses devoted
to making money for their owners. The organizations’ demand
for profits shapes the work of the individual communicators—
and through them, the messages that are communicated to the
intended audiences.

■ Rapid and Continuous Dissemination. The second stage in

the process of mass communication is moving the message
across distance and time. Modern media are characterized by
the speed of this movement. Whereas centuries ago it took
months or even years of painstaking work to reproduce a single
manuscript by hand, today high-speed presses run off thou¬
sands of copies of a book that can be distributed around the
country in a matter of days. Once a film is produced, thousands
of copies can be sent to theaters all over the country to millions
of viewers within days. Radio and television work even more rap¬
idly, so that the audience receives the message at virtually the
same time it is transmitted.
Besides being rapid, modern mass communication is usually
continual rather than sporadic; that is, the messages are sent
 The Process of Mass Communication 7 ■

on the basis of a schedule, not on the basis of someone’s whim.

Newspapers appear every day; magazines appear weekly or
monthly; publishers and movie producers provide a continuing
flow of books and films to the public.
Dissemination of mass communication has another charac¬
teristic: it involves the use of media. A medium is any object or
device used for communicating a message; that is, for moving
information over distance or preserving it through time. (Media
is the plural of medium.) Long before the age of television and
radio, people used cave drawings, flags, smoke signals, drums,
and handwritten manuscripts as media to extend their ability to
communicate; today the media of mass communication are me¬
chanical and electronic devices that depend on elaborate tech¬
nology, such as computerized typesetting equipment or com¬
munications satellites.
Each medium has advantages and limitations that influence
how it is used for disseminating messages. Print, for example,
depends on the learned habits of reading and writing. It would
be silly and useless to use print if you’re communicating with a
child who doesn’t know how to read or with a person who
doesn’t speak your language. It would also be silly to try to trans¬
mit an opera via the newspaper, because television, radio, and
movies are much better than print at transmitting some things,
such as moving images and sounds.

■ Large and Diverse (Mass) Audiences. The term mass in

mass communication needs explanation. It came to be a part of
the name of the process many years ago. It refers to the social
nature of audiences rather than just to their size. The meaning
of the word mass grew out of a set of beliefs popular among in¬
tellectuals early in this century concerning the nature of modern
society. They believed at the time that urban-industrial societies
were increasingly made up of individuals whose social ties to
others were slipping away. Such observers saw that the large ex¬
tended family of rural life, which included grandparents, aunts,
and uncles, was breaking down as people flocked to the cities.
They saw immigration mixing people with different origins and
cultural backgrounds. Bringing such diverse people together in
cities, they assumed, would result in a society in which social
bonds between people would be weak rather than strong.
Essentially, then, this is what was meant by a mass society:
a society in which people act as individuals rather than as mem¬
bers of families or other kinds of groups. Thus, modern society
was thought to be a kind of “lonely crowd” made up of people
who did not know one another well and were not bound to one
another by strong friendships, loyalties, or family ties. In fact,
their many differences in origin and culture, the analysts felt,
would thrust people apart rather than bring them together.
■ 8 The Nature of Mass Communication

It was this kind of society that early students of mass com¬

munication saw as the audience of the media that were devel¬
oping at the beginning of this centuiy. In other words, the
audiences were thought to be not only large but socially diverse.
More important, they were thought to be made up of individuals
who responded to media content in ways that were not influ¬
enced by social relationships with others. The importance of the
“mass” idea is that individuals in such diverse audiences were
thought to be particularly easy to influence by propaganda and
other forms of mass communication. Because (in theory) each
person was isolated, the influences of mass media messages
were not softened by social influences from other sources, such
as the family and other groups.
Today we no longer assume that audiences for the mass
media are like a lonely crowd. We understand that people in an
urban and industrial society still maintain strong relationships
with their families and other groups. They are not at the mercy
of every form of propaganda that comes along. In other words,
the older ideas implied in the word mass may not describe these
audiences. Still, the idea that the audience for mass communi¬
cation is large and diverse is sound, and we continue to use the
term.

■ Similarities of Meaning. The essence of human communica¬

tion, whether it is a face-to-face talk or a television message sent
to millions, is the achievement of parallel sets of meanings be¬
tween those sending and receiving the message. By meanings
we refer to a person’s inner responses to a message—the inter¬
nal experiences it evokes, including images, interpretations, and
feelings. If these internal responses of the receiver do not match
more or less those intended by the communicator, then parallel
sets of meaning have not been achieved and communication has
not occurred. When communication does occur, then commu¬
nicator and receiver are linked by their experience of parallel
sets of meanings; they “share” the meaning of the message.

■ Influencing People. The last stage in mass communication is

the outcome of the preceding stages. As a result of sharing
meanings with the communicator, people in the audience are
changed in some way. These changes form the basis of the me¬
dia’s influences, and they range from the trivial to the deeply
significant.
At a simple level, a person may learn new facts by hearing a
weather report on the radio. Thus, providing a person with new
information is a change brought about by the medium. Or again
at a trivial level, a person may be entertained by reading the
comics in the Sunday paper. Thus, causing a person to feel bet¬
ter is also a form of media influence.
 The Process of Mass Communication 9 ■

At a more complex level, mass communication can change

our shared understandings by introducing new words and
meanings. For example, before 1979 or 1980 few Americans
knew what was meant by the word ayatollah. But by intensely
covering Ayatollah Khomeini and the taking of American hos¬
tages in Iran, the media taught millions of Americans a new
word and established its meaning. Every year the media intro¬
duce words and associated meanings that become part of our
language; recent examples include yuppies, Reagonomics, E.T.,
AIDS, Sandanistas, the Jedi. Some are trivial, others deeply sig¬
nificant. But there is little doubt that mass communication is a
rich source of new words and meanings that alter the way we see
and understand the world.
Mass communication can also alter our feelings about social
issues. For example, the American press generally treated the
Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982 as an unwar¬
ranted aggression. This definition permitted President Reagan
to assist Britain openly—a policy that deeply offended the Argen¬
tine military government but cemented ties to the Thatcher
government in England, which later supported U.S. policy re¬
garding nuclear arms in Europe. Earlier, in 1979 the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan was widely denounced in the American
news media. The two superpowers had been moving toward
friendlier relations and a treaty limiting nuclear arms. When
public opinion took a negative turn as a result of the invasion,
President Carter boycotted the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow,
with considerable support from the American public. It is widely
believed that this led to the Olympic boycott by the U.S.S.R. in
1984. Thus definitions provided by the media can help form and
alter attitudes that can be a significant factor in the course of a
nation’s histoiy.
Exposure to mass communication may also alter overt behav¬
ior. After hearing or seeing an advertisement, we may change to
a new brand of breakfast food or, more significantly, decide to
take the time to vote or financially support one candidate or an¬
other. Some people believe that rock music encourages young¬
sters to use drugs or engage in sexual behavior. Others charge
that some television programs stimulate children to defy author¬
ity and act aggressively.
It is such forms of change that deeply concern social obser¬
vers of the mass media. Not many of us are troubled when some¬
one learns a few facts from a weather report or feels better after
reading the comics. But many people are very worried by the
possibility that the mass media may be controlling our politics
or corrupting our children. In other words, influence on people
is not only the final stage in the process of mass communication
but also the bottom line of public concern. It is for this reason
that researchers have spent so much time trying to understand
 ■ 10 The Nature of Mass Communication

the effects of mass communication, and it is for this reason that

in later chapters we will look closely at what fifty years of re¬
search have revealed about the media’s influence.

■ A Definition. Each of the stages we have described must be

part of a detailed definition of mass communication. With these
stages in mind, however, we can now define mass communica¬
tion more concisely:

Mass communication is a process in which professional communi¬

cators use media to disseminate messages widely, rapidly, and con¬
tinually to arouse intended meanings in large and diverse audiences
in attempts to influence them in a variety of ways.

Which Media Are Having defined mass communication, we can now see which
Mass Media? forms of communication should be considered as mass commu¬
nication and which devices should be considered as mass me¬
dia. For example, is the telephone a mass medium? What about
a large museum? Should we include a rock concert, the theater,
or a church service in our study of mass communication? The
answers become important when we try to understand the
process of mass communication, rather than its content, and to
sharpen our thinking about the nature of the media.
According to our definition, talking on the telephone is not a
form of mass communication because the audience is not large
and diverse; usually there is only one person at each end of the
line. Furthermore, these persons usually are not professional
communicators. A museum is not a form of mass communica¬
tion because it does not provide rapid dissemination with me¬
dia. And a rock concert does not qualify either, because it does
not disseminate messages over distance; it represents a form of
direct communication. Similarly, any situation in which live
performers and an audience can see each other directly—in a
theater or church, at a sports event or parade—is not an ex¬
ample of mediated communication. Large-scale advertising by
direct mail might qualify as a form of mass communication, ex¬
cept that it is not continuous. Thus by our definition none of
these activities is a form of mass communication, although all of
them can arouse meanings and influence people.
The record industry appears to be a mass medium at first
glance; its audience is certainly large. However, this might be
debated by some people. In any case, the recording industry and
popular music provide important content for the media and de¬
serve extensive discussion in this text (see Chapter 14).
Big-time sports present a somewhat similar case. For ex¬
ample, a televised football game is not a deliberately designed
message intended to arouse specific meanings, and it is very un¬
likely that any two members of the audience have the same
 The Process of Mass Communication 11 ■

■ While a graffiti message on an underpass may be seen by a large

number of people, it is not an example of mass communication.
Mass communication is a complex process that includes a number
of specific stages. Most are not present in the above. It is clearly hu¬
man communication, but not mass communication. (Gatewood/The
Image Works, Inc.)

interpretation of the game’s meaning. Therefore, we will not con¬

sider the production and distribution of popular music and ma¬
jor sports events as independent mass media: instead, we will
analyze them as activities of industries that are related to the
mass media.
Similarly, although people often talk about the “news media,”
this expression is misleading. News is a special form of content
produced by an industiy that presents its products to the public
through the use of the same mass media that bring us many
other kinds of content. Thus we will treat the gathering, pro¬
cessing, and distribution of the news—not as a mass medium—
but as an important, related industry.
 ■ 12 The Nature of Mass Communication

The major mass media therefore are print {books, magazines,

and newspapers), film (principally commercial motion pictures),
and broadcasting (radio and television). Many other forms of
mediated communication are worth studying; but print, film,
and broadcasting fit our definition of mass media most closely.
It is on these media that we will focus most of our attention. We
will look at their history, how they fit into modern society, how
they operate day to day, and how they influence their audiences.
We will also look at major industries that produce content—mu¬
sic, news, advertising—for mass media.
Before examining these specifics, however, we need to have
more than just a clear definition of mass communication and an
understanding of what are included among the mass media. We
need a deeper analysis of the nature of human communication
itself as the most fundamental form of exchange between hu¬
man beings. In particular we need to understand how mass
communication follows the general principles of all human com¬
munication and is not something totally different. We noted ear¬
lier that in mass communication more or less parallel sets of
meanings are achieved between the communicator and mem¬
bers of the audience. In fact, experiencing parallel sets of mean¬
ings is the heart of all forms of human communication. This is
not difficult to understand in the case of people talking directly
with each other. But does the use of media to reach large and
diverse audiences make mass communication totally different
from more intimate, face-to-face communication? To answer
this question we must first look closely at the essential elements
of all human communication. We can then compare the basic
form of human interaction with mass communication to under¬
stand the similarities and differences.

Elements of Human communication can be an extraordinarily complex pro¬

Human cess, but let us look at it first in a very simple form in order to
understand its principles. For example, consider the case in
Communication
which one person says “hello” to another who says “hi” in reply.
This simple exchange takes only a second or two, but it requires
the ability to perform a variety of activities, including (1) neural
activities of the brain on the part of both persons, because each
must remember what the words hello and hi mean; (2) psycho¬
logical activities, both because listeners must perceive the words
and because if they know what they mean, they must have
learned their meanings at some time; (3) cultural activities, be¬
cause the two people are using the shared rules of language,
which are an important part of their culture; and (4) socio¬
logical activities, because the exchange is a patterned social
interaction.
 The Process of Mass Communication 13 ■

We cannot explore each of these aspects of communication in

great detail, but we can give a basic explanation of how they
contribute to human communication. Our approach will be
something like that of a high-speed camera tracking a speeding
bullet: by slowing down a process that occurs almost
instantaneously, we will try to capture a glimpse of each step in
human communication.

Symbols, Memory, The basic act of communication begins when one person de¬
and Meaning cides that he or she wants to use a given language symbol (a
word or some object for which there is a standard interpretation)
to arouse a specific set of meanings in another person. Recall
that by meanings we refer to inner, subjective responses of im¬
ages, interpretations, and feelings such as those aroused by
each word we know. The act of communication is completed
when the internal responses of the receiver (the person to whom
the message has been sent) are more or less parallel to those in¬
tended by the communicator. Thus the act of communication
results in a correspondence of inner meanings between com¬
municator and receiver.

■ Memory and Meaning. We cannot initiate, receive, or inter¬

pret an act of communication using standardized language sym¬
bols unless we have an adequately functioning memory from
which to draw meanings. In addition, the initiator and the re¬
ceiver of a message cannot experience parallel meanings unless
they have learned the same cultural rules linking the symbols
and what they are supposed to represent. But the big question
is, how do people remember meanings and rules so that they
can engage in these activities?
Memory is based in the central nervous system—the brain. It
depends on biochemical and electrical processes that occur in
the molecular structure of nerve tissue. Without becoming too
technical, we need to grasp how this works because memory is
an essential part of human communication. Understanding the
role of memory in the communication process provides a foun¬
dation for understanding the effects of mass communication.
The most important concept that has emerged from studies
of the physiology of memory is the trace. The term refers to some
aspect of experience stored in the brain in such a way that it can
be recalled.2 Scientists have concluded that every experience of
which a person has ever been aware is indelibly registered
within the nerve cells of the brain. The process of registering
traces is called imprinting. It appears to involve some of the
most basic biochemical processes of living organisms, but the
precise mechanics of how imprinting occurs is a subject of
much debate. One theory holds that imprinting involves
■ 14 The Nature of Mass Communication

changes in neurons; another, that it occurs .by the formation of

new neural circuits. In fact, “there is some evidence that there is
more than one kind of memory, and that each may involve dif¬
ferent processes.”3 But whatever the exact nature of imprinting,
one thing appears clear: every experience of which we are ever
aware imprints a permanent record of that experience.
The brain contains billions of cells, and each cell may have
the capacity to store many “bits” of retrievable experience. Thus
the total trace capacity of human memory appears to be
astounding. But not every record is immediately available for
conscious recall. The fact that we all forget most of what we ex¬
perience suggests that the brain might “overload” if we could re¬
member everything at once. But in spite of limitations on recall,
research studies seem to support the idea that our traces pro¬
vide for storage of all our experiences, whether we can readily re¬
cover them or not.
In fact, medical studies have shown that an incredible
amount of detail is available for potential recall. One neurologist
has been able to show that delicate electrical stimulation of var¬
ious areas of the brain can trigger a mental “replay,” in rather
vivid detail, of experiences that had long been forgotten. In these
experiments when specific areas of the brain were electrically
stimulated, the subjects could re-experience activities under¬
gone many years earlier. This “reliving” was complete in every
detail and occurred at the same speed as the original experience.
For example, in one experiment a subject “saw” a play that she
had seen as a child; another repeated a visit to friends and rel¬
atives that had taken place many years earlier. Hypnosis has
also been used to recover memories of even insignificant details.
In one very dramatic case, an elderly bricklayer under hypnosis
“described in detail the bumps on bricks in a wall he had built
when he was in his twenties. When the wall was checked, it was
found that the bumps were there, just as he had said.”4
It remains a mystery why some individuals can recall experi¬
ences more readily from their traces than can others. People
with photographic memory appear to have almost total recall
even without electrical stimulation or hypnosis. Most of us, how¬
ever, have only partial conscious access to our stored experi¬
ences. Psychological theories, such as those of Freud, indicate
that emotions may interfere with our ability to recall some
experiences.
In summary, we may assume that a trace depends on a per¬
manent biochemical change in nerve cell structure. We may also
assume that it provides a psychological record of subjective ex¬
perience. Although the exact biochemistry is not yet understood,
it appears that the imprinted trace is the basis of human mem¬
ory. Thus the trace is a modification of nerve cell structure that
can store details of prior experience for potential recall.
 The Process of Mass Communication 15 ■

■ Meaning and Language Symbols. The trace explanation of

human memory is important for understanding the basic act of
communication because it enables us to understand how a com¬
municator can formulate a meaning for a given symbol. As a
result of learning the language of our culture as well as other ex¬
periences, we have billions of traces stored in our memories.
These traces can be selectively recalled or retrieved in various
patterns or configurations and linked to words or other symbols
according to the language rules we have learned. The meaning
for a given language symbol, then, is a specific trace configu¬
ration that we have learned to recover for that symbol.

Sending and So far we have seen that in initiating an act of communication,

Receiving Messages a person must identify an appropriate configuration of traces
and then determine if a given symbol is a suitable means for ex¬
pressing the desired meaning. To accomplish this, the person
must search his or her total array of stored traces for appropri¬
ate meanings. We can assume that this search involves a com¬
parison process much like a computer’s search through a vast
data bank. When potentially suitable traces have been iden¬
tified, they can be brought together into a configuration that
seems to represent the desired meaning (see Figure 1.1), p. 17.)

■ Labeling and Converting Symbols. Assigning a particular

language symbol to a set of intended meanings is called label¬
ing. Selecting a suitable label to express what we have in mind
is a critical part of communicating. It is this step that changes
the intended message from internal meanings located in the
traces of the communicator to a form that someone else can re¬
spond to. But before that can happen, the distance between the
two parties must be overcome. In other words, the message
must be sent or transmitted across the space between them.
How do we change the language symbol into a form that can
be transmitted and received by another person? We use the
parts of the anatomy involved in speaking, gesturing, writing, or
typing. For our purposes here we need simply note that through
such voluntary actions the communicator converts what began
as trace configurations into what we will call information—phys¬
ical events that conquer time or distance and can be appre¬
hended by the receiver.5 Simple examples of information include
the vibrations of air molecules that make up sound waves and
the patterns of light that form visual stimuli. These physical
events can be detected by a person who is within auditory or vis¬
ual range of the communicator.
It is important to stress that we are looking closely at activi¬
ties that are virtually instantaneous: remembering, identifying
a trace configuration to express meaning, labeling that meaning,
and converting the label into a physical form.
■ 16 The Nature of Mass Communication

■ The human memory has a truly enormous capacity. Through sys¬

tematic training and informal participation in groups and society,
people learn meanings for hundreds of thousands of words and
grammatical patterns. These are stored as trace configurations in
the brain to be recalled as needed during the act of communi¬
cating. (Donna Paul.)

■ Perceiving and Understanding the Message. The person to¬

ward whom a message is directed engages in activities that are,
in many ways, reverse forms of the communicator’s activities.
First, we can assume that the receiver is paying attention to the
communicator. This implies a state of readiness to perceive the
patterns of physical events—the information—that is being
transmitted. Perception is the mental activity by which sensory
input from our eyes and ears is classified into recognizable cat¬
egories and meanings. For example, when we perceive a word,
we must first identify the incoming pattern of physical events as
a known language symbol rather than some other kind of event.
This implies that we understand that the communicator expects
 The Process of Mass Communication 17 ■

COMMUNICATOR MESSAGE RECEIVER

Cognition Cognition
Search Perceive
and incoming
compare symbols
mean¬
ings Information
1
Select i Search
symbols S,-S2 s;-s2f and
via V V compare
cultural s3 s3; potential
roles and mean¬
\ Distance t
role¬ ings
\ /
taking
\ /
Overt of symbols Identify
action and
(speak, interpret
write, intended
etc.) mean¬
ings

Storage ► Labeling Transmission ► Interpretation ► Storage

1. For two-way communication, add feedback process with same components and
alternating roles.
2. For mediated communication, add mechanical medium in transmission phase.
3. For mass communication, add medium but delete immediate feedback process.

some specific internal response on our part. Once we have per¬

ceived a symbol, we begin the process of interpreting it, of as¬
signing meaning.
This assignment of meaning to a language symbol by the re¬
ceiver is reverse labeling. Recall that in labeling a communica¬
tor assigns a symbol to an intended meaning (that is, to a spe¬
cific configuration of traces). In reverse labeling, a receiver
assigns a pattern of meaning to a perceived symbol. To assign
meaning, we search and compare trace configurations. Once we
have decided which pattern of internal experiences corresponds
 ■ 18 The Nature of Mass Communication

best to the perceived symbol, we have interpreted the message.

That is, the symbol has activated a pattern of subjective experi¬
ences—images, understandings, and feelings—that have been
stored in our memory, a pattern that was imprinted as a result
of earlier learning. Thus if we are following the same cultural
rules of the language as the communicator, then our internal ex¬
periences of meaning will be more or less parallel to those the
communicator intended and built into the message. At this
point, a basic act of communication has occurred.

Complexity and Thus far we have explained the act of human communication at
Accuracy a very simple level. Common sense tells us that in several ways
interpersonal communication is more complex than our descrip¬
tion indicated. First, people use elaborate patterns, not isolated
words, in their messages. Second, people may fail to understand
what the other person is saying, or they may misread a written
message; in other words, there are various .sources of inaccu¬
racy. Finally, communication is a back-and-Jorth process, as
people respond to the content of each other’s meanings, ask for
clarification, indicate agreement, and so on.

■ Patterns in Messages. We seldom communicate with just one

word. Normally we put words together into patterns according to
rules—in sentences, paragraphs, and various grammatical con¬
structions. These patterns themselves introduce meanings that
go beyond the meanings associated with each of the words used.
For example, the pattern “The boy hit the car” implies a mean¬
ing totally different from the pattern “The car hit the boy,” even
though the words are identical. Patterns have their own
meanings.
These patterns pose no serious problem in understanding the
nature of communication. We learn the patterns and their asso¬
ciated meanings as part of our language, just as we learn the
meanings of each word. Thus the use of patterns by communi¬
cators and receivers follows the same general principles we
described for use of one word. The patterns correspond to con¬
figurations of traces that are aroused in both communicator and
receiver in a parallel manner.

■ Accuracy in Communication. We know from everyday expe¬

rience that the meanings intended by communicators and those
aroused in receivers are not always perfectly parallel. In fact,
complete accuracy—a perfect match, or congruency, between
the meanings of both parties—is unlikely. Congruency is likely
only in the case of very trivial messages. The opposite, incon¬
gruency, can be defined as any reduction in the correspondence
between the trace configurations of the communicator (the in-
 The Process of Mass Communication 19 ■

tended message) and those of the receiver (the interpreted

message).
The causes of incongruency, or loss of accuracy, are many. In¬
congruency can result from dim light, poor acoustics, disruptive
sounds, or any other physical condition that interferes with the
transfer of information. Incongruency can also be caused by
memory failure, faulty perception, or unfamiliarity with the lan¬
guage—that is, by any psychological, social, or cultural condi¬
tion that reduces similarities between the intended meanings of
the sender and the interpreted meanings of the receiver. This
leads us to an important principle of human communication:
The greater the amount oj incongruency, the less effective com¬
munication will be in achieving either mutual understanding
or an intended change in the receiver.

■ Feedback and Role Taking. Usually, human communication

is an ongoing process that goes back and forth between the par¬
ties. You start to tell a story to a friend; your friend comments,
or maybe frowns or smiles or shrugs as you’re talking, and you
continue with your story. In a face-to-face situation, a commu¬
nicator is ever alert to cues from the receiver. These cues are a
type of feedback—essentially a reverse communication by the
receiver back to the communicator. In face-to-face communica¬
tion, the receiver usually provides both verbal and nonverbal
feedback on an ongoing basis so that it can have a substantial
influence on the communicator’s selection of words and mean¬
ings. Thus the two parties alternately become both communica¬
tor and receiver as the messages of one stimulate feedback from
the other.
Feedback may be deliberate or not. In any event, the com¬
municator takes feedback into account to try to minimize incon¬
gruence. If there is adequate feedback, the intended meanings
of the communicator have a better chance of being parallel to
the interpreted meanings of the receiver.
When a communicator interprets feedback cues from the in¬
tended receiver correctly and adjusts the message so that incon¬
gruence is minimized, he or she is engaged in role taking. That
is, he or she is evaluating how the message looks from the other
person’s point of view. Role taking can be defined as the use of
feedback by the communicator to judge which symbols and non¬
verbal cues will work best to arouse the intended meanings in
the receiver.
These considerations of both feedback and role taking lead to
a second important principle of human communication: The
greater the amount oj feedback provided, the more effective
role taking will be in minimizing incongruence. Using the two
principles we have cited, we can add the closely related principle:
 ■ 20 The Nature of Mass Communication

■ People engaging
in face-to-face com¬
munication use not
only words and pat¬
terns of grammar,
but nonverbal ges¬
tures and a complex
body language to
symbolize their
meanings. In every
culture, facial
expressions, pat¬
terned movements,
and other gestures
have more-or-less
standardized inter¬
pretations. These
can add important
dimensions to inter¬
personal under¬
standing in
communication and
when a receiver pro¬
vides feedback.
Some media, such as
print and the tele¬
phone, lack the ca¬
pacity to transmit
the symbols of body
language and ges¬
tures. Thus, com¬
pleteness and
accuracy of meaning
may be reduced
when they are
used in communica¬
tion. (© 1984 Michael
Hayman/Click, Chicago.
© Abigail Heyman/
Archive Pictures Inc.)

The more effective the role taking, the less incongruence there
will be between intended and interpreted meanings.
In other words, face-to-face communication is accurate to the
extent that adequate feedback cues are provided by the receiver.
Accuracy also depends on the extent to which the communicator
uses feedback appropriately to formulate the message in terms
 The Process of Mass Communication 21 ■

that are likely to be well understood by the receiver. When these

conditions are met, accuracy will be at its highest and the pros¬
pect of influencing the receiver at a maximum. It is for these rea¬
sons that many people are most influenced by others, even
strangers, with whom they are in direct face-to-face contact.
These are important considerations that must be kept in mind

I
as we turn to a comparison between face-to-face communication
and mass communication.

Face-to-Face Having looked closely at the nature of human communication,

and Mass we can now ask how mass communication differs from face-to-
face communication. Recall that mass communication depends
Communication
on mechanical or electronic media and addresses a large, diverse
Compared audience. Do these characteristics alter communication in some
fundamental way? Or is mass communication just a specific
form of human communication?

I Consequences of
Using Media
Introducing a medium into communication between two people
clearly makes a difference. If we are talking on the telephone, for
example, we cannot obtain the rich feedback that we gather
when we are face to face with someone. Face to face, we can eas¬
ily detect a puzzled look, raised eyebrows, a smile, a frown. All
these cues help us know how our message is being received—
indeed, whether it is being received at all. But on the telephone
we receive feedback only if the other person decides to say some¬
thing or at least to make a sound. (Sometimes, of course, silence
itself says something.) The limitation on feedback reduces our
ability to engage in effective role taking. The result may be a re¬
duction in accuracy. Mechanical problems—static, crossed lines,
and so forth—may also produce incongruence.
Still, talking on the telephone is clearly human communica¬
tion. It depends on imprinted traces, learned patterns of meaning,
labeling with language symbols, transmission of information
over distance, perception by the receiver, reverse labeling, and
the experience of parallel meanings by receiver and communi¬
cator. In short, communication through the medium of the tele¬
phone follows the same stages as face-to-face communication,
although use of the medium increases the possibility of
incongruence.
Using a mass medium is obviously somewhat different from
using the telephone. Feedback is all but eliminated. We cannot
interrupt the television reporter who is confusing or infuriating
us. When a newspaper, radio, or television is the medium, the
communicators have no immediate contact with any member of
the audience. Thus mass communication is in many respects a
one-way activity, and direct feedback is almost nonexistent.
True, the communicators may get responses from part of the au-
 ■ 22 The Nature of Mass Communication

dience later, but they cannot use this feedback as the basis for
role taking while the message is being sent. Communicators are
left with little more than indirect, delayed feedback such as tele¬
phone calls, letters to the editors, ratings, movie reviews, and
box-office receipts. This delayed feedback may help them shape
future communication, but it provides no basis for role taking
while the message is being disseminated. In addition, commu¬
nicators using the mass media also face the possibility of
mechanical difficulties—such as typographic errors or bad print¬
ing, static or electrical failure. What all this means is that
accuracy in mass communication is difficult to predict.
In short, whether one writes a letter, makes a tape-recorded
message for a friend, shows a home movie, or broadcasts a mes¬
sage to tens of millions of people, all these forms of mediated
communication follow all the basic steps of face-to-face commu¬
nication. But mediated communication is not the same as that
between people who are face to face. The use of any medium
brings limitations. Generally, because the sources of potential
incongruence are many and because effective feedback is very
limited, communication through the mass media is likely to be
less accurate than Jace-to-Jace communication.

Consequences of Mass communication differs from face-to-face communication

Large, Diverse not only because it involves the use of media but also because
Audiences the audience is large and diverse. Still, whether there is one
receiver or a million, the basic activities of communicator and
receiver are the same; the fact that there may be millions of in¬
dividuals at the receiving end does not change the underlying
biological, psychological, and sociological aspects of communi¬
cation. Even if the communicator is a professional and the au¬
dience immense, communication still depends on imprinted
traces in the memories of communicators and receivers, on pat¬
terns of meaning, labeling, reverse labeling, and so on. Thus we
can conclude that mass communication is not a unique process;
it is a special form of interpersonal communication.
The existence of a large and diverse audience, however, can
have important effects on the form and content of communica¬
tion. What kind of message, after all, is likely to appeal to a large
and diverse audience? How does one share meanings with mil¬
lions of strangers? If the communicators try to take the role of
their receivers, how do they define that role when their audience
is large and diverse, especially when feedback is so limited? The
safest course is to assume that the audience has limited intellec¬
tual capacity, likes to be entertained, and has little interest in
delving deeply into any one subject. Then the communicator is
more assured that a large part of the audience will get at least
 The Process of Mass Communication 23 ■

most of the message. In short, the existence of a large and di¬

verse audience encourages messages that are low in their in¬
tellectual demands and high in their entertainment content.

Social and Cultural So far we have said little about the influence of society and cul¬
Influences ture on human communication or more specifically on mass
communication. Since we examine this topic fully in later chap¬
ters, we offer only a few observations here.
The foundation of all meaningful communication is language,
a central part of culture. In addition, every act of communication
is shaped by the rules of society. When we mail a letter or talk
on the telephone, that activity is embedded in our society’s econ¬
omy, its laws and regulations, its day-to-day customs and estab¬
lished traditions. To explain fully every feature of even a simple
communication between two people, we would have to take into
account hundreds of social and cultural factors that might make
a difference.
Society and culture exert even more complex influences on
mass communication. For example, each medium has its own
history within the economic and political system of each society.
As a result, the media differ greatly from one society to another
around the world. Whether we look at the Soviet Union, Great
Britain, the United States, or Mexico, the media in each society
reflect the historical evolution of its entire social and economic
system. Even the level of technology has an impact. In some so¬
cieties media were developed more or less on the basis of scien¬
tific advances made internally, with little borrowed from other
countries. But many societies borrowed media expertise, and
the media they have and how these media operate may be influ¬
enced by those from whom they borrowed. In short, the relation¬
ship between mass communication and society is not a one-way
street: the media are not independent agents that can influence
our ideas and way of life in any manner their managers might
wish. The way a society is organized and its culture play heavy
roles in shaping the kinds of media it has and the way they are
permitted to operate.
In the United States, with constitutional protections of free¬
dom of the press, communicators have a relatively free hand.
This means that in the United States professional communica¬
tors have a significant role in designing communications—
whether in the form of news, advertising, or entertainment—
that have the potential of shaping our ideas and behavior. This
does not mean that the U.S. population is at the mercy of its
media. It does mean, as we pointed out at the beginning of this
chapter, that professional communicators are a truly significant
part of the process of mass communication.
 ■ 24 The Nature of Mass Communication

The power of professional communicators, or at least the

power that they and others believe they have, may make their
activities seem important and exciting, at least compared with
some other jobs. In many cases the aura of glamour may reflect
myth more than reality, but it still may make a career in mass
communication look attractive. For this reason, we turn to a
brief overview of careers in mass communication and the kinds
of training that are currently useful.

(Professional
Communicators:
To speak of careers in mass communication is to speak of diver¬
sity. In each of the industries involved, there are organizations
of differing sizes, from multinational conglomerates and large
Careers and chains to one-person operations. These very different entities
Training employ persons with a diverse range of training and skills.
Whereas jobs such as writing require solitary work, managerial
jobs demand the ability to orchestrate the talents of scores of
people. Some jobs require graduate degrees; others require no
formal training at all. Salaries also vary greatly. While a network
news broadcaster may earn an enormous salary, there are
writers and editors and photographers all over the country who
barely pass the poverty line.
Despite their diversity, careers in mass communication do
share a few characteristics. First, they are flexible; they allow tal¬
ented people to move in and out of different roles, even in and
out of related industries. At various times a person may be a
newspaper reporter, an editor, and perhaps a public relations
executive. In fields like public relations, a person may go from
the public sector to the private sector and back again. The rate
of movement in, around, and among the various industries is
high indeed.
Second, jobs in mass communication have changed greatly in
recent years. New technology and an explosion in the demand
for all sorts of information have opened new jobs and changed
the substance of some old ones. In addition, the rewards for jobs
in mass communication have changed in the last decade.
Among those changes are better working conditions, better sal¬
aries, and greater social recognition. For example, journalism in
Jeremy Main’s words is “in the prime of its life. Once an ill-paid
and rather raffish trade of disillusioned idealists, journalism is
now respectable and reasonably remunerative.”6
This rise in status may derive from the social usefulness of
mass communication and more particularly from its role in sus¬
taining democracy. Democratic government requires a free flow
of ideas, and the communication industries are the custodians
of that flow. People working in mass communication may help
 The Process of Mass Communication 25 ■

Box 1

Careers in
Communica¬
tion

People who are successful in the field of mass public affairs-which eventually led to his daily
communications are as diverse as the many crisis briefings of the Washington press corps.
jobs they do, but in general they share one After resigning, Carter became anchor of the
very important characteristic: they are not weekly PBS-TV series “Inside Story,” which
stuck in a rut No matter what their back¬ critically investigates the news media
ground, interests, or training, they use all
their abilities to create varied opportunities Diane Sawyer, co-anchor of the CBS Morn¬
for themselves. Four examples from the world ing News. A former reporter for a Louisville,
of television news are: Kentucky, television station, Sawyer served
from 1970 to 1974 as administrator of the
Hodding Carter III, who first received na¬ White House press office, then went on to re¬
tional attention as the State Department’s search former President Richard Nixon’s
spokesman during the Iranian hostage crisis memoirs, RN. She returned to broadcast jour¬
of 1979-1980. A student of international af¬ nalism as a reporter and then as State Depart¬
fairs at Princeton, Carter began his career in ment correspondent for CBS News before tak¬
journalism as an editorial writer for his fa¬ ing her current position. A graduate of
ther’s newspaper, the Greenville, Mississippi, Wellesley College, Sawyer also is a member of
Delta Democrat-Times. He stayed on to be¬ the Council on Foreign Relations.
come managing editor and then editor and as¬
sociate publisher. Active in state Democratic Linda Ellerbee (photo above), whose late-
politics, Hodding Carter joined Jimmy night show NBC News Overnight, which ran
Carter’s campaign staff in 1977 and subse¬ for only eighteen months, was described by
quently accepted the president-elect’s offer of one critic as “the most intelligent news pro¬
the position of assistant secretary of state for gram on the airwaves." Ellerbee's career has
 ■ 26 The Nature of Mass Communication

taken her all over the country, from an early tion to broadcast its signal via satellite to ca¬
job as a disc jockey for a radio station in Chi¬ ble TV, Turner entered the communications
cago to a position as an Associated Press re¬ industry via his father’s billboard advertising
porter in Juneau, Alaska. She has also worked business, which he took over in 1963 at the
as a program director in San Francisco, a re¬ age of twenty-four. Within fifteen years he had
porter in Dallas, and a congressional corre¬ established the Turner Broadcasting System,
spondent in Washington, D.C. During the a multimillion-dollar conglomerate whose
summer of 1984, she did a weekly newspro- holdings include Cable Network News, several
gram. Known for her distinctive wit and talent TV and radio stations, and Turner’s favorite
for writing, Ellerbee never graduated from col¬ baseball team, the Atlanta Braves. An avid
lege and was fired from her first job—doing ac¬ sportsman, Turner won the 1977 America’s
counts for a trade magazine—because she Cup in his yacht Courageous and is rumored
made too many mistakes. to be interested in entering politics.

“The Mouth of the South,” Ted Turner. photo: Courtesy of the National Broadcasting Company,
Owner of the first independent television sta¬ Inc. Photography by Les Carron. .

set the agenda of public discussion, teach children how to be

consumers, or entertain millions. Criticism of the mass media
and public concern about the media’s effects reinforce the per¬
ception that mass communication is significant work. As a re¬
sult, during the last decade communications achieved a status
and glamour equaled by few fields. Indeed, when movies about
the press have been cast in recent years it has seemed natural to
have reporters’ roles played by such superstars as Robert Red-
ford, Dustin Hoffman, and Jane Fonda.

■ Paths to a Career Journalism, said Jeremy Main, “is a profession only in the loose
sense of the word. Its standards range from the eye-popping sen¬
sationalism of the National Enquirer to the meticulous scholar¬
ship of the Scientific American, from the flat objectivity of the
Associated Press to the highly personal journalism of Rolling
Stone.”7 The standards for other jobs in mass communication
are similarly varied. As a result, the path to a career in commu¬
nications, unlike law or medicine, is not tidily mapped out with
precise requirements, examinations, and licenses.
Employers, educators, and the current pool of workers all in¬
fluence the prerequisites of a career in communications.
The first step is a college education. Basically, there are two
broad paths—general education or professional education.
Traditionally a prospective journalist, broadcasting executive, or
advertising professional acquired a general education, earning a
bachelor’s degree in liberal arts, and then learned the demands
of a particular medium or organization on the job. This pattern
changed somewhat as schools of communication and depart-
 The Process of Mass Communication 27 ■

ments of journalism and related media developed. Today, the

distinction between general and professional preparation has
become a bit blurred. Professional schools and departments that
train people for the communications industries are integrated
with general education. For example, professional programs at
the undergraduate level in journalism and mass communication
typically demand that students take three-fourths of their work
in other arts and sciences and one-fourth in journalism or re¬
lated areas. Thus communications educators argue that their
students are liberal arts graduates with special capabilities as
writers.
Professional training programs are wide ranging. They in¬
clude specialization in news-editorial journalism (newspapers
and magazines), broadcasting, advertising, public relations,
photojournalism, and technical journalism. In addition there are
general programs in departments of communication, radio¬
television, speech communication, and media studies. Some
business schools offer work in advertising and public relations;
departments of film studies help prepare people for that indus¬
try. At the graduate level there are master's programs that pro¬
vide more advanced professional training (and credentials) in
communications. Some people come to professional schools
with undergraduate degrees in political science, sociology, En¬
glish, or other fields; others have undergraduate degrees in jour¬
nalism and education.
At both graduate and undergraduate levels, most professional
schools have two constituencies and a difficult, dual identity.
They must maintain contact with the media industries (and the
industries' confidence), and they must survive within the aca¬
demic community. As educator John Hulteng said, schools of
mass communication must be centers for learning and for the
advancement of knowledge about mass communication, not
“mere hiring halls operated at the whim of industry. ”8 Some¬
times this stance angers media professionals who scorn the
broader social and theoretical concerns of academics. Still, the
academic and business worlds manage to work together, and a
steady flow of trained people enters the professional world of
mass communication. Increasingly, schools of journalism and
mass communication are moving away from industry-specific
training toward more generalized approaches. This is due to the
revolutionary changes in our mass media that continue as tech-
nology develops. Educators used to talk about training journal¬
ists, broadcasters, or advertising specialists; now they speak of
preparing the new “information worker’’ for a variety of emerg¬
ing roles in the communication society.
In the end, employers want competent people with a sense of
professionalism and the ability to perform the work desired.
Good writing skills are essential to many jobs in communica-
 ■ 28 The Nature of Mass Communication

tion. Some employers prefer people who have developed profes¬

sional skills in colleges and universities; others prefer to provide
professional training themselves. But we can distinguish two
broad categories of training most frequently offered by American
schools today: journalism and speech-communication.

A Journalism In a recent nationwide study of American journalists, John

Perspective Johnstone and his colleagues concluded that “formal training in
journalism is by no means typical” among practicing journal¬
ists.9 But this statement is somewhat misleading. Among the
journalists studied, 27 percent had majored in journalism at
either the undergraduate or graduate level. Journalism majors
were outnumbered about two to one by persons with other tyr>es
of college training, but schools of journalism were the largest
single source of trained personnel. In 1984, the respected Wall
Street Journal Newspaper Fund reported that 85 percent of all
new entry-level hires on American newspapers came from
schools of journalism and mass communication.
Accredited schools and departments of journalism are moni¬
tored by the American Council on Education in Journalism and
Mass Communication, which is made up of leading media
professionals and educators. The council sets standards for
class size, student-teacher ratios, faculty qualifications, physical
space and equipment, and so on. Accreditation is granted only
to those schools that conform to certain norms and meet certain
standards.
Despite many shared values, beliefs, and experiences, schools
of mass communication do differ in their approaches to profes¬
sional education. For example, the graduate schools of Columbia
University, Northwestern University, and the University of Mis¬
souri give much practical, hands-on experience. In contrast, the
University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communica¬
tion and the University of Michigan are more conceptual in their
approach, reflecting the belief that the student is best served by
a rigorous study of research and theory. Still other schools, like
the journalism schools of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Ohio State,
look for a balance between theory and practice.
There is a continuing debate between professionals and edu¬
cators about whether the pool of people seeking jobs in journal¬
ism, and the number of students enrolling in journalism
schools, is too large. During the 1970s the role of reporters in
exposing the Watergate scandal increased the popularity and
prestige of journalists, and the number of students majoring in
mass communication accelerated rapidly—more rapidly than the
number of jobs. Whether it was the glamour of investigative re¬
porting or the simple need to find a practical career is not clear.
Respected press critic Ben Bagdikian has charged that journal-
 The Process of Mass Communication 29

ism schools were engaged in the “mass production and ques¬

tionable education of journalists.”10 Educational programs, he
maintained, were out of tune with the realities of the job mar¬
ket. There were more people enrolled in journalism schools, he
charged, than there were jobs and enough journalism students
to replace every professional journalist then employed on an
American newspaper.
Indeed, in 1976 there were about 65,000 students enrolled in
journalism schools and only 70,000 news-editorial jobs in the
United States. But only about 14,000 students were graduating
each year, and less than half of this number were looking for
newspaper jobs. Furthermore, many journalism schools could
more properly be called schools of communication or mass com¬
munication, and they provide programs in advertising, public
relations, film, broadcasting, and related areas as well as in
newspaper journalism. By the early 1980s almost all graduates
of journalism schools were finding jobs, and enrollments in
professional schools were stabilizing. Enrollments remain high,
but media industries are labor intensive and graduates find
employment.

A Speech- Although speech-communication departments do not provide

Communication training for a specific job, they do prepare students for a number
Perspective of careers. Several studies of employers’ attitudes toward young
job seekers indicate that the ability to communicate is highly
valued: employers want people who can write and communicate
ideas, who can pull complex or fragmented ideas into coherent
reports; skills in interpersonal communication and oral report¬
ing are also much in demand. By blending education in the
liberal arts with the study of communication, speech-communi¬
cation departments train students in skills needed by many
employers.
The primary aim of speech-communication departments is
“to advance the discovery and application of humanistic, behav¬
ioral. and linguistic knowledge of human symbolic interaction.
Communication is examined in all its forms, ... as it occurs in
all media ... as it is affected by cultural context; and for its in¬
fluence on the course and quality of public policy and social
change.”11 Speech-communication majors are educated in the
liberal arts and trained in areas such as rhetoric and public ad¬
dress, communication theory, organizational communication,
small-group communication, intercultural communication, and
radio-TV-film. Competent graduates have considerable skill in
writing, speaking, and organizing meetings and conferences.
Thus they can engage in a wide range of work based on com¬
munication—from analysis of nonverbal communication to
small-group work and planning communication programs.
 ■ 30 The Nature of Mass Communication

Indeed, the speech-communication graduate should have

something that pioneer public relations counselor Edward L.
Bernays advocated for years: a broad-based education that is
grounded in the social sciences and liberal arts and includes de¬
velopment of a sense of the strategies behind communication.
Too many people master the tactics (for example, specific job
skills and writing), said Bernays, without understanding social
psychology, linguistics, and other fields that provide a strategy—
a basis for planning and thinking about communication.
Speech-communication departments offer students not only a
broad-based education but also the tools for developing a com¬
munications strategy.
There is, however, one key problem in this career path: few
employers advertise for communicators as such. They ask for ed¬
itors, technical writers, conference coordinators, and other spe¬
cialists. Thus speech-communication graduates must tailor
their descriptions of their credentials for a specific position and
persuade the employer that they are equipped for the job.
Getting a job can be a first test of their skill! There is ample evi¬
dence that speech-communication graduates have been success¬
ful in doing so, for they are working in many fields, including
public relations, advertising, personnel, social services, sales,
the ministry, and teaching. In the 1980s a large number of
speech communication graduates were finding employment in
new corporate video careers. This field seems to be expanding.

■ Summary Contemporary societies are deeply dependent upon mass com¬

munication and probably could not exist in their present form
without it. Each society has had a unique history that has re¬
sulted in its current economic and political system. That history
has also defined its patterns of ownership and control in mass
communication.
Mass communication is a process that begins when profes¬
sional communicators formulate various kinds of messages to
present to different segments of the public for a variety of pur¬
poses. Through the use of media those messages are sent out to
large and diverse audiences, who attend to the messages in se¬
lective ways. Members of the audience interpret the message,
and if their internal meanings are more or less parallel to those
intended by the communicator, reasonably accurate communi¬
cation has taken place. If members of the audience are changed
in some major or even minor way, the messages have had an
effect.
Mass communication follows the same principles as face-to-
face communication. Messages begin as configurations of traces
experienced as meanings by a communicator. Such experiences
are labeled with culturally agreed upon symbols that are trans-
 The Process of Mass Communication 31 ■

mitted to a receiver. That person perceives the symbols and in¬

terprets the messages as it arouses a configuration of traces to
provide meaning. Feedback and role taking increase the accu¬
racy of a communication, as both parties strive to achieve con¬
gruence between the intended and the interpreted meanings.
But opportunities for feedback and role taking are limited in
mass communication because information is moved across
space or time by mechanical or electronic media. In addition, all
members of the audience may not share the cultural rules defin¬
ing the meanings of the symbols used by the communicator.
These special features of mass communication may limit both
its accuracy and its influence. Nevertheless, over time mass
communications can have a significant influence on audiences.
In the United States, media managers have a substantial
amount of freedom to shape the content of mass communica¬
tions. Therefore, professional communicators are often believed
to have considerable power. This leads many people to view ca¬
reers in the media as exciting and even glamorous.
In any case the media represent an expanding job market
that includes literally hundreds of specific roles. The training of
professional communicators is usually the task of colleges and
universities that offer degree programs in communication. The
two broad perspectives that have dominated those programs are
those of journalism and speech-communication. Like the media
themselves, each of these academic fields undergoes constant
change as the technology of the communications industries be¬
comes more complex, as new opportunities to work as profes¬
sional communicators appear, and as scientific understanding
of the process and effects of mass communication increases
through research.

Notes and 1 For a discussion of the broad implications of dependency, see Dal¬
References las W. Smythe, Dependency Road: Communication, Capitalism.
Consciousness, and Canada (Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing
Corp., 1981). For a summary of the basic theory, see Melvin L. De
Fleur and Sandra Ball-Rokeach, Theories of Mass Communica¬
tion (New York: Longman, 1982).
2 Alexander R. Luria, The Neuropsychology of Memory (Washing¬
ton, D.C.:V. H. Winston and Sons, 1976), pp. 1—16.
3 Robert A. Wallace, Biology: The World of Life, 2nd ed. (Santa Mon¬
ica, Calif.: Goodyear Publishing Co. 1978), p. 310.
4 Ibid., pp. 309—310.
5 Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver’s book is the classic
source for this definition. For their interesting treatment of this
process, see The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Ur-
bana: University of Illinois Press, 1949).
■ 32 The Nature of Mass Communication

6 Jeremy Main, “The Professionals: Journalists, a Career That’s Hit

Its Heyday,"Money, April 1977, p. 46.
7 Ibid., p. 49.
8 Speech to Oregon press conference, February 1976.
9 John W. C. Johnstone, Edward J. Slawski, and William W. Bow¬
man, The News People: A Sociological Portrait of American Jour¬
nalists and Their Work (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1976), p. 36.
10 Ben Bagdikian, “Woodstein U.—Notes on the Mass Production
and Questionable Education of Journalists,” Atlantic, March
1977, p. 80.
11 James H. McBath and David Burhans, Jr., Communication Ed¬
ucation Jor Careers (Falls Church, Va.: Speech Communication
Assn., 1975), p. 1.
 Blessed, are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Na¬
ture, and through her, God.
Henry David Thoreau, Essays and Other Writings

■ The Development of the

Mass Media

For untold centuries human beings had no means of communi¬

cating effectively across distances greater than that over which
the human voice could be heard. They were also unable to pre¬
serve their ideas through time. Since they lacked media, they
were restricted to the here and now. Under these conditions a
society can neither extend its influence over other people nor ac¬
cumulate a rich cultural heritage. As a result, social and cultural
development remain agonizingly slow. It was in just such cir¬
cumstances that human existence began and remained for eons.
This chapter reviews a number of milestones in the incredibly
long history of efforts to extend human speech through media.
As will become clear, at eveiy point in that histoiy the media
that emerged were influenced not only by the state of technology
at the time but by the social institutions and culture of the so¬
cieties in which they appeared.

■ The First Media A medium, as we noted earlier, can be any object or arrange¬
ment of objects used as a device to provide human beings with
parallel meanings. The first media appeared in prehistory, even
before people could write. Through century after century, in all
parts of the globe, people developed ingenious ways to expand
their ability to communicate beyond the spoken word, across
both time and distance. It took thousands of years for the first
modern medium—print—to be developed.
 ■ 34 The Nature of Mass Communication

Media in Preliterate Some anthropologists believe that our ancestors used complex
Societies language more than 300,000 years ago. In any event, it was a
very long time ago. By 27,000 b.c. prehistoric people were rep¬
resenting ideas through pictures or drawings. We can still see
the results of their work in caves in northern France and Spain,
where they left beautiful representations of bison, reindeer, wild
horses, and extinct animals on the walls.1 The messages con¬
tained in the drawings are not easy to understand today because
we know relatively little about their meanings to the people who
produced them.
These wall drawings were only one of the media used by pre¬
historic peoples. Little is known about what techniques were
tried first or about their effects on the people. But at various
points in prehistory some inventive individual must have come
up with each of the new techniques. People marked trails by
notching trees and indicated directions or boundaries with piles
of stones. In pottery, weaving, sculpture, and humble articles for
everyday use, many preliterate people incorporated decorative
motifs and designs like swastikas, crosses, serpents, birds, and
animals that seemed to convey meanings of deep significance. In
dances, ceremonies, and rituals they represented myths and leg¬
ends that expressed their group's central values. They used spe¬
cial clothing, hair styles, and body markings to signify ranks,
honors, and special privileges. Bodily adornments, tattoos, and
scars often signified a person’s status in society, such as the po¬
sition of warrior, priest, or chieftain, or their condition as mar¬
ried or unmarried.
Still, preliterate people could do very little to extend their
communication beyond face-to-face speech. Without writing or
paper, they had little that could overcome time but pictorial rep¬
resentations on wood, bark, skin, or stone. Their ability to com¬
municate over distances (telecommunications) was limited by
the sharpness of their eyesight or hearing and even by weather
conditions. Smoke signals, for example, can be seen at a dis¬
tance only in daylight and under favorable conditions. Some¬
thing more was needed. That something was writing—the most
significant human accomplishment of all time.

The Invention and The first step toward true writing was taken thousands of years
Spread of Writing ago when people arranged pictures or drawings in a sequence to
tell a story. Such pictographic writing was a slow, laborious way
to communicate. Eventually it was replaced by ideographic writ¬
ing, in which simplified or stylized pictures stand for specific
things. For instance, a drawing of the sun might stand for a day,
a whip for subjugation, and a bundle of grain for a good harvest.
Obviously, for such symbols to be useful there had to be wide¬
spread agreement about what stood for what.
 The Development of the Mass Media 35 ■

The ancient Egyptians used ideographic writing extensively,

developing highly stylized symbols known as glyphs. Often they
carved glyphs into stone to decorate tombs or public buildings.
But the glyphs were more than mere decorations. For those who
could read them, they transmitted complex messages. By about
4000 B.c. the Egyptians were using these symbols to record ac¬
counts of wars, religious ideas, and the deeds of important
leaders.
However, writing with glyphs was laborious and complicated.
Thousands of symbols were required to refer to the many words
and concepts in a language. The symbols had to be carved into
stone, and stone was difficult to move over distance. Under these
conditions ordinary people did not learn to read or write. Only
small numbers of scribes, who were usually controlled by politi¬
cal and religious leaders, used the written language.
A major step forward was taken when people found materials
to replace stone as a writing surface. The Mayan tribes of Cen¬
tral America, for example, used thin white bark as a writing sur¬
face. In several parts of the world, and at various times, scribes
began to imprint symbols on small clay tablets, or paint them on
materials such as papyrus, parchment, and bark with brush
and ink. With these media, people could write more quickly and
written messages could be transported fairly easily.
The ideographic symbols were increasingly simplified and
standardized. Eventually, over a period of centuries, scripts were
developed in which characteristic shapes and forms (such as the
letters of the various alphabets) came to stand for the sounds of
the language.2 Such phonetic writing greatly simplified the re¬
cording of speech. Fewer symbols are needed to represent all the
words of a language in phonetic writing than in ideographic
writing. The development of phonetic scripts made it possible to
write many of the world’s principal languages.
Once simplified written languages and portable media were
available, easily understood messages could be preserved
through time and moved over distance with relative ease. Long
before the birth of Christ, books, historical records, commercial
documents, legal codes, scientific treatises, and scriptures be¬
gan to accumulate as part of many cultures. Still, even by the
time of the Greek and Roman civilizations, only a small part of
the population could read and write. Widespread literacy was
centuries away.

Predecessors of Although lengthy written documents are almost as old as writ¬

Modern Books ing itself, books as we are familiar with them—with leaves
bound together between covers—did not appear until about the
fourth century a.d. Earlier, when papyrus and parchment came
into use, sheets were joined together in long rolls to form vol-
■ 36 The Nature of Mass Communication

■ An early form of writing was the system used in Egypt starting

around 4000 b.c. It made use of hieroglyphics (literally, “holy” or
“sacred” “carved symbols”). The glyphs were decorative but pro¬
vided records of important situations, events, and ideas. It was a
complex system and could be used only by trained scribes.
(Historical Pictures Service, Chicago.)

iimen. These scrolls were hard to use and difficult to store. It

was Roman jurists who decided to fold sheets together, collect
many sheets at their folds, and bind those sheets between cov¬
ers, forming a codex.3 We can consider these codices the first
books. The Maya also produced codices before they were con¬
quered by the Spanish. They produced long folded sheets (like
an accordion) bound between two wooden end pieces. Their
written accounts used glyphs rather than phonetic script. The
Maya even had libraries, but their Spanish conquerors burned
them. Only three Mayan codices survive today.
All these books were, of course, handwritten. In Europe,
monks laboriously produced books by copying each letter by
hand on parchment.4 Among the most beautiful of these manu
scripti were those produced in Irish monasteries in the sixth to
eighth centuries. Most were religious works, although, as time
passed, interest in other topics would grow.
Even before Europeans began using parchment, which is
made from the skin of goats or sheep, the Chinese were using a
cheaper and more abundant material—paper. Since the fifth
 The Development of the Mass Media 37 ■

century a.d., paper had been used widely in China. Its manufac¬
ture and use spread westward slowly.5 In a.d. 751 Islamic sol¬
diers captured a group of Chinese paper makers in Turkestan.
The prisoners taught their captors how to make paper, and its
use spread to the Moslem world. By 950 paper had completely
replaced papyrus in Egypt. It was being used in Morocco by the
1100s, and a few years later the Moors took it to Spain. By the
1300s paper was being used in virtually all parts of Europe, al¬
though it was not produced in England until the late 1400s or
on the American continent until the late 1600s. This early paper
was made from linen rags, not wood pulp. Meanwhile, the
Chinese preceded the West in another invention—printing.

I The Printing Press As early as the second century a.d., the Chinese were reproduc¬
ing documents by taking rubbings of texts that had been carved
in stone. During the sixth century, they introduced another
method: reverse images of letters or illustrations were cut into
blocks of wood and then the blocks were inked. When paper was
pressed against the blocks, the letters appeared in white against
the inked background. During the ninth century the Chinese
tried yet another printing method—movable type—although
they did not develop the idea fully.
Movable type proved to be the key to developing a simpler,
cheaper alternative to copying by hand. Individual pieces of type
were made for each letter of the alphabet. The pieces were put
together to form a page, but they could then be reused to form
other pages. In 868 the teachings of the Buddha were printed by
movable type in China in a book known as the Diamond Sutra.
In 1456 Johann Gutenberg printed his forty-two-line Bible in
Germany, which many have called the first book printed by mov¬
able type in the Western world.
Others were involved in preparing the first printed books in
the West, but Gutenberg stands out. He put together a sturdy,
workable printing press from the parts of a winepress and cast
his type in metal. Gutenberg's Bible was a work of great preci¬
sion and beauty. Moreover, in a world accustomed to the hand-
copied manuscript, people were astonished by the existence of
two hundred absolutely identical copies of a book. But Guten¬
berg did not enjoy fame: he died a pauper shortly after his press
was taken over to pay his debts.
By the end of the 1400s, printers had established their craft
in every major capital in Europe. The first press in England was
that of William Caxton, who printed the first book in English,
Recuyell oj the Hystonjes of Troye, in 1476. (It was a transla¬
tion from the French version that had first been printed in Bel¬
gium in 1475.) Caxton turned out dozens of titles, including
 ■ 38 The Nature of Mass Communication

many literary classics and translations. Other printers quickly

followed his example. By about the time Coltimbus first sighted
land in the New World, presses were operating all over Europe,
and books had been published on almost every topic then
known.
Print in the New World began very early. In 1539 Juan Pablo
set up a press in Mexico City and printed the first book in
the Americas. It was a religious work entitled Breve y mass com-
pencLiosa doctrina cristiana. This book, like the many others
that followed, was printed under the authority of the Spanish
archbishop of Mexico. Thus printing had begun in the Ameri¬
cas approximately a century before the Pilgrims arrived at Plym¬
outh Rock.

The Print Gutenberg’s innovation touched off a veritable communication

Revolution revolution in the Western world. Prior to the invention of the
press, book knowledge was concentrated in the hands of a few.
Most books had been prepared in Latin—the language of reli¬
gious authorities. As use of the printing press spread, more and
more books appeared in the ordinary languages of the people.
Thus, when printing spread, developments in science, philoso¬
phy, and religion slowly became available to almost anyone who
was literate and could purchase a book. Even though literacy
was hardly widespread and books were expensive, there were
probably more than 20 million books printed in the West before
Columbus made his historic voyage. (The average press run was
only about 500 copies per book, so this number represents a
very large number of titles.) As presses and the technology of
printing were improved during the 1600s and 1700s, and as pa¬
per became more available, the number of books printed each
year mounted.
The development of education contributed greatly to this
growth in book publishing. The great European universities had
started as early as the twelfth century. More were established
every year until, by the sixteenth century, universities were com¬
mon in all Western European countries. Changes in religions
brought a considerable demand for Bibles and other religious
works. In addition, the growth of science, philosophy, and liter¬
ature all added to the demand for more and more books.
At first, books were not seen as a political force. But as soon
as those in authority realized that printing could be used to cir¬
culate ideas contrary to the wishes of those in power, it came
under strong regulation. In England, for example, Henry VIII es¬
tablished a list of prohibited books and a system of licensing in
1529. In spite of these measures, many documents were circu¬
lated expressing political opinions. When the Tudors controlled
 The Development of the Mass Media 39 ■

the Crown in the mid-1500s, they were very effective at censor¬

ing England’s presses.6 This suppression was to last more than
a century.

Book Publishing in The first printing press in North America was set up at Harvard
North America College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the first book was
published in 1640, the Whole Booke of Psalmes (often known as
the Bay Psalm Book). The college controlled the press until
1662, when the Massachusetts legislature took it over.
Book publishing was slow to develop in the North American
colonies, in part because of restrictions by local government.
But political dissent around the time of the Revolution stimu¬
lated it. In the decades following the Revolution, New York, Bos¬
ton, and Philadelphia were established as centers of publishing.
By the 1840s a large reading audience existed in America.
Cheap paperback reprints of popular books appeared, and then
sensational fiction. The cheap paperback was thus established,
at this early date, as an important part of American publishing.
By 1855 the United States far surpassed England in the number
of books sold. That year saw the first publication of Leaves of
Grass, Hiawatha, and Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Probably
no other book in American history had as much impact on its
time as one published during this period: the antislavery novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Thus, even before the Civil War, book pub¬
lishing in the United States was well established as a business,
as a shaper of American culture, and as a mass medium.7 Dur¬
ing the remainder of the nineteenth century, books continued to
develop into a major form of mass communication.
Although advances in technology have altered the methods of
producing books, the medium has changed surprisingly little
since the nineteenth century. The industry is more commercial¬
ized and larger today, and more than fifty thousand titles are
published each year. Of these, fiction makes up only about 10
percent. College textbooks account for a large portion of the
books published; nearly 80 million copies are sold each year. In
recent years many publishing companies have merged, and
others have been acquired by large corporations.
Books today are the most respected medium. They allow the
slow, thorough development of ideas that serious and complex
subjects demand. But they are also a diverse medium. Every¬
thing from Einstein’s theoiy of relativity to hard-core pornogra¬
phy is available in books. The future of books might thus seem
secure, but so did the future of radio and the movies in the
1940s. New media appear all the time, and it is not impossible
that books might some day be obsolete. Long-term declines in
reading ability have influenced college textbooks: they must be
 ■ 40 The Nature of Mass Communication

■ A press was es¬

tablished at Harvard
College in Cam¬
bridge, Massachu¬
setts in 1640. The
Whole Booke oj
Psalmes (“Bay
Psalm Book”), pro¬
.... WHOLE _
duced that year by
!<D& BOOKE OFPSALMES
TMfuUj
Stephan Day, is
“° J TRANSLATED mte ENGLISH
America’s most pre¬
cious piece of print¬
UMctre.
ing. (By permission of :v#j
Houghton Library, Har¬ Whereunto is prefixed a difeourfe de- '
vard University.) .Jaring not only the lawful Ines, butalfofjjGl
I the neceffity of the heavenly Ordinance ^LdJ
J of ftnatno crrinfure
of ringing Pfalmes in
scripture P/alracs in i- i; *
the Churches of fefe
God.

<rfe-
CM fefe
Let the leer J of God dwell phnteouflj in
< \y I you, in all veiflome, teaching aniexhort- r Vr* I
! (*•> ing one another in uptimesjHimntt) and
(j> iritualli>en(rs,paging tot he Lordwitb

lames v.
( If An) he afflicted Jet him praytandif
eji!? any he merry let hitufng pfalmes.

Imprinted
16 ao

Jr-1
SC*

easier to read now than they were twenty years ago. Such
changes could have larger effects on the publishing industry in
years to come. At present, however, the book remains the only
form of communication that allows a topic to be set forth in
great detail and great depth. For this reason the death of books

■
in the near future is unlikely.

Newspapers in In a sense the history of newspapers is as long as the history of

America books. About the time of Christ, the Romans posted daily news
sheets in public places. In the mid-1500s leaders of Venice made
news of the war in Dalmatia regularly available to the public. To
 The Development of the Mass Media 41 ■

receive a copy, Venetians had to pay a small coin, a gazetta. An¬

other forerunner of newspapers was apparently printed in Ger¬
many in 1609, but little is known about it. Better known is the
coranto, which was first sold to the London public in 1621. Pub¬
lished somewhat sporadically as single sheets, the corantos dealt
only with foreign news.
Today’s newspapers have several characteristics not found in
these earlier publications. Edwin Emery, a distinguished histo¬
rian of journalism, has defined a true newspaper as a paper that
(1) is published at least weekly, (2) is produced by a mechanical
printing process, (3) is available to people of all walks of life (for
a price), (4) prints news of general interest rather than items on
specialized topics such as religion or business, (5) is readable by
persons of ordinary literacy, (6) is timely, and (7) is stable over
time.8 By this definition the first true newspaper was the Oxford
Gazette, later called the London Gazette. First published in
1665 under authority of the Crown, the Gazette appeared twice
weekly. Its publication continued into the twentieth century.
The first daily newspaper in English, the Daily Courant, be¬
gan publication in London on March 11, 1702. A newspaper of
high quality and considerable integrity, the Courant had a high
literary level and appealed primarily to an educated elite. Like
almost all newspapers, it recovered its costs mainly from
advertising.9
The English newspapers, like other publications, were legally
subject to censorship by the Crown, although after the late
1600s censorship was rarely enforced. In the American colonies
censorship came mostly from the governors representing the
Crown. These governments soon had a lively, independent press
on their hands.

The Eighteenth- The growth of newspapers in the American colonies was of

Century American course tied closely to cultural, economic, and political circum-
Press stances. Both population and commerce grew steadily in the col¬
onies, creating a market for news of shipping and trading as well
as advertising. Political tensions also grew, and the colonists
often published their criticisms of the Crown’s government of
the colonies. One of the more significant criticisms appeared in
Boston on September 25, 1690. It was a four-page paper titled
Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick. The paper
was the work of Benjamin Harris, a printer who had fled to Bos¬
ton from London, where the authorities had first jailed him and
later seized one of his publications. This was the paper’s first
and last issue. In it, Harris managed to insult both the Indians,
who were allies of the British, and the French king. The gover¬
nor of Massachusetts banned Harris’s paper on the grounds that
it had been published without authority and contained material
disapproved by the government.
■ 42 The Nature of Mass Communication

Because of its short life, Publick Occurrences is not credited

with being the first American newspaper. That honor goes in¬
stead to a rather dull publication called the Boston News-Letter,
which first appeared in April 1704. John Campbell, the pub¬
lisher, was also the postmaster of Boston, a position that al¬
lowed him to mail the paper without postal charges. (For early
colonial papers, a connection with a post office was almost in¬
dispensable.) In its first issue the News-Letter solicited advertis¬
ing. The small one-page paper also noted, immediately under its
banner, that it was “published by authority.” The result, accord¬
ing to Edwin Emery, was a paper that was “libel-proof, censor-
proof, and well-nigh reader-proof.”10 Because of a lack of public
interest, the paper was never a financial success.
Somewhat better was the Boston Gazette, which William
Brooker began in 1719. It was much like the Boston News-
Letter, but both its printing and its news information were
somewhat improved. The Gazette’s first printer was James
Franklin, who was the older brother of Benjamin Franklin.
In 1721 James Franklin started his own paper, the New En¬
gland Courant. It was not ’’published by authority” and had no
connection with a post office. It included shipping reports and
information from nearby towns, but it appealed most to those
who liked literary essays and controversial opinions. The Cour¬
ant was the first newspaper in the colonies to crusade on a pub¬
lic issue: in the midst of an outbreak of smallpox in Boston, it
argued strongly against the new procedure of smallpox
inoculations!
The Courant was quite sucessful, and it became increasingly
bumptious. It criticized this person, poked fun at another, and
finally attacked the governor himself. Eventually, James Frank¬
lin was thrown in jail for a month. He was ultimately forbidden
to publish the Courant or any paper “of like nature”—a restric¬
tion he got around by making his brother Ben publisher.
Young Ben Franklin was apprenticed to his brother and be¬
gan to gain firsthand experience with printing at the age of thir¬
teen. He had set type for the paper and done all the other chores
of a printer’s apprentice. He had tried his hand at writing es¬
says, signing his first works as “Silence Dogood" and slipping
them under the door of the print shop at night. They provoked
many replies by other essayists. When his brother was in jail,
Ben operated the print shop and paper. In 1723 he ran away
from Boston and six years later took over the Pennsylvania Ga¬
zette in Philadelphia. Franklin not only made the paper a suc¬
cess but also established a small chain of newspapers.
The colonial papers were small. They were usually about four
pages long, and their dimensions were about ten-by-fifteen
inches. By 1750 most Americans who could read had access to
 The Development of the Mass Media 43 ■

® The Boston News-

Letter, a one-page
newspaper, began
publication in 1704.
It was controlled by
The Bofton News-Letter! PubJHhei by Authority;

the governor of the hro u M-rihLy. Jftmnarj 19. to Monday ja*nJy 16. 1707.
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tail.

a newspaper. In 1783 the first daily newspaper was founded, the

Pennsylvania Evening Post and Advertiser.
Many papers were started in the colonies, but most published
only a few issues and died. The papers were severely limited by
technology, by the fact that literacy was not widespread, and by
their system of financing. The hand press used in 1790 was lit¬
tle different from that used by Gutenberg in the mid-1400s. Pa¬
per was still made from rags, not wood, and was both expensive
and always in short supply. The papers' news was scarcely up to
 ■ 44 The Nature of Mass Communication

date. Furthermore, the newspapers limited their own audience.

Many were partisan papers; that is, they consistently argued for
one point of view. When political parties developed at the end of
the eighteenth century, each party had some papers under its
control. Some papers were even subsidized by one of the political
parties. After the Revolution commercial newspapers also grew;
they concentrated on shipping and foreign news, which inter¬
ested merchants and businessmen but few others. All the pa¬
pers, commercial and partisan, were aimed at a comparatively
well-educated segment of society and were expensive. Around
the time of the Revolution a newspaper might cost six to ten dol¬
lars a year, about as much as a worker’s salary for one or two
weeks.
In spite of these limitations, the colonial press established a
tradition of journalism that was an important part of the emerg¬
ing society. Many papers defied local authorities. They showed
that the press could be a political weapon-. Writers such as
Thomas Paine and Samuel Adams helped build public support
for independence. After the war the most famous arguments for
the Constitution (the Federalist Papers) were first presented in
newspapers. From its beginnings the American press thus es¬
tablished itself as an important political force separate from the
government.

I The Penny Press By the early part of the nineteenth century, the technological
problems of newspapers were beginning to be solved. It was a
time when new machines were being driven by animal, water,
and even steam power to accomplish many tasks with astonish¬
ing rapidity and uniformity. With the old screwtype press a well-
trained team of two printers working full speed could put out
only 200 sheets per hour at most. Then in 1827 the first power
press in the United States was put into operation in Boston. It
was driven by a horse going around a track about thirty feet in
diameter.11 This press could turn out between 500 and 600
impressions an hour, presumably depending on the strength
and speed of the horse. By the early 1830s steam-powered rotary
presses produced 4,000 sheets per hour printed on both sides.
These technological improvements meant that newspapers
could greatly increase their circulation if the audience and
money could be found. Both the population and percentage of
people who could read had increased, but existing newspapers
were still very expensive. They sold for six cents a copy, and for
a working person who made only four or five dollars a week they
were a luxury. If a daily newspaper was going to increase its cir¬
culation greatly, it would have to reduce its price and hope to
recover the costs and make a profit through the sale of advertis¬
ing space.
 The Development of the Mass Media 45 ■

■ Hoe’s ten-cylinder printing press was invented to meet the need

of 18,000 copies per hour for the Sun's circulation of 52,000.
(Brown Brothers.)

On September 3, 1833, a strange little newspaper that took

just this approach appeared on the streets of New York. It was
published by Benjamin Day and was called the New York Sun,
with the slogan “It Shines for All.” Its content was clearly
designed to appeal to the less-sophisticated reader. Day hired a
“reporter" who wrote interesting stories about local happenings,
with an emphasis on crime, human interest, accidents, and hu¬
morous anecdotes. The Sun was sold on the streets by newsboys
for only a penny. This system of distribution worked well. The
newsboys purchased the papers in lots of a hundred for sixty-
seven cents. If they sold the whole hundred they could earn
thirty-three cents. Day made his profit on advertising, since the
profit on a single copy was very small. The paper was an instant
hit. It was soon selling over 8,000 copies a day. From there its
sales doubled. Three years later it was selling 30,000 copies per
day.
Within a few months the Sun had competitors, and the mass
press had become a reality. Together these newspapers are
known as the penny press. Particularly noteworthy was the New
 ■ 46 The Nature of Mass Communication

York Herald, founded in 1837 by the colorful James Gordon

Bennet. Bennet imitated Day, but he also added many features
that became part of modern journalism—for example, a financial
page, editorial comment, and more serious local, foreign, and
national news.
The penny papers were vulgar, sensational, and trivial in
many respects. But publishers like Bennet had begun to carry
basic economic and political news as well as editorial points of
view regarding public matters. They were bringing at least some
significant firsthand information and ideas to people who had
not been readers of earlier newspapers.

The Great The two decades preceding the Civil War saw an enormous ex¬
Expansion pansion of American society. Vast numbers of people moved
west, and the industrial and mechanical arts flourished. Tech¬
nological advances touched most aspects of life, including news
gathering, printing, and newspaper distribution. Increasingly
sophisticated steam-powered rotary presses could print, cut,
and fold thousands of finished newspapers per hour. The tele¬
graph linked major cities, leading to the rapid transmission of
news stories to the editor’s desk. On the very day that Samuel F.
B. Morse sent the historic first message by telegraph from Wash¬
ington to Baltimore (May 25, 1844), he also sent over the wire
the news of a vote in Congress. Newspapers in all parts of the
country began to use the “magnetic telegraph.”
The new railroads and steamboats also promoted the growth
of newspapers. They could deliver daily newspapers across sub¬
stantial distances so that communities beyond the larger cities
could receive the news in a timely manner. The ancient dream of
conquering both time and distance with an effective medium of
communication was slowly becoming a reality.
The 1840s also saw the birth of the first wire service. In 1848
several papers agreed to share the cost of telegraphing foreign
news from Boston. This was the beginning of the Associated
Press. Other newspapers purchased national and foreign news
reports prepared by the AP. The service was a boon to smaller
newspapers that could not afford to keep their own reporters in
Washington, much less overseas.
The Civil War stimulated newspapers enormously. People on
both sides of the conflict were desperate for reports of victories
and losses. There were hundreds of reporters in the field, and
they often devised ingenious methods for getting their reports
out ahead of their competitors.
By 1839 photography had been invented. It would be impor¬
tant later in the development of all print media as well as for
motion pictures and television. Of special significance was the
development of pictorial journalism. One of the country's lead¬
ing photographers, Mathew Brady, persuaded President Lincoln
 The Development of the Mass Media 47 ■

■ During the Civil

War, the newspapers
sent hundreds of re¬
porters to the fields
of action. The news¬
papermen lived and
travelled with the
military forces. The
officers in charge
wanted favorable
publicity. Shown
above is the portable
field headquarters of
the New York Her¬
ald, with its staff
being briefed on the
next engagement
The grim side of the
war is shown in Mat¬
thew Brady’s photo
of soldiers killed in
battle. Although
printing photos in
newspapers was still
a decade away,
Brady’s 3,500 photos
of the conflict have
become American
classics of great
significance.
(Smithsonian Institu¬
tion Photo No. 73-5137;
Library of Congress.)

to let him make a photographic record of the war. Brady was

given unrestricted access to militaiy operations and the protec¬
tion of the Secret Service. He and his team prepared some 3,500
photographs, one of the most remarkable photographic achieve¬
ments of all time.12 It would be a decade, however, before tech¬
nological improvements would enable newspapers to print
photographs.

I The Rise of Yellow

Journalism
From the end of the Civil War to the turn of the century, the
American nation went through a series of important social and
cultural changes. Millions of immigrants arrived from Europe,
■ 48 The Nature of Mass Communication

some to farm and others to swell the populations of the cities.

Industrialization increased at an ever faster pace. New machines
were invented to make farming, transportation, mining, manu¬
facturing, and even home life less burdensome.
Newspapers took part in these changes. Vigorous editors re¬
vitalized and reshaped older papers while others established
newspapers in the growing cities of the West. Newspaper “bar¬
ons” developed chains, and the mechanics of printing became
one of the wonders of the time. Cheap paper was being made
from wood as early as 1867. By the end of the century, news¬
paper publishers had at their disposal a rapid news-gathering
system, cheap paper, linotypes, color printing, cartoons, electric
presses, and, above all, corps of skillful journalists. The news¬
paper had settled into a more or less standard format much like
what we have today. Its features included not only domestic and
foreign news but also a financial page, letters to the editor,
sports news, society reports, women’s pages,, classified sections,
and advice to the lovelorn. Newspapers were complex, very com¬
petitive, and extremely popular.
It was their competitiveness that led to one of the most col¬
orful periods in the history of American newspapers. The key to
financial success in a newspaper—then as now—was to attract
as many readers as possible. By showing advertisers that more
people would see their messages than those in a competing pa¬
per, a publisher could attract more ads at higher prices and en¬
joy greater revenues. During the last decade of the century, the
competition for readers led to a trend toward sensational
journalism.
The first steps were taken when the penny papers began in¬
creasing their emphasis on crime, human interest, and humor.
Another step occurred when Joseph Pulitzer succeeded in build¬
ing the circulation of the Sunday World, in New York to over
300,000 in the early 1890s. To do this, he combined good re¬
porting with crusades, an emphasis on disasters, melodramat-
ics, sensational photographs, and comic strips in color—all to
increase reader interest. Pulitzer crusaded against corrupt offi¬
cials and for civil service reform and taxes on luxuries, large in¬
comes, and inheritances. He pioneered the use of colored comics
in newspapers, which did much to spur the circulation of his
Sunday editions. One cartoon in particular made history. It fea¬
tured a bald-headed, toothless, grinning kid, clad in a yellow
sacklike garment. The “Yellow Kid,” as the character came to be
called, appeared in settings that depicted life in the slums of
New York and was extremely popular.
It was William Randolph Hearst who mastered the art of at¬
tracting readers through appeals to sympathy and anger, the bi¬
zarre, and the picturesque. Hearst purchased the New York
 The Development of the Mass Media 49 ■

Journal in 1895, determined to build its flagging circulation to

surpass that of Pulitzer’s paper. Seeing the popularity of the Yel¬
low Kid, Hearst simply bought the cartoonist from his rival with
a large salary. He added other writing and editorial talent. Then
he published more comics, more sensational reports, and more
human interest material—which led to increased circulation.
As Hearst s publication began to rival Pulitzer’s circulation,
the two newspaper barons led their papers into practices that
came to be called yellow journalism. In part the label was used
because the Yellow Kid symbolized the newspapers’ mindless in¬
tellectual level. Their papers were preoccupied increasingly with
crime, sex, sob stories, exposes of sin and corruption in high
places (many of which were gross exaggerations), sports, sensa¬
tional photographs, misrepresentations of science—indeed any¬
thing that would attract and hold additional readers. It was said
that each issue of Hearst s San Francisco Examiner was de¬
signed to provoke one reaction: when the readers opened their
papers and saw the headlines, Hearst wanted them to say, “Gee
whiz!" The idea that newspapers had any responsibility to the
public seemed abandoned.

The Twentieth- As the centuiy came to a close, yellow journalism seemed to be

Century Press dying with it. Circulations had been boosted to a point where
(statistically speaking) virtually every household in the United
States received a newspaper every day. By the beginning of the
new century, the newspaper became somewhat more responsible
and entered its golden age.
Newspapers at the beginning of the twentieth century had
virtually the same kind of content and format we see today. Al¬
though the use of computers has transformed the way they are
produced, their appearance and distribution techniques have
much in common with those of 1910. But there have been sig¬
nificant changes in other areas—specifically, in circulation, own¬
ership, and styles of reporting.

■ Circulation. The American newspaper reached its peak of

popularity at about the time of World War I. There really was no
other means by which people could receive the news in a timely
manner. Newspapers were the major mass medium; they left no
large segment of the population untouched. During those years
more newspapers were sold per household in America than at
any time before or after. Since that time, increases in newspaper
circulation have not kept pace with the growth in population, as
Table 2.1 shows.
The newspaper enjoyed its golden age in the early twentieth
century for several reasons. First, broadcasting and the movies
were in their infancy; they were not serious contenders for either
■ 50 The Nature of Mass Communication

Table 2.1 The Growth of Daily Newspapers in the United

States, 1850—1981

TOTAL CIRCULATION OF DAILY CIRCULATION

NEWSPAPERS PER
YEAR (thousands) HOUSEHOLD

1850 758 0.21

1860 1,478 0.28
1870 2,602 0.34
1880 3,566 0.36
1890 8,387 0.66
1900 15,102 0.94
1910 24,212 1.36
1920 27,791 1.34
1930 39,589 1.32
1940 41,132 1.18
1950 53,829 1.24
1955 56,147 1.17
1960 58,882 1.12
1965 60,358 1.05
1970 62,108 0.99
1975 60,655 0.85
1976 60,976 0.84
1977 61,495 0.83
1981 61,431 0.75

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Census, Historical Statistics of the United

States, Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, D.C., 1960), Series R 176,
p. 500; Series R 169, p. 500; Series 255, p. 16; Series A 242—44. U.S.
Bureau of Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Contin¬
uation to 1962 and Revisions (Washington, D.C., 1965), Series R 170,
p. 69. U.S. Bureau of Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States
(Washington, D.C., 1973), pp. 53, 503; also for 1983, p. 563. U.S. Bureau
of Census, Current Population Reports: Population Characteristics,
Series P 20, no. 166 (August 4, 1967), p. 4 (and forthcoming reports).
Editor and Publisher, International Yearbook (New York: Editor and
Publisher Co.), an annual.
Note: Figures after 1960 include Alaska and Hawaii.

the attention of the public or the advertising dollars of business

and industry. Furthermore, newspapers had matured. By the
turn of the century problems in news gathering and reporting,
distribution, and printing had largely been resolved.
 The Development of the Mass Media 51 ■

■ Ownership. Newspaper circulation per household declined

sharply after 1930. Both costs and competition from other me¬
dia were increasing. Many papers stopped publication or were
purchased by their rivals in order to consolidate production and
other facilities. From 1914 to 1950 the number of daily news¬
papers dropped sharply; since then, the number has held fairly
steady.13 But, as we will see in Chapter 5, the number of owners
and independent newspapers has continued to drop as more
newspapers have been taken over by chains and conglomerates.

■ Styles of Reporting. During the history of journalism, styles

of reporting have ranged from a concentration on human inter¬
est and sensational topics to a vigorous pursuit of factual infor¬
mation about critical public issues. As we have seen, in the
eighteenth-century colonial press, essays that argued for one
side of a controversy were popular. During the nineteenth cen¬
tury, when the wire services were born, objective reporting
gained prominence; personal reports that stated the facts but
avoided opinions were favored. Later, yellow journalism was the
predominant style.
During the 1920s another form of yellow journalism emerged.
This new jazz journalism retained much of the sensationalism
of nineteenth-centuiy yellow journalism and added two new ele¬
ments. One was the tabloid format, copied from London papers;
a tabloid has smaller dimensions than other newspapers, mak¬
ing it easier to hold and read. The other new element was the
bold and dramatic use of photographs. For example, on January
14, 1928, the front page of the New York Daily News consisted
of a brief headline and a photograph of a woman at the moment
of execution in the electric chair. An enterprising photographer
had smuggled a camera into the death chamber and snapped
the picture just as the electricity surged through the woman's
body. The gruesome details of the woman’s reactions and a
graphic description of the apparatus were given below the
picture.
Gradually the excesses of jazz journalism moderated, just as
those of the penny press of the early 1800s had. But yellow
journalism and its offshoot, jazz journalism, are more than his¬
torical curiosities. They represent an approach to newspaper
publishing that seeks circulation and profit at the expense of
integrity and objectivity in reporting. It is an approach that
abandons responsibility toward the public and thus betrays the
confidence that the U.S. Constitution puts in the press. Under
the First Amendment to the Constitution, Congress is forbidden
to make laws that inhibit the freedom of the press. Instead, the
nation is to trust that a free press will provide a flow of objective
information that will allow citizens to make intelligent political
decisions.
 ■ 52 The Nature of Mass Communication

The public did not deserve the excesses of yellow journalism,

and it does not deserve similar excesses today. Yet elements of
yellow journalism can still be found in publications that “ex¬
pose” and “reveal” the secret lives of famous people, that distort
scientific issues, that play on people's hopes and fears concern¬
ing medicine, and so on. The National Enquirer is probably the
best-known example of this kind of journalism today; unfortu¬
nately, it is not the only one.
Happily, as the medium has matured, other styles of journal¬
ism have increasingly characterized good newspapers. One is in¬
vestigative reporting—like the reporting that led to exposure
of the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President
Nixon. Rather than arguing a point or simply recording the
circumstances of an event, investigative journalists play the role
of detective. In Chapter 5 we shall take a closer look at this and
other current styles of journalism.

American Magazines have a much briefer history than newspapers, but

Magazines they depend on the same technological developments and social
trends that gave rise to the other print media. Ben Franklin
published a magazine in 1741, but it lasted for only six issues.
For all practical purposes, American magazines began during
the middle of the nineteenth century. However, it was the social
trends of the last half of that century that allowed magazines to
survive as a mass medium.
The cities grew rapidly during the late 1800s and continued
to grow in the twentieth century. Literacy increased steadily, as
did the affluence of the middle class. Modem transportation, a
reliable mail service, and demands for specialized information
all played a part in the emergence of the modern mass-circula¬
tion magazine. In the years after the great depression of 1893, a
time that magazine historian Frank Luther Mott has called the
“more of everything era,” “every interest had its own journal or
journals—all the ideologies and movements, all the arts, all the
schools of philosophy and education, all the sciences, all the
trades and industries, all the professions and callings, all organ¬
izations of importance, all hobbies and recreations.”14 In other
words, while newspapers were providing their readers with var¬
ied content, magazines zeroed in on special interests, on audi¬
ences who shared an interest in a particular subject.
Toward the end of the century both the number of magazines
and their circulations soared. Several began to appeal to a na¬
tional audience and national advertisers; they achieved circula¬
tions of over 1 million subscribers. In 1900 somewhat over
5,500 periodicals were appearing regularly in the United States.
 The Development of the Mass Media 53 ■

Box 2

Henry Luce:
The Father of
Time

When Henry Luce and his Yale classmate material, the editors ignored or manipulated
Briton Hadden founded Time magazine in the facts themselves—a practice that was de¬
1923, their professed aim was “to keep men cried by many but that became more prevalent
well-informed.” Ambitious and energetic at Time after Hadden’s death in 1928, when
young men, they saw the need for a weekly Luce took over full control of the magazine.
publication that would summarize the news, Henry Luce was a man of definite opinions
enabling busy people to learn what was going and forceful personality, and he sincerely be¬
on in the world without spending hours read¬ lieved that it was his duty not just to report
ing the newspapers. The idea caught on. By world events but to help readers understand
1927 Time was immensely popular. Luce and and interpret them. A firm believer in the vir¬
Hadden were rich, and American publishing tues of Big Business, he saw to it that suc¬
had passed another milestone. cessful entrepreneurs were frequently por¬
One of the reasons for Time’s initial suc¬ trayed on Time’s covers and described
cess was the editorial policy instituted by Had¬ flatteringly in its pages.
den, who felt that news of the Jazz Age should Throughout Luce’s years as editor. Time
be presented in a jaunty, eye-catching style. was frequently accused of blatant propaganda,
Time employed no reporters in its early days; but despite the addition of reporters to the
instead, the news was clipped from other pub¬ staff, Luce remained firmly in control of edito¬
lications and rewritten by Time editors in rial content He was staunchly against Com¬
what came to be known as “Timese”: a trun¬ munism, and lost no opportunity to point this
cated prose full of inverted sentences and col¬ out In fact, during the late 1940s and early
orful adjectives. Sometimes, in the effort to 1950s he used the magazine to promote many
think of exciting new ways to set forth their of his favorite causes, such as American sup-
 ■ 54 The Nature of Mass Communication

port for Chiang Kai-shek in China and election “group journalism,” in vfhich no one person
of the Eisenhower/Nixon ticket to the White was responsible for the overall accuracy of an
House. As he told one critic, “I am a Protes¬ article, was sometimes replaced by a more
tant, a Republican, and a free-enterpriser, conventional arrangement in which a reporter
which means I am biased in favor of God, Ei¬ gathered the facts which were then checked
senhower, and the stockholders of Time Inc.— by a researcher as the piece was edited. Some
and if anybody who objects doesn’t know this departments in the magazine were expanded,
by now, why the hell are they still spending 35 and most began to reflect a diversity of
cents for the magazine?” viewpoints.
Henry Luce was enormously influential on Today Time has a worldwide circulation of
the political scene as well as in shaping the nearly 6 million copies a year and is probably
values of several generations of Time readers. read by four times that number. It still adheres
With the advent of the sixties, however, his to the values of the American establishment,
power began to erode. Timese (which Marshall but its editorials are clearly separated from its
McLuhan condemned by claiming that no one news stories and it takes a less obvious role in
could tell the truth in it) gradually gave way to promoting political causes.
a more reportorial prose style. The practice of photo: Elton Lord.

By 1905 there were more than 6,000. New titles appeared, died
out, and reappeared. Magazine publishing was a dynamic field,
as it is today.
Some magazines were extensions of publishing firms; for ex¬
ample, Scribner’s, Harper’s, and The World’s Work (published
by Doubleday). These journals previewed and displayed the pub¬
lishers’ new books, teasing readers and catching their interest
with sample chapters of forthcoming books. Other popular mag¬
azines began by appealing to particular interests among some
segment of the population (for example, True Confessions, Field
and Stream, and Silver Screen).
Some magazines became important instruments of social
change. They called for reforms in politics, industry, health care,
and child labor. For example, at the turn of the century, Mc¬
Clure’s attacked the powerful Standard Oil Company, political
bosses in major cities, and other instances of corruption and the
abuse of power. President Theodore Roosevelt gave these maga¬
zines the name muckrakers.
By World War I the muckraking magazines were declining,
but those publishing light fiction and feature articles grew. The
early 1920s saw the birth of a new breed of magazines with the
founding of Time, a weekly interpretation of the news. It would
be imitated by Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report. As
television grew in the 1950s, magazines aimed at a mass general
audience with no specialized interests began to fail. But maga¬
zines aimed at particular groups of people or people with spe-
 The Development of the Mass Media 55 ■

cialized interests—such as women or hunters or gardeners—

fared well.
In 1950 there were 6,960 periodicals published in the United
States; by 1983 the number had risen to 10,688.15 By combin¬
ing many of the features of the more timely newspapers with the
greater flexibility and in-depth discussion of books, they have re¬
tained an important role as a mass medium in this countiy and
around the world.

■ Motion Pictures The history of the motion picture as a mass medium is short,
spanning less than a centuiy. But the events that led to motion
pictures go back many centuries. The first step in this story was
the solution of a series of complex technical problems. A motion
picture, after all, is a series of still pictures projected rapidly on
a screen in such a way that smooth motion is perceived. Before
this illusion of motion could be achieved, problems in optics,
chemistry, and even human physiology had to be solved. Lenses,
projectors, cameras, and roll film had to be invented. Only then
were the movies born.

Magic Shadows on The first problem to be solved was how to focus and project an
the Wall image. Convex quartz lenses for magnifying and concentrating
the rays of the sun were used as early as 600 B.c. Centuries
later, Archimedes earned fame by frightening the Romans with
a lens during the defense of Syracuse. He is said to have
mounted a large “burning glass” on the city’s wall that could set
fire to the Roman ships. The story may or may not be true, but
it indicates that the ancients had begun to solve one of the main
problems associated with cameras and projectors—how to use
lenses to focus light.
A major advance was made in the mid-1600s. A German
priest, Athanasius Kirscher, conducted experiments on project¬
ing a visual image by passing light through a transparency. In
1645 he put on a “magic lantern show” for his fellow scholars at
the Collegio Romano, using slides he had painted himself. His
projected images of religious figures could barely be seen, but
his show was a sensation. No one had ever seen anything like it.
In fact, there were dark rumors that he was in league with the
devil and was conjuring up spirits through the practice of the
“black arts.”16
In the eighteenth centuiy the public became increasingly
aware of the idea of the projected image. Showmen entertained
audiences with shadow plays and projected images of ghostlike
figures. By the mid-1800s improved lanterns with reflecting mir¬
rors and condensing lenses provided fairly reliable sources of
 ■ 56 The Nature of Mass Communication

light. The simple oil-burning lantern was eventually replaced by

a powerful light produced by burning hydro*gen gas and oxygen
through a cylinder of hard lime. Ultimately, of course, electric
lights provided the necessary illumination.

Photography The science of lenses and projection had advanced more rapidly
Develops than that of photography. Until the nineteenth century people
could project images, but no one had been able to capture im¬
ages to form a still picture. Advances in chemistry in the late
1700s and early 1800s, however, set the stage for the develop¬
ment of photography. An artist, Louis Daguerre, and a chemist,
Joseph Niepce, along with others, worked for several years on
the problem. Niepce died shortly before success was achieved,
but his partner Daguerre carried on.
In 1839 Daguerre announced the success of his work and
showed examples of his sharp, clear photographs to the public.
He called his process the daguerreotype. Each picture was made
on a polished copper plate coated with gleaming silver. The plate
was exposed to iodide fumes to form a thin coating of light-
sensitive silver iodide. After the plate was exposed briefly to a
scene, the image registered on the plate. Chemical baths then
“fixed” the image on the plate. Because Daguerre’s pictures were
much clearer and sharper than those of others (who tried to use
paper), his process was adopted all over the world.17
Photography was received enthusiastically in the United
States. Soon there were daguerreotype studios in every city, and
itinerant photographers traveled the back country in wagons to
take portraits. As chemistry and technology improved, such pi¬
oneers as George Eastman transformed photography from an art
practiced by trained technicians to a popular hobby. More than
anything else, it was Eastman’s development and marketing of
flexible celluloid roll film that made popular photography a suc¬
cess.18 The availability of flexible film also made motion pictures
technically feasible. But before motion pictures could become a
reality, the development of photography had to be matched by
progress in understanding visual processes and the perception
of motion.

The Illusion of Motion pictures, of course, do not “move.” They consist of a se¬
Motion ries of still pictures in which the object in motion is captured in
progressively different positions. When the stills are run
through a projector at the correct speed, an illusion of smooth
motion is achieved.
At the heart of this illusion is a process called visual lag or
 The Development of the Mass Media 57 ■

visual persistence: “The brain will persist in seeing an object

when it is no longer before the eye itself.”19 We “see" an image
for a fraction of a second after the thing itself has changed or
disappeared. If we are presented with one image after the other,
the visual persistence of the first image fills in the time lag be¬
tween the two images so they seem to be continuous.
The discovery of visual persistence by Dr. Peter Mark Roget in
1824 and its study by eminent scientists of the time led to wide¬
spread interest in the phenomenon. Toys and gadgets were pro¬
duced that were based on visual lag. For example, a simple card
with a string attached on each end can be twirled with the fin¬
gers. If a figure, say a dog, is drawn on one side of the card and
a doghouse on the other, and the card is twirled, the dog seems
to be jumping in and out of the doghouse.
Few of these gadgets were of historical importance, but one
does stand out as a step in the development of the motion pic¬
ture: the Zoetrope, later known as the “wheel of life.” It was a
cylinder mounted on a vertical spindle, with cards showing fig¬
ures in successive movement—such as a man running or a
horse jumping a fence—mounted inside. A viewer could peer
into the cylinder through slits and see one card at a time as the
cylinder revolved. The result was the illusion of smooth motion.
The illusion of motion came under intense study by such sci¬
entists as Joseph Plateau, who studied timing, color intensity,
and other matters related to the perception of movement. By the
middle of the century, the wheel of life (or phenakistiscope as it
became called) was highly developed. When elaborated and com¬
bined with the photography of things in motion, its principles
provided the basis for movies.

Capturing and During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, various
Projecting Motion people tried to photograph motion. A major advance was the re¬
on Film sult of a bet. Governor Leland Stanford of California and some of
his friends made a large wager as to whether a running horse
ever had all its feet off the ground at once. To settle the bet, they
hired an obscure photographer named Eadweard Muybridge.
Muybridge photographed moving horses by setting up a bank of
twenty-four still cameras, each of which was tripped by a thread
as the horse galloped by. His photographs showed that a horse
did indeed have all four feet off the ground at once.
The photographs created such interest that Muybridge took
many more, refining his techniques for photographing moving
things. He eventually traveled to Europe to display his work and
found that others had been making similar studies. Interest in
the photography of motion became intense, but in 1890 no one
■ 58 The Nature of Mass Communication

■ Creating an illusion of motion from a series of still photos re¬

quired the solution of a number of complex problems. Photographer
Eadweard Muybridge played a central role in these developments
with his sequential pictures of people and animals in motion.
Shown above is an 1887 series that he entitled: “Jumping a hurdle;
saddle; bay horse . . . Daisy.” Shortly afterward, techniques for pro¬
jecting such stills on a screen in sequence made “motion pictures”
possible. (Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts.)

had yet taken motion pictures as we do today. Further advances

in both cameras and projectors were needed.
During the late 1880s and early 1890s, various crude motion
picture cameras were under development, and a number of
showmen were entertaining people with moving pictures based
 The Development of the Mass Media 59 ■

on serially projected drawings. Then during the 1890s a virtual

explosion of applications of film and viewing procedures
occurred. By 1895 French audiences were seeing brief motion
pictures projected on a screen by August and Luis Lumiere. The
audiences were greatly impressed. Other applications of the new
technology soon followed, and several individuals clamored for
the title of inventor of the motion picture. But it was William
Dickson, assistant to Thomas Alva Edison, who perfected the
motion picture camera.
Meanwhile Edison and Thomas Armat developed a practical
and reliable projection system. Edison and his partner obtained
U.S. patents and began to manufacture their projector, the Vi-
tascope. Edison also set up a studio to produce short films—
mostly of vaudeville acts—for use with the projector. Although it
had many shortcomings, the Vitascope worked reliably. Its ma¬
jor flaw was that it projected at a wasteful forty-eight frames per
second, whereas sixteen frames easily provide the illusion of
smooth motion.
Because Edison, ever the penny pincher, declined to spend
$150 to obtain foreign patents, his machines were quickly du¬
plicated and patented in Europe. In fact, numerous improve¬
ments soon made Edison’s original machines obsolete. Furious
patent fights in the courts later threatened to kill the new
medium.
Then Edison decided to exhibit his moving pictures in a peep
show device called the Kinetoscope. For a nickel, one could turn
a crank, look inside the machine, and see a brief film on a small
screen. This one-viewer-at-a-time approach, Edison thought,
would bring a larger return on investment than projecting to
many people at once. Needless to say, Edison’s approach did not
catch on; instead, the industry developed on the theater model.
Such pioneers as the Lumiere brothers and others in Europe
had seen this clearly. By 1896, however, Edison was projecting
motion pictures to the public in New York for the first time in
America. In general, by 1900 all the scientific and technological
problems of the motion picture had been resolved. It had taken
centuries to achieve some of the solutions, but the medium was
now ready for mass use. Millions of people would be eager to pay
to be entertained by its magic shows.

The Expanding The first couple of years of the new century were marked by ex¬
Movie Industry perimentation. Many of the early films ran for only a minute or
so. Just the sight of something moving on the screen could thrill
an audience. Then the makers of motion pictures began to seek
longer films and more interesting content. One-reel films were
produced on every conceivable topic, from prize fights to reli-
■ 60 The Nature of Mass Communication

gious plays. They were exhibited at vaudeyille halls, saloons,

amusement parks, and even opera houses.
By 1903 both American and European producers were mak¬
ing films that were up to twenty-five minutes or more in length
and told a story. Some, such as Life of an American Fireman
(1903), The Great Train Robbery (1903), and A Trip to the Moon
(1902), have become classics. Production and distribution of
films expanded at an extraordinary pace.

■ The Nickelodeons. The idea of renting films may seem insig¬

nificant, but it made the local motion picture theater possible as
a small business venture. The investment needed was modest,
and the profits could be high. One could rent a vacant store, add
some cheap decorations, install folding chairs, buy a projector,
piano, and screen, rent films, and open the door for business.
Harry P. Davis and John P. Harris of Pittsburgh did exactly that
in 1905. They charged five cents for admission and called their
theater “The Nickelodeon.” In a week they made $1,000 playing
to near-capacity houses.
The success of the first nickelodeon greatly impressed the en¬
tertainment world, and there was a stampede to set up others in
cities all across the nation. Within a year there were 1,000 in op¬
eration, and by 1910, 10,000 were exhibiting films. National
gross receipts for that year have been estimated at $91 million.20
Most of the early theaters were located in the industrial cities
of the Northeast. Movies were made to order for that time and
place. America was a nation of immigrants, most of whom were
newly arrived and many of whom lived in northeastern cities.
Since these early movies were silent, language posed no barrier
for the audience. Going to the movies was cheap, so they pro¬
vided entertainment for people at the bottom of society. Even the
illiterate could understand their stereotyped plots, overdrama¬
tized acting, and slapstick humor. The nickelodeons have there¬
fore been called “democracy’s theaters.”
The early movies proved to be popular beyond the wildest
dreams of their pioneers. In New York City alone, more than a
million patrons a week attended the nickelodeons in the early
1900s. Although the nickelodeons were associated with the
slums and ghettos, movies had become big business. Corpora¬
tions had been formed to produce, distribute, and exhibit the
films.

■ Movies for the Middle Class. While the nickelodeons brought

the motion picture to the urban poor, the industry was anxious
to lure the huge mass of middle-class families into the theaters.
 The Development of the Mass Media 61 ■

But movies were associated with low taste and the least presti¬
gious elements of society. To shake this image and bring middle-
class patrons to the box office, longer, more sophisticated films
were produced. Attractive theaters were built in better neighbor¬
hoods, and movie palaces opened in the business districts.
Producers discovered that they could increase attendance by cre¬
ating “stars." They gave prominent roles to particular actors and
actresses and publicized them as personalities—even idols and
love goddesses. Thus the star system was born. It gave a tremen¬
dous boost to the popularity of motion pictures.
By 1914 an estimated 40 million patrons attended movies
every week, including an increasing number of women and chil¬
dren. The movies had been accepted by the middle class, and the
era of the nickelodeon was over. Meanwhile, as Europe entered
World War I, Hollywood had been established as the center of
American movie making. The closing of industries in Europe be¬
cause of the war opened the world market to American film mak¬
ers. They took advantage of the opportunity, and a huge growth
in film attendance occurred all over the globe. American films
have been popular in the world market ever since.

■ The Talkies. Since the 1890s, inventors had tried to combine

the phonograph and the motion picture to produce movies with
synchronized sound. Few of their contraptions worked well. The
sound was either weak and scratchy or poorly coordinated with
the action in the film. The public soon tired of the experiments;
movie makers thought that talking pictures posed insurmount¬
able technical problems.
But the technical difficulties were overcome by the mid-
1920s. American Telephone and Telegraph used its enormous
capital resources to produce a reliable sound system. Then
Warner Brothers signed an agreement with AT&T, and the tran¬
sition to sound was ready to begin. Warner produced a new fea¬
ture including sound for the 1927—1928 season. It starred A1
Jolson and was called The Jazz Singer. Actually, it included
only a few songs and a few minutes of dialogue; the rest of the
film was silent. But it was an enormous success, and other tal¬
kies followed quickly.
Almost overnight the silent movie was obsolete; the motion
picture with a full sound track became the norm. As technical
quality, theaters, acting, and other aspects of the medium im¬
proved, motion pictures entered their maturity.
The 1920s also brought changes in moral codes in the United
States. In its struggle for increased profits, the movie industry
began to introduce subject matter that was sexually frank by the
■ 62 The Nature of Mass Communication

standards of the times. Their attempts are, reminiscent of the

episodes of yellow journalism during the struggle among news¬
papers for circulation. But when major religious groups actively
opposed sexually frank movies, the industry was forced to take
steps to police itself. In 1930 the Motion Picture Producers and
Distributors Association adopted its first code for censoring
films prior to exhibition.

■ The Golden Age. The movies increasingly tried to appeal to

entire families as their major form of entertainment, and the
standards in the motion picture code became almost puritani¬
cal. By the mid-1930s, for example, the code banned words such
as broad, hot (woman), fairy, pansy, tart, and whore. Bedroom
scenes always showed twin beds and fully clad actors. The code
was rigidly enforced, and by the 1940s the movies had become
a wholesome, if bland, form of family entertainment.
It was during this same time—from 1930 to the late 1940s—
that American movies in many ways reached their peak. During
these two decades movies were the most popular form of mass
entertainment in America. They were dominated by a few major
studios—such as MGM, Twentieth Century—Fox, Paramount,
RKO, and Republic—which controlled the movies from their
conception to their showing in local movie theaters. The golden
age of movies had arrived.

■ The Decline. Receipts at the box office held steady until the
late 1940s. By then, some 90 million tickets were being sold
weekly. With the rise of television, though, the movies under¬
went an increasingly sharp decline, as Table 2.2 shows. By 1970
only about 15 million tickets were being sold during an average
week.
To try to draw patrons back to the theaters, movie makers
turned to a variety of devices, gimmicks, and innovations. They
tried escalating levels of violence, increasingly explicit sexual
portrayals, horror themes, spectacular special effects, scaiy
monsters, more pornography, space themes, and even an occa¬
sional three-dimensional picture. These efforts helped. In 1982,
a peak year in recent times, average weekly ticket sales rose to
more than 22 million. There has been only a small decline since
then. Today, however, audiences consist not of entire families as
in earlier decades but mainly of younger people. Many neighbor¬
hood theaters closed long ago when TV became popular. Never¬
theless, the movie business is healthy and is here to stay. It is
surviving by adapting to its smaller audiences with films for
more youthful patrons, and by producing movies for broadcast
and cable television.
The Development of the Mass Media 63 ■
 ■ 64 The Nature of Mass Communication

Broadcasting Devices that could conquer both distance angl time were a dream
for centuries. Giovanni della Porta had written in the sixteenth
century of the “sympathetic telegraph” for which learned men
were searching.21 It was to use a magnetic lodestone that would
sensitize two needles so they would act in unison. The needles
were to be mounted on separate dials, something like com¬
passes, in such a way that if one needle were moved to a given
position on its dial, the other would move to a parallel position
immediately—even though the devices were far from each other.
With the alphabet arranged around each dial, messages would
be sent and received over distances.
The special lodestone was never found, but the slow
accumulation of science and technology, and its more rapid ac¬
celeration in the twentieth century, eventually yielded commu¬
nication devices that would have astounded Giovanni della
Porta. The telegraph was first, followed by the telephone. The
wireless telegraph was followed quickly by the radiophone.
These eventually led to home radio and then, at mid-century, to
home television. These applications of scientific principles were
spurred in the late nineteenth century by an ever-increasing
need for rapid communications as nations developed powerful
military forces and commercial interests that literally spanned
the globe.

The Growth of Unraveling the mysteries of electricity was a first step toward the
Technology creation of broadcasting. The Greeks marveled at static electric¬
ity but did not understand its nature. By the 1700s Europeans
were generating gigantic static charges, but they still didn’t un¬
derstand the nature of electricity. Slowly, experiment followed by
experiment succeeded in revealing how electricity worked, how
it could be stored in batteries, and how it could be used in the
telegraph, the light bulb, and the electric motor. Discoveries of
scientists such as Volta, Ampere, Faraday, and Maxwell laid the
foundations for our radio and television. Their scientific princi¬
ples were then applied by Samuel Morse, Guglielmo Marconi,
Philo T. Farnsworth, and others.

■ Communicating Via Wires. The era of instantaneous tele¬

communication began on May 24, 1844. On that day Samuel F.
B. Morse sent the dramatic words “What hath God wrought?” in
code by electricity across about twenty miles of copper wires
strung on poles between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore,
Maryland. Within a few years such wires connected all the major
cities of the United States. Business, the military, and news¬
papers began to depend on the telegraph for communication.
Underseas cables soon followed, and the United States was
 The Development of the Mass Media 65 ■

linked with Europe by 1866. Yet the telegraph obviously was not
a medium for the general public. It would be more than half a
century before the public at large would have a device in their
homes for instantaneous mass communication without wires.
The telegraph set the model for the structure of ownership
that would eventually characterize the electronic media in the
United States. Even though the federal government had paid for
Morse’s original line to Baltimore, it declined to exercise control
over the telegraph. The medium became the property of a private
corporation to be operated for profit. This pattern was followed
for telephone, radio, and television as they developed.

■ A Telegraph Without Wires, Meanwhile, a German scientist,

Heinrich Hertz, had been experimenting with some curious elec¬
tromagnetic waves that he had produced in the laboratory. By
1888 he had demonstrated the existence of what we know today
as radio waves. A few years later, a twenty-year-old Italian youth,
Guglielmo Marconi, had read everything he could find about
these waves. He built his own devices to produce and detect
them on his father’s estate. His idea was that messages in Morse
code could be sent and received by systematically generated ra¬
dio waves, without wires. By 1895 he had succeeded in sending
messages over a considerable distance. With the aid of family
and friends he went to England, patented his device, and then,
with considerable financial backing, built powerful versions that
could span the Atlantic.
Radio in this dot-and-dash form had enormous practical ad¬
vantages over the telegraph, which required wires. Ships at sea
could communicate with land. Various stations could all hear
the broadcast of a home station simultaneously. For England—
as well as other nations with numerous colonies, a large navy, a
huge merchant marine, and far-flung commercial enterprises—
the wireless telegraph was a godsend.

■ The Radiotelephone. It was 1906 when voices, instead of the

Morse code, were first heard over the air waves. Reginald A. Fes¬
senden in the United States had built a system for using exist¬
ing transmitters and receivers to send music and the human
voice over the air. Then a simple radio receiver—the crystal de¬
tector—was invented. It stimulated a horde of amateur radio
fans to build their own home receivers.
It was Lee De Forest who brought the radio into its own by
inventing the vacuum tube, which allowed vastly more sophisti¬
cated circuits and applications. The vacuum tube made small re¬
liable receivers possible. As a result, portable radio transmitters
and receivers about the size of a breadbox played important
 ■ 66 The Nature of Mass Communication

roles in World War I. By this time radio communication had ad¬

vanced sufficiently for a pilot to receive ancl transmit from an
airplane to people on the ground.
Another advance occurred in 1935. Up to that time transmis¬
sion and reception were based on amplitude modulation of radio
waves (which is explained in Chapter 6). Working alone for ten
years, Edwin H. Armstrong developed static-free radio broad¬
casting: frequency modulation (FM). His approach stunned the
scientific world and opened a whole new field of transmission
and reception.

I Home Radio The idea of manufacturing small and simple radio receivers for
use in the home seems obvious and practical in retrospect. But
during the early days of the medium David Sarnoff, who would
soon head RCA, was one of the very few who deemed it worth¬
while. Radio was thought to be suitable only for commercial and
military purposes, not for family use. No stations were trying to
interest ordinary people.
Then events took a rather curious turn. Several people began
to play Victrola music on the air over small transmitters. Dr.
Frank Conrad, an engineer for Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, was
one. He had a small transmitter in a room over his garage so
that he could continue his experiments at home after work. To
see how far this signal would reach, he played records and asked
people to write in with requests. He was swamped! Amateur ra¬
dio enthusiasts eagerly tuned in on his broadcasts. Conrad and
his family became the world’s first disc jockeys.
Westinghouse, the first manufacturer of home receivers, had
Conrad build a more powerful transmitter (200 watts) on the
roof of the Westinghouse plant in Pittsburgh. A metal shack was
constructed as a studio, and radio station KDKA was in busi¬
ness on November 2, 1920. The first broadcast was the election
returns in which Warren G. Harding defeated James M. Cox for
the U.S. presidency. There were probably between 500 and
1,000 listeners. Thereafter, home radio sets sold like the pro¬
verbial hotcakes in the Pittsburgh area.

■ Financing the Medium. KDKA was followed very quickly by

similar stations in other cities. Suddenly the sale of home re¬
ceivers was big business. For example, RCA sold $11 million
worth of receivers in 1922, but by 1925 sales had jumped to $50
million.22
At first, people played with their home receivers like toys.
They marveled at their ability to pick up signals from hundreds
of miles away. During the mid-1920s there were no regular pro¬
grams. Those who operated transmitters broadcast whenever
they felt like it. Still, receivers were selling by the millions.
 The Development of the Mass Media 67 ■

■ By 1925, radios were being manufactured and sold to the public

for use at home. They were powered by batteries and made use of
primitive exponential horn speakers. They caught on like wildfire
and by the end of the decade radio had become a national mass me¬
dium. (Brown Brothers.)

Before long people tired of just trying to receive a signal from

far away. They wanted to be entertained. The major barrier to
regular programming was, of course, financial. No one had
figured out how private enterprise could make a profit from
broadcasting entertainment. Various proposals were debated.
Some felt that licensing each receiver (as in Great Britain) would
yield enough income so that a public trust could operate trans¬
mitters. AT&T wanted the medium to operate like a public
telephone booth. That is, they would own and operate the trans¬
mitters; anyone who wished to broadcast could pay for use of
the facilities. When they tried to implement this plan in the early
1920s it was a dismal failure. The customers they anticipated
■ 68 The Nature of Mass Communication

did not appear. Others suggested that wealthy individuals

should endow stations as they endowed libraries and museums.
The last thing leaders in the industry wanted was either govern¬
ment control of the medium or its use as a means of huckstering
over the air.
The turning point came in 1922 when a few stations sold
time to advertisers. First a company bought ten minutes to read
a message about real estate lots for sale on Long Island; then a
cosmetics firm sponsored a program. Within months, radio sta¬
tions across the country were turning to commercial sponsors
for financing.
Advertising revenues stabilized the new medium. By the mid¬
dle of the 1920s regular broadcasts had been established, and
people could tune in weekly to their favorite programs. The pro¬
grams included comedy, concerts, sports, drama, lectures, and
news commentary. The networks were established by using
long-distance telephone lines so that local stations could broad¬
cast programs that originated elsewhere. First NBC was set up
in 1926; CBS followed in 1927. ABC owes its origins to a court
decision in 1943 that forced NBC to give up some of its stations,
which became the nucleus of ABC.

■ Allocating Frequencies. The popularity of radio had at least

one undesirable side effect: near chaos over the air waves. The
problem arose from the simple but important fact that the num¬
ber of frequencies is limited. Without regulation, stations fre¬
quently interfered with each other’s broadcasts. Some stations
increased the power of their transmission or changed the time
of their broadcasts; some changed from frequency to frequency,
trying to find one free from interference. For a while Secretary of
Commerce Herbert Hoover assigned frequencies to stations on
an informal basis, but the courts ruled that his actions were
illegal. Finally, the industry convinced a reluctant Congress to
design legislation to control broadcasting hours, power, and fre¬
quencies so that stations would not interfere with one another.
The result was the Radio Act of 1927, which provided a tempo¬
rary solution while the problem was studied.
The Federal Communications Act of 1934 finally placed the
government in the position of allocating frequencies and licens¬
ing transmitters of all types in order to control their use in the
public interest. The act also established the Federal Communi¬
cations Commission (FCC) and gave it strong regulatory powers.
Although its powers have changed from time to time, the FCC
continues to have jurisdiction over the use of all radio frequen¬
cies by transmitters in the United States—including those used
by aircraft, the police, marine operators, citizens’ band radios,
AM and FM radio stations, and television.
 The Development of the Mass Media 69 ■

■ Radio’s Heydey. No one could have foreseen the massive

growth of radio that took place during the 1930s and 1940s. Ra¬
dio became a major entertainment medium with its own star
system. It broadcast music and made big bands and individual
musicians famous. It presented plays, comics, operas, sports,
and hundreds of other types of programs. In particular, it
brought rapid and dramatic news coverage by commentators
and announcers with their own special styles. Radio not only ex¬
panded the consciousness of its listeners concerning events in
the world but also placed before them personalities that were
larger than life—such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, patent medicine
man Dr. Brinkley, and the political priest Father Charles E.
Coughlin. It was through their radio broadcasts that these men
gained a following and a place in history.
Even the Great Depression of the 1930s did not slow the
growth of radio. If anything, the hard times helped the industry.
Advertisers were looking for ways to stimulate sales, and they
turned to radio because the listening audience continued to
grow. People who were out of work or out of money hung on to
their radios despite their troubles. Radio was free, and it
brought music, comedy, and plays into their homes to provide a
bright spot in the face of hardship. The furniture could be re¬
possessed and the car remain unrepaired, but the radio would
be kept.

■ Radio Meets Television. After World War II radio faced an un¬

expected challenge: the growing popularity of television. Profits
in radio dropped, but the industiy survived by adapting. It gave
new emphasis to information and music and less to dramas and
comedies. Network and national programming declined, and ra¬
dio became more and more a local medium—with independent
stations and local programs, local news, and local sports. Radio
today, particularly FM broadcasting, is economically healthy and
growing.

I Television The histories of radio and television are closely intertwined. The
three major television networks were radio networks first, and
the same companies that developed home radio and pioneered
commercial broadcasting developed television.
Early in the 1920s such corporations as General Electric and
RCA allocated small budgets for experiments with television.
The idea seemed far-fetched and futuristic to many in the indus¬
try, but research was authorized in the hope that it would
somehow pay off. General Electric employed an inventor, Ernst
Alexanderson, to do what he could, and by 1927 he had devel¬
oped a workable system. However, it was not to be the system
that the industiy finally adopted.
■ 70 The Nature of Mass Communication

Even though the country had entered the age of corporate re¬
search and development, a lone inventor played a key role. Gu¬
tenberg had put together a workable printing system; Morse had
made the telegraph a reality; Edison and Armat had perfected
the motion picture; Marconi had developed a practical wireless;
and Armstrong had developed FM broadcasting (over which
television signals are broadcast). Incredibly, television, too, was
invented independently by a genius working in isolation on a
shoestring budget. A boy with the unlikely name of Philo T.
Farnsworth was in high school in the remote community of
Rigby, Idaho. Farnsworth astounded his science teacher when
he showed him drawings of a workable television system. The
year was 1922, and Farnsworth had single-handedly solved the
problems in sending and receiving television signals. By 1930
Farnsworth had patented his device. RCA had been working on
the same system but had not patented it. At age twenty-four,
Philo Farnsworth forced the corporate giant to meet his terms in
order to obtain the rights to manufacture the system. Early tel¬
evision sets used his basic designs.

■ The Early Broadcasts. The earliest experimental television

sets used tiny screens, about three by four inches. Cameras
were crude and required intense lighting. People who appeared
on the screen had to wear bizarre purple and green makeup to
provide contrast for the picture. In fact, the lights were so in¬
tense they almost fried the actors. Nevertheless, in 1927 Herbert
Hoover, then secretary of commerce, appeared on an experimen¬
tal broadcast.
By 1932 an experimental television station, complete with
studio and transmitting facilities, had been built in the Empire
State Building. RCA set aside a million dollars to develop and
demonstrate television. In 1936 it began testing the system,
broadcasting two programs a week. Before World War II, a few
people in the New York area had TV receivers in their homes.
The medium was set to take off.
But the new industry was about to be nipped in the bud. The
Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and survival
monopolized the country’s attention. All the electronics manu¬
facturers turned to producing for the armed forces. Not until
1945 did these companies return to making products for the ci¬
vilian market. In the immediate postwar years, however, televi¬
sion stations were quickly established in many major cities, and
the public began to buy sets as fast as they could be manufac¬
tured. TV had become a medium for home use (see Figure 2.1).
 The Development of the Mass Media 71 ■

■ The Television Generation. From 1948 through 1952, the

federal government slowed the spread of television by refusing to
assign licenses to transmitters. The purpose was to study the
broadcasting situation thoroughly and allocate appropriate fre¬
quencies to TV, FM radio, and other forms of broadcasting. As a
result, many American cities could not receive television until
after the freeze was lifted.
During the freeze, the FCC developed a master plan that gov¬
erns TV broadcasting today. The system prevents one television
■ 72 The Nature of Mass Communication

■ Early television receivers were expensive and had small screens.

The 1949 receiver shown above was a “big screen” model that cost
about half the price of the average new car. Nevertheless, the public
bought television receivers as fast as they could be produced and
the sets became an important status symbol. (The Bettman Archive,
Inc.)

station from interfering with the broadcasts of another. Thus

the chaos that characterized early radio broadcasting was
avoided. When the freeze was lifted in 1952, television spread
quickly throughout the United States. Soon television was so
successful that social commentators often spoke of the “televi¬
sion generation.” Most Americans born after World War II had
never known a world without television, and the medium was
presumed to have shaped their lives in significant ways.
 The Development of the Mass Media 73 ■

Today television is the most popular medium of all. Many

families own several sets, and audiences for some programs run
into the tens of millions. Television viewing averages over
7 hours daily per TV household. Color has all but replaced black
and white. Cable television is commonplace and is challenging
the dominance of the medium by the three major networks. Sat¬
ellites in space relay programs coming from all parts of the
world, as well as from space itself.
We have seen in this chapter that each of the mass media has
had a long and fascinating histoiy. It is difficult today to imag¬
ine a world in which the only media for communications were
carvings on stone and the beating of a drum. The communica¬
tions world we live in has changed so radically from those early
times—or even from the time of our grandparents—that it is not
surprising that we have not yet determined all the implications
of these changes. In later chapters we examine these media in
more detail—their financial bases, social organization, and day-
to-day functioning. Then we will be able to turn to the task of
assessing their impact on individuals and society.

■ Summary Media, whether primitive or modern, are extensions of speech

that permit communication beyond the range of the unaided hu¬
man voice. The most significant event in the centuries-long de¬
velopment of communications was the invention and spread of
writing. When paper and printing were also developed, the book
as we know it today became a reality. From the time of Guten¬
berg’s printing press in the fifteenth century, the publication of
books grew rapidly. Today books are our most important me¬
dium for the expression of complex ideas. In this sense they are
the most significant form of mass communication for society
and culture. Even so, as new devices develop, the future of books
is not a certainty.
The history of newspapers and magazines overlaps that of
books because they share the same basic technology. However,
newspapers as they are defined today did not appear until the
seventeenth century. By the early 1700s a daily newspaper was
being published in England.
Newspaper publishing in America began in the 1600s and de¬
veloped during the 1700s. These papers were small and expen¬
sive, intended mainly for educated people. By the early 1830s,
however, rapidly developing technology made it possible to pub¬
lish a newspaper for the ordinary citizen. From these beginnings
the American newspaper industry expanded swiftly. In the late
nineteenth century it passed through a period of sensationalism
known as yellow journalism. Today the industry has consoli¬
dated ownership through chains, developed new styles of report¬
ing, and retained its vigor as a financially strong industry.
 ■ 74 The Nature of Mass Communication

Magazines combine some characteristics .of books with some

features of newspapers. They have been important as an enter¬
tainment medium, a source of news reports, and a stimulus to
social change.
Motion pictures have a technological history that extends
back into several centuries of scientific development. That his¬
tory includes inventions in optics, photography, and electrical
technology and discoveries in the psychology of perception. By
1896 silent motion pictures were being shown in America; by
the end of the 1920s talkies were common. In about four de¬
cades the movie industry had been transformed from a mere
novelty into a huge entertainment industry. When television ap¬
peared, the audience for movies declined, making numerous ad¬
justments in the industry necessary.
Broadcasting in all its forms also has a long technological his¬
tory. Its major developments occurred during the present cen¬
tury when the wireless telegraph and telephone came into use.
As a household medium, radio broadcasting began in the 1920s.
Two decades later, radio was in its golden age. Television, whose
growth soared during the 1950s and 1960s, has not displaced
radio, but it has caused the medium to find a new role.

Notes and 1 Douglas McMurtrie, The Book: The History of Printing and Book¬
References making (New York: Oxford University Press, 1943), p. 1.
2 Hendrik D. L. Vervliet, ed., Through Five Thousand Years (Lon¬
don: Phaidon Press, 1972), p. 18.
3 McMurtrie, The Book, pp. 76—77.
4 Falconer Madan, Books in Manuscript: A Short Introduction to
Their Study and Use, 2nd ed. (London: 1920).
5 Robert Hamilton Clapper, Paper: An Historical Account oj Its
Making by Hand from the Earliest Times Down to the Present
Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934).
6 Frederick Seibert, Freedom of the Press in England, 1476—1622
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952), chs. 1—3.
7 JohnTebbel, The Media in America (New York: Thomas Y. Crow¬
ell, 1974).
8 Edwin Emery, The Press in America, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), p. 3.
9 Marvin Rosenberg, “The Rise of England’s First Daily
Newspaper," Journalism Quarterly, 30 (Winter 1953), 3-14.
10 Emery, The Press in America, p. 31.
11 John W. Moore, Historical Notes on Printers and Printing, 1420 to
1886 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), pp. 36—37, originally pub¬
lished in 1886.
 The Development of the Mass Media 75 ■

12 An excellent selection of Brady’s photographs can be seen in Phil¬

lip B. Kunhart, Jr., Mathew Brady and His World (New York:
Time-Life Books, 1977).
13 For a review of such trends, see Raymond B. Nixon, “Trends in
U.S. Newspaper Ownership: Concentration with Competition,”
Gazette XIV, No. 3 (1969).
14 Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, Vol. IV,
1855-1905 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 10.
15 The IMS '83 Ayer Directory of Publications (Fort Washington,
Penn.: IMS Press, 1983), p. viii. See also U.S. Bureau of the Cen¬
sus, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to
1970, Series R 232—243.
16 Martin Quigley, Jr., Magic Shadows: The Story of the Origin of
Motion Pictures (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press,
1948), pp. 9-10.
17 Josef M. Eder, History of Photography (New York: Columbia Uni¬
versity Press, 1945), pp. 209-245, 263-264, 316-321.
18 There were several claimants to the invention of celluloid roll film
in the late 1880s. Eventually, the courts awarded a legal case on
the matter to the Rev. Hannibal Goodwin. However, Eastman pro¬
duced it in his factory and marketed it to the public. Frederick A.
Talbot, Moving Pictures: How They Are Made and Worked (Lon¬
don: William Heinemann, 1923).
19 Talbot, Moving Pictures, p. 2.
20 Tino Balio, ed., The American Film Industry (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1976), p. 63.
21 John Baptista Porta (or Giovanni Battista della Porta), Natural
Magick, ed. Derek J. Price (New York: Smithsonian Institute for
Basic Books, 1957). This is a modem reprint of the work first pub¬
lished in the late 1500s.
22 Erik Bamouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Tele¬
vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 36.
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
T. S. Eliot

■ The Continuing Revolution

in Technology

During the early 1980s, mass communication took on a much

greater social role than it had previously held as the terms com¬
munication revolution and information society came into vogue.
More and more people engaged in the creation, processing, and
dissemination of information. The sociologist Daniel Bell de¬
clared that by the early 1980s the United States had more people
working in the production of information than in manufactur¬
ing or agriculture, a fact that heralded “the information society.”
Technological invention and innovation that included the devel¬
opment of the microchip, the satellite, and the computer caused
the communication revolution. One of the first visible signs of
the communication revolution in mass communication was ca¬
ble television. In addition, for broadcasting and the print media,
a variety of time- and money-saving machines came into use
during the 1960s and 1970s.
The purpose of this chapter is to define and discuss the rev¬
olution in communication technology as it affects the mass com¬
munication industries and the individual citizen. This is written
at a time when there are many emerging technologies and ser¬
vices being delivered by new machines. Some of them will suc¬
ceed; others will fail in what has been called “the great
shakeout.” This shakeout refers to the abundance of competing
new electronic systems and services that may be too much for
the marketplace to bear. Technology changes quickly, and in
 The Continuing Revolution in Technology 77 ■

mass communication as in other industries, anything can and

I What Is the
Communication
might happen.

If anyone questioned whether there was a communication revo¬

lution in America, the doubts would have been dispelled by the
dazzling display at the technology trade show held in Las Vegas
Revolution?
by the American Newspaper Publishers Association in the sum¬
mer of 1984. There were electronic printing and typesetting ma¬
chines, word processors with seemingly magical capabilities,
photographic processes involving lasers, cable transmission
equipment, and much, much more—enough to cover several
football fields. Most of the items at the exhibit were unknown a
decade earlier, and some would have seemed unlikely even a year
or two before.
Nevertheless, British commentator Anthony Smith has ar¬
gued that there is “a bewildering hyping of technical histoiy.”1
After all, the modern media have been accumulating equipment
for more than a century. Telephones, typewriters, cameras, rec¬
ord players, pocket calculators, and television receivers are ex¬
amples. If this is the case, what is so different about current
innovations?
Is there really a communication revolution? Yes, says Smith:
What happened in the late 1970s was a sudden increase in the
potency of telecommunications and in the computing capacity of
society that made it possible for us to reap a whole series of ben¬
efits that were impossible when the same technical possibilities
existed on a smaller scale.”2 The communication revolution is,
as communication scholar John Wicklein has said, a time when
“all modes of communication we humans have devised since the
beginnings of humanity are coming together into a single elec¬
tronic system, driven by computers.”3 There is no longer a rigid
distinction between print and electronic media in a world in
which “electronic magazines” and distant data bases—comput¬
erized information services—are available on the home
computer. As one writer put it, we have moved from a paper
information age to an electronic information age. We are in “a
communication explosion—an electronic maelstrom of satellites,
microprocessors, computers, and advanced phone and radio ser¬
vices.”4 This is the communication revolution and the informa¬
tion society.

I The Rise of the New

Technology
Although every technological innovation since the invention of
the telegraph in the nineteenth century has represented new
technology, the term new communication technology today
usually refers to a marriage between the computer and the tele¬
vision set. That union was made possible by several inventions.
 ■ 78 The Nature of Mass Communication

■ New technologies
in communication Wherever you spend the summer
involving active audi¬ spend it with a
ence participation
began earlier than
many people think.
The “every person a
communicator” idea and re-live the enjoyment
is evident in this ad¬ throughout the year
vertisement from the
1920s. (EKM- 'A Motion Picture Camera for Amateurs’ %
Nepenthe.) T AKE your own motion pictures. Come back with a
moving picture of the good times you have had. You
can take your own motion pictures with JKbvette. The
camera is small, compact, easy to carry and operate. No
adjusting, no diaphraming or focussing. You “find
your picture, turn the crank, that's all. The film is for A

sale by cMovette dealers, who will also develop it and

make the print for you.
And then the pictures you have, and which are shown
with the zMovette projector, are real motion pictures,
with the same clearness and detail as shown in theatres
but smaller, to fit your home.
Price $100, Camera and Projector complete. Your dealer i
will show you ChCovelte or write to us for booklet. ■j

275 State Street Zovette, Inc. Rochester, New York

The computer and the microchip made possible the storage and
retrieval of vast amounts of information. The satellite allowed
global transmission of pictures and sounds: it can receive tele¬
phone, television, and other signals from earth and transmit
them great distances around the globe. It can also provide direct
transmissions to home receivers without the use of local televi¬
sion ground stations. The telephone wire opened the way for the
transmission of digital information—that is, a fundamental re¬
duction of information to digits, letters, and punctuation
marks. This was made possible by the digital computer, an au-
 The Continuing Revolution in Technology 79 ■

■ By using VCRs and portable small video cameras, people can

have a more instantaneous video experience than was possible with
the earlier technology of the movie camera. They can also tape
broadcast and cable programs and view them at a later time.
(© Sylvia Plachy/Archive Pictures, Inc.)

tomatic character manipulation machine that can handle incre¬

dibly large amounts of information at high speeds. Coaxial cable
and, later, fiber optics allowed a television of abundance to re¬
place the scarcity of channels that characterized over-the-air
broadcasting.
Once the computer, the microprocessor, the satellite, the tele¬
phone, and the cable were available, the new television of abun¬
dance was technically possible. To promoters of cable television,
this meant that as many as a hundred or more channels could
be available in every home. It meant that complex information
storage and retrieval systems could be placed in every home,
that there could be electronic mail, and that people could use
two-way systems to talk back to their television sets and order
 ■ 80 The Nature of Mass Communication

goods and services; they could even be guaranteed safer homes

through electronic home security.
All these things were technically possible by the late 1960s,
and many social critics predicted that by 1975, or most certainly
1980, they would all be a reality for most Americans. New York
magazine even ran a cover that showed a “mediaroom” with
these services. We were told we would be a “wired nation,” with
most homes wired for cable, electronic mail, electronic banking,
and other services.
What is technologically possible doesn't always happen—or at
least, happen right away. Economics, governmental regulation,
and people’s habits were among the reasons that the communi¬
cation revolution and the home communication system didn't
happen on schedule. Investors didn’t see immediate payoffs, and
many were slow to put their money in new technology. Some
large firms like AT&T were not permitted to move into the mar¬
ket because of the possibility that they could monopolize it. Gov¬
ernment regulation put the brakes on such' industries as cable
television, which had to meet standards somewhat different
from those for conventional broadcasting. And, to be sure, the
traditional media industries fought back against their emerging
competitors. In one battle before a U.S. Senate committee, the
newspaper industry managed to negotiate a compromise with
the Bell System, which agreed not to go ahead with a plan for
“electronic yellow pages.” The newspaper people argued that if
instantly updated yellow pages were available over phone lines,
classified advertising—a principal source of revenue for news¬
papers—would be devastated.
These were only a few of the factors that seemed to dim the
promise of cable and other new technologies during their
formative years. Nevertheless, the communication revolution
continued. As Daniel Bell predicted, the old industrial order
employed fewer people than the new information industries with
more than 50 percent of the work force earning a living in jobs
that involve the manipulation of symbols.

I People, Money, and

the New Technology
The new technology of mass communication is more than an im¬
personal inventory of hardware and software; it involves ideas,
people, and money. In the beginning there was an invention,
usually involving scientists, engineers, and other technical spe¬
cialists. The invention was then exploited by venture capitalists,
who worked with marketing people to find users and buyers for
the product. Huge fortunes are at stake in the 1980s and 1990s
as various interests compete in the marketplace for the new
technology dollar.
What are these interests and who is involved? Beyond the ob¬
vious fact that there are shareholders at one end of the line and
 The Continuing Revolution in Technology 81 ■

■ People are essential to the creative decision making that is es¬

sential to the effective use of new technologies. Women, such as the
woman here doing video tape editing, hold many key positions in
the cable field and even have a national professional organization
called Women in Cable. (© 1984 Stanley Rowin.)

consumers at the other, some of those involved in mass com¬

munication technology include:

• Manufacturers, who build the equipment, whether newspa¬

per pagination systems used for electronic publishing,
computers used for advertising transactions, or electronic
news-gathering equipment used for broadcasting. The man¬
ufacturers produce the machines, or hardware, of the new
technology. Firms like Digital Equipment, IBM, Apple, Atex,
and Compugraphic are examples.
• Software firms, who create programs for computers as well as
the material that goes on videodiscs and the programs for ca¬
ble television and direct broadcast transmission. They also
include data base companies that package and sell special¬
ized information.
■ 82 The Nature of Mass Communication

• Marketing and sales representatives, who identify target

markets for the machines and programs created by the man¬
ufacturers and the software firms.
• Communication consultants, who provide advice to special¬
ized groups, such as venture capitalists, system operators,
cities and towns considering cable franchises, and so on.
Companies like Kas Kalba and Associates and the Yankee
Group as well as Paul Kagan and Associates are examples.
• Communications companies, which range from the giant
AT&T and its various divested component companies to
multisystem operators (MSOs) like Warner-Amex, which owns
cable systems. These firms are major users (and sometimes
producers) of technology ranging from satellites to other
hardware that ties local operations into a national or inter¬
national network.
• Local operators, like the local cable company, which supply
services to a community. These services range from enter¬
tainment and information programming to home shopping
and public access channels.
• Communication workers, sometimes called “the new infor¬
mation workers” who are the people in essentially new jobs
ranging from marketing and sales to information packaging
who work for all the firms mentioned above.
• Regulators, including a number of government entities, such
as the Federal Communications Commission, various
congressional committees, state cable commissions, public
utility commissions, and local telecommunication and cable
authorities in cities and counties.
• Consumers, who range from private individuals to enormous
corporations that subscribe to a cable service or a data base.
Once, video tape recorders and other hardware were used
mostly by institutions such as broadcast stations or schools;
but increasingly these products of the new technology are
finding their way into individual homes.

In addition, legions of bankers, lawyers, and others are heavily

involved with the new technology.
The people of the new technology are not faceless persons
wandering somewhere in the Silicon Valley or on Route 128,
Boston. Some are charismatic figures like Ted Turner, owner of
Turner Broadcasting System and creator of Cable News Net¬
work. Turner, who can sometimes be found staring out of De¬
war’s Scotch ads in magazines, also owns a baseball team (the
Atlanta Braves) and twice won the America’s Cup for his yacht¬
ing exploits. He is a go-getter in the tradition of earlier American
entrepreneurs. A visit to a cable convention gives the impression
that many in the new technology field are very young and up-
 The Continuing Revolution in Technology 83 ■

■ Many of the mechanical functions of both print and electronic

media share similar machines. For more than a decade now, report¬
ers in most newspapers have worked at video display terminals
which were originally installed to facilitate electronic typesetting,
but which now have many other functions. (© 1984 Brent Jones/Click,
Chicago.)

wardly mobile. There is a strong representation of women, and

in fact, the only professional organization for individuals inter¬
ested in the advancement of cable as a profession to date is
called Women in Cable. There are many other technical and in¬
dustrial groups—programmers, associations of cable owners,
advertising societies, and so on, of course.

I Competition and What happens in this swirling cauldron of technology, ideas,

■ the Future people, and money is both public and private. In the early days,
•most of the information about the new technology had to be
gleaned from two major sources—technical reports written by
people who seemed to think that if a new machine worked on
paper and in the lab it would be an instant success, and futur-
 ■ 84 The Nature of Mass Communication

ists who seemed to work in science fiction and spoke frequently

of “the electronic highway” and the brave new world that the
new technology would usher in. Today, although many firms in
the industry are rather secretive about their activities as they
fight for corporate survival, there are many more sources of in¬
formation, from trade publications and newspapers such as the
Wall Street Journal to congressional hearings.
One thing about the new communication technology is cer¬
tainly clear: to understand it is to understand that throughout
the related industries there is great competition. Indeed, several
experimental projects failed during the mid 1980s—including a
high-quality cable programming service developed by CBS, a ca¬
ble magazine bankrolled by Time Inc., and an upscale entertain¬
ment channel. New media, like traditional media, depend on
consumer acceptance. As this is written, many new machines
and services are being developed. Some will succeed, but others
will fail, just as dozens of home computer manufacturers died or
were absorbed by larger companies in the 1980s. A similar great
shakeout may strike the mass communication industries.
Les Brown, the gifted editor of Channels, a new technology
magazine, has warned that “the present has no patience.”5 The
new technology field is volatile, with an array of winners and los¬
ers. Some firms have been colossal successes, but others have
done poorly, which gives some people the jitters. For example,
after the initial promise of cable television was dispelled and
delayed, analysts and critics gave more sober assessments,
sometimes gloomily predicting failure even when a relatively
unimportant setback occurred. Such short-term thinking is
chided by Brown and others, who have reminded us that when
television was introduced at the New York World’s Fair in 1939,
the New York Times said it would never last and couldn't pos¬
sibly compete with radio broadcasting. Color television, techno¬
logically possible in the 1940s, didn’t gain acceptance until the
1960s. On the other hand, citizen-band radio, the rage of the
country in the 1970s, has attracted much less interest during
the 1980s. It is not surprising that some people are waiy about
predicting the future of the communication industry.

I What Is the New

Technology?
The communication revolution is happening rapidly. The com¬
puter, using satellites and benefiting from the microchip and
optical fibers, has become part of an integrated system of com¬
munication, and the traditional mass media have become major
users of this new technology. For example, the Wall Street Jour¬
nal and the New York Times as well as the wire services use sat¬
ellites to beam messages for printing at distant sites. The
national newspaper USA Today, begun in 1982, is the product
of computerized marketing research and reproduction using a
 The Continuing Revolution in Technology 85 ■

satellite network.6 Around the country even more conventional

newspapers have electronic editing systems, computerized op¬
erations for both display and classified advertising, and elec¬
tronic data processing for management. They rely on reports
from AP, UPI, and other wire services that are transmitted by
satellite. Increasingly, news organizations are using data bases.
In the mid 1980s newspapers were warily eyeing electronic de¬
vices to handle graphic displays, design, and pagination. Mean¬
while, magazines and broadcast stations also have sophisticated
electronic equipment, and advertising and public relations firms
are using computers to do their work more efficiently. For ex¬
ample, advertising media buyers can more quickly and effi¬
ciently compare relative advantages and disadvantages of media
“buys” such as radio versus television to reach the greatest
number of people, and so on.
When we stand back and look at the complex contours of the
new communications technology, it is important to note the
connection among telecommunications as the discipline of in¬
formation transmission, the communications media that pack¬
age information, and data bases that are concerned with
information packing (storage and retrieval). The marriage of the
computer with telecommunication technology has blurred if not
eliminated the distinction between print and TV, film and TV,
and so forth. The magazine is a message design or format
whether transmitted as the traditional printed product or in an
electronic format. In fact, by digitizing the contents, consumers
may select whether they wish the product to be presented on a
CRT or in print, or, at another level, whether they want to read
a print copy of Toffler's Third Wave or view a video presentation
of the concepts.
In the following sections we will take a closer look at a few of
the new technologies that most directly affect consumers of the
products of the mass media.

I Satellites In Chapter 2 we discussed several ways that electronic messages

are transmitted, so what is special about satellites? Stephen
Alnes called them “the single most important piece of new hard¬
ware in the telecommunication revolution."7 Why? These radio
relay stations in the sky have transponders that can receive and
transmit messages. Since they beam messages up and down
rather than horizontally across the earth’s distances, they get
none of the ground interference from mountains, buildings, and
so on. In addition, they can send and receive signals over thou¬
sands of miles. Satellites receive messages from the ground,
beamed to them from an “uplink,” and then retransmit them to
a receiving dish, which is called an earth station, or “downlink.”
Thus a report of the Carnegie Corporation stated, “Simply put.
 ■ 86 The Nature of Mass Communication

■ This is a giant
sending and rectify¬
ing antenna, linking
the earth station
with a satellite.
Much smaller earth
stations are now ap¬
pearing outside peo¬
ple’s homes or on
apartment houses.
Typically, these only
receive signals from
distant satellites.
(Courtesy of COMSAT.)

satellites provide a broadband, low cost, distance insensitive

means of distributing information. . . . There is little that most
terrestrial transmissions can do that satellites cannot do more
cheaply and quickly and with equal or better quality and
reliability.”8
More specifically, satellites

1 Make possible live global transmissions of pictures and sound

from both fixed and mobile transmitters. . . .
2 Make possible the easy creation of new radio and television
networks and “super stations”. . . .
3 Make much more programming available to cable television
systems, many of which have had unused cable capacity. . . .
4 Make possible the creation of a direct satellite-to-home net¬
work. . . .
 The Continuing Revolution in Technology 87 ■

5 Make it possible to put together an audience on a national or

regional basis for a program or programs which might not at¬
tract a viable audience in a smaller geographical area. . . .
6 Offer business a cheaper way to communicate over long dis¬
tances, from rooftop to rooftop if desired. Indeed, satellite
communication is said to be “distance insensitive” in terms
of cost. . . .9

James Traub outlined the tremendous debt that the commu¬

nication revolution owes to the satellite by noting that

the capacity of inexpensive, instantaneous nationwide transmission

offered by the satellite has transformed cable television from a relay
station into an immense industiy; freed broadcast stations from
much of their dependence on networks; increased the volume and
efficiency of long-distance phone service; blurred the distinction be¬
tween print and electronic media and created such wholly new tech¬
nologies as videoconferencing.10

In the mid 1980s the United States was using some fifteen
satellites. One was owned by the federal government; the others,
by private companies. For example, the Galaxy satellite—which
transmits HBO, Turner Broadcasting, and C-Span—is owned by
Hughes Communications, Inc., and COMSTAR—which carries
ABC, CBS, NBC, AT&T, and ESPN among others—is owned by
the Communication Satellite Corporation (COMSAT), which was
authorized by Congress in 1962.

I Cable The French call cable television Telematique. In our country,

Magnavision and Wondervision have been suggested as alter¬
natives to Cable television. Nicholas Johnson, a former FCC
commissioner, remarked that the “difference between ordinaiy
television and cable is the difference between a garden hose and
Niagara Falls.”11 There is a vast array of services available from
cable systems. Of course, not all of these are available in every
area of the country at the moment, and like magazines, cable
programming services come and go depending on consumers’
interest and support.
Among the most popular of the current cable offerings are

Entertainment & Sports Programming Network (ESPN)—

Owned by Getty Oil Company; offers in-depth sports coverage
as well as business news.
Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN)—Owned by the
Christian Broadcasting Advertising Network; provides family
programming that stresses positive values.
Cable News Network (CNN)—Owned by Turner Broadcast¬
ing; provides continuous coverage of hard news, along with
■ 88 The Nature of Mass Communication

features on subjects ranging from lifestylje to cooking.

Music Television (MTV)—Owned by Warner Amex; offers the
video version of rock radio, including tapes by leading rock
groups in concert and “hit” songs accompanied by video as
well as interviews and record promos.

In addition to the above, there are also satellite channels di¬

rected toward more specialized audiences. They include:

Black Entertainment Television (BET)—Owned by Robert L.

Johnson, Telecommunications Inc., and Taft Broadcasting;
targeted for the black community, this channel offers musical
events, political discussions, call-in shows, and movies as
well as regular weekly series.
Spanish International Network (SIN)—Owned by Televisa
S.A. and Rene Anselmo; programs are broadcast in Spanish,
including news, soap operas, sports, musicals, variety shows,
movies, specials, and live telecasts from Mexico.
The Silent Network—Owned by Sheldon Altfeld; targeted for
the deaf and hearing-impaired community, this channel of¬
fers original captioned programming including game shows,
talk shows, aerobics, and drama.

Finally, there are the “super stations,” those general stations

that reach a very wide audience:
V

1
WTBS—Owned by Turner Broadcasting System; offers net¬
work reruns, sports, movies, news. Also offers original pro¬
gramming of soap operas, music-videos, and documentaries.
WGN—Owned by The Tribune Company: offers network re¬
runs, sports, movies, and news.
WOR—Owned by RKO General Television, New York; provides
movies, sports, news, and documentaries.

Les Brown of Channels noted that “as a technology, cable

more closely resembles telephone than television” because, of
course, it involves wiring homes for service.12 Sometimes cable
has been called “the third wiring of America.” The first wiring
was the telegraph, the second was the telephone, and the third
is cable. Cables carry services from cable system offices (called
“headends”) to homes and other buildings. Because the author¬
ity for deciding who will operate a local cable system resides with
the municipal government in most areas, cable has also been
 The Continuing Revolution in Technology 89 ■

■ The multiple
channels of cable
systems have al¬ SPORTS FROM ALL
lowed for specialized
programming to
reach a discreet au¬
dience, such as
sports fans. (© 1983
f !(l I
mm
it I

Entertainment and ESPN bnngs 'W m

Sports Programming you all the excite-
merit and color /J.
Network, Inc.) of sports. And / Stretch ESPN's

\ goes anywhere in / Horse Racing ~ "

the world to do it U = Weekly, Sports-
Not only do V
► youseegreat if
* American L
^
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S Forum and
SportsCenter,
the most
\
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%
sports like NBA Canada. Davis Cup Tennis, comprehensive^ 9

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basketball.the Australian Rules Football,
mL new United
S States Fool¬
-sW^orld Cup Skiing.
sports news show JB B
on television. Anti fr JB
special events m
like the NFL Draft and the
er W ball League.
M college football Baseball Hall of Fame
and basketball, auto induction ceremonies ^
racing, boxing, PKA Tfie excitement and f
karate and major golf events

t
You also see great
international events like
Pro Football
from

i much, much more involvement of sports

But we do more than has no boundaries And
bring you great events. neither does ESPN. Where
We bring you an in the cheering never stops.
depth look at the world
of sports through such
programs as This Week
in the NBA, College
. Basketball Report,
Inside Baseball, the
award winning Down the I

THE mu SPORTS NETWORK

used as a city communication system, linking fire stations and

hospitals with schools and libraries.

■ A Brief History. Today cable is a vast industry, a television

system, and a municipal communication system. But it began
as a transmission service for fringe areas that could not easily
receive television signals. In the 1970s and 1980s, cable came to
metropolitan America, and more and more homes were wired for
cable. A few cities opted for publicly run systems, but most
granted private operators the right to establish a local cable sys¬
tem. There was rigorous, sometimes ruthless competition
among cable system operators to win these local franchises,
which were expected to be lucrative moneymakers. So the mul¬
tisystem operators (MSOs) offered low rates (as low as $2 per
month in Boston, for example) and special benefits (such as
profit sharing and libraries) to cities. See Table 3.2 for a listing
of the top ten cable companies as of 1984.
But by 1984 the growth in the percentage of households that
subscribed within cable areas had slowed, and profitability had
slipped. The New York Times reported that “across the country,
■ 90 The Nature of Mass Communication

*
Table 3.2 Cable’s Top Ten

NO. OF NO. OF
SUBSCRIBERS FRANCHISES

1. Telecommunications (TCI) 2,297,000 428

2. Time Inc. (ATC) 2,267,000 119
3. Group W Cable 1,872,000 140
4. Cox Cable 1,379,000 58
5. Warner Amex 1,340,000 146
6. Storer Communications 1,291,000 122
7. Times Mirror 858,000 67
8. Rogers/UA Columbia 776,000 22
9. Newhouse 742,000 64
10. Continental 686^000 66

Source: Cable TV Investor Newsletter, 1984. Reprinted by permission

of Channels oj Communication.

cable operators are struggling to bolster their earnings—or pare

their losses—by shrugging off many of the onerous require¬
ments of franchise agreements that were signed in more hopeful
times a few years ago.”13 As one cable operator, Charles Herma-
nowsky of Miami, put it, “Cable is not the golden goose that peo¬
ple said it would be. It is a business like any other and you can
go out of business just as easily.”14
According to the Times, several challenges are giving cable
operators a bruising. One is programming. Visionaries had pre¬
dicted a 108-channel system, but by the mid 1980s there was
only enough programming to fill 30 or 40 channels. Second, ca¬
ble operators had hoped to gain revenue from subscribers to
pay-for-view and special information systems called videotex.
But the response to pay-for-view has been disappointing; the
technology is expensive and program suppliers, such as Holly¬
wood, want more of the revenues. Similarly, videotex is costly,
and consumers have been loath to pay for these special infor¬
mation services. Finally, cable’s market is threatened by new
technologies that provide competing delivery systems (such as
microwave facilities) that can be built faster and more cheaply.15

■ Public Access. One somewhat controversial source of cable

programming is public access cable television, which usually in¬
volves a channel that local citizens and organizations can use to
present their own programming. Initially, the Federal Commu¬
nications Commission (FCC) required local operators to provide
 The Continuing Revolution in Technology 91 ■

■ Cable News Net¬

work, a 24-hour
news and informa¬
tion service which
CNN's in-depth
is distributed by
Turner Broadcasting,
coverage justgwt
is one of the most
successful cable
deeper.
Investigative reporting — it's the stories, and delivers them to you fast,
programming ser¬ toughest job in the news business. It Because news is all CNN does, we
means going where you're not welcome, do it better. Only CNN has the profes-
vices and has at¬ asking questions no one wants to an- sionals and the time to uncover the
swer. It s long hours of probing. And facts and deliver them to you instantly,
tracted both com¬ persistence. Discover investigative reporting from
mercial and critical And now Cable News Network. tiie people who wrote the book on
America's 24-hour news leader, has 24-hour news. Watch
acclaim. (Cable News created the Special Assignment Unit. CNN on your system
a highly specialized team that wrestles or contact your cable
Network.) with only the toughest, most elusive operator to get it.

public access. Some early public access channels were used to

carry public meetings of city councils, school boards, and so on.
Later, public access organizations emerged and began to develop
alternative programming. The formal requirement of the FCC no
longer exists, but most communities have one or more public
access channels. Some feature creative programmings; others
have dull “talking heads" programs and are a kind of soapbox of
the air. In some communities, this programming is ideological
and very critical of commercial cable operations.
Whether this “people’s television” will survive may depend on
how many people watch. In some communities, it is under fire
for producing poor-quality programs that few watch. If this is
the case, local officials may turn these valuable channels over to
commercial or educational uses. The public access movement is
a noisy and contentious one that makes for lively debate about
the purposes of cable and its relationship to the community.

■ Cable’s Competition. Those who thought cable would be a

more dominant force in American media by the mid 1980s
hadn't anticipated the array of competitors that arose to chal¬
lenge cable’s supremacy. With home video, people simply have
■ 92 The Nature of Mass Communication

their own videocassette or videodisc players and buy or rent

tapes to play at home. Competition has also come from subscrip¬
tion television (STY)—a broadcast signal available from a local
station that actually provides over-the-air TV; the signal is
scrambled and the viewer must pay to have access to it. Movies,
special entertainment, sports, and much more is available
through this medium. And there is more competition on the
way—including DBS, HVN, MDS, and SMATV;

• DBS is direct broadcast satellite-, it will provide direct satellite-

to-home programming services. United States Satellite Cor¬
poration of St. Paul is a leader in this area, but to date,
services have not been developed for commercial use. DBS
will use two-foot receiving dishes and promises a high-quality
picture with an array of programs.
• ABC proposed HVN—home view network—which would allow
people to use their videocassette recorders, to view special pro¬
grams piped in through over-the-air broadcasting.
• Multipoint distribution service (MDS) uses microwaves on a
high-frequency band to provide local pay programming to
homes. Minimal services are available to date, but MDS can
be useful in limited local areas.
• Satellite master-antenna television (SMATV) is useful in
such places as apartment houses; an earth station or master
antenna makes programming available to residents in a lim¬
ited area or building.

Just how does the competition fare when compared with ca¬
ble? Market analyst John Reidy said bluntly, “The rest of the
technologies are peanuts compared to cable.”16 And the numbers
seem to bear him out. In 1983 pay cable had 16.8 million sub¬
scribers; pay-for-view, 2.5 million; STV, 1.1 million; and MDS
and SMATV, about a half million each.17
Remember that cable and the other services we have men¬
tioned all compete with other mass media. It has been suggested
that there is a finite amount of entertainment and information
programming that people will want. Professor Maxwell McCombs
calls this the constancy hypothesis. If the hypothesis is accu¬
rate, some of the new (and old) media outlets may not survive.

■ The Economics of Cable. Cable revenues come mostly from

local subscribers who pay a monthly fee for cable services. They
can opt for minimal services (say, five or six channels), or more
extensive tiers of services, which include movies, special news
and sports networks, and much, much more. The revenues from
the subscribers go to local operators, who in turn pay for various
programming services beamed to them by satellite.
 The Continuing Revolution in Technology 93 ■

Advertisers provide little revenue for cable systems. Why? To

attract large advertisers, a medium must be national; it must
reach a substantial number of U.S. homes. As William Donnel¬
ley, vice president for new electronic media for Young & Rubi-
cam advertising agency, said in 1981:

We believe 30% penetration of U.S. households is the critical mass

required of an electronic communication medium to become a
broad-based advertising medium. We say 30% penetration is the
critical mass because that has been the television experience from
the days of its competition with radio . . . through the development
of daytime television. ... 18

Donnelley and others say 30 percent is a “magical and critical

number,”19 and it is. However, the matter is much more compli¬
cated than it appears at first. By 1984, 39.3 percent of the na¬
tion was wired or cabled, but that was a national average. Cable
had a whopping 77.5 percent penetration in Santa Barbara, Cal¬
ifornia, but only 16.4 percent in Chicago and 23.7 percent in
Detroit. In spite of the favorable national average, advertisers are
still reluctant to make heavy use of cable. This may change as
cable develops better audience measurements and can demon¬
strate its ability to command particular audiences. It wasn’t un¬
til the early 1980s that the cable industry organized a Cable
Advertising Bureau and began to pay more attention to advertis¬
ing potential. By 1985, advertising still accounted for a tiny
share of cable revenues, but the industry was not giving up.

Videotex and In a New Yorker cartoon, two small boys stare at a television set.
Teletext Says one to the other: “I hate it when television writes at you!"
What the boy was complaining about was videotex or teletext, a
textual service delivered to the home over the television screen.
Videotex refers to two-way electronic information—it comes into
your home and you can respond to it on a little device that looks
like a pocket calculator. Teletext is a one-way information ser¬
vice delivered via broadcast television, cable, SCA, or MDS. The
term videotext is a generic term that refers to both videotex and
teletext. (Other sources say that videotex is the generic term: as
yet there is no universal agreement.) A third kind of information
service called viewdata uses a telephone line or cable, but this
is really the same as videotex. As one writer put it, “Teletext and
videotex are truly the most radical of the new technologies. By
bringing the powers of the computer to the home TV set, they
transform an entertainment medium into an information age
appliance.20
Videotext technology was first developed in Britain and Eu¬
rope. The British Broadcasting Corporation introduced its Cee-
■ 94 The Nature of Mass Communication

■ Viewers can order up information and entertainment on videotex

systems like this one in Chicago. Instantly updated news and infor¬
mation for home and business users is one of the features of video¬
tex, as is the electronic game shown in this panel. (© Keycom
Electronic Publishing. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.)

fax system, and the independent British television companies

offered a system called Oracle. These systems provide news and
other information. They are not interactive. The Canadians de¬
veloped an interactive system called Teledon, and other systems
were tried in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Japan, and
elsewhere. By the late 1970s, there were enough systems around
the world for videotext enthusiasts to hold an international
conference.
In the United States, several media companies began experi¬
menting with videotext in the 1970s, but it wasn’t until the mid
1980s that several systems went on-line. Some of them include
Keyfax Interactive Information Service in Chicago; Viewtron, a
Knight-Ridder service in Miami; and Gateway, a Times-Mirror
service in suburban Los Angeles. There are several other video¬
tex and teletext ventures; but by the mid 1980s most were
reaching tiny audiences, ranging from under five hundred to
over fifty thousand. Most were deemed experimental. The sys¬
tems can deliver new and regularly updated information on a va¬
riety of subjects; some provide agribusiness information, news,
weather, and travel information; some also offer home shopping,
banking, and security systems. For the most part, they are rela¬
tively expensive information services that appeal to affluent au¬
diences. In one early experiment reported in the Los Angeles
 The Continuing Revolution in Technology 95 ■

Times, a videotex service in Southern California claimed its av¬

erage subscribers had incomes over $75,000.
At this writing, such systems are quite limited, and the com¬
panies promoting them are only cautiously optimistic. They
have had a slow, faltering start. In an article about Knight Rid-
der’s Viewtron, the British magazine the Economist said: “View-
tron's problems will be familiar to those who followed the fate of
Britain’s Prestel, the world’s biggest videotex disaster. View-
tron’s price is too high . . . and the service is too boring.”21 This
grim report aside, CBS, IBM, and Sears were all involved in vi¬
deotex experiments in 1984, and J. C. Penney was well on its
way to having a successful service.
Are such systems a new communication medium? No, says
communication researcher David Weaver. In a study of the Brit¬
ish videotext, Weaver wrote:

At present, the British teletext and viewdata systems—the oldest

public systems in the world—are not dramatically new media. They
do not provide much, if any, information or news not available from
existing media; the choice and volume of news are very limited: jour¬
nalists working for these systems do almost no original reporting;
the news carried by such systems tends to be very superficial and
event-oriented; the systems themselves are not strikingly new in
their appeal to different senses; they have not had much impact on
other media; they are more difficult and expensive to use for casual
reading than printed media and . . . they are not diffusing among
the public as quickly as predicted.22

In order for videotext systems to prosper, Weaver argues that

they must improve their content and become more energetic
journalistic enterprises.

Other New There are many new technologies not treated here. For example,
Technology the video games in arcades and homes are becoming important
popular culture “toys” that consume much leisure time. The
same is true with home video. People with their own video tape
recorders watch movies that are either purchased or rented.
Videodiscs are used to transmit music, especially rock music.
They may be transitional technologies, though, since their sales
have been disappointing to manufacturers.
Other new technologies have improved visual communica¬
tion. Holography allows for stunning three-dimensional pictures
in magazines and other printed materials. Telephony is im¬
proved by fiber optics and mobile telephony. Videoconferencing
goes on in business, education, and other fields. Many of these
technologies are transitional; they are likely to evolve into more
complex and more efficient machines and appliances.
 ■ 96 The Nature of Mass Communication

Box 3

A
Technological
Success, but a
Commercial
Failure

When the RCA Corporation announced that it already been sold, and demand seemed to be
would begin selling videodisk recorders— strong. Although competing products such as
VDRs—on March 22, 1981, it boasted that the VCRs and laser-disk recorders were already on
new product would “revolutionize home en¬ the market, they were considerably more ex¬
tertainment.” The recorder, developed at RCA pensive than the VDR. Other companies in the
during intensive research in the previous de¬ market were not producing VDRs at the rate
cade, was designed to play videodisks much as RCA was; with a new plant in Bloomington, In¬
a record player plays records, using a stylus to diana, and a substantial financial commit¬
“read” grooves in the disk and project images ment, RCA could easily dominate the field.
on a TV set. People would buy the recorder, There were signs, however, that all was not
which was then selling for about $250, and as rosy as RCA hoped. Serious video fans were
then buy disks of their favorite movies or attracted to the laser recorders, which use a
other videos. As Thornton Bradshaw, chair¬ laser to scan a flat disk for patterns of light At
man and chief executive officer of RCA, put it, $750 the laser technology was very expensive,
“The concept was that it was a razor-razor but its disks would never wear out and pro¬
blade situation, and you could make money on vided unmatched picture and sound quality.
the blades.” At the other end of the market, VCRs rapidly
With a promotional budget of nearly $20 came down in price, as did the videocassettes
million and a large inventory ready to ship to themselves, and people began renting those
retailers, RCA had good reason to think that videos they were not prepared to buy. Most im¬
the videodisk recorder would be a success. Vid¬ portant, videocassette recorders enabled con¬
eos were growing in popularity; about one mil¬ sumers to record TV programs for later
lion videocassette recorders (VCRs) had viewing, an advantage VDRs could not provide.
 The Continuing Revolution in Technology 97 ■

In an effort to meet the competition, RCA provide disks for the million or so people who
dropped prices on its product to as low as had bought a VDR). Thking a loss of about $575
$150 per machine and $20 per disk, but sales million on the system, RCA had to shut down
continued to be slow. Other manufacturers its Bloomington plant and find new jobs for its
dropped out of the market as VCRs gained a 750 employees and to take a $175 million pre¬
stronger foothold, and at last, on April 4,1984, tax writeoff on the product, its largest writeoff
barely three years after launching its VDR since 1971. As Bradshaw admitted when mak¬
campaign, RCA announced that it would stop ing the announcement, the VDR was “a tech¬
making the machines (although Bradshaw nological success, but a commercial failure.”
pledged that the company would continue to (PHOTO: RCA.)

I Social
Consequences
Both positive and negative influences of the new technology
have been widely discussed. Arthur Clarke and other futurists
paint a rosy picture for new communication technology, indicat¬
of the New
ing that it will make people’s work easier and allow for some ac¬
Technology tivities that would typically strain human performance. Because
people now have infinite information sources, they will be better
educated and freer, futurists say. Members of the World Future
Society are fond of the idea that new technology has a liberating
effect. They also suggest that computers will end unnecessary
business travel, that they will allow people to work at home and
reap many other benefits. They believe the benefits of new tech¬
nology greatly outweigh the liabilities.
One supposed great benefit is managing the information ex¬
plosion. Modern society is inundated with information from
many sources, much of it unmanageable without the help of
computers and various data bases. Not only do the new ma¬
chines make a vast array of information accessible, but they also
have the capability of synthesizing it for better use. For example,
they can summarize all the items in a particular area.
For broadcasting, the new technology has broken the shack¬
les of limited channels. Over-the-air broadcasting was always
governed by the scarcity of channels imposed by a limited spec¬
trum. Thus there have been relatively few television and radio
stations with much competition for licenses. Now with satellites
and cable, multiple channels are possible. (We cover the devel¬
opment of the cable field and low-powered television in Chapter
6.) Some cities already have more than one hundred cable chan¬
nels, although most still have fewer than ten. This could usher
in a new television of abundance, with a wide choice of pro¬
grams available to people. Already cable systems offer all-sports
(ESPN), all-news (CNN), children’s (Nickelodeon), and other spe¬
cialized channels. As a result, the virtual monopoly that the
three major networks have exercised over television program-
 ■ 98 The Nature of Mass Communication

ming is eroding. It is said that this greater capability for infor¬

mation, entertainment, and other programming will enhance
freedom of expression, giving people more viewing options.
No one knows what effects the new technology will have on
traditional media. Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media ex¬
pert, once suggested that every new communication medium
dramatically changes the functions of existing media. For ex¬
ample, the introduction of television removed much of the enter¬
tainment function of radio, as dramatic programs were dropped
and music and news became staples. It was thought that cable
might alter the kinds of programming that the networks do, al¬
though this has not happened to any appreciable degree yet. The
electronic newspaper will surely change the nature of the hard
news in print as information about weather, the stock market,
and sports is available on home screens. Whether movies shown
in theaters will survive the home video revolution is anybody’s
guess. The point is that new technologies usually serve a need
or create a demand for consumers, and they, in turn, make new
requirements of older media whose functions naturally change.
Critics see a dark side to the explosion of information and
new technology. In particular, two powerful negative effects are
possible.
First, what if only relatively affluent people obtain cable and
other information services? The poor and dispossessed will be
left behind. This will create a society of information-rich vs. in¬
formation-poor people, and in modern times—when information
is power—this could be devastating to society and split the na¬
tion apart. Also more and more information is proprietary—that
is, one must pay for it. Although public libraries do subscribe to
data bases, increasing numbers of data services are not available
in public institutions and can be obtained only through paid
subscriptions; moreover, the fees are often high.
The new technology and information services might also frag¬
ment society in another way. That is, people will watch more
and more specialized programs and use specialized information
and entertainment services. If the networks tend to give America
a sense of community and national identity, then the new multi¬
channel services will break us into tiny communities of interest.
There is evidence that this theory has merit, but it does not take
into account viewer habits and people’s capacity for making
sense of their world. Just as the new services may have frag¬
menting effects, they may also be “sense-making” enterprises,
providing content that will serve as a survival kit for people in
the information society.
A second threat from the new technology involves issues of
control, freedom of the press, and privacy. First, the centralized
nature of computing and telecommunication might allow gov-
 The Continuing Revolution in Technology 99 ■

ernment or private industry to accumulate great power. As John

Wicklein warned, although this new communications system
will have many benefits, it will also put us in danger of losing
our individual liberty.23 Several Third World nations have al¬
ready moved to control telecommunication in order to determine
the information people get and to monitor how they use it. One
reason for the breakup of the vast American Telephone and Tele¬
graph system was the fear that it would gain a monopoly of all
kinds of telecommunication and technology.
The matter of privacy also weighs heavily in any considera¬
tion of new communication technologies. With two-way cable,
for example, it is possible for the cable operator to know people’s
political, social, and sexual views, what services they are buying,
and much more. To date there is nothing to prevent misuse of
this personal information. Many people fear that with telecom¬
munication capacity, the government or large corporations can
strengthen control over various activities of individuals or insti¬
tutions. In the field of banking, the coming of the computer had
a great impact on centralizing and solidifying the Federal Re¬
serve System. There is even some evidence that the Federal
Reserve is infinitely more powerful today and certainly more
centralized. The owners of newspaper and broadcast properties
can maintain greater supervision of their employees by using
computers, and this would seem to reduce local control and
weaken local decision making, which was possible when the
owners were off in distant cities.
The question, of course, is what all this means for the indi¬
vidual. Will the individual citizen face a “Big Brother” system of
televideo control that will diminish individual freedom? Will the
ability of government, business, and various special interests to
tap into people’s attitudes, consumer behavior, and the like lead
to greater regimentation? There are no ready answers for these
and other questions, and there is a tendency to think that var¬
ious checks and balances in the American system will prevent
much of this from happening. However, what might happen in
Third World nations where governments want to control all
means of mass communication is something quite different.
Legislation has been proposed and will continue to be debated
in the years ahead. Again, we face the question Wicklein posed:
“Will the new technology by its very nature, manipulate us . . .
or will we manipulate the new technologies to serve the good of
society?”24

■ Summary In this chapter, we have introduced and defined the new com¬
munication revolution wherein various technologies are chang¬
ing the nature of the communication process and the
communication industry. We have examined the various com-
 ■ 100 The Nature of Mass Communication

ponents of the communication revolution, which seems to be

moving toward a demassification of communication. We have
discussed the various inventions that led to the rise of the new
technology, including microprocessors, satellites, and cable.
Along with the technical invention is the response of the poten¬
tial consumer, which inevitably determines whether a new me¬
dium or format will be successful. Because the new technology
of communication is closely tied to economic and human con¬
siderations as well as government regulation, we have examined
these factors. The various people and organizations that are in¬
volved in or benefit from the communication revolution are also
itemized and discussed. Specific attention is given to satellites,
cable, and cable’s various competitors. Finally, there is a discus¬
sion of the social consequences of the new technology.

Motes and 1 Anthony Smith, “Information Technology and the Myth of Abun¬
F erences dance, ’’Daedalus, 3 (Fall 1982), 2.
2 Ibid., p. 3.
3 John Wicklein, Electronic Nightmare, The New Communications
& Freedom (New York: Viking Press, 1981), p. 1.
4 Frederick Williams, The Communications Revolution (Beverly
Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1982), back cover.
5 Les Brown, “Perspective: Beyond Boom & Bust," Channels, 1984
Field Guide, December 1983, p. 6.
6 See Everette E. Dennis, “Hot Off the Satellite,” Northwest Orient,
14 (June 1983), 55-59.
7 Stephen Alnes, Telecommunication: A Picture of Change (Min¬
neapolis: Upper Midwest Council Report, May 1981), p. 3.
8 Sheila Mahony et al.. Keeping PACE with the New Television
(New York: Carnegie Corp., 1979).
9 Alnes, Telecommunication, p. 3.
10 James Traub, “Satellites: The Birds That Make It All Fly,” Chan¬
nels, November/December 1983, p. 8.
11 Les Brown, “Cable TV: Wiring for Abundance,” Channels, 1983
Field Guide, November/December 1982, p. 8.
12 Ibid.
13 Sandra Salmans. “Cable Operators Take a Bruising,” New York
Times, March 4, 1984, sec. 3, p. 1.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Lawrence Sukerman, “Pay TV: HBO & the Also-Rans,” Channels,
November/December 1983, p. 32.
17 Ibid.
 The Continuing Revolution in Technology 101 ■

18 William J. Donnelley, “The Emerging Video Environment, New

YorkYoung and Rubicam Issues, 12(1981), 2.
19 Ibid.
20 Gary Arlen, “Videotex: Videotex Goes On-Line,” Channels, No¬
vember/December 1983, p. 40.
21 “Videotex—Not a Popular Road,” Economist, 290 (March 1984),
68.
22 David H. Weaver, Videotex Journalism, Teletext, Viewdata and
the News (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1983),
p. 3.
23 Wicklein, Electronic Nightmare, p. 1.
24 Ibid.
 ■ 102 The Nature of Mass Communication

■ The media have

played a vital role in
events of national
importance during
the twentieth cen¬
tury. When President
John F. Kennedy
was assassinated in
November 1963, sev¬
eral million people
knew of the event
through the media
within an hour of its
happening. Later,
millions of shocked
television viewers
watched as Jack
Ruby shot Lee
Harvey Oswald, Ken¬
nedy’s alleged assas¬
sin. (above: © Dan
McCoy/Black Star.
right: © 1963 by Bob
Jackson, Dallas Times
Herald.)
 Photo Essay: Media Coverage of National Crises 103 ■

■ During the Viet¬

nam War, the major
TV networks sent
teams to Vietnam
that sent back foot¬
age of interviews
with soldiers as well
as scenes of de¬
struction caused by
the war. Some critics
charged that the
films were too con¬
troversial: others
charged that they de¬
sensitized viewers to
the war. It was a war
that many Ameri¬
cans watched di¬
rectly: from the
safety of their arm¬
chairs. (above: ©
George Gardner/Stock,
Boston, right: © Mark
Godfrey/Archive.)
 ■ 104 The Nature of Mass Communication

■ In a series of
newspaper articles a
team of journalists
from the Washington
Post, Bob Woodward
and Carl Bernstein,
exposed the Water¬
gate conspiracy and
subsequent coverup
which led to the res¬
ignation of President
Richard Nixon and
other high-ranking
officials in August of
1974. Woodward and
Bernstein later wrote
a book about their
experiences during
the gathering of ma¬
terial for their Post
articles, entitled All
the President's
Men. (above: Wayne
Miller/Magnum, right: ©
Michael O’Brien/
Archive.)
 Photo Essay: Media Coverage of National Crises 105 ■

■ In November 1983,
one hundred million
people watched the
ABC broadcast of the
film “The Day After,”
a film that depicted
in detail the after ef¬
fects of a nuclear
blast on a small mid-
western town. ABC
broadcast the film at
a financial loss; but
it was clear that the
American public
agreed on the social
significance of the
film, (above: Tannen-
baum/Sygma. right:
Dean Williams/Ameri-
can Broadcasting Com¬
panies, Inc.)
 A newspaper is a private enterprise, owing nothing to the public.
Wall Street Journal, January 1929

H Economic and Political

Controls on the Media

Most Americans today accept without a second thought the fact

that their mass media are privately owned. They also accept the
credo that it is essential in a democracy to have something
called a “free press.” Many even believe that we have such an ar¬
rangement and that the mass media are free of governmental
interference. Few citizens worry that economic considerations
limit the content of the media. Similarly, the majority are un¬
concerned or even unaware of controversies that erode any lit¬
eral meaning of a “free press.”
We do not suggest that the United States should shift to some
other set of arrangements for the mass media, or that what we
have now is bad. But we do try here to show some of the costs
that Americans share because we have chosen our present sys¬
tem. We focus in this chapter on economic and political institu¬
tions. We try to show how the content presented by the media is
sharply influenced by private ownership and how the media are
limited in various ways from presenting a completely free flow of
the news. To do so we examine the following questions: Why did
the American media develop as private, profit-making enter¬
prises; how do they operate as businesses today; and what are
the influences of economics on them? What is the basis for the
freedoms from government control that the American media en¬
joy; what are the limitations on these freedoms; and how are
those limitations imposed?
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 107 ■

The Economic The American media for the most part are privately owned busi¬
Environment nesses that are operated for a profit. In this sense they are very
different from their counterparts in, say, the Soviet Union, Great
Britain, or China. In fact, in most countries the government
either operates the media directly or supervises and controls
them extensively. In the United States the media are profit ori¬
ented in part because American society is committed to a set of
values that defines profit, private ownership, and freedom from
government control as very desirable.

American It was almost inevitable that the media in America would de¬
Economic Values velop as private enterprises. From the beginning American soci¬
ety has approved the profit motive and individual initiative. The
New Englanders were traders and entrepreneurs who roamed
the world to trade in fish, furs, lumber, slaves, and rum. Their
fellow colonists to the south developed the land to derive a profit
from cotton, tobacco, and other agricultural products. It was an
industrious nation that was constantly in search of ways to turn
an honest (or maybe not so honest) dollar.
The foundation for a strong commitment to competitive pri¬
vate enterprise began with the underlying beliefs of the Protes¬
tant ethic, which has been described by German sociologist Max
Weber.1 The Pilgrims subscribed strongly to this set of beliefs.
They were Protestants who valued hard work, frugality, and self-
denial. Through hard work they thought that they could aid God
in fulfilling His plan for the universe. By frugality they believed
they could become prosperous—and prosperity, they believed,
was a sure sign that they were being guided by the hand of Prov¬
idence. By self-denial they avoided temptations, reducing the
risk of squandering their capital. In more modern dress these
values still pervade the work ethic dear to the American middle
class.
As the nation developed, other beliefs helped influence Amer¬
ican economic values. The pioneer life of the frontier stressed
self-reliance and rugged individualism. This was later com¬
pounded with social Darwinism—a philosophy that valued
“natural selection” and “survival of the fittest” in business
competition.
It was with these orientations that Americans shaped their
economic institutions. Competition, private ownership, and
profit making seemed natural to generations of earlier Ameri¬
cans. For the majority of Americans today, they still do.
As the early media appeared, they became part of the eco¬
nomic system based on these values. Even the earliest colonial
newspapers were private enterprises. If they did not produce suf¬
ficient revenue to defray the costs of their production and distri-
 ■ 108 The Nature of Mass Communication

■ The economic
function of mass me¬ The ill ip Delaware,
dia has been evident William J .in es, M.r'ter,
since the earliest co¬ ._ Is now i eudy to J.-.jd or
lonial newspapers as C H A R L E S T O N,
these advertise¬ And is intended to fail the 7th of the 10th month.—
ments charting com¬ 'l'lie Delaware ii a new flip, built in the bclr manner
merce and trade in¬ of cctiar and live oak, ia fitted and round u every
thing nere flit y, and accttmrn dated for paliengers e-
dicate. (Smithsonian
qual if not fupttior to any veiled ever in tile trade—
Institution Photo No.
lor freight or pail gc apply to the Captain on h .ard
78-714.) at Clifford s whart, or at his houfe rn Front aiove
Callowhill firms, or to
JAMES & SHOEMAKER,
Who have for Sale—Indigo of vaiiousqu.dities, in
large and Imall calks, Rite. Tobacco, Cullre soap,
Madder, Flaxfeed, Fuy.l and Madeira Wines and a
lew barrels of Beef, ,i(f

For Liverpool,
The Ship G R A N G E,
William RoutKib. Waiter;
A conlfant Trader ; ii intended to lai! with alicon-
venient fpced. Fo freight or pallaae apply to ihe
Captain on board at the Oid Ferry.Onub’ wharf, orro
ORo. 5. JER. WARDER, PARKER, & CO.
Who have lor (ale from on board, omit and line
Salt of the fir It quality, and lume excellent Jrlouie
Coal.

For ^mfterdajn,
The Brig
PHILADELPHIA PACKET,
John Rauls, Walter;
To fail in a few days. For freight or palTage apply
to JACOB GERARD KOCH,
Who has for fale, imported in laid veffel — Idolhmrl
gin in p pcs ; madder, firlt quality ; hyfon and ton.
chong teas, fuperior quality , refined camphor; hla k
pepper in hales and calks; window glaG, 10 hy 8;
Holland and Rnflia fail duck; Raven's dunk 1 (low-
laifes; Haerlem tapes and Jacet, Boidting Cloths.Src.

bution, they simply went out of business. The newer media of

the twentieth century found no government subsidy waiting to
support them; they too developed as private, profit-making, com¬
petitive businesses. Movies had to make it on their own as a
form of popular entertainment. In spite of early resistance, radio
as a household medium had little choice but to derive its sup¬
port from advertising. Television followed and spread quickly
because the system of economic support—local and national
advertising—had already been developed in radio broadcasting.
Many intellectuals deplore the economic basis of the Ameri¬
can media on the grounds that it produces much content of low
quality. Defenders of the system point out that by and large,
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 109 ■

when Americans turn to print, film, or the electronic media, they

have more to choose from than anyone else in the world. In
many respects, however, the critics have a valid point. Private
ownership of the media and the search for profits, as we shall
see, have led to an emphasis on popular culture. The tastes of
the majority of consumers dominate media content. It is abun¬
dantly clear that such content often lacks artistic, intellectual,
or educational merit.

I Rules of the Game Because they are mostly profit-making enterprises, the Ameri¬
can media share two important characteristics. The first con¬
cerns the content they produce; the second concerns conditions
within the industry.

■ Economics and Content. Newspapers, magazines, television,

and radio depend on advertising revenue; advertisers in turn are
looking for programs that will sell the largest possible quantity
of beer or soup or soap. As a result, the American media are
ruled by the law of large numbers. That is, whatever content
will attract the largest number of consumers and produce the
most advertising dollars will be the content provided. Content
that can attract large numbers of consumers will tend to crowd
out content that cannot. Movies and books do not depend on ad¬
vertisers for revenue, but here too the law of large numbers plays
a key role in determining which films and books are produced.
It is no secret that the people with low artistic and intellectual
tastes far outnumber the people with highly developed tastes.
Although there are exceptions to this crude law of large num¬
bers, it generally accounts rather well for the low intellectual and
artistic level that prevails in American mass communications.
For a more complete view of how economics affects the con¬
tent of the media, we need to supplement the law of large num¬
bers with a corollary: the law of right people. Consider the case
of the New York Daily News. In the early 1980s, it was the na¬
tion’s largest daily newspaper, yet it seemed that the paper
might die. Why? The Daily News was delivering large numbers
of readers, but it was not appealing to the right readers in the
view of advertisers. Who are the “right” readers? This advertise¬
ment for the Executive, a California-based magazine, makes the
point:

The Executive reaches the right numbers of the right people in the
right places because its circulation is controlled. For more informa¬
tion about how to reach the high-income executives who control cor¬
porate purchases in California's Million-Dollar-Plus Companies, call
your nearest sales office.
 ■ 110 The Nature of Mass Communication

■ With clever use of

typography and lan¬
guage, early advertis¬
ing attempted to cap¬
ture attention just
as its contemporary
successor does.
(Smithsonian Institu¬
tion Photo No. 78-
19094.)
VIOLINS.
XAFEW excellent toned VIOLINS
for Sale, at CALLENDER'S Ivory Turning
&Whipmaker*s Shop, juft below Mr.JONES’s
Audion-Office, Northfide of State-Street.
Alfiy a Variety of Phaeton & Chaife
WHIPS, and a few filver-mounted cat-gut
Whips, all of his own manufa&urc ; Thongs
of all lengths & prices; a variety of Walking
Sticks of all Prices ; India Bambooes ; large
and imall India Joints, Billiard Balls, Drums
and Fifes, with a Variety of other articles in
his Line.-cheap.
Alfo, a few Elephant’s TEETH
Black Ebony by the hundred or lefs quantity
Letter V ood ; Rattan by the bundle, dozen
or yard.
Alto a very handfome fett of
CGUDRILL, made of Pearl.
given for Sea-Cozu 'Teeth.
Turned Work of all Kinds for
Houfes, done in the cheapeft & bed manner
with Thanks for the fmalleft Favours.

For advertisers the best audience is often not just the biggest
audience but the audience with the largest number of people
who are likely to buy their product—which may mean people
with a particular interest or hobby or people with a certain min¬
imum income or education. Advertisers in the Daily News
found they could get a better “media buy,” reaching more of the
“right" people—that is, readers in particular educational, in¬
come, and age ranges—through television or specialized maga¬
zines. Cable television and very specialized magazines, such
as executive newsletters, are expert at delivering the right
audience.
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 111 ■

■ Ownership of the Media. A second characteristic of America’s

modem media is increasingly concentrated ownership; fewer
and fewer firms own more and more of the media. As the costs
of the media have risen, large corporations are more and more
frequently their owners. A particular newspaper, magazine,
television network, or motion picture studio is likely to be
not independently owned but part of a large corporation or
conglomerate.2
This increased concentration of ownership is the subject of
much debate. This might seem curious at first since many other
industries, from auto manufacturers to microcomputer makers,
have followed the same trend toward fewer but larger firms. Why
should people worry when the same thing happens in the com¬
munication industry?
The concern reflects several ideas and values. First, one basis
for the freedom of expression guaranteed by our political system
is a belief in a free marketplace of ideas. That is, truth and
falsehood should grapple for supremacy in the market just as
good and bad manufacturers do. If there is a free marketplace,
in this view, the good idea like the good product is likely to win
out. But the fewer voices there are in the marketplace, the less
variety of information and opinions available and the greater the
chance that the best idea has not been heard at all. The wary
view of the increasing concentration of control of communica¬
tion is also based on two well-embedded American values: first,
bigness is bad; second, localism is good. As media researcher
Ben Compaine has explained:

Control of information, news and ideas should be spread around as

much as possible. Locally owned newspapers and broadcast sta¬
tions, many book publishers, scores of independent film producers
and distributors would supposedly provide greater access to diverse
opinions than fewer owners controlling an identical number of me¬
dia outlets.3

The Media as Behind their similarities we also find significant economic dif-
Businesses ferences among the media. In developing as businesses each me¬
dium had to adapt to its own continually changing economic
circumstances. Competition from other media and the rising
costs of services, labor, talent, and materials influenced their
success and their content. In Part II we look at each medium in
more detail, but here we can get an overview of the constraints
that economic considerations place on the media.

The Print Media While each of the print media is faced with both the law of large
and right numbers and the trend toward concentration of own¬
ership, there are important variations among them. Newspa¬
pers, books, and magazines are distinctive business enterprises.
■ 112 The Nature of Mass Communication

■ Newspapers. Over the years American newspapers have

turned to different sources of revenue, and their content has
shifted accordingly. The early colonial papers paid their costs
through both advertising and subscriptions. Then, beginning
with the penny press of the nineteenth century, newspapers be¬
gan to depend on advertising as their main source of revenue.
When it became clear that with increased circulation advertising
could support a newspaper sufficiently to reduce its price, the
elite press gave way to the popular press. The papers now em¬
phasized human interest, crime, and humor and from time to
time resorted to sensationalism as well. Some newspapers, how¬
ever, also received significant subsidies from political groups:
from the time of Thomas Jefferson, political parties arranged to
have newspapers serve as their pipelines to the public. But by
the beginning of the twentieth century, most newspapers had
severed their ties to political parties and lost these subsidies.
Consequently, the papers became more general in their point of
view and more comprehensive in their coverage of the news.
Thus over the years American newspapers became more and
more dependent on advertising. In 1880 the average newspaper
devoted 25 percent of its space to advertising. By World War I,
advertising accounted for about 50 percent, and today, for 60 to
70 percent.4 This dependence has proved to be a mixed blessing.
On the one hand, dependence on advertising discourages
newspapers from dealing harshly with the business community
that supports them. Publishers who lose the goodwill of the
business community risk losing advertising money as well.
Thus, under today’s arrangements, newspapers that print sto¬
ries damaging to local business—say, “Local Supermarket Chain
Sued for Insects and Rat Hair in Hamburger” or “Local Auto
Dealers Cheat Customers” or “City’s Theaters—Fire Traps?”—
are truly biting the hand that feeds them.
But what would newspapers be like without support from ad¬
vertisers? In order to cover all the expenses involved, a single
copy of a daily newspaper might cost over a dollar at the news¬
stand. Delivered to one’s door, an annual subscription would
cost more than $500.
Newspapers might be more eager to print stories damaging
to the businesses that today help pay the costs of publishing the
paper.5 But the end of advertising revenue would probably have
other effects on the content as well. Sports, news, and the finan¬
cial section of the paper all require complex logistics. Without
advertising revenue, the papers might not be able to continue
many of these features. In fact, without advertising revenue,
newspapers might become much as they were before the penny
press arose in the nineteenth century, if they could survive
at all.
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 113 ■

Clearly, advertising support for newspapers has both costs

and benefits. Dependency on it may bias publishers in favor of
the values and interests of merchants and businesses. But the
approximately $18 billion spent annually for newspaper adver¬
tising brings content and services that only such astronomical
sums can produce.
The constraints introduced by dependence on advertising are
by no means the only ones felt by the press. Faced with contin¬
ually rising costs for materials, labor, and services, newspapers
have had to increase their income to meet costs or go out of
business. Several hundred newspapers have folded for one rea¬
son or another since the peak of their popularity at about the
time of World War I. In fact, the reduction of the number of
newspapers in America has been one of the most significant
trends in newspaper publishing in this century.
The prospects of starting a new daily newspaper in a major
city are very limited. It might require as much as $100 million
or more to start a newspaper in a city like San Francisco or Chi¬
cago. Furthermore, a newspaper’s chances of getting a share of
the available advertising revenues would be very low. Thus, any¬
one wanting a newspaper in a city would be well advised to pur¬
chase an existing paper. And, of course, this is precisely what
has happened over the years. Existing papers have been bought
by large corporations that already own papers elsewhere. The pa¬
pers can then consolidate some activities and management for
substantial savings.6
The result of these trends has been reduced competition
among newspapers. While the number of daily papers in the
United States has more or less stabilized at around 1,750, com¬
petition among papers has declined sharply. Most surviving pa¬
pers are quite profitable, but few cities have competing papers
that are independently owned.

■ Books. Book publishing is not a large industiy when com¬

pared with such giants as General Motors, IBM, or General
Foods. In 1984 all American book publishers together produced
about $9.2 billion in retail sales of 2 billion books both here and
abroad. Many publishers are small, and some 80 percent of the
total sales are produced by only about 20 percent of the compa¬
nies. Although the book publishing industry has grown over the
last quarter-century, it is still one in which rather small firms
produce and sell very specialized products by comparison with
America’s corporate giants.
Advertising plays virtually no role as a source of revenue for
book companies. Instead, they depend on the outright sale of
their products to consumers. Thus the wholesale price of a book
must be enough both to cover its costs and to yield a profit. That
■ 114 The Nature of Mass Communication

price has been going up steadily. In 1970 a hardback college text

or a well-manufactured technical book could be purchased for
about ten dollars. By 1985 its price had more than doubled.
Their high price might be one factor keeping the sale of books
down. On the average, Americans do not read a lot of books.
Current estimates put the figure at about five to ten books per
year. Probably, the number of book readers has declined as tele¬
vision has grown in popularity, but it is difficult to make such
comparisons over time because the proportion of American so¬
ciety that is illiterate has declined and the percentage with ad¬
vanced education has increased.
Although advertising does not play the role in book publish¬
ing that it plays in many other media, and although books have
a smaller audience than many other mass media, the law of
large numbers does operate in the book industry, but in modi¬
fied form. Like any business, book publishers want to maximize
their profit margins and produce dividends for their stockhold¬
ers. They must therefore keep their costs of production down
and maximize their sales. This basic economic principle plays a
key role in every decision that is made from the time a publisher
expresses interest in a manuscript or idea to the time the fin¬
ished product is delivered to a retail outlet. It has the effect of
screening out some manuscripts that could be of great interest
to a very specialized audience and favoring those that will attract
wide interest. Thus it is far easier to interest a textbook pub¬
lisher in a basic book that will be used by students in large in¬
troductory courses than in an advanced technical book that will
interest only a small number of specialists. Similarly, it may be
difficult to find a publisher for poetry, short stories, avant garde
fiction, or other works that are unlikely to attract a large num¬
ber of purchasers.

■ Magazines. Unlike books, magazines depend on advertising

revenues to cover much of the cost of production. By the turn of
the century, the magazine for a general audience was well devel¬
oped because such magazines provided excellent vehicles for ad¬
vertising. By 1929, the nation’s leading 365 magazines had an
average readership of about 95,000 each. By 1950, 567 major
magazines were reaching, on the average, over 223,000 readers
each.7 But as more and more Americans watched television, the
general-interest magazines failed. The main reason is that it
costs about half as much to reach a thousand people with a tele¬
vision ad as with a magazine ad.8 The general-interest maga¬
zines tried to buck this trend, but they eventually failed in the
face of the competition of television.
The near death of Harper’s in 1980 dramatically illustrated
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 115 ■

the economics of magazines today. Harper’s was a monthly mag¬

azine aimed at a fairly educated, prosperous, and influential au¬
dience, and it had survived for 130 years. In 1979 it had a
circulation of about 325,000—but relatively little advertising
and losses of more than $1.5 million. By mid 1980 it was an¬
nounced that the magazine would soon cease publication. Its fall
was reported to be due not to television—whose coming it had
survived—but to competition from more specialized magazines.
Increasingly, reported the Washington Post, “advertisers found
the Harper’s audience too difficult to define. They couldn’t pre¬
dict whether the Harper’s reader was interested in whiskey,
cars, power tools, sports clothes or any combination of the
above.”9 Then a private foundation came to the rescue and Har¬
per’s was saved, but in the process it became a nonprofit
organization.
In contrast, an advertiser knows that a magazine like Gour¬
met is a great one in which to advertise expensive food proces¬
sors and high-quality cooking pans. It would make little sense to
advertise such products in a shot-gun approach on television.
The same is true of fishing tackle, microcomputer software,
model railroad parts, and special diet products. Such advertis¬
ing of specialized products in specialized magazines for special¬
ized readers pays off, and in 1982 alone, advertisers spent over
$3.7 billion on magazines. Specialized magazines make money
because they can reach their readers with advertisements that
are closely related to their focused interests.
Thus the trend in magazine publishing has been toward in¬
creasing specialization. Among the vast American population
there are enough people with particular specialized interests
that a magazine devoted to those interests can be a success.
There are thousands of magazines that appeal to specialized tar¬
get audiences, such as Byte, Organic Gardening, Model Rail¬
roader, Firehouse; Identity and Nuestro (for Italian Americans
and Hispanics, respectively). To these we can add Weight Watch¬
ers’ Magazine for those yearning to be thin, and F.I.B. for those
who claim that fat is beautiful, and thousands more.
The situation of magazines in the mid 1980s can be summed
up in a tongue-in-cheek comment made by Marc Connelly, a
writer for Holiday magazine, at a reception in Portugal several
years ago. When each journalist was qsked to stand and identify
his or her magazine, Connelly claimed that he was a writer for
Popular Wading, which he said was devoted to enthusiasts of
shallow water sports. He maintained that his magazine special¬
ized in such topics as the ravages of “immersion foot” and other
dangers of the sport. The hosts of the party smiled politely, but
to the other writers Connelly’s description was hilarious because
 ■ 116 The Nature of Mass Communication

it seemed to sum up what has happened to American magazines

in the last two decades as specialization came to rule the
industry.

■ The Movies Anyone who doubts that the movies are big business can con¬
sider the fact that even a Hollywood potboiler costs nearly
$20,000 a minute to shoot. Large additional costs are involved
in distributing the final version to a worldwide market and ex¬
hibiting it in theaters. An enormous investment is required to
produce and market even the most mediocre film.
It is therefore not surprising that many of the movies we see
are made and owned by the same film companies that have dom¬
inated the industry for decades—companies such as Columbia,
Paramount, Twentieth Century-Fox, United Artists, Universal,
and Warner Brothers. Since the 1960s, however, independent
companies have made more and more films. The studios there¬
fore have less control over the medium, while independent pro¬
ducers have more. But because a movie requires such a large
financial investment, most of the independent companies rely
on the major companies for financial backing. Thus the major
companies still get the largest share of box-office receipts and
thereby retain some influence on what movies are made.
Economic influences on the film industry are very similar to
those on the other media in one very important respect: the law
of large numbers prevails. Movie producers seek above all to
maximize the size of their audiences. In the 1930s and 1940s
they did so by being the dominant form of family entertainment.
Their content had to conform to the prevailing mores of the
time. When television developed in the 1950s, it presented en¬
tertainment for the same general audience, reflecting basically
the same tastes, themes, and content as the movies, but it did
so at far less cost and inconvenience to the consumer. As televi¬
sion thus stole the movies’ audiences, the movies had to change
to survive.
At first the movies tried to regain their audience through
technical gimmicks. There were experiments with huge screens,
three-dimensional films, and special sound effects. Most of these
devices failed to boost ticket sales significantly. As the struggle
continued, movie makers turned to showing more violence and
more explicit sex—content that audiences generally could not
find on television. But even that did not slow the stampede to
television.
The movie industry has had to adapt to the fact that the size
and composition of its audience has changed. Whereas in the
1930s and 1940s the whole family would go to the movies, today
people under thirty account for over three-fourths of the annual
audience. Today movies try to appeal to a new generation of
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 117 ■

moviegoers, and it is their tastes that govern content. Movie

makers still seek films with universal appeal, such as romance
and adventure, but they make many movies with very specific
groups in mind. The violent movie filled with fistfights, spectac¬
ular auto chases, and blazing crashes is made for a young audi¬
ence with limited education and undeveloped aesthetic tastes.
Movies are made specifically for such groups as children, lovers
of animals in the wilderness. World War II buffs, aviation enthu¬
siasts, and rebellious teen-agers. Pornographic movies are made
with yet other groups in mind.
Despite the problems the movie industry has faced, audi¬
ences pay nearly $1.5 billion a year at the box office. Another bil¬
lion comes to the industry from foreign sources, and about half
a billion comes from the sale of films to television. Movie making
is a high-risk industry, but one with the potential for very high
profits. Some movies produced several years ago are still bring¬
ing in dollars. By the time a popular film completes its runs and
reruns here and abroad, including its television showings, it can
gross millions for its producers and distributors. Of course, for
every film that succeeds, a dozen or more are dismal failures at
the box office. But the movie industry today is in good shape fi¬
nancially and has adapted well to the challenges of competing
media.
The very medium that caused the movie industry most of its
problems is now one of its major sources of revenue—television.
Television has an almost insatiable appetite for films. They cost
less per minute of air time than live broadcasts and can attract
more viewers than many other kinds of content. Subscription
television and cable movie channels as well as tape cassettes
have increased the market for films. Although these trends may
lead to a decline in sales at movie theaters, they will clearly add
to the revenues of the film industry.

I Broadcasting The economic situation of the broadcasting industry differs

strikingly from that of the other media. For example, there is no
clear trend toward concentration of ownership of radio or tele¬
vision stations; FCC rules have limited the number of stations
one person or company can own. Additional differences arise
from the importance of local programming in radio and from the
growth of cable television.

■ The Owners and the Networks. According to FCC regula¬

tions, an individual or organization can own no more than seven
television stations, and no more than five of these can be VHF
stations (that is, those channels numbered from 2 to 13). More¬
over, an owner of a broadcast television station cannot own a ca¬
ble system in the same community. The FCC also limits
 ■ 118 The Nature of Mass Communication

ownership of radio stations: an individual or group can own no

more than seven AM stations and seven FM stations. In 1984,
the Commission proposed a change in this rule which would
have raised the maximum to 12-12-22. The change was part of
the trend toward deregulation, but there was considerable disa¬
greement over the practical effect of the rule change and the FCC
decided to delay its action. When the rule change was being de¬
bated the old arguments again emerged. FCC chairman Mark S.
Fowler said the new rule would allow for the creation of new tele¬
vision networks and more diverse programming. As Fowler put
it, “Bigness is not necessarily badness. Sometimes it is good¬
ness. This, however, runs counter to a deeply held American
value.
The networks, however, represent a different kind of concen¬
tration: the concentration of control over programming. Their
influence goes far beyond the stations they actually own. They
also produce or purchase programs and then pay local stations
to carry the programs. Of the three largest networks, CBS and
ABC are independent corporations; NBC is a subsidiary of RCA,
the giant that has survived since the earliest days of broadcast¬
ing. In addition, there are noncommercial, public networks—
PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) for television and NPR
(National Public Radio) for radio—that receive subsidies from
the government.

■ Radio. The three big networks all began as radio networks;

but once television appeared, the revenues of the radio networks
declined drastically. Although their revenues came back strong
in the 1970s and 1980s, the networks today are less influential
in radio than in television. Most radio stations have no network
affiliation; they are independent stations, locally produced for lo¬
cal consumption.
Among the broadcast media, radio appears to have the fewest
economic problems. AM radio seems to be losing much of its au¬
dience and revenue to FM radio, but radio as a whole is prosper¬
ing. It has a unique place in American mass communications as
a provider of music, weather reports, information on local
events, and summaries of the news. Radio reaches people when
a color spectacular on television would be out of place, or when
reading a newspaper or going to a movie is not an alternative.
Furthermore, it is unlikely that this role will be taken over by an¬
other medium.

■ Television. Radio is healthy, but economically it is dwarfed

by television. Here the networks loom large indeed. NBC, CBS,
and ABC today provide about 65 percent of all broadcasting
hours by their affiliates. Since more than 40 percent of the com-
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 119 ■

mercial VHF stations in America are affiliated with one of the

three major networks, it is clear that the networks have sub¬
stantial control over what we see and hear on television.
Many critics have deplored the virtual monopoly that these
three networks enjoy over the content that is broadcast nation¬
ally. For years their only competition for viewers came from the
Public Broadcasting System (PBS), which is partly tax sup¬
ported. But PBS has a veiy limited budget and provides almost
no competition to the commercial networks for a significant
share of viewers nationwide.10 Even when stations supported by
schools, communities, or other noncommercial sources are in¬
cluded, the viewing audience for “public” television in the
United States is still minor.
The owners of local television stations might have relatively
little power over what their stations broadcast, but they cer¬
tainly have other incentives for owning a station. According to
Arnold H. Ismach, “On the basis of return per dollar of invest¬
ment, television stations are more profitable than newspapers.
They are more profitable than any other enterprise short of Ari¬
zona land sales and the illicit drug trade.”11
The principal reason for this profitability is the eagerness of
sponsors to advertise on television. Currently television receives
about 21 percent of all dollars spent for advertising in the United
States, whereas radio gets about 7 percent and newspapers
about 30 percent. Television’s share of these dollars is increas¬
ing. In fact, since there are far fewer television stations, they re¬
ceive a larger per station share of advertising revenue and higher
net profits than the more numerous newspapers.
Advertisers’ eagerness to buy time on television is based sol¬
idly on operation of the law of large numbers. With some 83 mil¬
lion households (98 percent of all American homes) owning at
least one television set in 1983 and with each set turned on for
an average of more than seven hours daily, the audience for an
advertisement can be awesome. For example, the average daily
audience for most daytime soap operas is in the tens of millions.
For special events such as Superbowl football, audiences can be
five or six times as large. It is little wonder, then, that manufac¬
turers of consumer goods eagerly stand in line to get their mes¬
sages on commercial television.
Competition for advertising time has driven the cost of adver¬
tising on commercial television as high as $400,000 per minute
for the 1983 Superbowl. The average thirty-second prime-time
television announcement was priced at $100,000 per minute in
the mid 1980s, and spots on a top-rated series, such as Dallas
were $200,000. Figure 4.1 (on the next page) shows the costs of
advertising on several network programs. Even spots on low¬
rated shows can be as much as $50,000 per thirty seconds. On
■ 120 The Nature of Mass Communication
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 121 ■

Figure 4.1 Continued

7:00 7:30 8:00 8:30 9:00 9:30 10:00 10:30

The New The Greatest
Benson The guest
Odd Couple American Hero
ABC 26
24 21
21
$85,000 $75,000
$75,000 $85,000

The Dukes of Hazzard Dallas Falcon Crest

Fri

CBS 38 44 37
$150,000 $150,000 S130.000

The Powers of
Knight Rider Remington Steele
Matthew Star
NBC 17 22
18
$75,000 $75,000
$75,000

T. J. Hooker The Love Boat Fantasy Island

ABC 27 35 34
$105,000 $130,000 $125,000

Walt Disney The CBS Saturday Night Movies

Sat

CBS 26 26
$85,000 $100,000

Silver Gimme a Love,

Diff'rent The Devlin Connection
Spoons Break Sidney
NBC Strokes
25
24
$115,000 22 26
$85,000
$85,000 $90,000 $90,000

Ripley’s Believe It or Not Matt Houston The ABC Sunday Night Movie
ABC 18 22 29
S65.000 $80,000 $120,000

Archie Bunk¬ The One Day

60 Minutes Gloria Trapper John, M.D.
Sun

er's Place Jeffersons At a Time

CBS 44
34
34
35 34
33
$175,000 $115,000 $115,000
$125,000 $120,000 $115,000

Voyagers! CHiPS NBC Sunday Night at the Movies

NBC 18 25 26
$65,000 $85,000 $105,000

Above estimates were compiled from a variety of sources and are based on peak fourth quarter viewing
October through the first two weeks of December. Specific unit prices vary widely depending on whether
the buy was made in the upfront or the scatter market, on the overall size of the advertiser's schedule,
and on the negotiating skill of the different buyers.

Source: Reprinted with permission from the September 27,1982 issue of Advertising Age. Copyright
1982 by Crain Communications, Inc.
■ 122 The Nature of Mass Communication

local TV stations, thirty-second spot announcements range from

$15,000 for top-rated series in major markets to as little as $10
in tiny markets. Still, the costs are going up. In recent years, the
cost of advertising on television has risen as much as 20 to 30
percent per year, and the end is nowhere in sight.
The high price of television advertising, and television’s re¬
sulting profitability, is based mainly on the absence of strong
competitors. A limited number of licenses are available in each
city because of FCC regulations. Owning a television station li¬
censed to transmit in a good market area is equivalent to having
a partial monopoly on an important product that is in great de¬
mand—audience attention to advertising messages. The three
large commercial networks have an even more profitable partial
monopoly because they command national audiences and re¬
ceive the largest share of the broadcasting advertising dollar. For
every $5 received by local stations for advertising, the networks
receive $8.30. Thus ABC, CBS, and NBC are red hot money
makers.
But the rosy picture of profitability that prevails in television
may end in the relatively near future. Changes are going on that
may do to ordinary broadcast television what that medium did
to the movies in past decades. Cable television is the most im¬
portant of these changes.

■ Cable Television. Although traditional over-the-air broad¬

casting is still dominated by the networks, the emergence of var¬
ious new technologies made possible by the microchip, the
computer, and the satellite have brought much more diversity of
ownership and programming to the American people. Cable, for
example, became a national medium of considerable importance
once a third of the nation was wired to receive this service by the
mid 1980s. Subscription television also strengthened its posi¬
tion as did videotex and various home video services.
Cable television presents problems for the over-the-air broad¬
casters because it spreads the audience over more channels. Ad¬
vertisers may be reluctant to spend their dollars on a station’s
services, or even a network’s efforts, if they cannot be assured of
a large audience of potential customers. Needless to say, cable
television has been vigorously opposed by the commercial
broadcasters.
For its users, cable television has the advantage of providing
scores of channels, rather than the usual four or five that are
broadcast in a typical city. Some channels may pick up commer¬
cial-free broadcasts from satellites; sports events from a city like
Atlanta can be shown to viewers in a city like Los Angeles via ca¬
ble. Viewers can choose to receive various “tiers” of service, de-
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 123 ■

pending on how much they’re willing to pay. Of course, cable

has the advantage to users that they must pay for it directly.
For advertisers, cable has the advantage of specialization and
limited purposes since it aims at highly defined, specific audi¬
ences. Increasingly there is advertising on cable, and the cable
industry has its own Cable Advertising Bureau in New York, just
as the newspaper, broadcasting, and magazine industries have
advertising bureaus.
Standard television broadcasting has also been challenged by
the appearance of devices for taping programs off the air or for
playing back programs that have been prerecorded. This trend
toward using videocassettes may change the viewing habits of
Americans, but it is not likely to change the economic structure
of the industry or the content of its programs. In fact, although
cable television and cassette recorders both appeal to large num¬

I
bers of people, even those who can afford to use them will un¬
doubtedly continue to view standard broadcasts.

Political Political as well as economic considerations place limitations on

Protections: The the media. In Great Britain newspapers are privately owned, yet
it is a crime to publish anything from public documents unless
Constitutional
authorization is obtained. Reporters are allowed to report only
Framework what is said at a trial, nothing more. Pretrial publicity is not
permitted.
In the United States many Americans take special pride in
having freedom of speech and a “free press." Yet in 1972 the
courts ruled that the government could censor a book by Victor
Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CM and the Cult of Intelli¬
gence. When the book was published, it had 168 blank spaces
as a result of the censor’s cuts. In the case of former CIA agent
Frank Snepp, government action went well beyond mere censor¬
ship. In the late 1970s when Snepp published a book about the
CIA called Decent Interval, the government stepped in and
seized his royalties—which had amounted to more than
$200,000 by 1983. In 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the
government, which argued that Snepp had signed agreements
not to publicize his former undercover activities. In short, the
media certainly have more freedom in the United States than in
most nations, but here, too, they must operate within a system
of constraints imposed by the government.
The political environment of the American media has two
fundamental elements. First, a guarantee of freedom of the press
was embodied in the U.S. Constitution. Second, as freedom of
the press has come in conflict with other rights and freedoms
and as American society has changed, legal limitations on free¬
dom of the press have been established. We begin an examina-
 ■ 124 The Nature of Mass Communication

tion of these limitations by looking aj: the constitutional

guarantee of a free press that arose from America’s colonial
experience.

The Historical ■ The Colonial Heritage. Colonial America was, of course,

Legacy ruled by England. Governors representing the Crown were ap¬
pointed for each colony to ensure that English laws and English
policies prevailed. With English law came a specific set of legal
relationships between the press and the government. The prin¬
ciple embedded in those laws was prior restraint; that is, the
government could not only punish those responsible for illegal
publications but also prevent the publication of material it did
not like. The government, in other words, could censor
publication.
In England the Crown had not enforced its prior restraint
laws for many decades before the Revolution, although it had
jailed or fined some whose publications it did not like. English
pamphleteers and newspapers in the eighteenth century often
criticized the government without reprisal. But the situation in
the colonies was another matter. Rebellions were an ever-pres¬
ent possibility in overseas possessions. In the colonies the gov¬
ernors representing the Crown could and sometimes did require
that any comment on the government’s activities be reviewed
and approved by the governor’s office before publication.
As the eighteenth century wore on, colonial newspapers and
pamphleteers began to follow the English example; criticism of
the Crown’s representatives increased. Occasionally, colonial
governors would decide to crack down. Ben Franklin’s brother
James was among those who suffered the consequences; he
went to jail for the criticisms he published.
One of the most celebrated cases involving freedom to publish
occurred in New York with the encouragement of a group of an¬
tiestablishment merchants. John Peter Zenger, publisher of the
New York Weekly Journal, had repeatedly published criticisms
of the governor of the colony. The governor finally took action
and had Zenger arrested on November 17, 1734.
Zenger was charged with libel—publishing material that
tends to damage a person’s reputation. Actually, Zenger’s case
involved what has been called criminal libel—defaming the
state, in this case the Crown and its governor. The case dragged
on for months while the governor, trying to ensure Zenger’s con¬
viction, manipulated the courts and Zenger remained in cus¬
tody. Meanwhile, Zenger’s wife continued to publish the paper,
including strong criticisms of the governor and his administra¬
tion. The public looked on with fascination.
The high point of the trial was the defense of Zenger by a
prominent lawyer, Andrew Hamilton. According to British law
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 125 ■

(and American law, too, until the nineteenth century), the truth
of what was published was no defense against the charge of li¬
bel. But Hamilton, over the objections of the judge in the case,
appealed to the jury to find Zenger not guilty because what Zen-
ger had published was true. He urged them to assert the right of
citizens to speak out against the government. Hamilton’s appeal
was successful, and Zenger became a popular hero.
The Zenger case did not change the laws regarding libel, but
it did put public opinion firmly behind the idea that newspapers
should be allowed to print the truth even if it was contrary to the
wishes of the government. The principle of prior restraint, too,
remained a part of the legal system for many years, but it was
seldom enforced.
Following the Zenger trial, colonial newspapers became in¬
creasingly bold, and the governors of the colonies did little to
suppress them. During the time just before the Revolution, var¬
ious writers published essays and editorials that urged inde¬
pendence from England. Pieces by Thomas Paine, Samuel
Adams, Isaiah Thomas, and John Dickensen were widely read
and helped gain the public support needed in the fight against
England.

■ The First Amendment. Curiously enough, in spite of the key

role played by newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides in mobi¬
lizing support for the Revolution, the framers of the U.S. Con¬
stitution did not mention freedom of the press in the original
document. For one thing, they could not agree on what the con¬
cept meant in practical terms or how such a provision could be
enforced. In addition, some of the framers argued that there was
no need to guarantee such freedoms in the Constitution.
Shortly after the Constitution was ratified, however, the
states passed amendments that guaranteed the freedoms we
have come to know as the Bill of Rights. Prominent among these
is the First Amendment, which states, “Congress shall make no
law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." These
words are known as the free speech and free press clause of the
First Amendment. (The amendment also includes guarantees of
freedom of religion and freedom of assembly.) At first glance, the
clause seems clear and unambiguous. Yet through the years the
press and the government have become enmeshed in a tangle of
issues that have confused the public, perplexed the most able ju¬
rists, and placed a variety of constraints on those who operate
the mass media.
How could such confusion occur? At the outset we should
recognize that even in the first days of the Republic, many of the
founders had mixed feelings on the merits of a “free press” and
on the extent to which it should be free. Some had qualms be-
■ 126 The Nature of Mass Communication

cause it seemed obvious that newspapers were instruments of

political power. For example, newspaper enthusiasts today are
fond of quoting Thomas Jefferson, who said: “Were it left to me
to decide whether we should have a government without news¬
papers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesi¬
tate a moment to prefer the latter.” Less frequently quoted is the
qualifying sentence that followed: “But I should mean that every
man should receive those papers and be capable of reading
them” (italics added). And almost never quoted are the disillu¬
sioned remarks of Jefferson the politician, after being opposed
frequently by the press. He bitterly noted: “The man who never
looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads
them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to the truth
than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”
Almost all Americans will nod vigorously in agreement if
asked if they believe in freedom of the press. It ranks with moth¬
erhood and the flag in national esteem. But when pressed on
some specific case—such as pornography, criticism of their fa¬
vorite public figure, or unfavorable stories about themselves—
their assent to a free press is likely to vanish. Belief in freedom
of the press is often based not on the idea that the government
simply has no right to control it but on the belief that a free
press is the best method for ensuring a well-informed public and
a stable democracy. When the press seems to be doing a poor job
of informing the public, support for its freedom is likely to
diminish.
The debate over freedom of the press became more compli¬
cated when film and the broadcast media appeared. Are they
forms of speech and press and therefore protected by the First
Amendment? In 1915 the Supreme Court ruled that cinema was
a “business, pure and simple, originated and conducted for
profit” (Mutual Film Corporation v. Ohio). Therefore, the Court
went on to say, it was not protected by constitutional guarantees
of free speech and a free press. Then in 1952 the Supreme Court
reversed this decision. The State of New York had said that an
Italian film (The Miracle) could not be exhibited in the state be¬
cause it was “sacrilegious.” When the case was appealed to the
Supreme Court, the Court ruled that the state had no power to
censor films on religious grounds.12 The effect was that films
gained the protection of the First Amendment.
Radio and television present a more complicated situation.
Whereas the number of “channels” available to the print and
film media is, theoretically at least, unlimited, the number of fre¬
quencies that can be used for broadcasting is severely restricted.
This difference between broadcasting and print has provided the
basis for a host of government regulations regarding broadcast-
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 127 ■

ing. In other words, broadcast regulation has been justified by

the scarcity of channels. Not everyone can own one, even if they
could afford it, so the government regulates those who do by
granting and renewing broadcast licenses as well as regulating
content to some extent. No such system exists for the print me¬
dia. As we shall see later in this chapter, the regulations regard¬
ing broadcasting are generally compromised between the
principle that “the public owns the airwaves” and the Constitu¬
tion’s guarantee of freedom of speech. However, this too is
changing because of technology. With the advent of cable televi¬
sion and direct broadcast satellite transmission as well as such
emerging technologies as fiber optics (Chapter 3). we are enter¬
ing a period not of scarcity, but of abundance. This has pro¬
vided new arguments for the deregulation of broadcasting. In
fact, by the mid 1980s some deregulation had occurred, but for
the most part the old regulatoiy regime still reigns. Perhaps the
greatest source of conflict over the right to a free press, however,
comes from the fact that it is not the only right or freedom in
town. The right to a free press sometimes seems in conflict with
society’s right to maintain order and security. For example, the
press’s exercise of its freedom may conflict with the ability of the
police and courts to do their jobs or with the government’s abil¬
ity to maintain secrets it deems necessary for national security.
Freedom of the press can also conflict with the rights of individ¬
uals, such as the right to privacy and the right to a fair trial. As
a result of these conflicts, the courts have frequently ruled
against the right of the press to publish anything it pleases. The
most important limitations on the press imposed by the courts
concern libel, coverage of trials, obscene material, and govern¬
ment secrets.

Protection from Injunctions against saying untrue, defamatory things about oth¬
Libel ers have ancient origins. Among the Ten Commandments is the
injunction, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neigh¬
bor.” In ancient Norman laws it was written, “A man who falsely
called another a thief or manslayer must pay damages, and hold¬
ing his nose with his fingers, must publically confess himself a
liar.”13 The idea that a person whose reputation has been dam¬
aged because of untrue public statements by another is entitled
to compensation was passed on to the American colonies
through English law. It remains an important part of American
law. Not only are the reputations of individuals protected but
also those of corporations and businesses. With the development
of media with huge audiences, it became possible to “bear false
witness" and damage reputations on a very large scale, with very
serious economic consequences.
H 128 The Nature of Mass Communication

Large numbers of libel cases are brought against newspapers,

magazines, book publishers, and broadcast stations each year.
The courts must weigh the right of the press to publish freely
versus the right of people to preserve their privacy, reputation,
and peace of mind. The situation is complicated by the fact that
there are no federal statutes concerning libel. It is a matter of
state law, and each state has its own laws.
State laws usually give news reporters and the news media
some protection against libel suits. They usually allow publica¬
tion of public records and “fair comment and criticism” of public
officials. But it is not entirely clear who qualifies as a reporter
under the laws of the states.
In recent years reporters and the media have also received
constitutional protection from libel suits. In 1964 the Supreme
Court considered for the first time whether state laws regarding
libel might be overturned on the grounds that they violate the
First Amendment to the Constitution. The case was The New
York Times v. Sullivan. During the height of the conflict over
the civil rights of blacks in the South, the Times had published
an advertisement that indirectly attacked the Birmingham, Ala¬
bama, police chief. An Alabama jury ruled that the Times had to
pay $500,000 in damages because the advertisement included
some misstatements of fact. But the Supreme Court overruled
the Alabama jury, holding that its decision violated the freedom
of the press. Essentially, the Supreme Court held that a full and
robust discussion of public issues, including criticism of public
officials, was too important to allow the states to restrain the
press through their libel laws.
After 1964 it became very difficult for public officials to claim
libel damages. Only when the official could show that there had
been “malice,” “reckless disregard of the truth,” or “knowing
falsehood” by the press, the Court said, could public officials sue
for libel. More recent cases have extended this doctrine to in¬
clude public figures as well as public officials.
By no means was the libel issue decided once and for all time
in the 1964 Times v. Sullivan case, though. Since that time,
courts have defined and redefined who is and who is not a public
official and a public figure. In a 1979 case, Herbert v. Lando, the
Supreme Court ruled that courts could inquire into the state of
mind of a reporter in determining whether there was malice
present as a story was written. And there have been many large
libel judgments against the media. In 1983 alone, these were
some of the major libel verdicts:

• A woman whose former husband was interviewed on the “Phil

Donahue Show” was awarded $1.7 million in actual damages
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 129 ■

and $4.2 million in punitive damages by a federal court juiy.

The woman accused Donahue and the show’s producers of
conspiring in a kidnapping when they agreed to interview the
man, who had seized his child in a custody battle, without
revealing his whereabouts.
• A former assistant district attorney in Philadelphia won a
$4.5 million libel suit against the Philadelphia Inquirer,
which alleged that he had given favorable treatment to two
college students (one was his son) who were implicated in the
death of a man.
• An Atlantic City motel owner won $7 million in damages in a
suit against Philadelphia magazine, which said he was a
drug dealer.
• A public school teacher won more than $1 million in a libel
suit against the Richmond Times-Dispatch, which had ques¬
tioned her performance as a teacher.
• A New Jersey banker won a $1.05 million suit against the
Bridgewater Courier-News for suggesting that he had insuf¬
ficient collateral for a mortgage he received.

On appeal, judges often reduce the amount of such “megaver¬

dicts” considerably, but nevertheless libel suits of this kind are
extremely expensive and sometimes take years to litigate.
Members of Congress are totally protected against suits for li¬
bel, as long as what they say can be interpreted as being related
to their responsibilities as public officials. They therefore can,
and often do, make public statements about issues and people
with the knowledge that they will not wind up in the courts. The
late Senator Joseph McCarthy provides a classic example of the
abuse of this protection.
In the 1950s McCarthy gained national and even worldwide
attention by claiming that the United States was in the grip of
powerful but hidden Communist infiltration. He used the media
to whip up public fear of a vast Communist conspiracy. It some¬
times seemed that he charged eveiyone in sight with being “sub¬
versive,” or a “fellow traveler,” or “a card-carrying member of the
Communist party." He accused high military leaders, the film in¬
dustry, the U.S. State Department, educators, artists, business
leaders, and even the clergy. The media gave his outrageous
claims nationwide coverage.
McCarthy’s accusations helped create a climate of fear that
wrecked reputations and ruined careers all over the nation. Fi¬
nally, however, the media that had helped McCarthy’s rise as¬
sisted in his downfall. As a result of his accusations. Congress
held formal hearings on Communist influence in the Army. The
hearings were televised daily to a national audience. McCarthy’s
 ■ 130 The Nature of Mass Communication

Government and
mass communica¬
tion are inextricably
linked. People de¬
pend upon the media
for news of and ex¬
perience with gov¬
ernment, as in the
famous Army-
McCarthy hearings
of the 1950s. At first,
McCarthy used the
media; later, the me¬
dia figured largely in
his downfall. (Robert
Phillips/Black Star.)

tactics were so outrageous that, after seeing him in action, the

public concluded that he was an irresponsible demagogue. He
lost credibility, and his bid for power came to an end.

I Trial by the Media The Constitution guarantees freedom of the press, but it also
guarantees a fair trial to defendants. Sometimes publicity about
a crime and the suspected criminal seems to make a fair trial
impossible. The classic example of how the press can turn a trial
into a Roman circus and thereby deny the defendant's right to a
fair trial occurred in the case of Sam Sheppard.
Dr. Sam Sheppard was a well-to-do osteopathic surgeon in an
Ohio city. One night his wife was brutally beaten and stabbed to
death under mysterious circumstances in their expensive sub¬
urban home. The police were baffled because there were no wit¬
nesses and few clues. Nevertheless, after a short time they
arrested Dr. Sheppard and charged him with murdering his
wife.
Long before the police investigation had been completed, the
local newspapers decided that Sheppard was guilty. One head¬
line read, “Quit Stalling—Bring Him In.” Another said, “Why
Isn’t Sam Sheppard in Jail?” Numerous editorials and cartoons
proclaimed him guilty. The trial itself was overrun with report¬
ers and photographers, and the jury was not adequately shielded
from negative news reports about Sheppard. One newspaper
even printed a photograph of Mrs. Sheppard’s bloodstained pil¬
low. The photograph had been “retouched” so as to “show more
clearly” an alleged imprint of a “surgical instrument.”
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 131 ■

■ The appearance of
film stars (such as
Danny Kaye, Evelyn
Keyes, June Havoc,
Humphrey Bogart,
and Lauren Bacall)
at the hearing of the
House UnAmerican
Activities Committee
in the late 1940s re¬
flects another dark
period in American
history during which
government gave
special attention to a
communication me¬
dium and its people
because of the power
of communication.
(Historical Pictures
Service, Chicago.)

The prosecutor found no witnesses to the murder, and the

only evidence he presented was circumstantial (for example, the
fact that Sheppard had been having an affair with another
woman). But Sheppard was convicted and spent many years in
jail. Finally the Supreme Court reviewed his case. It declared his
trial invalid, largely because of the publicity and improper legal
procedures. Ohio tried Sheppard again, and he was acquitted.
By this time, of course, his life was shattered. He died in 1970,
still a relatively young man.
More recently, the Supreme Court in the case of Gannett v.
DePasqualle (1979) seemed to say that the press could be
barred from certain portions of trials. An uproar followed in
which many said the decision was a threat to the coverage of
supposedly public trials. This was clarified somewhat in a 1980
Supreme Court decision, Richmond Newspapers, Inc. v. Vir¬
ginia, which gave specific constitutional protection for the me¬
dia to cover public trials.

I Moral Values:
Obscenity and
Do parents have the right to protect their children from seeing
advertisements on the street for pornographic movies or from
Pornography seeing pornographic magazines displayed at the corner drug¬
store? Many Americans would answer yes: the Supreme Court’s
answers have been ambiguous. The most emotional issue at
present is child pornography: magazines and films showing
young children engaged in explicit sexual acts with adults and
with each other. Public pressure prompted Congress to hold
hearings on the issue.
■ 132 The Nature of Mass Communication

Two very different conceptions of the role of government un¬

derlie debates about government regulation of obscene material.
Liberals generally deplore censorship of such material. In fact,
they often argue that government should not attempt in any way
to regulate the moral behavior of its citizens as long as the peo¬
ple involved are consenting adults. Many conservatives are in¬
clined to see censorship of obscenity as a proper duty of local or
even national government. They tend to feel that a safe society
can be maintained only through government regulation of such
matters as sexual behavior and the use of liquor and drugs. The
media become involved in many of these arguments in strange
and convoluted ways.
The Supreme Court seemed to side with the conservatives in
1957. That year it announced, “Obscenity is not within the area
of constitutionally protected speech or press” (Roth v. United
States). But it has not been easy to determine what is or is not
obscene. In the 1960s material could not be declared obscene if
it had “any redeeming social value” whatsoever. Then in 1973
the Court made it easier to ban materials by relaxing this stan¬
dard. Moreover, it dumped the issue back into the laps of local
communities by saying that the material should be judged in
terms of the standards that “prevail in a given community”
(Miller v. California). What is obscene in one community may
not be obscene in another. But since this decision the Court has
overturned some efforts by communities to ban materials. What
can and cannot be censored on the grounds that it is obscene is
far from clear.
In the face of public pressure, however, the media have cen¬
sored themselves to some extent. Various industry associations
have drawn up codes limiting the treatment of material related
to sex. The classic example is the self-regulation of the movie in¬
dustry in the 1930s. The self-imposed Motion Picture Producers
and Distributors Code by the mid 1930s had become so puritan¬
ical at one point that not even butterflies could be shown mat¬
ing. In the 1950s the comic book industry voluntarily (if
grumpily) curtailed production of weird and horror comics in re¬
sponse to a public outcry. (Congressional hearings were held to
determine whether such comic books were harmful to children.)
Even as late as 1965 the American Newspaper Advertising Code
prohibited such words as girlie, homosexual, lesbian, lust, na¬
ked, and seduce. It also ruled out horizontal embraces and com¬
ments on bust measurements.14 The National Association of
Broadcasters forbids the use of dirty words and explicit sexual
content. The relative purity of broadcasting, however, is also a
result of the Federal Communications Commission’s strict rules
against obscenity.
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 133 ■

■ How we perceive censorship depends on our point of view. Often

movie and book censorship is usually associated with an old-
fashioned conservative morality. But in the 1980s when Women
Against Pornography marched to protest pornographic movies,
books, and magazines, they often espoused more liberal feminist
values. (Jim Anderson/Stock, Boston.)

More recently, there has been considerable conflict between

feminists and producers of lurid, sexually explicit material. Here
the old liberal-conservative split over censorship of pornography
has come unglued. Many feminists believe that pornography is
so offensive and damaging to women that censorship is war¬
ranted. The issue of censorship is complex and evokes much

I
emotion.

The Government’s In times of national crises such as wars, reporting some kinds
Secrets During of information can give the enemy a clear advantage. The inci-
National Crises dent of the scholarly spy illustrates the danger. In 1940, before
the United States and Germany were actually at war, a German
 ■ 134 The Nature of Mass Communication

Box 4

Grenada:
Defining the
Limits of
Censorship

If you were reading the newspapers, listening These “facts,” reported by every news me¬
to the radio, or watching television on October dium in the country, came from the United
25, 1983, you probably found out about the States government, which denied the press ac¬
U.S. invasion of Grenada. The story was at the cess to Grenada until the invasion was suc¬
top of the news that day: some 3,000 American cessfully completed. Information was relayed
troops had landed on the island nation to pro¬ to the public by White House spokespersons,
tect 1,000 United States citizens who lived Pentagon officials, members of the adminis¬
there and who were in danger from an immi¬ tration, and President Reagan himself, who
nent Cuban occupation. gave a televised speech on October 27 to an¬
In the next two or three days you learned nounce the completion of the mission.
more: the Cuban military force on Grenada Though the press grumbled, the public
consisted of about 1,100 men, most of whom seemed satisfied: it was all over very quickly.
were posing as construction workers. They What more was there to say?
had established a terrorist training camp in There was a lot more. Reporters went to
the barracks at Calvigny and were stockpiling Grenada after the invasion and unearthed a
Soviet-made weapons in warehouses. The So¬ number of discrepancies between what they
viets, who were behind the October 19 assas¬ saw and the government’s reports. For in¬
sination of Maurice Bishop, the island’s stance, 6,000 American servicemen were on
Marxist prime minister, had thirty advisers on the island on October 25, not 3,000. On Octo¬
Grenada and were ready to supply more arms ber 30, the State Department admitted that
to the Cubans. Fortunately, the American in¬ there had been only about 700 Cubans there,
vasion had stopped the Cuban takeover in all but 100 of whom were in fact construction
time; eight servicemen had been killed in the workers. Similarly, the alleged cache of weap¬
two days of fighting. ons was found to be much smaller than the
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 135 ■

President had indicated, and there was no evi¬ help from other Caribbean countries; al¬
dence of a terrorist training base on the is¬ though that request had been used as the jus¬
land. Papers released by the government did tification for interference, reporters found
not show that any Cuban takeover had been that officials had been discussing action since
planned or that the Soviets had been involved before Bishop's assassination.
in any way with the prime minister’s murder. In the confusion over the facts, one point
Some of the returning American citizens, about press censorship during the Grenada
while grateful to be safely at home, admitted invasion became clear: many Americans
that they had never been aware of any danger, learned only what the government told them.
and journalists found that the Cuban govern¬ Once the outcome of the conflict was decided,
ment had given assurances several times that Grenada was no longer the top news story, and
they would not be harmed. American casual¬ the public turned its attention to other mat¬
ties were eventually listed as eighteen dead ters, perhaps retaining an impression of
and eighty-nine wounded; most of these had events that was not accurate. In the end, the
been sustained on the first day of the invasion. question that plagued critics most was
And a Canadian reporter discovered that a whether censorship that was justified on mil¬
mental hospital had mistakenly been bombed, itary grounds had been imposed for political
resulting in the deaths of seventeen civilians, reasons—and whether, in limiting the free¬
which the government had never reported. dom of the press, the government had in¬
Most important, it was learned that the United fringed upon its citizens’ more basic right to
States government had been planning a mili¬ know about its activities.
tary action since before the official request for PHOTO: UPI/Bettman.

undercover agent was smuggled Into the United States and

given a suitable cover. His mission was to assess America’s fu¬
ture capacity to produce air armaments. Such knowledge would
play a vital part in Germany’s preparations for air defense.
The spy did not need to sneak around airplane factories or
army and navy airfields. Instead, he simply spent all his days
reading in public libraries. He carefully scrutinized the New
York Times Index and the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Litera¬
ture for published accounts that mentioned aircraft facilities,
plans for factories, or existing air armaments. After making cop¬
ious notes, he was smuggled back to Germany, where he pre¬
pared a report to the high command. This report was later
acquired by American espionage agents in Germany. It turned
out that the scholarly spy had put together an extremely accu¬
rate prediction of U.S. production of military aircraft for the
years 1941 through 1943. In fact, his assessment was more ac¬
curate than that made by the U.S. War Production Board for the
same years. Yet all the spy’s data had come from newspapers,
magazines, and books readily available to the public.15
Recognizing the dangers facing their nation, Americans have
generally accepted some sort of censorship during wars. Even
■ 136 The Nature of Mass Communication

many fervent civil libertarians agree that the government de¬

serves and requires protection during wartime. But such cen¬
sorship obviously contradicts the guarantee of a free press and
limits the public’s right to know. In peace and war, government
secrecy has led to many controversies. For example, in October
1983, when the United States invaded the Caribbean island na¬
tion of Grenada, military commanders barred the press from the
island and thus the war zone. Journalists and broadcasters pro¬
tested the government policy vigorously, saying it was unprece¬
dented and unwarranted censorship; the White House said it
was trying to protect the lives of the media people. In any case,
within a few days of the invasion, the ban was lifted.

■ Direct Censorship in Wartime. In past wars the government

has been able to use several indirect methods to protect its se¬
crets. One indirect way to control information is to deny access
to telegraph, cable, or similar facilities. Reporters then must
either let military censors screen their copy or try to transmit it
in some other way. For example, when the battleship Maine
blew up in the harbor of Havana, Cuba, in 1898, the U.S. gov¬
ernment immediately closed the Havana cable to reporters. Sim¬
ilarly, when World War I broke out, the British immediately
severed the cables between Germany and the United States.
American reporters had to use the English-controlled cables be¬
tween Europe and the United States and submit their copy to
rigid British censorship.
The government has also imposed censorship through codes,
regulations, and guidelines. During World War I, for example,
U.S. censorship was extensive. The Espionage Act of 1917 pro¬
vided fines and prison terms for anyone interfering with the war
effort in any way. Newspapers were outraged by its provisions,
and legal battles over the issue went all the way to the Supreme
Court. Eventually such censorship was declared unconstitu¬
tional, but Congress then passed even stricter laws to control in¬
formation. For example, the Sedition Act of 1918 made it a
crime to publish anything that abused, scorned, or showed con¬
tempt for the government of the United States, its flag, or even
the uniforms of its armed forces. To enforce the law, such pub¬
lications could be banned from using the mails.
On December 19, 1941, only a few days after Japanese forces
struck Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt created the U.S. Office
of Censorship and charged it with reviewing all communications
entering or leaving the United States for the duration of the war.
At the peak of its activity, the office employed more than ten
thousand persons. Their main objective was to review mail, ca¬
bles, and radiograms. The press was handled differently. A Code
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 137 ■

of Wartime Practices for the American Press was issued, and vol¬
untary cooperation was requested from the nation’s editors and
publishers. The purpose was to deny the Axis powers any infor¬
mation concerning military matters, production, supplies, ar¬
maments, weather, and so on. (The case of the scholarly spy
occurred before the guidelines were in effect.) For the most part,
those responsible for the content of the print media cooperated
very well, often exceeding the guidelines that the govenment set.
A related code was issued for broadcasters, and their coopera¬
tion was also excellent.
The system of codes, regulations, and guidelines in World
War II worked because the press did cooperate voluntarily. The
country was trying to find a way to deny vital information to the
enemy without using official censors, and by and large it
succeeded.
Even when the nation has not been at war and formal guide¬
lines have not been in effect, the press has often censored itself
to protect the national interest. In 1960, for example, the Soviet
Union shot down an American U-2 spy plane. The incident tem¬
porarily ended attempts to improve Soviet-American relations.
For a year before the plane was shot down, however, James Res-
ton of the New York Times had known that spy planes were
flying over the Soviet Union, but “the New York Times did not
publish this fact until one of the planes was shot down in
I960.”16

■ Challenges to Government Secrecy. Beside these examples

of voluntary censorship by the press, we could place a score of
examples in which the press and the government have been
locked in conflict, disputing the government’s right to censor
the press. A shared belief in the need for freedom of the press
became a tradition very early in the life of the nation, and any
effort by the government to limit that freedom has always met
with some hostility.
During the Civil War, for example, the fifty-seventh Article of
War provided for a court martial, with a possible death sentence,
for anyone giving military information to the enemy. During
wartime these rules applied to civilians as well as to the military.
Newspapers were an indirect source of military information. The
leaders of the Confederacy went to great lengths to obtain copies
of major northern newspapers because they often revealed the
presence of military units and naval vessels. As a result, the U.S.
War Department tried to forbid newspapers to publish any news
from which movements of troops or ships could be inferred. The
newspapers generally ignored these orders. Even after the war
General Sherman refused to shake hands with Horace Greeley,
■ 138 The Nature of Mass Communication

publisher of the New York Tribune, maintaining that Greeley’s

paper had caused a heavy loss of life by revealing troop move¬
ments to the enemy.17
Thus even in wartime Americans have questioned censor¬
ship, asking what kind of controls should be imposed and by
whom? The government has the need to protect itself and the
right and a duty to protect the nation. But the press has the
right to tell the public what its government is doing, and the
public has the right to know. Thus there is an inherent conflict
between the right to a free press and the need to control infor¬
mation that would be damaging to government.18
The conflict between government and the press seems to have
grown in recent decades as the government itself has grown.
Since World War II we have supported a giant defense establish¬
ment, a complex web of foreign relationships, and uniquely pow¬
erful nuclear weaponry. Government secrecy has grown with all
of these. The majority of editors and publishers cooperate with
the government when they see that national'security is at stake
in maintaining secrecy. But as a host of government bureau¬
crats classify thousands and thousands of documents secret
each year, the press—and the public—often wonder how many
of these secrets protect national security and how many protect
the government from embarrassment. Often it is difficult to de¬
termine what is being protected or at what point a secret be¬
comes so damaging to the national interest that the
constitutional guarantee of free speech should be overruled. The
case of the Pentagon Papers illustrated these questions
dramatically.
During the Johnson administration, the Defense Department
had put together a forty-seven—volume history of American in¬
volvement in Vietnam, including secret cables, memos, and
other documents. The history, which came to be known as the
Pentagon Papers, was classified as top secret. It documented
American political, military, and diplomatic decisions regarding
Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. Then in 1971 Daniel Ellsberg, who
had worked on the papers but had come to oppose the war,
leaked the papers to the New York Times. Ellsberg hoped that
the release of the history of the war would turn public opinion
against it and help bring about its end. Although the documents
were both stolen and classified, the Times began publishing a
series of articles summarizing the papers, including some of the
documents in them. A legal uproar followed.
The Nixon administration went to court to stop the Times
(and later other newspapers) from publishing additional articles
on the papers. It argued that publishing the papers would en¬
danger national security. In response, the courts issued a tem¬
porary restraining order, stopping the Times from continuing
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 139 ■

its planned series on the papers. In effect, the courts briefly im¬
posed prior restraint.
Eventually, the case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled
against the government. The government had failed to convince
the Court that publication of the Pentagon Papers constituted a
danger severe enough to warrant suspending freedom of the
press. Relieved and triumphant, the newspapers resumed their
articles on the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg was later tried for
stealing the documents and went to prison. The Court’s decision
in the Pentagon Papers case, however, is still regarded as contro¬
versial, and it settled little. Conflict continues between the
press’s desire to publish information, the public’s right to have
information about the operation of its government, and the gov¬
ernment’s need to protect the secrecy of some activities.
During the administration of Ronald Reagan there has been
a contentious tug of war between the press and the president
over access to government information. President Reagan pro¬
posed sweeping changes in the Freedom of Information Act,
which provides public access to the various departments and
agencies of government, and issued executive orders that made
it more difficult to get information about such agencies as the
FBI and CIA. Such groups as the Society of Professional Jour¬
nalists and the American Society of Newspaper Editors have
campaigned vigorously against these restrictions. What we typi¬
cally have here is a profound disagreement between the govern¬
ment, which says it is acting in the best interest of the people by
withholding information, and the press, which says the people
are better served by a free flow of information.

Protection for While the government claims that some secrets are necessary to
Reporters’ Sources its survival, the press makes a similar claim. Take the case of
Annette Buchanan. In 1966 Buchanan, the editor of the student
newspaper at the University of Oregon, published a stoiy about
marijuana smoking on the campus. Buchanan was asked by a
local court to reveal the names of the people from whom she had
obtained much of her information. She refused and was even¬
tually fined three hundred dollars.
Although this incident involved neither serious crimes nor
harsh punishments, it does illustrate all the elements of an im¬
portant controversy regarding freedom of the press. If Buchanan
had given the names of her informants to the police, her credi¬
bility with them would certainly have been destroyed. News per¬
sonnel claim that maintaining the confidentiality of sources is
an important part of the machinery of reporting. If reporters are
not allowed to keep their sources secret, they will not be able to
obtain information that the public should have.
A case with more serious consequences involved Earl Cald-
■ 140 The Nature of Mass Communication

well, a reporter for the New York Times. Caldwell had gained the
confidence of the Black Panthers in the San Francisco area. At
the time, many people considered the Panthers militant and
dangerous. Caldwell published several stories about the Pan¬
thers, but he did so in a way that did not cost him the group’s
confidence. A year later, after Black Panther David Hilliard had
been charged by a grand jury with threatening to kill the presi¬
dent, Caldwell was asked to appear before the grand jury and
testify. He refused. In fact, he refused to go anywhere near the
grand jury on the grounds that even if he entered the closed ses¬
sion and then refused to testify he would lose the confidence of
his informants, who would never be certain what he had said
behind closed doors. Because of his refusal Caldwell was held in
contempt of court—a decision later upheld by the U.S. Supreme
Court.
The case caused an uproar among journalists. During the Su¬
preme Court’s hearing on the case, the Author’s League of Amer¬
ica argued:

Compelling a reporter to identify his sources or divulge confidential

information to a grand jury imposes obvious restraints on the free¬
dom of the press to gather information. . . . The threat of such in¬
terrogation would induce many reporters to steer clear of
controversial issues inducing the “self-censorship which is repug¬
nant to the First Amendment.19

The Caldwell decision appeared to provide a clear basis for le¬

gal action against reporters who refuse to divulge such infor¬
mation. Peter Bridges was the first reporter actually jailed as a
result of the decision. In 1972 he remained in jail for twenty-one
days because he refused to identify the sources for an article he
had written on alleged illegal practices involving the Newark
Housing Authority.
Some moves have been made to provide legal protection for
news media and reporters who do not wish to divulge sources.
Many states have passed so-called shield laws, which specifi¬
cally exempt journalists from having to reveal their sources.20
Some journalists and lawyers argue against such laws, saying
that they imply acceptance of the Court’s interpretation of the
First Amendment. On the other hand, many lawyers oppose
shield laws on the grounds that the courts need all the infor¬
mation they can get in order to protect citizens against wrong¬
doing and to provide fair trials.
The issue of the confidentiality of sources is by no means re¬
solved. In 1978 Myron Farber, a reporter for the New York
Times, was jailed for contempt by a New Jersey court for refus¬
ing to turn over his notes in a murder trial. The defendants’ law-
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 141 ■

yers had claimed that they had a right to see the notes. Not only
was Farber punished with civil and criminal convictions, but
the newspaper was also forced to pay a fine. All this happened in
spite of a New Jersey shield law that supposedly protected re¬
porters’ confidential sources. The New Jersey Supreme Court
and the U.S. Supreme Court both said that the Sixth Amend¬

I
ment, which guarantees a fair trial, took precedence over the
claims of the press.

Political We have discussed several specific areas in which the freedom of

Constraints: the press guaranteed by the Constitution is limited, not abso¬
lute. But in practice the freedom of the press depends not only
The Agents of
on this abstract constitutional framework but also on the daily
Control decisions of courts, bureaucrats, and politicians. The constitu¬
tional framework itself continues to change; it has evolved and
continues to evolve as specific problems and conflicts arise.
Moreover, in particular cases the actual freedom of the press
may differ from its theoretical freedom. We therefore look next at
the various agents of political control of the media, including the
courts, legislatures, White House, bureaucrats, and even private
citizens. These groups may exert both formal controls on the
media and informal influence on the flow of information.

I The Courts We have seen that the courts often act as referees in conflicts be¬
tween the rights of the press, the rights of individuals, and the
rights of the government at large. This is nothing new. As early
as 1835 the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville observed,
“Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that
is not resolved sooner or later into a judicial question.” Today
conflicts involving the media often lead to lawsuits in local
courts. Sometimes these court verdicts are challenged and taken
to a state or federal appeals court. Some appeals may be carried
all the way to the Supreme Court in Washington.
Often the Supreme Court’s interpretations of prevailing law
or the Constitution have broken new ground, establishing new
policies. In recent years the Court has ruled on many issues af¬
fecting the media, including newsroom searches, libel, the con¬
fidentiality of journalists’ sources, the regulation of advertising,
and laws regarding copyright and cable television. These rulings
have often been the center of immense controversy. The prevail¬
ing view in the press has been that the Supreme Court under
Chief Justice Warren E. Burger has been generally, though not
always, hostile to the press and its claims. Dan Rather of CBS
News went so far as to claim that the Supreme Court has been
“repealing the First Amendment” by its decisions. Many legal
scholars, however, disagree.
 ■ 142 The Nature of Mass Communication

What we see in the courts when the press is on trial is a legal

battle between parties, sometimes private citizens, sometimes
the government and the media. It is all a matter of rights in
conflict.” As journalist Anthony Lewis put it in a 1983 speech:

We have libel suits because we think a civilized society should take

account of an interest besides freedom to criticize. In other words,
individuals have rights too; sometimes they conflict with the rights
of the press. It is not uncommon to find rights in conflict: that’s why
we have judges. But sometimes the press sounds as though the Con¬
stitution considers only its interests. If a network or a newspaper
loses a case, “That’s it, the Constitution is gone; Big Brother has
taken over." Well I don’t think life is so simple. The interest of the
press may not be the only one of constitutional dimension when
there are conflicts.21

I The Legislatures The Supreme Court is a kind of final staging ground for many
media battles. What it and other courts do sometimes mirrors,
sometimes second guesses, and sometimes shapes or antici¬
pates what other parts of the government are doing. Often the
first round of these battles is fought in the state legislatures.
State legislatures write laws that have considerable impact on
the mass media. They may amend or rewrite statutes dealing
with libel, misrepresentation, business taxation, newspaper ad¬
vertising, cable television, and many other subjects. Most major
lobbying groups for the media, such as state broadcast and
newspaper associations, have representatives at their state cap¬
itals to watch out for their interests.
The influence of Congress on the media is greater than the
influence of state legislatures. Postal rates for books and maga¬
zines, for example, loom large on publishers’ balance sheets.
Like other businesses the media can be hurt or helped by
congressional decisions regarding taxes, antitrust policy, affirm¬
ative action, and so on. In addition, both houses of Congress
have subcommittees that deal specifically with communications
issues and policies. Congress has investigated the financial
structure of the communications industry, tried to determine
whether the television networks were pressuring producers not
to release films to pay-cable systems, considered the regulation
of television advertising, written a new copyright law, passed
laws on campaign spending in the media, and considered a fed¬
eral shield law. In the late 1960s, Congress authorized the De¬
partment of Health, Education and Welfare to study the effects
of television, especially the effects of televised violence on chil¬
dren.22 Congress was responsible for passing the censorship
laws during World War I, as well as for the Freedom of Informa¬
tion Act, which has opened the government to greater scrutiny
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 143 ■

by the media as well as the general public. Finally, Congress es¬

tablished the agencies that regulate advertising and broadcast¬
ing, and it regularly examines, and criticizes, the work of these
agencies.

The Executive The web of government influence gets more tangled when we
Branch consider the executive branch, which includes a host of govern¬
ment departments and agencies as well as the White House.
Some bureaucrats in federal departments and agencies exercise
formal control over information through the government’s clas¬
sification system, but bureaucrats also exercise informal con¬
trols over the flow of information to the press and the public.
Both federal and state governments are composed mainly of
large bureaucracies which manage their own public relations.
Each group is anxious to create a favorable public image. At the
federal level, many millions are spent each year on domestic
public relations by groups such as the FBI, the Department of
Agriculture, and the Pentagon. Every division of government has
its own information officers and staffs, and reporters depend
heavily on the.se public relations officers for information about
the daily workings of government. Reporters often have no way
of assessing the validity of this information. Much of the news
that is reported about the government is therefore just what the
public relations people hand out to the press. Through press re¬
leases, news conferences, and interviews, the bureaucracies
thus control most of the news that appears about their agency
or group. Obviously this kind of reporting limits the ability of
the press to inform the public.
The White House also exercises informal influence on the flow
of information. For example, it is a tradition for the president’s
press secretary to select a limited number of reporters from the
pool of those assigned to the White House to cover an important
political briefing or social event. The remainder of the press
must get the information from those selected. If a member of the
pool is seen by the White House as a friend or is in disfavor, that
fact can have a significant influence on his or her prospects for
firsthand coverage of the news.
Spiro T. Agnew demonstrated another way of trying to influ¬
ence the press. In 1969, while Agnew was U.S. vice president
and the war in Vietnam was being debated, he claimed (in es¬
sence) that the news media were dominated by a liberal eastern
elite and that the views of more conservative citizens were not
adequately represented. He implied that this constituted a “con¬
trolled press” and that perhaps it was time to “do something
about” the situation. Agnew’s speech sent shock waves through
the industry, especially through the television industry because
television stations can have their licenses taken away by the gov-
■ 144 The Nature of Mass Communication

■ No figure in America—and probably the world—makes heavier

use of mass communication than the President of the United States,
regardless of who is in office. Ronald Reagan has been called “the
great communicator” because of his effective use of television.
(Paul Conklin.)

ernment. In fact, there is some evidence that the networks

changed their policies after Agnews remarks. For example, in
1971, when some half a million people flooded Washington,
D.C., to protest the war in Vietnam, the network news media
gave the event only minimal coverage. A short time later they
covered Bob Hope's “Honor America. Day (which took a conser¬
vative view) thoroughly.23
The White House also has more formal sources of influence
on the media. The White House may present legislative propos¬
als to Congress. For example, during the early 1980s the Reagan
administration, in an effort to tighten up security, proposed
changes in the federal Freedom of Information Act. It also issued
a series of executive orders—which do not require the approval
of Congress—to prevent leaks and to curtail other activities by
government employees. In one executive order alone, more than
100,000 former and present government employees were to be
required to submit all articles, speeches, and even letters to the
editor to their agencies for prepublication review. Although
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 145 ■

some commentators defended this practice for “national secu¬

rity” reasons, the American Society of Newspaper Editors called
the new policy, “peacetime censorship of a scope unparalleled in
this country since the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1791.”24
Without doubt, the Reagan administration news and informa¬
tion policies were the least popular with the press of any presi¬
dency since the Nixon-Agnew years. The White House may also
lobby for or against proposals that Congress is considering.
Moreover, the president appoints some members of the two reg¬
ulatory agencies, the FCC and FTC, that have important powers
to regulate and guide parts of the media.

■ The Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Congress

created the FCC in 1934, charging it with the task of seeing that
the people who run broadcasting stations operate them in the
“public interest, convenience and necessity.” Just what this
means is the subject of considerable debate.
The FCC makes and enforces rules and develops policies that
govern all kinds of communications, from the telephone to cable
television. For example, the FCC enforces the equal time rule,
which states: “If a licensee shall permit any person who is a le¬
gally qualified candidate for any public office to use a broadcast¬
ing station, he shall afford equal opportunities to all other such
candidates for that office in the use of such broadcasting sta¬
tion.’ Building on the equal time rule, which applies only to po¬
litical candidates, the commission over the years evolved the
fairness doctrine, which grants equal time to people represent¬
ing issues and causes. Later the FCC and the courts added a
personal attack law, which gives individuals attacked by a
broadcast station air time to respond. Other rules govern adver¬
tising, ownership of broadcasting stations, and obscenity. The
FCC's rulings have the status of law and can be overturned only
by the federal courts or by congressional action.
A good deal of the FCC’s attention is given to interpreting its
own rules as it resolves disputes between broadcasters and var¬
ious individuals and interests. In some instances these rules are
veiy specific, as is the equal time rule. But in other instances
the law is vague, and the commission must wrangle over terms
like "the public interest,” trying to determine just what the pub¬
lic interest is in a particular circumstance.
The FCC spends much of its time issuing, renewing, and re¬
voking licenses granted to radio and television stations. Much of
the wrangling between the commission and the broadcast in¬
dustry comes at renewal time, when the FCC requests detailed
information on programming, looks for evidence of public ser¬
vice, and tries to see whether (and how well) the station serves
its community. Although broadcasters often complain of the
■ 146 The Nature of Mass Communication

heavy hand of government, the FCC has been remarkably lenient

in renewing licenses. In fact, one critic compared the relation¬
ship between the commission and the industry to a wrestling
match wherein “the grunts and groans resound through the
land, but no permanent injury seems to result.”25
A case in point is the handling of obscenity. The Federal
Communications Act gives the commission the power to revoke
the licenses of stations transmitting obscene or indecent mate¬
rial over the airways. There have been numerous instances of
stations running pornographic films and comedy routines, but
the most the commission has ever done is to levy fines, usually
small ones.
Most critics agree that the FCC has not been the most hard¬
hitting of the federal regulatory agencies, yet its very existence
does provide a constraint on broadcasting. Broadcasters regard
the FCC as an overly bureaucratic nuisance, but it exists mainly
to prevent self-serving station owners from trampling on the
public’s access to information and expression. This differs
markedly from the role of the government in the print media. As
Chief Justice Burger stated when he was an appeals court judge:

A broadcaster seeks and is granted the free and exclusive use of a

limited and valued part of the public domain: when he accepts that
franchise it is burdened by enforceable public obligations. A news¬
paper can be operated at the whim or caprice of its owners; a broad¬
cast station cannot.26

■ The Federal Trade Commission (FTC). In December 1978

the Federal Trade Commission began a series of hearings to
study the growing concentration of ownership in the media. The
FTC wanted to know whether this trend influenced the flow of
information. Although the hearings generated no definitive an¬
swers, media owners denounced the FTC for its potential
interference.
These hearings reflect only a small part of the FTC’s interest
in mass communications and other industries. Like the FCC,
the FTC is an independent regulatory agency of the federal gov¬
ernment. It exists for the purpose of preventing unfair competi¬
tion. In relation to the media, this task generally translates into
the regulation of advertising.
Almost from its inception in 1914, the FTC has looked at de¬
ceptive advertising as unfair competition. Both it and the FCC
have brought suits against manufacturers and the media for
false claims or misrepresentations. A classic illustration is pro¬
vided by the Rapid Shave case. Rapid Shave had a television
commercial that opened with actors shaving effortlessly with the
product. A voice claimed that shaving was especially easy be-
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 147 ■

cause the substance had a “deep wetting” ingredient. A demon¬

stration followed in which it was shown that even sandpaper
could be shaved clean if Rapid Shave was used. What the audi¬
ence was not told was that in one version of the commercial the
sandpaper had been soaked in water for nearly an hour and a
half prior to the demonstration. In another version the shaving
demonstration was even easier because it was not done on sand¬
paper at all: instead, a plexiglass surface over which sand had
been sprinkled was used. The case was in the courts for six
years, during much of which time the commercial continued to
be shown. Finally, the Supreme Court banned such trickery.
Another example of advertising that the FTC found deceptive
is provided by Profile bread. The bread’s makers claimed that it
could help dieters and that each slice had a third less calories.
Actually, the manufacturer was simply slicing the bread a third
thinner than a standard slice. The advertisement implying that
the bread had special ingredients was banned. But the most fa¬
mous action of all was that taken against the cigarette industry.
All advertising of cigarettes was banned from television, and the
manufacturers were forced to put a label on each package warn¬
ing the user of dangers to one’s health.
Although the FTC directs its action mainly against individual
advertisers, it has a strong indirect effect on the mass media,
which are the channels for advertising. When the FTC told Pro¬
file to stop implying that its bread had a special ingredient, it
clearly influenced the content of advertising.
The FTC issues warnings before moving to formal orders.
Some of these orders have the effect of law, and the commission
can and has levied fines, some for hundreds of thousands of dol¬
lars. Again, these fines have penalized companies, not the media
directly.
Decisions by the FTC have defined the scope of deception in
advertising, discussed the concept of truth in advertising, and
denounced puffeiy (that is, exaggerated claims in advertising).
The FTC also holds conferences on trade practices, issues guides
that suggest what advertising and labeling practices should be,
hands down advisory opinions in which advertisers ask for ad¬
vance comments about advertisements, and publishes rules. In
recent years the FTC has frequently called on communications
researchers to help examine issues such as the effects of televi¬
sion commercials directed toward children.

■ Deregulation of Communication. In recent years, both the

FCC and the FTC have been somewhat less vigorous in regulat¬
ing the communication industry. This reflects a general trend
that began during the Carter administration and continued
 ■ 148 The Nature of Mass Communication

through the Reagan administration toward the deregulation of

various industries. Underlying deregulation is a belief that com¬
petition in the marketplace is the best way to conduct business
in America and that government rules, even when offered for the
sake of protecting the public, are intrusions.
Compared with the dramatic deregulation experienced by air¬
lines and banks, deregulation in the communication industries,
whether broadcasting or advertising, has been somewhat quiet¬
er. There has been one far-reaching and very publicized case:
the 1981 antitrust agreement between American Telephone and
Telegraph and the federal government. Regulations that had
prohibited the giant communication monopoly to compete in
such fields as cable television and information services, where it
wants to develop electronic yellow pages and compete with news¬
paper classified ads, drastically changed. The result of that com¬
plex agreement may take years to understand, however. Other
consequences of deregulation have been less scrutiny over adver¬
tising content by the FTC and proposals in Congress to end the
fairness doctrine and equal time rule because they inhibit
speech on the part of the media and public.
With the advent of the electronic newspaper through videotex
and with the transmission of such standard papers as the Wall
Street Journal by satellite, the federal government has some ju¬
risdiction (through the FCC) over these enterprises. To date
there has been blessed benign neglect with little governmental
interest in controlling independent newspapers, magazines, or
wire services. However, the potential is there. It was concern
about this potential threat to press freedom that led to the intro¬
duction of the Freedom of Expression Act of 1983 in the U.S.
Senate, which would deregulate broadcasting and give the elec¬
tronic media the same rights as print media. This bill died in
committee in 1984, but its supporters vowed to return to fight
again. Most of the American media supported the legislation—
print and electronic alike. What has happened, as John Wicklein
warned in his description of the merging of technologies, is that
there is now little difference between electronic communication
and the print media. The reporter who works for a videotex firm
like ViewTron serves the same social function as the small-town
newspaper reporter, yet one is protected fully by the First
Amendment, and the other is not. There will no doubt be a vig¬
orous social dialogue about this potential threat to press
freedom.

I The Police In normal times the relationship between the police and the me¬
dia poses few problems, but in times of tension conflicts often
emerge. One can ask how far the police should go in trying to
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 149 ■

control the media even during outbursts of violence. Perhaps

whenever controls on the media are needed during crises, the
controls should come from sources other than police. Police
methods can be very inappropriate for dealing with the media.
In recent history, a classic example of such inappropriate po¬
lice methods is provided by police actions during the August
1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It was the Au¬
gust after President Lyndon Johnson had withdrawn from the
presidential race because of opposition to American involvement
in the Vietnam War, the August after Robert Kennedy had en¬
tered the race and had been assassinated, the August after Mar¬
tin Luther King had been assassinated. The Democratic
convention was a magnet for critics of the war and the govern¬
ment. Many of the critics who came to protest in Chicago
dressed and acted in unconventional ways. To many conserva¬
tive Chicagoans, these visitors seemed not only unconventional
but also dangerous and immoral. Mayor Richard Daley told his
police force to keep the protestors under control. The protestors
were equally determined to demonstrate their dissatisfaction
with the nation. All this set the stage for a major confrontation
between police and thousands of demonstrators. Rioting and
violence occurred over several days. The police used a great deal
of force against the protestors, who fought back. During the
heat of the confrontations, the police were lashing out at every¬
one in sight, including reporters. A number were injured. Typi¬
cal of the violence suffered by many people from the news media
was the case of Claude Lewis of the Philadelphia Evening Bul¬
letin. An officer tried to grab his notes, shouting, “Give me your
damn notebook, you dirty bastard!” When Lewis did not comply,
he was beaten with a club and had to be treated at a hospital for
scalp wounds. Many other people from the media were assaulted
or had valuable equipment smashed by police officers.27
The Chicago police riot is an important example of how rela¬
tionships between police and the media can deteriorate. Photog¬
raphers, reporters, and television personnel have been mauled
by the police in other cities during violent episodes in recent
years. At the same time, the police have sometimes been justi¬
fied in charging that the news media often do not act in the pub¬
lic interest. They give publicity to people who stage
demonstrations for the very purpose of attracting attention to
themselves. Coverage of airplane hijackers, prison rioters, crim¬
inals with hostages, and terrorists provides cases in point. In
such cases it is not difficult to understand why the police be¬
come frustrated by the overwhelming presence of cameras, re¬
porters, and television equipment. Proper conduct of both the
police and the press in times of stress remains less than clear.
 ■ 150 The Nature of Mass Communication

Pressures from Reporters and editors share with the rest of us the typical weak¬
Outside the nesses of human beings. When approached on a friendly basis
Government by nice people offering free drinks, free meals, or even free trips
to exotic resorts, many accept the favors. Such activities are typ¬
ical of the tactics used by businesses, lobbyists, and press
agents who want favorable treatment in the press. Any accept¬
ance by reporters of such “freebies reduces their objectivity
about the behavior of their benefactors.
A senate investigation of informal influence on the press re¬
vealed that many reporters, and even their wives, had accepted
all-expenses-paid trips to resorts in various parts of the world.
Their later stories extolled the virtues of being a tourist in the
countries that had paid for the trips.
More serious is the case of journalists trips to South Africa.
South Africa maintains strict separation of the races, with se¬
vere restrictions on nonwhites. For years some Americans have
urged this country to exert pressure on South Africa to end
these policies. South Africa, of course, has fought such efforts.
In 1965 and 1966 the Republic of South Africa brought more
than twenty reporters and editors with known segregationist
and right-wing views to visit the country and paid all their ex¬
penses. When the story came out, the South African government
denied that it was trying to influence American opinion.28
Pressure from groups outside the government can influence
the media, as the codes against obscenity illustrate. More re¬
cently, public opinion has been exerting pressure on the media
to reduce the amount of violence they portray, especially on tele¬
vision. Numerous research studies support the conclusion that
frequent viewing of violence increases the probability of aggres¬
sive behavior by some categories of children. (The findings of
these studies will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 8.) As
a result, groups such as the Parent-Teachers Association and
the American Medical Association continue vigorous campaigns
to convince stations and networks to reduce the amount of vio¬
lence on television. Many of the liberals who deplore censorship
of sexual material enthusiastically join these efforts.29 Nothing
much has happened, however, and the media continue to por¬
tray violence in many prime-time programs.
On the whole, Americans have mixed attitudes about censor¬
ship and are often more amused than threatened by it. Controls
during wartime have usually been accepted, but other kinds of
censorship provoke different reactions. Johnny Carson pokes
fun at the whole issue with his characterization of Miss Priscilla
Goodbody, the fictitious NBC moral censor. But censorship can
also be seen in a more ominous light. When dictators take over
a country, censorship of the media is one of their first moves. In
communities with strict enforcement of public morality, thea-
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 151 ■

ters, magazine stores, and newspapers have been shut down if

their content contradicted the moral beliefs of those in power.
Overall, our review of freedom of the press has shown that it
is often extremely difficult to protect both this freedom and
other important rights. As a result, the press and the other me¬
dia are surrounded by a web of both formal and informal politi¬
cal, as well as economic, constraints.

■ Summary In American society today the mass media are privately owned
and operated for a profit. Americans generally regard this ar¬
rangement as good. Early in our history the Protestant ethic and
social Darwinism promoted Americans’ belief in private enter¬
prise and competition free from government interference. As
each new medium appeared, it was influenced by these basic be¬
liefs and values and developed as a private, profit-making, com¬
petitive industry.
Their dependence on profits has had many consequences for
American media. First, the law of large numbers prevails; that
is, the content of the media is geared for the most part to the
tastes of the majority. The law of right people points to the need
to get content to specific audiences who can purchase advertised
products. The media’s dependence on profits has also meant
that they have had to adapt as economic conditions have
changed. Inflationary pressures, for example, led to a clear trend
toward consolidation of newspaper ownership. Rivalry with
other media led to modification in movies, radio, and now tele¬
vision. New media forms, such as cable TV and video tape cas¬
settes, promise more changes to come.
In addition to these economic constraints on the media, there
are political constraints as well. Although most Americans ap¬
prove of and think we have a free press, the mass media in the
United States must operate in a complex web of limitations aris¬
ing from politics and government. The First Amendment forbids
Congress to make laws restricting the press; but the freedom of
the press often conflicts with other rights, such as the right to
privacy and the right to a fair trial. Moreover, obscene material
is not clearly under the protection of the First Amendment. Dur¬
ing wartime, controls over the press have ranged from outright
government censorship via codes and guidelines to voluntary
self-regulation by the media.
The courts are frequently referees when the right to a free
press and other rights seem in conflict. Legislatures and the ex¬
ecutive branch also influence the press, both through formal
powers and through their informal influence over the flow of in¬
formation. Both bureaucrats and politicians can introduce bias
in what is reported through their informal influence. The FCC
has the power to regulate many aspects of broadcasting. Groups
 ■ 152 The Nature of Mass Communication

of private citizens as well as public opinioa exert yet other pres¬

sures on the press.
Thus, although the American media are generally free from
direct government control or outright censorship, they are
greatly influenced by economic and political conditions. Since
economic conditions, legal interpretations, and political pres¬
sures constantly change, the media will be modified as well.

Notes and 1 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
References trans. Talcott Parsons (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1930).
2 Kevin Phillips, “Busting the Media Trusts,” Harper’s (July 23,
1977), pp. 23-24.
3 Benjamin Compaine, Who Owns the Media? Concentration of
Ownership in the Mass Communication Industry (New York:
Harmony Books, 1979).
4 Don R. Pember, Mass Media in America, 2nd ed. (Chicago: SRA,
1977), p. 88.
5 For a fanciful account of such possibilities, see George G. Kir-
stein, “The Days the Ads Stopped,” Nation, June 1, 1967,
pp. 555—557.
6 Raymond B. Nixon, “Trends in U.S. Newspaper Ownership: Con¬
centration with Competition,” Gazette, 14, no. 3, pp. 181—193.
7 T. Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Urbana, Ill.:
University of Illinois Press, 1964).
8 P. Sandman, D. Rubin, and D. Sachsman, Media: An Introduc¬
tory Analysis of American Mass Communication (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976).
9 “Finis for Harper’s,” Washington Post, June 18, 1980, p. 1.
10 Tom La Faille, “Corporate Underwriting: The Dragon that Threat¬
ens Public Broadcasting,” in Robert Atwan, Barry Orton, and Wil¬
liam Vestermon, American Mass Media (New York: Random
House, 1978), pp. 407—414.
11 Arnold H. Ismach, “The Economic Connection: Mass Media Prof¬
its, Ownership and Performance,” in Everette E. Dennis, Arnold
H. Ismach, and Donald M. Gillmor, Enduring Issues in Mass
Communication (St. Paul: West, 1978).
12 John L. Hulting and Roy P. Nelson, The Fourth Estate (New York:
Harper & Row, 1971), p. 9.
13 William S. Holdsworth, “Defamation in the Sixteenth and Seven¬
teenth Centuries,” Law Quarterly Review, 40 (1924), 302—304.
14 Richard Findlater, Comic Cuts (London: Andre Deutsch, 1970),
pp. 21—22.
15 Douglass Cater, The Fourth Branch of Government (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1959), p. 119.
 Economic and Political Controls on the Media 153 ■

16 James Reston, The Artillery of the Press (New York: Harper &
Row, 1966), p. 20.
17 Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism, 3rd ed. (New York:
Macmillan Co., 1962), pp. 336-337.
18 John L. Hulting and Roy P. Nelson, The Fourth Estate (New York:
Harper & Row, 1971), p. 9.
19 See “Freedoms to Read and Write and Be Informed,” Publisher's
Weekly, December 13, 1971, p. 29.
20 A good example is New York’s 1970 law. Essentially, it protects
journalists and newscasters from charges of contempt in any pro¬
ceeding brought under state law for refusing or failing to disclose
the sources of information obtained while gathering news for
publication. See Editor and Publisher, May 6, 1972, p. 32.
21 Anthony Lewis, “Life Isn’t So Simple as the Press Would Have It,"
ASNE Bulletin, September 1983, quotation on p. 34.
22 Television and Growing Up: The Impact of Televised Violence
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education and
Welfare, December 31, 1971).
23 Fred Powledge, The Engineering of Restraint (Washington, D.C.:
Public Affairs Press, 1971), p. 46.
24 See Tony Mauro, “Reagan Imposes ‘Ironclad grip’ on Words by
Government Employees,” 1983-84 Freedom of Information Re¬
port, Society of Professional Journalists, Chicago.
25 R. H. Coase, “Economics of Broadcasting and Government,”
American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, (May
1966), 442.
26 Office of Communication, United Church of Christ, v. F.C.C.
(1966).
27 Hillier Krieghbaum, Pressures on the Press (New York: Thomas Y.
Crowell, 1972), p. 80.
28 For further examples of such influences, see John Hohenberg,
The New Media: A Journalist's Look at His Profession (New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968).
29 Garry Wills, “Measuring the Impact of Erotica," Psychology To¬
day, 11, No. 3 (August 1977), 30-34, 74-76.
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■ The Communication
Industries
 A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself.
Arthur Miller

■ The Print Media

Newspapers, magazines, and books all package basically the

same thing: printed words. Yet all three have been around a long
time, and there is no sign that any one of them is about to re¬
place the others. Even in the face of competition from broad¬
casting and newer technologies, each of the print media
continues to reach millions with a sweeping variety of messages.
To understand why they have survived, we introduce three
concepts here: form, function, and audience. Then we look at
each of the print media in more detail. Our examination is far
from exhaustive, but we will review the diversity within each
medium, their similarities and differences, how the various me¬
dia have influenced each other, how newspapers, magazines,

I
and book publishers work, and how the print media are
financed.

Forms, Ever since Gutenberg invented his press, words printed on pa¬
Functions, and per have helped shape the history of Western civilization. Almost
at once kings, nobles, and clergymen saw the printed word as a
Audiences
weapon in the war for influence on the minds of men and
women. Sayings like “The pen is mightier than the sword” be¬
came commonplace. Or, in Napoleon Bonaparte’s more graphic
terms, “Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a
thousand bayonets.”
But writing had been known for centuries. Why did the writ¬
ten word come to have such power only after the fifteenth cen-
 The Print Media 157 ■

tury? And why did different forms of print—books, magazines,

and newspapers—appear and endure? To answer these ques¬
tions we need to consider the relationships among three ele¬
ments: form, function, and audiences.

The Functions of As we saw in Chapter 1, mass communications serve many

the Media functions. Scholar and commentator Harold D. Lasswell identi¬
fied three principal functions of the media:1

1 Surveillance of the environment. Newspapers, for example,

cover a community, collecting information from a wide vari¬
ety of sources to give the public a picture of what is
happening.
2 Correlation of the parts oj society. Whereas surveillance is
the gathering and distribution of information, correlation
provides explanation and interpretation. The press attempts
to make sense out of the information it has gathered, telling
the public that certain facts are part of a trend or pattern.
Whereas news is surveillance, editorial comment or interpre¬
tive coverage is correlation.
3 Transmission of the social heritage from one generation to
another. This function is essentially educational, taking the
intellectual contributions of one generation and passing
them on to the next.

More simply, we can say that the media serve the functions of

1 Informing
2 Influencing
3 Entertaining
4 Providing a marketplace for goods and services

Most of the print media have multiple functions, although

often one function is dominant. For example, most novels
mainly entertain, although they may also inform and persuade
the reader. We might say that a novel entertains, a newspaper’s
front page informs, and an opinion magazine influences. And, of
course, advertising has a marketplace function as it promotes
goods and services.

Form and Function How do these functions relate to the form of a medium? By form
we mean all the physical characteristics of a medium and how it
is produced. All the print media share one characteristic: they
are composed of words inscribed on some sort of paper by some
sort of ink. Their form is strikingly different from the fleeting
sounds and images of television and films. There are also ob¬
vious differences in form among the print media. The form of a
 ■ 158 The Communication Industries

book gives it a permanent quality; it is therefore most suited for

transmitting the social heritage from one generation to the next.
A book contains words that are meant to be preserved for the fu¬
ture as well as the present. In contrast to books, newspapers
and magazines are forms that can be produced quickly and
rather cheaply, that deteriorate quickly, and that many people
throw away without a second thought. Flimsy, quickly produced
newspapers are well suited for providing the news of the day.
But the relationship between form and function is not a
simple one of cause and effect. The same functions, after all, are
served by different forms. Books, newspapers, and radio can all
inform, and within each form there is considerable diversity.
Moreover, functions change. In the nineteenth century, news¬
papers and magazines emphasized entertaining content; they
serialized novels and included many humorous columns. At one
time 60 percent of the printed matter in popular magazines was
fiction, and 40 percent was nonfiction; now this ratio has been
reversed. Why? The functions of existing media change when a
new medium is introduced. The introduction of films, radio, and
television changed the uses and content of the print media. As
the electronic media offered more and more entertainment, the
print media reduced their emphasis on this function.
Changes over time in the functions of books are also instruc¬
tive. The earliest printed works were vehicles for authoritative
messages; they transmitted religious gospels, the thoughts of
the learned, and the commands of government. Books at first
were luxury items produced for the rich and the powerful. The
great potential of the written word was realized only when it be¬
came a form of communication used by the common person—
and that could happen only after the invention of the printing
press made cheap reproduction possible. In other words, once
there was a change in form—once written material could be
printed instead of hand-copied—it found new functions and new
audiences.

I Audiences There is, of course, no mass communication of any form without

an audience. Printed words are messages prepared for specific
audiences, and their acceptance or rejection of these messages
determines the shape and direction of the medium. It is because
audiences have frequently changed in degree of literacy, tastes,
and interests that all forms of print have undergone almost
constant modification since they emerged centuries ago. To un¬
derstand the differences between say, the magazines of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we need to ask who the au¬
dience is, what uses people make of the medium, and what grat¬
ifications it gives them.
Most forms of print were begun with tiny audiences in mind.
 The Print Media 159 ■

For example, we have seen that books at first were produced for
the learned or the rich, either to read to themselves or aloud to
audiences in churches and governmental institutions. Similarly,
early newspapers carried the political and financial information
that was interesting and useful to their elite audience. There
was a premium on information, and information was equated
with power, which was not to be given indiscriminately to the
common person.
To a great extent the rise of true mass media paralleled the
decline of political and social control by elites and the rise in
power of the common person. As society became more demo¬
cratic and as literacy spread to the lower classes, the print media
had a new potential audience—including workers as well as
bosses, for example. Nineteenth-centuiy workers in New York
City might not have been very interested in financial news and
shipping, but they were very interested in news of people like
themselves. When newspapers in the 1830s started to offer that
kind of news at a reasonable price, they captured a new audi¬
ence and developed into a mass medium. In books and maga¬
zines, too, changes occurred as society, and the audience,
changed.
Looking at the differences among the media, Canadian critic
Marshall McLuhan offered a provocative analysis of the relation¬
ship between media and audiences. Whatever their content,
McLuhan said, the print and electronic media make different de¬
mands on their audiences. Electronic messages, especially on
television, involve several senses at once. Print, on the other
hand, makes a dominant demand on the eyes and forces the
reader to think in sequence, just as the reader’s eyes move in a
sequence from left to right on the printed page. The electronic
messages, according to McLuhan, are more challenging and en¬
gage the mind in different ways than the print media do. This
and other ideas led McLuhan to his famous aphorism: “The me¬
dium is the message.” In other words, the way a medium inter¬
acts with people’s minds is more important than the content it
delivers. To McLuhan, the print media have become obsolete,
and he predicted their death as a result of the appearance of
electronic media such as television. Whether or not one accepts
McLuhan's extreme position, it emphasizes that technological
innovations change the media, that one medium affects other
media, and that the audience is an important element in
communication.
Understanding the development of print thus requires some
understanding of the characteristics of the audience it serves.
(We will describe the audiences for various media in more detail
in Chapter 11.) What is popular today, what meets the demands
of today’s reader, may not satisfy the reader of tomorrow. The
 ■ 160 The Communication Industries

growth of the print media has been the story of a changing au¬
dience with new expectations and new demands.

■ Newspapers The distance is great from the simple colonial newspaper, run by
a single printer in a tiny shop, to the complicated operations of
a paper like the Washington Post or Wall Street Journal. In
place of ink-smudged typesetters one finds gleaming computers.
In place of the printer who was also essayist, editor, and busi¬
ness manager, one often finds a corporation employing thou¬
sands. Approximately 63 million newspaper copies are now sold
in America every day. To examine this huge medium, we begin
by looking at one aspect of American newspapers that has
changed little over two centuries: the dual identity shaped by
their economic and social environment.

I A Dual Identity We can define newspapers rather simply: newspapers regularly

publish by mechanical processes general news prepared for a
general audience. Once we go beyond this very simple definition,
however, we find that newspapers are different things to differ¬
ent people.

The United States Department of Commerce classifies newspapers in

business terms. Newspaper publishing is the nation’s tenth largest
industry and its fifth largest industrial employer. The United States
Constitution and its interpreters see newspapers as conveyors of in¬
formation and opinion vital to the operation of government and the
maintenance of freedom. . . . The millions who read newspapers see
them in myriad roles. . . . The newspaper is at once a private enter¬
prise struggling in a highly competitive economy and a quasi-public
institution serving the needs of all citizens.2

In short, newspapers are private, profit-making businesses

with a special role. They are the basic instrument for delivering
information to citizens to allow the robust discussion of public
affairs necessary in a democracy. As a result, newspapers have
a special responsibility to inform the public and, as we saw in
Chapter 4, are granted special freedoms protected by the
Constitution.
Thus newspapers have a dual identity: on the one hand, they
are quasi-public institutions that claim to serve the public inter¬
est; on the other hand, they are profit-making businesses that
can be very self-serving. As a quasi-public institution, the news¬
paper is supposed to be the watchdog of the public interest and
often an antagonist of government and other forces in power. As
a business, the newspaper seeks to make a profit and is a mem¬
ber of the business community, a major employer, a member of
the chamber of commerce. The conflict inherent in the news¬
paper s dual role can show up within the newspaper organiza-
 The Print Media 161 ■

tion, as business interests and the professional values of

journalism clash. For example, the advertising department and
news editors may compete for space, or they may argue over how
some stories should be covered.
It probably makes little difference how we define newspapers,
but how newspaper people define them can make a great deal of
difference. If a publisher sees the paper as only, or primarily, a
business, why bother to investigate a minor scandal that is
likely to antagonize advertisers? Why bother to pay the salaries
necessary to keep good reporters if your gossip columns and
comics and sports section can maintain your circulation and
your advertising? But if the publisher does not see the paper as
a business, it is not likely to be printing the news or anything
else for long.

Changing Seeing the newspaper as a business means knowing how to

Functions make a profit, which means one must know how to sell the pa¬
per to an audience. More than a half-century ago, sociologist
Robert E. Park said of newspapers

The natural history of the press is the history of the surviving spe¬
cies. It is an account of the conditions under which the existing
newspaper has grown up and taken form. A newspaper is not merely
printed. It is circulated and read. Otherwise it is not a newspaper.
The struggle for existence, in the case of the newspaper, has been a
struggle for circulation.3

To win this struggle for circulation, newspaper publishers have

had to adjust to the changing demands of their audience; they
have had to fulfill varied and changing functions.
Around the time of the American Revolution, the newspapers’
definition of their function was limited. There were two cate¬
gories of papers: (1) political papers, which were the organs of
political parties or factions and argued their point of view; and
(2) commercial papers, which simply recorded commercial
transactions and business matters such as the coming and
going of ships. As we have seen, the audiences of these news¬
papers were as limited as their functions.
Then in the 1830s Ben Day’s New York Sun did something
else, and along with the rest of the penny press, it spurred a rev¬
olution in communication. Day offered his readers the news that
was nearest at hand—the incidental happenings of New York
life. The Sun was filled with news of human interest about com¬
mon people. In its first issue Day declared; “The object of this
paper is to lay before the public, at a price within the means of
everyone, all the news of the day, and at the same time afford
an advantageous medium for advertising.”4 The penny press
 ■ 162 The Communication Industries

expanded the range of topics that newspapers surveyed and

correlated, and it did far more to entertain its audiences than
previous papers had. And its audience grew in size. With the
growth of American cities came the rise of mass-circulation
newspapers.5
Since the time of the penny press, American newspapers have
included diverse content for a diverse and large audience. To at¬
tract this heterogeneous group of people, most American papers
try to fulfill many functions simultaneously: to inform, correlate,
entertain, and serve as a marketplace for goods and services.
Their dominant functions, however, have been to provide infor¬
mation and serve as a marketplace.
Some newspapers also have a special function as a local gov¬
ernment’s official newspaper. According to Black’s law diction¬
ary, an official newspaper is one “designated by a state or
municipal legislative body, or agents empowered by them, in
which the public acts, resolves, advertisements, and notices are
required to be published.’’ For example, the laws of a city or
state may require that the government publish a notice of can¬
didates for office, of an auction of property taken over for failure
to pay taxes, or of a building contract open for bids. When a local
government designates a paper as its official newspaper, it pays
the paper to print these notices and advertisements. Since co¬
lonial times, local governments have subsidized selected news¬
papers with legal advertising. Sometimes the subsidy made the
difference between survival and bankruptcy for the newspaper.
In many cities and towns, the official newspaper is the commu¬
nity’s main daily or weekly, but in large cities it is often a spe¬
cialized legal or commercial newspaper.
When the appearance of radio threatened newspapers, they
began to emphasize the news “scoop” less; radio, after all, could
always get the news out faster. Instead, newspapers emphasized
the details and the significance of the news, which they could
supply better than radio could. When newspapers in the 1960s
and 1970s feared they were losing out to other media, they again
began to change their content to make newspapers lighter and
more like magazines. In other words, they gave less emphasis to
the information function.
One change came in the way news was covered. Educator
Todd Hunt described the trend as a move away from event-
centered news—such as stories on fires, meetings, or political
speeches and toward process-centered news—such as eco¬
nomic analyses, stories on cultural trends, and background re¬
ports on political decisions.
Another change came in what was covered: newspapers be¬
gan to give less emphasis to hard news and more attention to
lifestyle and consumer issues. Even the New York Times, known
 The Print Media 163 ■

for its tendency to be staid and serious as well as reliable, now

includes special sections each week called Home, Living, and
Weekend. In a typical newspaper today, you might find, in addi¬
tion to the 60 percent of the space given over to advertising, 20
percent devoted to features, columns, sports, comics, and so on,
and 20 percent to news. These changes in content conform
pretty well with what people will actually read in a newspaper.
Connecting with the audience has always been vital to news¬
papers and other media, but rarely has preoccupation with au¬
dience interests been more dramatic than in the launching of
the national newspaper USA Today in 1982. In one of the most
exhaustive newspaper marketing studies ever done, researchers
probed potential readers to find out what they would read, what
form the material should take, and even how it should be dis¬
played. Thus one magazine declared that USA Today was a re¬
sult of “how editors interpreted what readers told researchers
they wanted.”
Changes in coverage have been aimed at one group especially:
the youth market, those in their late teens to late twenties. A few
years ago newspaper executives were alarmed by studies show¬
ing that young people were not becoming newspaper readers,
much less newspaper buyers. The trend portended a bleak fu¬
ture for newspapers and did not please advertisers. People in
this age group, after all, are among those whom advertisers most
want to reach. As a result, the Newspaper Advertising Council
urges newspapers to provide more material of interest to young
people. The result has been special sections and more coverage
of entertainment and clothing.
These changes in content have been accompanied by similar
changes in format. Some papers once included as many as nine
columns of rather small type. By the 1980s, however, most pa¬
pers had reduced the number of columns, adding white space
between columns and reducing the size of the page. The result
looks easier to read. Other changes in design, including greater
use of drawings and color, have made newspapers visually more
appealing.

The Years ago, Walter Lippmann marveled at the rich offerings of

Communicators: American newspapers when he wrote, “The range of subjects
How Newspapers these comparatively few men [editors] manage to cover would be
Are Organized a miracle, indeed, if it were not for a standardized routine.”6
Part of that routine involves using material from many outside
sources—in particular, the wire services and syndicates, which
we discuss in Chapter 13. Here we look at the foundation of a
newspaper’s routine: its organizational structure, its division of
labor.
Although newspapers range in size from the New York Times,
■ 164 The Communication Industries

■ News carriers, mostly “newsboys” in this turn of the century

photo, have been a part of the distribution of newspapers since the
days of the Penny Press. (Smithsonian Institution Photo No. 73-5139.)

with a staff of about six thousand employees, to the country

weekly with a staff of three or four, one aspect of their organi¬
zational structure is constant: all papers have both business
and editorial operations. Generally, the business side manages
business affairs and advertising—which generates income and
keeps the paper alive—and the editorial side acquires informa¬
tion and produces the paper’s editorial content.
The larger the paper, the more complex the organization. On
the business side several essential activities are often organized
as separate departments. The advertising department handles
both display advertising from merchants and businesses and
the brief announcements (such as apartments for rent, help
wanted) known as classified advertising. The production de¬
partment is responsible f »r typesetting and printing. Selling the
paper and arranging for s delivery by home carriers, mail, or to
 The Print Media 165 ■

street sellers is the responsibility of the circulation department.

A general business department handles such things as account¬
ing, personnel, and building maintenance.
The editorial side of the paper gathers and writes stories, se¬
lects what to publish, and prepares it for printing: photographs,
too, are handled by the editorial side. It is headed by an editor,
sometimes called the executive editor. The executive editor
works for the publisher and coordinates operations with the
business manager. Reporting to the executive editor is the man¬
aging editor, who manages the newsroom. The managing editor
hires and fires staff members and supervises various subeditors.
Among the subeditors may be an editor of the editorial page
(sometimes called the associate editor) and a city editor, or met¬
ropolitan editor, who is the direct supervisor of all reporters and
of the special editors for entertainment, sports, business, and so
on. The city editor also manages the various copy editors and
copy desks, where the work of reporters is reviewed, given head¬
lines, and generally readied for publication. These desks (or little
departments) include the city desk (where news from the city it¬
self is coordinated), the metropolitan desk, the county desk,
and the state desk. In addition there is a news editor, some¬
times called the wire editor or telegraph editor, who edits and
coordinates the national and international news coming from
wire services such as the Associated Press and United Press
International.
Reporters are the people who gather news and write stories.
There are basically three kinds of reporters. General assignment
reporters cover a wide range of news as it happens, regardless of
the topic; they also rewrite stories. Beat reporters are assigned
to particular areas of government, such as the courts, police,
and state government. Specialist reporters are trained to cover
fields such as business, science, and urban problems.

The Message: Types American newspapers come in all types and sizes, but most
of Newspapers American papers, past and present, have shared at least one
characteristic: they are vigorously local papers. In contrast, in
France, Britain, and most other nations, the newspapers em¬
phasize national news and national concerns. They are aimed
not at one specific city or area but at a whole country: they are
national papers with a national audience. The United States
does have a few national newspapers, for example, USA Today,
the Christian Science Monitor, and the Wall Street Journal. In
addition, the New York Times and the Washington Post are read
nationwide. But both of the papers are not quite “national” be¬
cause they depend on their city for most of their readers and
give special attention to that area. They frequently have news of
their city on the front page and devote a section of the paper to
■ 166 The Communication Industries

news of their region. Most American papers are associated with

a particular area and give special attention to that area. They are
regional papers with a distinctive local stamp.
We can divide America’s thousands of newspapers into two
very general categories: first, papers aimed at a particular social
class or particular group, a category that includes a very small
fraction of American papers, and second, newspapers intended
for the mass of people within their area. These papers are often
classified in terms of how often they are published and how
many people they reach.

■ Major Metropolitan Dailies. The major metropolitan dailies

in the nation’s largest cities have circulations in excess of
250,000 and a probable readership several times that. (Circula¬
tion is the number of copies sold; any copy sold may be read by
several people.) They usually publish seven days a week, includ¬
ing a large Sunday paper that devotes considerable space to fea¬
tures on books, travel, the arts, personalities, and similar
topics. Major metropolitan newspapers, such as the Chicago
Tribune or Los Angeles Times, often reach readers not only in
their metropolitan area but also in surrounding states. These
papers may have national significance (the New York Times) or
regional importance (the Kansas City Star) or primarily a local
readership (the Milwaukee Sentinel). They are distributed
house to house by carriers or occasionally by mail.
The major metropolitan dailies include news, features, enter¬
tainment, sports, and opinions. They rely on the wire services
for much of their national and international news, although a
few have national staffs (usually based in Washington) and for¬
eign correspondents in important cities around the world. Sev¬
eral have set up special investigative teams that put together
detailed stories on local problems or scandals.
The vast majority of metropolitan newspapers are printed full
size—usually approximately fourteen by twenty-two inches with
six or seven columns. Some are tabloids—approximately twelve
by sixteen inches with five columns. At one time tabloids were
usually splashy, sensational newspapers in big cities. They were
designed to capture attention for high sales on the street, and
often they had large, bold headlines. Today tabloids include the
strikingly sensational New York Post and Boston Herald as well
as the more sedate Christian Science Monitor.

■ Medium-sized and Small Dailies. Medium-sized dailies may

have modest circulations (say, between 50,000 and 100,000),
but they are often physically hefty. They may have fewer of their
own editorial resources than the major dailies, but they can use
the news and features supplied by the wire services. They may
 The Print Media 167 ■

also subscribe to syndicates that provide feature material, com¬

ics, and political columns. Some medium-sized dailies have re¬
gional circulations, but most try to provide local news not
readily available from other sources.
Small dailies have a circulation under 50,000. They are even
more localized than medium-sized dailies and sometimes are
meant to be read along with a larger, nearby regional paper.
Usually physically smaller than other dailies, they use less ma¬
terial from external sources such as the wire services than the
medium-sized dailies do.

■ Nondaily Newspapers. Sometimes called the community or

grassroots press, the weeklies were once exclusively rural or sub¬
urban publications. They ranged from sophisticated suburban
papers that featured lifestyle stories (for example, on apartment
living or how to fund a day-care center) to small country papers
dominated by local events and country correspondence. In the
1980s an increasing number of new urban weeklies have devel¬
oped. Some concentrate on their own neighborhood; others are
sophisticated, cosmopolitan publications that review such top¬
ics as politics and the arts. Urban weeklies like New York's Vil¬
lage Voice, Chicago’s Reader, Boston’s Phoenix, for example,
are mainly supplementary reading for people who are already in¬
formed about public affairs from other media. In 1983, the
Washington Post launched a national weekly for just such an au¬
dience (those who wanted an interpretive supplement on na¬
tional affairs).
Most weeklies are local papers in local communities, although
there have been some notable national weeklies. The family-
oriented feature paper Grit, published in Pennsylvania, has been
serving people in small towns across America for generations.
The National Observer, which died in 1977, appealed to Ameri¬
cans nationwide, presenting magazinelike content—feature
articles and interpretations about the nation—in a newspaper
format.

■ Free-Distribution Newspapers. Papers that were originally

called “shoppers" by the commercial press have been with us for
decades, but in the 1980s many of these free-circulation papers
took an even more aggressive stance in competing with tradi¬
tional daily and weekly newspapers. They added more news and
also entertainment material as well as calendars of local events
and various features. Many were willing to print publicity ma¬
terial for local organizations and groups without much editing.
These papers, once regarded as nonserious journalism by the
mainstream press, have become serious competitors. Indeed,
a number of conventional papers have begun their own free-
■ 168 The Communication Industries

distribution papers to remain competitive Examples of free-

distribution newspapers are the Tab, which publishes separate
editions of its paper for several Boston suburbs; Northeast
News, in Houston, Texas; and the Village Advocate, in Chapel
Hill, North Carolina.

■ The Ethnic Press. Both foreign-language papers and papers

written in English but aimed at a particular ethnic group make
up the ethnic press. At one time there was a substantial foreign-
language press in America. In the colonial period papers in
French were common. Later, during the late nineteenth century,
German and Scandinavian papers prospered. But as an immi¬
grant group assimilates into the general population, its foreign-
language papers tend to die out. Thus German-language papers
are less common today than they once were, while the number
of Spanish-language papers is increasing, as are papers aimed
at new Asian immigrants. English-language papers serving ra¬
cial and cultural minorities are more common today than
foreign-language papers.
The black press in America began in the nineteenth century.
From 1827 to 1830 John B. Russworm issued the periodical
Freedom's Journal to counter the attacks on blacks by New York
papers. In 1847 Frederick Douglass began publication of his
North Star, later called Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Today there
are more than one hundred black newspapers, including the
Baltimore Afro-American, Bilalian News, the Amsterdam News,
and the Chicago Defender.
Most black newspapers emerged because of segregation in the
white press. Black people and their concerns were virtually ig¬
nored, and for many years it was difficult for blacks to get jobs
within the mainstream media. This began to change as a result
of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and has
continued, in part, because of demands by the federal govern¬
ment for more minority hiring. Many industry and professional
organizations in the newspaper field have organized special pro¬
grams for minorities, and there is a continuous effort to recruit
minority personnel. There has also been more emphasis on re¬
porting on the minority community, although this coverage is
regarded as inconsistent by many media critics. Although there
was considerable progress in both hiring and coverage during
the 1970s and 1980s, many programs fell far short of their goal,
and minority journalists complained that they were often the
“last hired, first fired.”
In the early 1970s it was widely thought that the black press
was dying. In recent years, though, there has been something of
 The Print Media 169 ■

a comeback by the black press, with papers providing specialty

news for this audience and also serving as an outlet for mes¬
sages and products being marketed exclusively to the black
audience.
In 1855 Francisco P. Ramirez founded El Clamor Publico
(“The Public Outcry”) to give Mexican-Americans a voice. Promi¬
nent Hispanic American newspapers today include La Raza
(Los Angeles), La Guardia (Milwaukee), and El Grito del Norte
(Albuquerque). Indian papers include the Navaho Times (Ari¬
zona), Cherokee Advocate (Oklahoma) and the Yakima Nation
Review (Washington). For the most part these papers are com¬
munity weeklies that give close attention to local people and lo¬
cal affairs, but they also take on broader issues that affect their
readers.

■ Other Specialized Newspapers. The list of specialized papers

can go on and on. There are many industrial and commercial
newspapers; labor newspapers; religious newspapers; hobby,
voluntary association, and other special-interest newspapers;
and, of course, college newspapers. There are even prison news¬
papers. Specialized newspapers are directed at a specific group
of people rather than a general audience, and in that sense they
fall outside our definition of newspapers as a mass medium.
Some of these papers are supported not by advertising but by
membership fees or an organization’s profits.

■ Alternative Newspapers. Yet another type is the alternative

newspaper, which is aimed at countering the majority press
through unconventional messages. In the 1960s underground
newspapers emerged to cater to participants in the counter¬
culture. They were mainly concerned with such matters as psy¬
chedelic art, drugs, rock music, and political and social causes.
Most had died by the mid-1970s. The few that survived, includ¬
ing the Boston Phoenix and the Chicago Reader, are a far cry
from their earlier forms. Rather than urging the cause of a coun¬
terculture and social change, they now provide some coverage of
politics plus a large dose of fairly conventional information on
the arts and local entertainment. There is a national organiza¬
tion of alternative news weeklies that holds an annual conven¬
tion. This group, once mainly concerned about the “underclass”
in America and other social issues, is more likely to be inter¬
ested in advertising rates and journalistic techniques today.
The alternative newspapers clearly represented dissatisfac¬
tion with the prevailing standards and styles of journalism in
America. Closely related to them are muckraking papers like the
 ■ 170 The Communication Industries

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■ While most American newspapers are general circulation periodi¬

cals aimed at a geographic audience, newspapers are becoming
more demographic. Some are targeted to specific ethnic audiences
as El Mundo, a Hispanic paper; and Sojourner, a paper directed to¬
ward women. (Courtesy El Mundo Newspaper. Used by permission. Sojour¬
ner, Cambridge.)

investigative and scrappy San Francisco Bay Guardian and the

Maine Times, a paper largely concerned with the quality of life
and environmental issues in Maine. Another paper, the Willa¬
mette Week of Portland, Oregon, got a reputation for quality
journalism by winning important prizes.

I The Economics of
Newspapers
By 1984 American newspapers employed nearly 425,000 people.
Their salaries—as well as all the other costs of the newspapers—
were paid principally by advertising. The newsstand price ac¬
counts for only about one-fourth of a newspaper’s revenues;
advertising accounts for about three-fourths. To get these adver-
 The Print Media 171 ■

tising dollars, newspapers today must compete with radio, tele¬

vision, magazines, and direct-mail advertising. As we have seen,
this competition has led to some changes in newspapers, but on
the whole they are faring pretty well. To put together a profile of
the state of the industry, we can ask how many papers are sold,
how many are published, who owns them, and how profitable
they are.

■ Circulation, Total circulation of daily newspapers in America

has climbed from about 51 million in 1946 to almost 63 million
in 1982. Except for declining circulations in 1972-1975, the
growth in circulation has been pretty steady. Circulation per
household, however, has declined; the American population has
grown faster than newspaper circulation. Newspaper circulation
may be barely holding out against the competition of other me¬
dia, both print and broadcasting.

■ The Number of American Papers. Between 1880 and 1900

the number of newspapers in America more than doubled—from
850 to 1,967. But after 1910, when the country had 2,202
English-language dailies and 400 foreign-language dailies, the
number of papers began to decline. Some papers merged; some
dailies became weeklies; others suspended publication com¬
pletely. The number of daily newspapers declined from 2,042 in
1920 to 1,772 in 1950. Since then, the number of daily papers
has stayed fairly constant, varying from year to year from about
1,700 to 1,750. The number of weekly newspapers has indeed
declined steadily since 1960, but their total weekly circulation
and estimated readership grew. The number of small dailies (un¬
der 50,000 circulation) has generally decreased since the end of
World War II, whereas the number of middle-sized papers (be¬
tween 50,000 and 100,000 circulation) has grown markedly. Es¬
pecially noteworthy is the fact that the number of all dailies with
circulations over 50,000 has increased greatly. The number of
dailies with circulations over 250,000 (that is, the major metro¬
politan papers) has remained rather stable.
These numbers suggest that the economy will support a more
or less fixed number of papers. This notion is confirmed by the
large sums that publishers have been willing to pay to buy exist¬
ing newspapers. If there were a market to support new papers,
they would not be willing to pay so much for existing ones.

■ The Owners of American Fapers. While the number of pa¬

pers has remained pretty stable in recent years, the number of
independent papers has declined. Just as the small, individually
owned business in America has often been assimilated into
giant corporate enterprises, so it is with newspapers. Small,
■ 172 The Communication Industries

independent, family-owned papers have be^n sold to newspaper

groups or chains.
Chains are nothing new. But in recent years chains have
been buying chains, and groups have been buying up groups.
The media gave considerable attention to the Australian press
lord Rupert Murdoch, who came to America and began purchas¬
ing newspapers and magazines. In New York he bought the New
York Post, the Village Voice, and New York magazine; in Mas¬
sachusetts, the Boston Herald; in Illinois, the Chicago Sun-
Times. But the impact of Murdoch is small compared with other
purchases that have occurred with less public fanfare. For ex¬
ample, by 1984 the Gannett Corporation owned ninety daily
newspapers, as well as seven television stations and twelve radio
stations in thirty-three states; according to Fortune magazine, it
was one of the nation’s five hundred largest companies. The
Times-Mirror Company, which has even larger financial re¬
sources than Gannett, owns the Los Angeles Times, Newsday
(on Long Island, N.Y.), and the Dallas Times-Herald as well as
several book publishers, magazines, television stations, paper
mills, and cable television companies.
Most communications enterprises are owned by companies
that specialize in communications; but lately other corporations
have moved into the communications field. Media critics like
Ben Bagdikian have warned that in a few years a handful of
insurance companies, oil companies, and other corporate enter¬
prises might have a stranglehold on the American media,
especially newspapers. This prospect is even more alarming
than dominance by large communications industries for two
reasons: with its far-flung and diverse economic interests, the
conglomerate is more likely to have reasons to bias the news;
and the managers of a conglomerate are more likely to view the
newspaper as a business rather than an institution with special
responsibilities to the public as well as a business.
Sometimes religious organizations invest in general circula¬
tion media, and this too can be controversial. The Christian Sci¬
ence Monitor, which makes no secret of its ownership by the
Christian Science Church, is a highly respected paper, but the
religious connections of other newspapers have aroused con¬
cern. For example, Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s followers own and
operate the New York News-World, a small-circulation tabloid.
In Washington, D.C., the Washington Times, a conservative
daily, also has ties to members of Moon’s Unification Church.
Again, the concern is whether a paper owned by a church or a
political party or a business can be an impartial carrier of the
news. In 1984, the Times’ publisher was fired as controversy
flared about the role of the Unification Church in the affair.
 The Print Media 173 ■

Box 5

When the
Shark
Bites...

“A shark in a snake’s skin. ” promises were "not worth the paper they’re
“Press lord of mass ignorance.” written on.”
The man these phrases have been used to Fearful of action by the British monopolies
describe is Rupert Murdoch: Australian entre¬ commission, Murdoch came to America in
preneur and owner of one of the world’s larg¬ 1973, first acquiring two papers in San Anto¬
est newspaper chains. News International. nio and then launching a supermarket tabloid,
Murdoch may be the most controversial figure the Star. His next acquisition was the New
in publishing today, provoking rage and de¬ York Post, to which he applied the formula that
spair among journalists and prompting one had been successful in Great Britain and Aus¬
editor to charge that “what he does just isn’t tralia: attention-grabbing headlines, racy pho¬
journalism.” But what does he do? tos, and bingo-style contests. These boosted
Murdoch began acquiring newspapers at the Post's circulation from 485,000 to 960,000
the age of twenty-two and financed his em¬ within a few years. More acquisitions fol¬
pire-building with funds garnered from the lowed: New York magazine, the Village Voice,
success of a brash, flashy tabloid in Australia. the Boston Herald. Murdoch made an unsuc¬
His amibition led him to London where in cessful bid for control of the giant Warner
1969 he bought an ailing, left-wing newspaper Communications Corporation. Then, early in
and turned it into a tabloid featuring sensa- 1984, he bought the nation’s eighth largest pa¬
tionalistic headlines and photos of partially per, the Chicago Sun-Times, and a storm
nude women. Then when Murdoch made a broke out again. Within five months, sixty-
move toward London’s stately Times news¬ eight of the paper’s 360 staff members had re¬
papers, the British grew nervous. Editors who signed, among them the editor, publisher,
had left his Australian papers said that he had managing editor, foremost columnist, and en¬
told them what to write and which politicians tire staff of editorial writers. The newspaper
to back. Murdoch signed guarantees of edito¬ took on characteristics similar to the Post and
rial freedom when he took over the Times in the Herald and gave increased coverage to
1981, but within a year he admitted that those sports events and violent crimes.
 ■ 174 The Communication Industries

Confronted with charges that he has ma¬ the London Times, quoted Murdoch as saying,
nipulated the news in order to increase sales “I give instructions to my editors all around
and/or foster conservative political causes, the world, why shouldn’t I in London?”
Murdoch retorts that “American journalists Many journalists and newspaper readers
simply don’t know how to compete,” and feel that Murdoch has turned papers such as
points out that the Village Voice and New the Post into “entertainment papers,” driving
York have not changed substantially since he serious newspapers out of business. They feel
bought them. But editors and reporters con¬ that journalists and proprietors of news¬
tinue to worry about the kind of influence that papers alike should share a commitment to
Murdoch has on their business. The Colum¬ excellence and accuracy in news reporting.
bia Journalism Review claimed that “he rou¬ But Murdoch disagrees. “After all,” he says,
tinely uses his newspapers to promote his “we are in the entertainment business.” What
political causes.” Asked whether he would is your opinion?
contradict Murdoch on a political matter, one
of Murdoch’s Australian editors bluntly an¬
swered, “no.” Harold Evans, former editor of photo: Tted Thai/Sygma.

■ Ownership and Content Does the trend toward consolida¬

tion of newspapers and their ownership matter? What have the
economic trends meant for newspaper content and personnel?
In 1945 Justice Hugo Black declared that the First Amend¬
ment guarantee of a free press “rests on the assumption that the
widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and
antagonistic sources is essential to the well-being of the public”
(italics added).7 The trend is surely away from “diverse and an¬
tagonistic sources” of the news. For example, the Cox Broad¬
casting Company, which owns newspapers as well as other
media outlets, reaches 83 percent of the homes in Georgia. No
other organization in the state comes close to matching its
influence.8
Whether ownership in fact influences content is not alto¬
gether clear, however. Some observers say that editors are losing
their authority and power and have less influence on the con¬
tents of their papers. They become responsible to corporate
managers who may or may not understand the special mission
and purposes of newspapers. Some feel that the chains and cor¬
porate ownership have led to a sameness and blandness in
newspaper content. One study of the presidential endorsements
of chain-owned newspapers found that papers within a chain
tended to endorse the same candidate; generally, the study
found less divergence of opinion once a newspaper had become
part of a chain.
On the other hand, Ben Bagdikian, who is generally a caustic
critic of chain ownership, has said, “I think [the result] varies
 The Print Media 175 ■

greatly. Some [papers! were schlock operations before they were

bought and they are schlock operations now.”9 Spokespersons
for chains tend to say that local papers are autonomous in spirit
and that local control of their contents prevails. Allen Neuharth,
president of the Gannett group, disputes those who decry the
impact on quality. He has noted that group ownership can give
a local paper access to a well-staffed Washington bureau and to
other resources that enrich its content.
For the staffs, chain ownership may mean absentee manage¬
ment. New people may join the newspaper and decrease its local
orientation. According to Bagdikian, “With notable exceptions I
find there is usually less satisfaction among the staff of news¬
papers that have been bought by chains.”10

■ Size and Scope of Chains. Determining the relative size and

scope of a newspaper chain or group is more complex than it
may seem at first (see Table 5.1). Some critics are fond of count¬
ing the number of newspapers owned, whereas others look more
to circulation figures. The differences among leading groups are
pointed up in the contrast between Knight-Ridder and Gannett.
Knight-Ridder, which has slightly more circulation, owns a
number of large metropolitan dailies. Gannett, on the other
hand, owns small and medium-sized papers—and more of
them—but has slightly less total circulation than Knight-Ridder.
Of course, if USA Today is counted, this single paper with
nearly 2 million circulation in 1984 would change the figures
considerably. When it comes to the relative power of newspaper
chains, there is little agreement about who has the most clout.
Each of the chains has its own distinctive corporate identity and
sometimes this is carried down to the local paper; at other times
there is significant autonomy, and differences between a chain-
owned and an independent paper are hard to discern. While
critics have long speculated about the negative effects of group
ownership on diverse editorial messages and vigorous, definitive
research evidence on these charges is clearly lacking. It remains
an enduring issue in American communications, however.

■ Profits. Whatever the effect of consolidation of newspaper

ownership, the trend seems unlikely to change. Newspapers are
attractive purchases because newspapers are, by and large,
profitable. Information on newspaper profits is somewhat frag¬
mentary, because many newspapers are still privately held
companies. But one market report showed that, for those news¬
papers whose stock was publicly traded, the average return on
sales was almost twice the average return for the nation's five
hundred leading corporations.11 Similar reports have reinforced
this picture of a profitable industry. In spite of publishers’
 Editor & Publisher Yearbook, 1982; Advertising Age. Reprinted with permission from the June 27, 1983 issue of Advertising Age. Copyright 1983 by
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 The Print Media 177 ■

laments, there is little doubt that today’s newspapers—large,

small, and medium-sized—are profitable industries.

Criticism of For as long as they have existed newspapers have been criti¬
Newspapers cized. Usually the principal critics are people who feel they are
getting a bad deal from the media. Both large institutions and
private individuals are among these critics. In 1983 author Ken
Kesey was so angry at an Oregon newspaper for suggesting he
might be involved with cocaine that he picketed the paper and
filed a $4 million libel suit. Minority groups, especially blacks,
and women have attacked the press for ignoring their accom¬
plishments or demeaning them. Undoubtedly the most sus¬
tained criticism of the press in the 1970s and 1980s has come
from business. Large corporations like Mobil Oil have been so
dissatisfied that they have taken to firing back retorts in adver¬
tisements denouncing what they regard as biased journalism.

■ Objectivity and Its Opponents. At the heart of many cri¬

tiques of the press during the 1960s and 197's was an assault
on objectivity, a style of reporting that has b^en the accepted
standard in American newspapers for decades. Objective report¬
ing attempts to be impersonal and factual; it is based on the
idea that fact and opinion can be separated. Defenders of this
style say that by removing emotion and personal involvement
from their stories, fairness and a balancing of interests is en¬
sured. Critics claim that the objective form is not objective—that
is, unbiased—at all. No matter how impersonal the tone of a
story, the selection and ordering of what is to be said is subjec¬
tive. During the 1960s and 1970s, many critics claimed that the
objective style was a cover for repeating the government’s line as
fact and thus for supporting the status quo. Readers will be bet¬
ter informed, critics claim, if reporters do not pretend to be ob¬
jective but instead acknowledge their feelings and opinions.
This criticism of objectivity inspired new styles of writing, in¬
cluding what is called the new journalism and advocacy journal¬
ism. The new journalism makes room for the emotions and
personalities of reporters by allowing color and feeling in
newswriting. Some practitioners of the style use interior mono¬
logues (reporting what people said they thought), extensive de¬
scriptions, and other methods associated with fiction writing.
Advocacy journalism makes room for a journalist’s political be¬
liefs. In advocacy journalism the reporter takes a point of view,
identifying with a particular cause or purpose.
We will discuss these styles of journalism in more detail in
Chapter 12. Interest in the new journalism and advocacy jour¬
nalism has slowly faded, but not without leaving a decided
mark. Advocacy pieces continue to be published, and newswrit-
■ 178 The Communication Industries

ing generally is more creative and varied today than before these
styles came on the scene. Some of this writing has even been in¬
corporated into mainstream journalism.

■ What Is Covered: Deciding the News. The new journalism

and advocacy journalism were attempts by reporters to change
the way the news is reported; the media access movement was
an attempt by outsiders to change the content that is reported.
It was an attempt to open the newspapers to those outside the
industry.
The media access movement was based on what one law pro¬
fessor called a “positive interpretation” of the news. Professor
Jerome Barron argued that when the framers of the Constitu¬
tion wrote the First Amendment, they meant that all the people
have a right to freedom of the press, not just the owners of the
media. Barron claimed that all people should have the legal right
to buy advertising and reply to editorials in the print media. The
fairness doctrine developed by the FCC grants equal time
for people to reply to comments made on television and radio;
Barron wanted the fairness doctrine to apply to the print media
as well.
Barron received support from many consumer groups, but
newspaper editors were livid. His position amounted to an as¬
sault on freedom, they said. Newspapers have a right to decide
what is news and what to edit, they claimed.
The debate came to a head when a Florida state legislator dis¬
covered a little-known state law that required newspapers to pro¬
vide space for a reply to a personal attack. He decided to test the
law, claiming his right to reply. In 1974 the U.S. Supreme Court
decided against the legislator’s claim—and against Barron’s
interpretation of the First Amendment (Miami Herald v. Tor-
nillo). Citizens do not have a right of access, said the Court, and
the Florida law interfered with freedom of the press “because of
its intrusion into the function of editors. . . . The choice of ma¬
terial . . . the treatment of public issues and public officials—
whether fair or unfair—constitutes the exercise of editorial
control or judgment.” No legislature can force a newspaper to be
responsible.
The media access movement was only one form of criticism of
newspaper coverage. More generally, the way newspapers define
what is news often seems curious. Even impartial observers can
be perplexed by what is and is not reported. Why is the contin¬
ued turmoil in the Middle East or Ireland on the front page one
day and forgotten another, even though the trouble continues?
Why did a legion of reporters show up at Princeton University
in 1983 when model Brooke Shields enrolled? Are the comings
and goings of Britain’s royal family important enough to merit
 The Print Media 179 ■

headlines even in the most serious of papers? As we will see in

Chapter 12, the significance of events may be secondary in
determining what newspapers cover. At least two other
questions help determine their coverage: What are other media
saying, and what is new and different?

■ Forums for Criticism. Out of the rumblings of many critics

came several instruments for criticism of the press. These are
especially relevant to newspapers, but they apply to magazines
and broadcasting as well. One is the press council, a voluntary
organization of citizens that is intended to provide a forum for
criticism of the press. It has no formal powers in the United
States, but by identifying newspaper practices—both good and
bad—it can be a moral force.
The roots of the press council movement can be found in sev¬
eral foreign countries and in the 1947 Report of the Commission
on Freedom of the Press. Sweden’s first press council was
founded in 1916; in Britain a press council was first established
in 1953. The first American press councils started in small com¬
munities like Littleton, Colorado, mainly on an experimental ba¬
sis. In the late 1960s Stanford University journalism professor
William L. Rivers started councils in several cities in the West.
Other local councils followed, some of which survive today. A
statewide press council was begun in Minnesota in 1971, fol¬
lowed by one in Hawaii and another in Delaware. In 1973 the
National Media Council, with headquarters in New York, was es¬
tablished, but it died in 1984 because of lack of support and
outright media hostility. A media credibility committee was es¬
tablished in Oregon in 1983 as an alternative to press councils.
The press councils today are forums where citizens can meet
with publishers and voice their complaints, but they have no di¬
rect control over the press. Although press councils have not
generally been successful, there has been great concern in the
media about credibility—that is, the confidence which the pub¬
lic does or does not have in the media, especially newspapers
and television.
Another result of the new wave of criticism was the journal¬
ism review. Unlike press councils, journalism reviews are run by
the people who work for a newspaper or broadcast station. Their
purpose is to criticize their own newspapers or stations and
bring about changes. This move by journalists to engage in sys¬
tematic self-criticism on a regular basis was unprecedented. It
was part of the so-called reporter-power movement in which
newspaper reporters and others demanded a larger voice in
newspaper policy.
One of the first reviews was established in 1968 in Chicago.
Before long there were reviews in nearly twenty U.S. cities. Main-
■ 180 The Communication Industries

taining the reviews required considerable personal sacrifice and

enthusiasm, but meanwhile media criticism became fashion¬
able. Major magazines and newspapers began to feature critical
articles and explanations of their internal operations. The need
for the tiny journalist-run reviews was not compelling. Most sim¬
ply died, although a few have held on. San Francisco’s JeedJ
back, the scrappy St. Louis Journalism Review, and the slick
Washington Journalism Review are among them. The best
known journalism review is Columbia Journalism Review, pub¬
lished by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
Media criticism can also be found in various trade publica¬
tions that cover the media—among them presstime, published
by the American Newspaper Publishers Association, and Quill,
published by the Society of Professional Journalists. Major mag¬
azines and newspapers also provide media criticism. For ex¬
ample, when USA Today was launched in 1982, there were
scores of articles offering critical commentary, some of which
called it “junk food journalism” and “MacPaper.” Other critics
were more charitable, hailing it as “the newspaper of the fu¬
ture.” Today, major papers often have reporters covering the
communications industry—especially newspapers.
Other instruments of media criticism also have emerged.
Some newspapers appointed readers’ representatives, or om¬
budsmen, to handle citizen complaints. In some cities, worker-
participation committees gave reporters and other newspaper
personnel greater authority in running their own organizations.
These moves were a step short of democracy in the newsroom,
but they did expand participation in policy making.
In 1983 Philip Meyer of the University of North Carolina pro¬
posed another response to media criticism. He suggested that
there be codes of ethics for employees on both the editorial and
the business sides of newspapers. Existing codes usually apply
only to editorial employees. Meyer further suggested the creation
of all-newspaper ethics committees and outside boards of ad¬
visers. He carried his message to the national convention of
the prestigious American Society of Newspaper Editors and was
well received. Meyer’s suggestions may start a new trend in self¬
regulation of the press.

■ A Balance Sheet By the standards of businesses, news¬

papers are doing well: they are profitable. We have seen that cir¬
culation is increasing as the number of papers holds steady and
their ownership is consolidated into fewer and fewer hands.
Fearing that they were in danger of losing their audience and
their advertisers in the 1970s, newspapers adapted, changing
their content and format to be more appealing to the mass of
 The Print Media 181 ■

readers. In the 1980s they continue to worry about competition

from the electronic media and from national newspapers.
By the standards of their critics in the 1960s and early
1970s, however, newspapers have not done so well, although
they have certainly changed. No one reform movement brought
about striking change, but together they had an effect on style
and coverage. Newspapers today are less objective; they include
more interpretive articles as well as more personal stories. These
changes might result from publishers’ opinions of what readers
like rather than political criticisms of the objective style, but
they are changes nonetheless. Coverage of women and minori¬
ties is substantially greater than it was twenty or even ten years
ago, and there are more ways for the public to criticize news¬
papers. In becoming more like magazines, newspapers have be¬
come better at offering interpretations to their readers. Whether
they have become better at what has been their main function
for decades—providing their readers the basic news—is ques¬
tionable at best.

I Magazines Just what is a magazine and how does it differ from a news¬
paper? Generally, a magazine is published less frequently than
a newspaper. It is also manufactured in a different format—usu¬
ally on better quality paper, bound rather than just folded, and
with some kind of cover. There are exceptions to all these char¬
acteristics, but for the most part they satisfactorily distinguish
the form of magazines from that of newspapers.
To these differences in form we can examine differences in
the functions and audiences of magazines. Because they are
published less often than newspapers, magazines can look into
issues and situations more carefully. In magazines we find less
concern for citing the details of the day’s events—and more for
interpreting and correlating topics in a broad context. Histori¬
cally, magazines have appealed to a regional or national audi¬
ence and have been free of the fierce localism of newspapers.
Theodore Peterson offered this succinct description:

Although the magazine lacked the immediacy of the broadcast me¬

dia and the newspaper, it nevertheless was timely enough to deal
with the flow of events. Its timeliness and continuity set it apart
from the book. As a continuing publication, it could provide a form
of discussion by carrying responses from its audience, could sustain
campaigns for indefinite periods, and could work for cumulative
rather than single impact. Yet its available space and the reading
habits of its audience enabled it to give fairly lengthy treatment to
the subjects it covered. Like the other print media it appealed more
to the intellect than to the senses and emotions of its audience. It
was not as transient as the broadcast media, nor did it require at¬
tention at a given time; it was not as soon discarded as the news-
 ■ 182 The Communication Industries

paper; its issues remained in readers’ homes for weeks, for months,
sometimes even for years. In short, the magazine by its nature met
well the requirements for a medium of instruction and interpreta¬
tion for the leisurely, critical reader.12

The History of In its early years the American magazine was primarily a genteel
American journal intended for an elite group of people. Magazines around
Magazines the time of the Civil War were publishing short stories, novels,
poems, scholarly essays, and political and social commentary.
Several magazines of this period survived into the twentieth cen¬
tury, including North American Review (founded in 1815), Har¬
per’s Monthly (1850), and Atlantic Monthly (1857).
As the century was ending, the magazine industry was ex¬
panding and diversifying. Advertisers were eager to reach
women, and they did so through such magazines as Ladies’
Home Journal, McCall’s, and Woman’s Home Companion. The
1880s and 1890s saw the beginning of several new mass-
circulation magazines that included both Action and nonAction,
such as Collier’s, Cosmopolitan, McClure’s, and the Saturday
Evening Post. In addition, magazines appealing to every inter¬
est, every philosophy, and every profession appeared.
The early years of this century were dominated by the muck¬
raking magazines. The name was coined by President Theodore
Roosevelt to express his disdain. He was comparing journalists
to the “Man with the Muckrake” in Pilgrim’s Progress, who
would not look up from the Alth on the Aoor even when he was
offered a glittering crown. As early as the 1870s Harper’s Weekly
had campaigned to oust New York City’s “Boss” Tweed; and an¬
other nineteenth-century magazine, The Arena, had attacked
slums, sweatshops, and prostitution and demanded sanitation
laws, birth control, and socialized medicine. But at the turn of
the century such campaigns became common. Many magazines
began to publish thorough exposes of corruption in the cities
and abuses by industry, and they were widely read. The names
of such reform-minded writers as Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell,
and Ray Stannard Baker became household words. Steffens pro¬
duced the widely praised “Shame of the Cities” series; Tarbell,
“History of the Standard Oil Company”; and Baker “The Right to
Work,” a series on the problems of workers and corruption in la¬
bor unions. Both mass-circulation and opinion magazines
joined in the muckraking.
Some magazines tried to push social change in ways other
than investigative reports. Cosmopolitan had sent a correspon¬
dent to Spain to negotiate the purchase of Cuba during the
Spanish-American War. The correspondent was ignored, but his
dispatches made good copy. Cosmopolitan also sent good-will
ambassadors to foreign countries, asking that they be allowed to
 The Print Media 183 ■

■ Some magazines, such as Harper's Weekly and McClure's, pub¬

lished articles and short stories that expressed a particular social or
political point of view. (Smithsonian Institution Photo No. 73-14217. Cul¬
ver Pictures.)

meet with heads of state. It proposed an international language

and an international congress and even started a national cor¬
respondence university complete with campus. Eventually, it too
joined the muckrakers.
By World War I, interest in muckraking had declined, but
new classes of magazines soon appeared. One was the news¬
magazine, a term coined by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden
when they founded Time in the 1920s. New concepts arose, too,
such as the digest—a collection of excerpts from other publica¬
tions. Reader's Digest is one of the most successful magazines
 ■ 184 The Communication Industries

of all times. The New Yorker was also founded in the 1920s. In
1936 the picture magazine Life was first phblished, and in 1945
the black picture magazine Ebony was founded. For almost
thirty years, large general-circulation magazines like Life, Look,
Collier’s, and the Saturday Evening Post dominated the maga¬
zine market. Magazines were far ahead of newspapers and books
in the effective, sophisticated use of photographs and graphic
design.
By the end of World War II, magazines were slick and profit¬
able; many were geared to the mass market. Then came televi¬
sion. Like television, magazines depend mostly on national
advertising, and like television, magazines offer both visual ap¬
peal and light entertainment. Thus, as television’s popularity
grew, the general mass-circulation magazine found its audience
and its advertising revenues dwindling. Specialized magazines
fared well, but many general-interest magazines, such as Col¬
lier’s and American, succumbed to economic pressures in the
1950s. In the 1960s many others died, including the large pic¬
ture magazines Life and Look. Some, like Life, returned in the
1970s and 1980s, but in their new form they have smaller, more
carefully targeted circulations.
There are still a few immensely popular magazines that ap¬
peal to the general population, including TV Guide, Reader’s
Digest, and People. But most magazines today are directed not
to a broad, heterogeneous audience but to a more defined group
with distinct interests. In place of many mass-circulation mag¬
azines, we find thousands of special-interest magazines—from
Psychology Today to Parents and Skiing. In short, the maga¬
zine industry had adapted and survived the challenge posed by
broadcasting. Indeed, according to historian James P. Wood:

The magazine . . . provides more efficient communication among

more millions of people than it did over two centuries ago. It trans¬
mits more and different facts and more complicated ideas largely be¬
cause the twentieth century has more of each to transmit than the
eighteenth century, and because people today wish and need more
knowledge and information. Its social force is greater because it
reaches more readers who through their education are more recep¬
tive to ideas in print and who have learned, largely through maga¬
zines, to live in an extended social, political, and economic
environment.13

The In order to reach specialized audiences, magazine publishers

Communicators: sort potential readers into neat, demographic categories with
The Magazine the help of computers; then they refine their products to match
Industry the interests of those readers. They target their magazine’s con¬
tent and tone to appeal to specific audiences. These specialized
audiences appeal to many advertisers who like to be able to tar-
 The Print Media 185 ■

get their advertising to likely consumers. And like newspapers,

most magazines depend on advertising for a large part of their
revenue; a magazine’s selling price is usually less than the cost
of production.
For magazines, like other media, audience ratings and audi¬
ence surveys are important in determining their advertising
rates. But as Philip Dougherty has pointed out, there is an in¬
teresting twist for magazines:

If an editor creates a magazine that is so on target that subscribers

refuse to part with it, that’s bad. If, however, the editor puts out a
magazine that means so little to each individual that it gets passed
from hand to hand to hand, that’s good. Reason: the more the mag¬
azine is passed along, the higher the total audience figure will be. In
that way, the ad agency rates will look more efficient to agency
people, who would be more likely to put the magazine on their . . .
schedule [for advertising].14

For magazines a very high reader-per-copy rate is 6 and a low

rate is 1.8. Simmons Marketing Research reported in 1982 that
the New Yorker had a very high rate (6.1), and Harper's, which
competed for some of the same audience, had a lower rate (4.2
readers per copy).15 So, in spite of circulation differences (New
Yorker had about 500,000, Harper’s, about 330,000), the New
Yorker could charge more than three times as much for its ads
as Harper's could. The New Yorker’s popular cartoons were
thought to be the main reason for its high pass-along rate.
Thus, like all other media, a magazine must pay keen atten¬
tion to its audience in order to survive. And many do not sur¬
vive. American magazines seem to be in a continual process of
birth, adaptation, and death. Because magazine publishers
rarely own their own printing presses, the initial investment
needed to found a magazine is rather modest, and so starting a
magazine is comparatively easy. Maintaining it is more difficult.
Most leading observers agree that many magazines die because
the publisher failed to strike a balance between revenue from
circulation and revenue from advertising. Some magazines die
because the publisher failed to fine-tune the product to meet
changing fashions and interest.
The most successful magazine publishers are those who pro¬
duce more than one magazine. If one magazine fails, they still
have others to keep their company alive. Like newspapers, many
magazines today are owned by chains, large corporations, and
conglomerates.

The Message: Types In 1950 there were 6,960 periodicals in the United States: in
of Magazines 1984 there were more than 12,000. About 800 of these were
general-interest magazines: the rest were devoted to particular
 ■ 186 The Communication Industries

subjects. The American magazine industry today provides a

magazine for just about every income level, age, educational
level, occupational group, and interest.
A hint of this variety is found in the Literary Market Place,
which lists magazines by subject matter. Among its categories
are art and architecture; book digest; business and finance;
juveniles; adults and child study; fantasy and science fiction;
farming and agriculture; and so on to travel, nature, and sports,
and women’s interests, house, and garden. Writer’s Digest clas¬
sifies magazines into four major types: trade journals, such as
Modern Machine Shop and Publisher’s Weekly; sponsored pub¬
lications, such as American Legion; farm publications; and con¬
sumer magazines (see Table 5.2).
Consumer magazines are all those periodicals purchased at
newsstands or subscribed to by the general public. The major
ones are also called the slicks because of their smooth paper;
McCall’s and Ebony are examples. Many consumer magazines
are mass-circulation magazines; but a subcategory, the secon¬
dary consumer magazine, includes broadly circulated maga¬
zines that concentrate on a specialized topic, such as religion or
politics. In fact, the category “consumer magazines” hides a
wide variety of types.

■ Newsmagazines. Serving as national newspapers in America,

newsmagazines include Time, a Luce publication, which was
once known for its strong Republican bias but is now more mod¬
erate politically; Newsweek, a less doctrinaire publication with
a generally liberal bias, owned by the Washington Post Com¬
pany; and the conservative U.S. News & World Report, which
has had a strong pro-business orientation.

■ City Magazines. Publications such as New York, Philadel¬

phia magazine, The Washingtonian, and Boston exemplify the
city magazines, which tend to concentrate on the activities of a
particular city or region. Most major cities, such as Columbus,
and many smaller ones (for example, Albuquerque) now have
city magazines that investigate public affairs and try to sort out
the local scene (especially entertainments and restaurants).

■ Sex Magazines. These publications have high circulations

and generate high incomes. They take pride in their fiction and
nonfiction articles and interviews as well as in their suggestive
photographs. This group includes such general-interest sex
magazines as Playboy, Playgirl, and Penthouse. There are also
raunchier publications like Hustler and Screw that cater to peo¬
ple with unusual sexual appetites (for example, sadomaso-
 The Print Media 187 ■

Table 5.2 Types of Magazines

TYPE DESCRIPTION EXAMPLES

Consumer Periodicals purchased on McCall’s, Ebony, Playboy,

magazines newsstands or subscribed Sports Illustrated,
to by the general public at Commentary
home
Trade Magazines aimed at a particu- Meat Packer Digest,
journals lar trade or industry; also Modern Machine Shop,
called the businesspaper Publisher’s Weekly
press
Sponsored Internal publications of par- Elks, American Legion,
publica- ticular organizations. Ambassador
tions unions, or other groups—
including college and uni¬
versity magazines, cus¬
tomers’ publications,
employee magazines, and
so on
Farm These magazines are given a Farm Journal,
publica- category of their own be- Southern Hog Farmer
tions cause of their large number
and the degree of speciali¬
zation within the farm
press

chism). There are sex magazines for heterosexuals as well as ho¬

mosexuals and bisexuals.

■ Sport Magazines. Americans are preoccupied with sports of

all kinds, and there are scores of magazines to satisfy their in¬
terests, ranging from Sports Illustrated and Sport, which cover
a variety of sports, to specialized magazines covering just one
sport. Runner’s World, Racquetball, and Skiing are examples. A
new sports fashion will quickly generate magazines. When rac¬
quetball gained enthusiasts in the 1980s, several racquetball
magazines appeared. Sport magazines, like sex magazines, once
seemed to be intended “for men only.” But now women make up
■ 188 The Communication Industries

more and more of the audience for general sport magazines, and
there are some sport magazines designed for women.

■ Opinion Magazines. These include some of the oldest and

most respected journals in America. They range from the vener¬
able Nation, which has been publishing since the Civil War,
to the National Review, a conservative magazine founded in the
1950s by columnist William Buckley. Some others are the liberal
New Leader, New Republic, and the Progressive, which received
front-page headlines in 1979 when it clashed with the govern¬
ment over publication of a story describing how an H-bomb
is made.

■ Intellectual Magazines. These publications are very similar

to the opinion magazines, but they usually have denser copy and
are aimed at a more intellectual audience. Examples include
Commentary, American Scholar, and Partisan Review. Both
the opinion magazines and the intellectual magazines pride
themselves on “influencing the influential.” They generally have
small circulations.

■ Quality Magazines. Although these magazines are similar to

opinion and intellectual magazines, they usually have slightly
larger circulations (say, 500,000) and reach a more general au¬
dience than the intellectual journals. Some examples are the
Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Esquire, the Smithsonian, and
National Geographic.

■ Men’s Interest These publications, such as True: The Man’s

Magazine and Argosy, sometimes overlap with sex magazines
and sport magazines. Gentleman’s Quarterly and other male
fashion magazines represent a new preoccupation with dress
by men.

■ Women’s Interest Magazines. Some of the most successful

magazines in the country, with the highest circulations, are
aimed at women. The first American magazine in the nineteenth
century to have a circulation of more than a million was Ladies’
Home Journal, which continues today. Other magazines in this
class are Savvy, Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeep¬
ing, and McCall’s. A women’s interest magazine that departs
from the traditional mold of women s periodicals is Ms., which
reflects a moderate feminist viewpoint.

■ Humor Magazines. Taking hold in the 1870s with Puck, The

Comic Weekly, humor magazines have been with us ever since
and include the National Lampoon, Mad, and Harpoon. The
 The Print Media 189 ■

New Yorker is not primarily a humor magazine, but its urbane

humor has certainly contributed to its success. Closely related
to humor magazines are the comic magazines and comic books,
which are almost an industry in themselves.

■ Business Magazines. Few subjects are more compelling to

the American audience than business. Among leading business
magazines are Business Week, published by McGraw-Hill; For¬
tune, a Time-Life publication; and Forbes, published by the
colorful Malcolm Forbes, which uses the whimsical slogan, “a
capitalist tool.” Barron's is published by Dow-Jones, which
produces the Wall Street Journal. Some business magazines of¬
fer broad-based news coverage, and others are designed to ad¬
vise their readers on the machinations of the stock market.
There are also many specialized business magazines, especially
those covering high technology and electronics, such as Byte
and Computer World. In fact, the publishing industry has ben¬
efited a great deal from the changes in technology; there are
many new publications on computers alone.
One major growth area for business magazines has been that
of regional publications. Corporate Report covers the upper Mid¬
west, New England Business looks at that region, and many
other business magazines carry names of states or cities. There
are also many specialized business papers that cater to audi¬
ences interested in the industries of a particular area. Grain and
milling magazines might be found in Kansas City or Minneapo¬
lis, and cattle and oil magazines are found in Texas and
Oklahoma.

Functions of Throughout their history magazines have been at the forefront

Contemporary of fashion, ideas, and style. They have been instruments of sur¬
Magazines veillance, often delivering information ahead of the rest of the
media. Some magazines, like Time, are intended mainly to in¬
form, and others, like Playboy, to entertain. But, among the
various functions served by magazines, the most notable has
been correlation—interpreting society and its parts, projecting
trends, and explaining the meaning of the news by bringing to¬
gether fragmented facts. Other print media also inform and en¬
tertain, but it is in performance of the correlation function that
magazines stand out. Magazines, in other words, are the great
interpreters.
Some historians credit magazines with aiding social change.
They point, for example, to child labor laws, the federal Food and
Drug Act, and other reforms that were advocated by the muck-
rakers and then implemented by the government. Present
knowledge of the dynamics of public opinion leads us to doubt
that the muckrakers were the immediate cause of these reforms.
 ■ 190 The Communication Industries

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■ Magazines are usually designed for quite specific audiences. Ms.

is a modern women’s magazine with a feminist orientation. Time, a
weekly newsmagazine, covers general news but is proud of its up¬
scale, affluent and highly educated audience. (Ms. Magazine, June
1984; used by permission. Copyright 1984 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Re¬
printed by permission from Time.)

But undoubtedly they focused attention on social issues and

helped arouse people to set in motion the forces that eventually
produced social change. Their reform-minded, investigative tra¬
dition is carried on today by magazines like Mother Jones.
In Part III we will take a much closer look at how magazines
and other forms of mass communication influence individuals
and society. For now, we can note Theodore Peterson’s succinct
description of the magazines’ contributions to American life:

First, magazines certainly were responsible in some measure for

the social and political reforms made during the century. . . .
Second, magazines not only interpreted issues and events but
put them in national perspective. . . .
 The Print Media 191 ■

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■ Rolling Stone has a youth emphasis and gives extensive coverage

to music and entertainment Runner's World ties into the trend to¬
ward physical fitness. (From Rolling Stone #425, July 5, 1984. Photos by
Albert Watson. By Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. © 1984. All rights reserved.
Reprinted with permission. Reprinted with permission from Runner's World
Magazine.)

Third, the national viewpoint of magazines no doubt fostered

what might be called a sense of national community. . . .
Fourth, magazines provided millions of Americans with low-cost
entertainment. . . .
Fifth, for millions of Americans the magazine was an inexpen¬
sive instructor in daily living. . . .
Sixth, magazines were an educator in man’s cultural heritage, and
Finally, one of the most reassuring strengths of magazines was
their variety in entertainment, information and ideas.16

To this list we can add one other contribution: magazines

have inspired change in other media. They have often been
ahead of other media in the way they package and present infor-
 ■ 192 The Communication Industries

mation and in their ability to target a well-defined audience. The

newsmagazines, for example, have led media in their imagina¬
tive use of graphs and charts. Magazines have also led the way
in the use of color printing. Indeed, when newspapers have
made major changes in packaging and presentation, it is often
said that they are adopting a “magazine format,” or style. Other
media have copied them. Newspapers have become more like
magazines both in marketing methods and in writing style.
Even television has been influenced. Various stations now pro¬
duce “evening magazine” shows; CBS’s popular “Sixty Minutes”
calls itself a television newsmagazine. The syndicated “Evening
Magazine” shows on television are another example of this.
The long-held distinction among newspapers, magazines,
and electronic magazines is becoming more blurred. With the
advent of videotex information services like Viewdata and such
data bases as The Source, people will, in fact, create their own
specialized magazines without benefit of paper or magazine edi¬
tors. This will alter the role of the traditional magazine, al¬
though most analysts think the magazine will continue to exist
because of its portability and its permanence.

■ Books Books share with other media the functions of informing, per¬
suading, and entertaining, although unlike newspapers and
magazines they usually do not include advertising. They differ
from the other print media in that they are bound and covered
and consecutive from beginning to end. Because books often
take a year or more to produce, they are less timely than news¬
papers and magazines. More than the other media at least,
books are made to last, and their form lends itself to the explo¬
ration and development of a topic or idea in depth.
These characteristics suit the book to a special role among
the mass media. Most books sell only a few thousand copies.
Even a national best seller will probably sell no more than 10
million copies—far, far less than the audience for many televi¬
sion programs. Yet the social importance of books can hardly be
overestimated. Like opinion magazines, books often persuade
the influential, and they have influence beyond their actual sales
and readership. They have promoted powerful ideas and in¬
spired changes in institutions and people, even revolutions.
They are a major channel for transmitting the cultural heritage.
Books are seen as delightful, but they are also seen as danger¬
ous. Books have been banned from libraries and burned by
dictators.
Between the authors of these powerful messages and the pub¬
lic lies the publishing company. The publisher’s role is threefold:
to select what will be published; to produce the physical artifact
that is a book; and to take the risks involved in investing the
 The Print Media 193 ■

money needed to convert the manuscript into a book and to pro¬

mote and distribute it to the public. But most publishers are
private businesses, and they therefore have a fourth role: to
make a profit. The industry's changing economics have influ¬
enced the way publishers carry out their other roles.

The Publishing Books published early in America’s history included religious

Industry: An works, almanacs, and political and social treatises. In the nine¬
Overview teenth century, meticulous, scholarly publishers opened their
doors, as did religious publishers. Their work was characterized
by fine printing and leather binding, and it was aimed chiefly at
a refined audience of educated people. Even in the nineteenth
century, however, American publishers also offered books for a
broader audience, outside an educated elite, including cheap
paperback novels, textbooks, and reference books, as well as
works of literature and scholarship.
In the first half of this century, book publishing took an im¬
portant turn toward commercialism. What it offered the public
was determined more and more by a concern for profits. As ed¬
ucation increased, so did the sale of textbooks and reference
books. In the 1920s the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Liter¬
ary Guild were founded, expanding the market for books by
reaching those who lived far from bookstores. These changes ac¬
celerated after World War II. The demand for textbooks soared as
returning veterans from World War II, helped by the GI bill, filled
colleges and universities and more children entered school than
ever before. Book clubs expanded. The market for paperbacks
grew as publishers distributed them in drugstores and news¬
stands. Technological changes soon allowed faster production of
books.
All this resulted in dazzling growth in book publishing and
significant changes within the industry. Book publishing had
long been something of a “gentleman’s profession”: it was not
the place where one usually found either big money or the
sharpest business skills. And much of the industry had con¬
sisted of small family-owned enterprises. But to take advantage
of the new opportunities for growth, publishers needed new re¬
sources. To obtain them, they went public, issuing stock. Banks
and investors began to put money into publishing companies.
During the 1960s, many publishers merged or were acquired by
communications corporations or conglomerates. The Times Mir¬
ror Company, for example, bought several publishing compa¬
nies, including New American Library and World Publishing
Company. Xerox took over Ginn & Company and R. R. Bowker.
As a result of these trends, publishing companies gained finan¬
cial resources and business and marketing skills, but some pub¬
lishers also lost autonomy in their decision making.
 ■ 194 The Communication Industries

Meanwhile, the economics of publishing had led publishers

to change their role in producing books. Until recent decades,
publishers ran their own printing plants, binderies, and book¬
stores; now they contract with independent typesetters, print¬
ers, and binders to work on specific books. Often they also hire
people outside the company to design the book, draw illustra¬
tions, proofread copy, and do many of the other tasks that are
part of the process of producing a book.
What worries critics most is the increasing role of market re¬
search in determining what will be published. Traditionally,
publishers have carried many meritorious works that don’t sell;
but as publishing houses adopt a more businesslike approach
and modern management techniques, they are less likely to pub¬
lish these unprofitable manuscripts. They are less likely to see
themselves as an aid to authors who have something worthwhile
to say—and more likely to consider themselves simply as profit
makers, aiming to manufacture a product that they can per¬
suade consumers to buy. Thus publishing' today looks less like
a craft and an intellectual enterprise and more like a modern in¬
dustry. Critics fear that neither the meticulous craftsmanship of
the traditional publishing industiy nor intellectual standards
will survive, and that in their place will be “uniformity—con¬
formity to the median of popular tastes.”17

The Process of As less of the craft of publishing is done by employees of their

Publishing companies, publishers to a great extent are orchestrators, hiring
and coordinating the work of many people outside the company.
Foremost among these “outsiders” is the author. In most cases,
authors are not employees of their publishers, although some
companies have experimented with staff-written books—a few
successfully.
Many authors are represented by literary agents. Agents fer¬
ret out book ideas, negotiate for the author with the publisher,
and know which publishing houses and which editors in those
houses might be interested in a particular idea. The agent re¬
ceives a percentage (usually 15 percent) of the author’s share of
a book’s earnings.
An author, an agent, or an editor may initiate the idea for a
book. As publishers have increased their use of market research,
the editors’ role in initiating or reshaping the idea for a book has
also grown. For example, Time Inc. sometimes sends prospective
readers elaborate brochures describing a book or series of books
and eliciting responses; the replies may lead to cancellation of
the project or to changes in its proposed content, format, and
promotion. The book is written only after this elaborate market
research has been completed.
Once a manuscript is submitted to a publisher, it is worked
 The Print Media 195 ■

on by editors. Publishing companies have all kinds of editors

with all kinds of titles, and their responsibilities vary from com¬
pany to company. One or several kinds of editors in a company
may generate ideas for books, find authors, evaluate the quality
of a manuscript or its sales potential, polish the grammar of a
manuscript, coordinate its production into a book, or develop il¬
lustrations. Other people design the book and the cover and
check proofs.
For setting the manuscript into type, publishers hire outside
companies called compositors. Publishers also buy paper from
paper companies and contract with printers and binders. Sales
representatives from the publishing company persuade inde¬
pendent booksellers to carry the company’s books or persuade
school boards or faculty members to assign their textbooks. A
few publishers also run bookstores of their own.
Thus the publisher brings together a team that includes au¬
thors, editors, compositors, printers, and booksellers. In all this
the publisher “is the grand strategist and organizer.”18 Through
the various stages of bookmaking, publishers try to control the
cost, schedule, and quality of the work. Their role, in writer Dan
Lacy’s words, is “somewhat analogous to that of a theater pro¬
ducer, or an independent film producer.”19

Types of Publishers Like producers, publishers—to some extent at least—have styles

and Types of Books and reputations. In part these come from how they organize the
process of publishing, how they tend to deal with authors, and
the physical appearance of their books. Some companies are
stodgy; others are bold. Some produce books as quickly and
cheaply as possible, publishing books on events like the inva¬
sion of Grenada in 1983 or the murder of John Lennon in 1980
while they are still front-page news. Others are known for their
craftsmanship. Perhaps even more, however, companies are
known by the kinds of books they choose to publish.
A few American publishers are known for their political point
of view. For example, Devon-Adair is a conservative publisher, as
is Arlington House. International Publishers is the official pub¬
lishing organ of the American Communist party. Beacon Press
of Boston is closely tied to the Unitarian Universalist Society and
has a liberal political reputation. Other publishers are known for
specializing in one subject, such as art or law.
More common is the distinction between text publishers, who
produce educational or reference books, and trade publishers,
who produce everything else, whether fiction or nonfiction.
Trade books account for about 15 percent of book sales and text¬
books for about 29 percent.20 University presses form a third
and smaller category. They are publishing houses associated
with a university, and their books are intended primarily for
 ■ 196 The Communication Industries

scholars and scientists. Some companies specialize in hardback

books, or in paperback books, or in mass paperback books,
which are cheap and sold through grocery stores, supermarkets,
and newsstands. Table 5.3 shows a classification of books ac¬
cording to their audience and function.

I Software
Publishing
In addition to books, publishers are producing software or com¬
puter programs. Many publishing houses are now operating
software publishing departments that bring out a variety of ma¬
terials to be used in various electronically based, computer-

Table 5.3 Types of Books

TYPE DESCRIPTION

Trade Includes literature, biography, and all

nonfiction books for general
reading. These books are usually
handled by retail bookstores.
Textbooks Includes books for elementary and
high schools, colleges, and
universities. These books are
usually sold through educational
institutions or college bookstores,
but publishers make their sales
pitches to state or local school
boards or faculty members.
Children’s Sold through bookstores or to
schools and libraries.
Reference Includes dictionaries, encyclopedias.
atlases, and similar books. These
require long and expensive
preparation.
Technical Includes manuals, original research.
and and technical reports.
scientific
Law Involves the codification of legal
materials and constant updating.
Medical Also requires frequent updating.
Source: Smith. Guide to Book Publishing, pp. 128—129.
 The Print Media 197 ■

■ One marketing technique used by book publishers is having au¬

thors autograph books, as Arnold Schwarznegger, author of a book
on physical fitness, does here. (© Barbara Alper.)

driven devices. These range from programs for computer-

assisted instruction to information storage and retrieval sys¬
tems and video games.
In April 1984, Publisher’s Weekly, the trade journal of the
book industry, ranked the top one hundred software publish¬
ers.21 Just what is a software publisher? It is a company that
“produces a standardized, proprietary title that can be sold on
an off-the-shelf basis (through retail channels, direct mail, OEM
deals and the like.)” Among those excluded from the listing were
firms whose products required customizing and installation by
the developer, which ruled out publishers who serve mainframe
and minicomputer users. Essentially, then, software publishers
provide for microcomputer users services that can be bought off
the shelf in a computer store or other electronic retail firm. Most
software publishers are free-standing firms that are not owned
 ■ 198 The Communication Industries

by major publishing houses. Software publishers are located all

over the United States, but mainly close to high-technology in¬
dustries in the Silicon Valley of California, Route 128 near Bos¬
ton, and Texas.

The Economics of By 1984 American book publishers were turning out more than
Publishing 42,000 book titles a year.22 About two-thirds of these were new
titles; the other third were reissues of old titles. In addition to
these are the uncounted publications of the U.S. Government
Printing Office, the nation’s largest publisher. Some publishers
are subsidized by religious, political, or educational organiza¬
tions; but for the most part America’s books are published by
private companies trying to make a profit. Retail sales of books
in 1983 amounted to about $9 billion.
Editor Dan Lacy, commenting on the “essence of publishing
as entrepreneurship,” noted, “The publisher pays the costs and
assumes the risks of issuing each book, and hence he occupies
a highly speculative position.”23 Of course, authors also take a
risk. Although they may get some money from the publisher be¬
fore their books are published, almost all their money will come
from royalties on the book—a percentage of the net sales. If the
book does well, authors do well; if it does not, they do not. They
don’t even receive their royalties from the publisher until several
months after the sales have occurred. The size of the royalty and
the schedule for paying it are stated in a contract. The amounts
vary considerably; a well-known author can often command a
handsome royalty. Trade book authors usually get lower royal¬
ties than textbook authors.
Another branch of publishing that works very differently is
called subsidy publishing, or the vanity press. When you see an
ad declaring New York Publisher Seeks Authors,” you can bet
that it is a subsidy publisher seeking customers. In this type of
publishing, the authors, not the publishers, pay for the printing
of the book, and the authors receive nearly full returns on any
sales. Authors who go to the vanity press have often failed to
find a commercial publisher, however, and they have no other
way to publish their books. Many books published by the vanity
press are family histories, personal reminiscences, or other un¬
likely sellers. But this kind of publishing rarely pays off for the
authors. They often end up with printing costs in the thousands
and no returns at all.
The vanity press is far outside the mainstream of American
publishing. The center of that mainstream is found in the large
publishing companies, most of which have their headquarters
in New York. Just 3.3 percent of the nation’s publishers account
for about 70 percent of book sales.24
 The Print Media 199 ■

Scattered all over the country, however, are many small pub¬
lishing houses. A publishing company can begin with only one
or two people and little equipment. They do not need printing
presses; they hire outside printers and binders on a book-by¬
book basis. Unlike the small radio station or small newspaper,
the small book publisher is not limited to a local audience.
Through promotion and advertising it can command national
attention and sales. Book publishers can thus begin with lim¬
ited capital, publishing only a few titles until they begin to show
a profit.
Many books, however, never turn a profit. Profits may, of
course, be very high on a best seller, high enough to pay for
other books that lose money or barely break even. Some econo¬
mists have observed that book publishers would be better off
publishing fewer books and concentrating on obtaining higher
sales for those they do publish. Some critics attribute the ten¬
dency to produce a wide range of titles to optimism. Others say
it results from vigorous competition. After all, an author rejected
by one publisher can go in search of another.
Even this somewhat staid industiy uses modern marketing
techniques. One method is a special prepublication price. Some¬
times, working through book clubs or magazine ads, publishers
offer a reduced rate for buying the book in advance of the pub¬
lication date.
Book publishers operate under a number of limitations. It
has been said that there are too few retail bookstores, but
chains have become a major force in bookselling. “The large
chains are the power behind book publishing today,” says Joan
M. Ripley, a former president of the American Booksellers Asso¬
ciation. Traditionally publishers have had tiny advertising bud¬
gets compared with other consumer product industries. Perhaps
more than other forms of print, books depend on other media.
For example, they depend on magazines and newspapers to pro¬
mote books through reviews as well as paid advertising. Authors
are frequent guests on television and radio talk shows, where
they promote their books.

Books in Book publishing is not always as serious as it seems. Who can

Perspective take seriously books with titles such as The Non-Runner's Book
or The Dieter's Guide to Weight Loss During Sex? Even publish¬
ers are willing to mock themselves. Workman House published
a satire written by Christopher Cerf and several colleagues called
The 1980s: A Look Back at the Tumultuous Decade, 1980—
1989. Released in 1979, the book carried a 1990 publication
date. In a spoof of special prepublication prices, advertisements
 ■ 200 The Communication Industries

said that the publisher’s list price would b$ $69.95, but that the
book was available to advance buyers for a mere $7.95.
Still, books are the most permanent and most serious me¬
dium, and they provide much of the content for other media.
Films are often based on novels; magazines often popularize
ideas that books have presented in full. Books are a key to the
intellectual process in what is mainly an intellectual medium_
print.

The Future of All forms of the print media—newspapers, magazines, and

the Print Media books—are not only channels of communication but also busi¬
nesses that try to eke out a profit. All, but especially newspapers,
are very profitable today, and they play a substantial role in the
American economy. They are doing battle with the electronic
media for advertising dollars and have been more than holding
their own. Critics claimed that the public would tire of print;
McLuhan predicted the death of the medium. In contrast, mag¬
azine editor and author Norman Cousins predicted that the
print media would not only survive but thrive:

We are confident that print will not only endure but will continue to
be a primary force in the life of the mind. Nothing yet invented
meets the intellectual needs of the brain so fully as print. The ability
of the mind to convert little markings on paper into meaning is one
of the ways civilization receives its basic energy.25

There can be no doubt that print remains a powerful force

even in the face of the electronic media. Whether in the future
words will be printed on paper (a scarce commodity in the con-
temporaiy world) or displayed on computer terminals is not par¬
ticularly important, but the survival of the print media seems
likely because of three features: portability, permanence, and
cost-effectiveness. First, portability is an attractive quality, and
it is possible to carry a newspaper anywhere without benefit of
electronic circuitry. This advantage will no doubt falter should
we ever have electrodes implanted in our brains, but for the mo¬
ment it is pertinent. Print also has permanence. We can save
clippings from newspapers or hold onto magazines like the Na¬
tional Geographic for decades. Although electronic information
services can be “printed out,” this requires a decision on the
part of the reader-viewer, and it isn’t, as yet, so easy to thumb
leisurely through an electronic system as through, say, a maga¬
zine. Also, magazines package material that we would never “or¬
der up in an electronic system. Editors make decisions and
attempt to anticipate our interests and tastes. Finally, for the
immediate future, analysts of the newspaper industry tell us
that the newspaper will remain the cheapest and most efficient
medium. For twenty-five or fifty cents and a dollar or two on
 The Print Media 201 ■

Sundays, we can get a massive amount of information, enter¬

tainment, and advertising. Although the future audience for the
print media may be more refined and specialized than in the
past, print does appear to be here to stay.

■ Summary In this chapter we have presented a perspective on print, the

oldest medium, by looking first at the concepts of form, func¬
tion, and audience. Print’s three forms today are newspapers,
magazines, and books. Its functions are to provide information,
influence opinion, interpret the environment, transmit the so¬
cial heritage, serve as a marketplace for goods and services, and
entertain. The audience for these media as a whole is large and
diverse, although many magazines and books are aimed at spe¬
cialized audiences.
Newspapers in America are private, profit-making businesses
with a special role: delivering the information that citizens in a
democracy need. Since the early nineteenth century, American
newspapers have appealed to a large, diverse audience and have
fulfilled diverse functions. Although there is great variety among
American newspapers, most are fiercely local, not national, in
their audience and perspective. For most of their revenue they
depend on advertising. Many are owned by chains and conglom¬
erates. In the 1960s and early 1970s, newspapers were fiercely
criticized for the style and content of their coverage; in the mid
1970s their circulation declined: and for decades they have faced
competition from broadcasting. But newspapers adapted. In the
1980s, they increased their coverage of “soft” and process-
centered news, included more subjective writing and interpre¬
tation, increased their coverage of women and minorities, and
brightened their appearance. Most are profitable today.
Like newspapers, magazines depend on advertising for most
of their revenue, are often owned by chains and conglomerates,
and have had to adapt in the face of competition from broad¬
casting. One result of this competition has been a decline of
mass-circulation, general-interest magazines and an increase in
magazines designed for specialized audiences. Magazines lack
the immediacy of newspapers, but they often present a broader
context and more depth in their discussion of ideas and events.
They have often pushed new styles, new policies, and new ideas
into the mainstream of American life.
Books have a smaller audience than magazines and newspa¬
pers and are less timely, but they are more lasting. They have
been powerful instruments both for preserving the social heri¬
tage and for changing society. Between the authors of these
powerful messages and the public stand the publishers. In re¬
cent decades, publishers have become primarily orchestrators
and risk takers. As orchestrators they bring together the author,
 ■ 202 The Communication Industries

the people who produce the physical book, and booksellers. As

risk takers they invest the money to turn the manuscript into a
book. Most publishers are private businesses; many are owned
by large communications companies and conglomerates. Al¬
though many publishers now use modern marketing tech¬
niques, many books never earn a profit, though tolerance for
this may be changing.

Notes and 1 See Charles R. Wright, Mass Communication: A Sociological Per¬

References spective, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 9.
2 Ernest C. Hynds, American Newspapers in the 1980s (New York:
Hastings House, 1980), p. 11.
3 Robert E. Park, "The Natural History of the Newspaper,” in Mass
Communication, ed. Wilbur Schramm (Urbana: University of Illi¬
nois Press, 1960), pp. 8-9.
4 New York Sun, Septembers, 1833, p. 1.
5 See Edwin Emeiy, The Press in America, 3rd ed. (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), pp. 441-442.
6 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Free Press, 1965), p.
214, originally published in 1922.
7 Associated Press et al. v. United States, 326 U.S. 1 (1945).
8 Martin H. Seiden, Who Owns the Mass Media? (New York: Basic
Books, 1974), p. 56.
9 Deirdre Carmody, “More Newspapers Change Hands with the Role
of Chains Increasing, ” Nem York Times, Februaiy 15, 1977, p. 16.
10 Ibid.
11 Arnold H. Ismach, “The Economic Connection: Mass Media Prof¬
its, Ownership and Performance,” in Enduring Issues in Mass
Communication, ed. E. E. Dennis, D. M. Gillmor, and A. Ismach
(St. Paul: West, 1978), pp. 243-259.
12 Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 2nd
ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), p. 442. Reprinted
by permission.
13 James Playsted Wood, Magazines in the United States, 2nd ed.
(New York: Ronald, 1956), p. 378.
14 Philip Dougherty, “Saturday Review’s New Drive,” New York
Times, April 12, 1979.
15 From Standard Rate & Data, September 27, 1982; Media
Mark Research, passim.; Magazine Audiences, 1 (Spring 1982),
p. viii.
16 Peterson, Magazines, p. 448. Reprinted by permission.
17 Quoted in Charles A. Madison, Book Publishing in America (New
York; McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 402; see also Benjamin M. Com-
 The Print Media 203 ■

paine, The Book Industry in Transition (White Plains, N.Y.:

Knowledge Industry, 1978).
18 Datus C. Smith, Jr., A Guide to Book Publishing (New York: R. R.
Bowker, 1966) p. 7.
19 Dan Lacy, “The Economics of Publishing or Adam Smith and Lit¬
erature,” in The American Reading Public (New York: R. R.
Bowker, 1965). Based on an issue of Daedalus.
20 John P. Dessauer, Book Publishing: Whatltls, WhatltDoes (New
York: R. R. Bowker, 1974), p. 23.
21 “Ranking the Top 100 Software Publishers,” Publisher’s Weekly,
April 20, 1984, p. 56.
22 Publisher’s Weekly, March 16, 1984, p. 46; “Title Output and
Average Prices.”
23 Lacy, “Economics of Publishing. ”
24 John P. Dessauer, “Book Publishing,” The ALA Yearbook (Ameri¬
can Library Association, 1976), p. 293.
25 Quoted in Roland E. Wolseley, The Changing Magazine (New
York: Hastings House, 1973).
 One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both
instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of
show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather
bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three un¬
der one roof, the dust never settles.
Edward R. Murrow

I The Electronic Media

Our definition of mass communication in Chapter 1 seems

made to order for radio and television. The broadcasting in¬
dustry sends out messages twenty-four hours a day according to
detailed schedules, using such complicated technology as com¬
munications satellites. Every day it reaches millions of people,
whatever their background, level of education, or interest. Radio
of course came first, but television has not displaced it. The
story of radio’s survival and the current status of radio and tele¬
vision illustrate again the impact of one medium on others and
the relationships among form, function, and audience.
We look first at the broadcasting industry as a whole, exam¬
ining the technology that makes it possible, the way its com¬
municators are organized, and the messages it sends. Then we

■
examine radio and television in more detail, looking finally at
cable television.

Approaches to The twentieth century, said British writer John Crosby, is the
Broadcasting age of noise—“physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire—
we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder; for all
the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been
thrown into the current assault against silence.”1 Broadcasting
led this assault. Although motion pictures and radio developed
at about the same time, radio brought the “noise” of the modern
age right into people’s homes and stayed there. Broadcasting en¬
larged people’s reality in a way that film never could because film
 The Electronic Media 205 ■

has been primarily an entertainment medium. Broadcasting

brought events from faraway lands and gave people the
sounds—and later the sights—by which they could know and
understand the world and its people much better.
Mention the word broadcasting to a group of people, and they
are likely to think of many different images: a television set, a
disc jockey playing records, a favorite star, or a stock certificate
in a broadcasting company. Broadcasting is all these things and
more.

Defining We are using the term broadcasting to refer to a particular type

Broadcasting of telecommunication. Telecommunication is the general term
for communicating over a distance using electromagnetic in¬
struments.2 In point-to-point telecommunication, electromag¬
netic instruments are used for a direct, relatively personal kind
of communication, for example, by telephone, teletype, mobile
radio, or air-to-ground radio. A second type of telecommuni¬
cation is surveillance telecommunication, which “scans the
horizon,” such as a search for danger signals. Surveillance
telecommunication includes radar and weather-scanning de¬
vices. We are interested in a third type of telecommunication,
mass telecommunication, which uses electromagnetic instru¬
ments to reach a mass audience simultaneously. This is broad¬
casting, which includes radio and television.
Over-the-air broadcasting is distinguished from broadband
communication, which uses a wire or cable instead of the air¬
waves. Cable television is a common example of broadband
communication since it distributes radio-frequency television
signals to subscribers’ TV sets via a coaxial cable or optical fiber.
A broadband communication system can accommodate video
signals; therefore, cable is broadband, but the telephone is not.
The term narrowcasting is used to describe the ability of broad¬
band communication to direct highly specific programming to a
quite limited (or narrow) audience.
More than any of the other media, broadcasting meets the
definition of mass communication set out in Chapter 1: mes¬
sages are sent out regularly by professional communicators
through mechanical media to a large, diverse audience. The
broadcast media also fulfill all the functions of the print media
outlined in Chapter 5: they are deeply involved in surveillance
and correlation of the environment and in transmission of the
social heritage. They also provide entertainment and advertis¬
ing. To see just how broadcasting does all these things, we need
to approach it from several angles, looking at broadcasting as a
technology, as a production and distribution system, and as
content.
 ■ 206 The Communication Industries

Broadcasting as Broadcasting technology is varied and complex, involving every¬

Technology thing from the early scientific experiments* with radio waves and
the theory of information processing to modern television cam¬
eras and global satellites. Look inside a television station and
you will see sophisticated transmitters, control rooms, cameras,
videotape equipment, editing devices, microphones, and much
more. Even in the home, broadcasting technology may include
not only radio and television sets but also videotape recorders,
giant screen receivers, and video games.
From this variety of technical devices we can isolate the es¬
sence of broadcasting as a technology: it is a means of transmit¬
ting electronically generated radio waves to receiving devices.
The broadcasting station is the center for transmission. Basi¬
cally, the transmitter generates two types of waves that it ra¬
diates into space. A lower-frequency wave carries information—
that is, the sound or images to be broadcast. But the energy of
this information wave is not sufficient to go through the air it¬
self: hence it is superimposed on a high-frequency carrier
wave.3 It is in the transmitter that the information picked up by
cameras or microphones is superimposed on the carrier wave.
When the information wave is superimposed on the carrier
wave, the carrier wave is said to be modulated.
This modulation can occur in two ways: amplitude modula¬
tion or frequency modulation. In amplitude modulation (AM)
the height of the carrier wave is altered when the information
wave is superimposed on it. In frequency modulation (FM) the
frequency of the carrier wave is changed. AM broadcasts can
reach a wide area, but FM is less affected by electrical disturb¬
ances and static. In television the video signal is amplitude-
modulated and the audio signal is frequency-modulated. At the
receiver the carrier wave is converted back to sound and/or
images.
I he transmitter is the heart of the broadcasting station, but
the station may receive as well as send messages. Messages—
from a television network, for example—may come to the station
via microwave, coaxial cable, telephone wire, or satellite. (These
are all point-to-point communication devices.) The broadcasting
station then relays these messages.

Technological If we look at broadcasting only as a type of technology, much of

Development and the radio and television world will remain a mystery. For one
Social Use thing, technological developments in the laboratory are often far
ahead of their actual use in the world. For another, the uses
eventually found for the technology often differ from what the in¬
ventors and technicians expected in their laboratories. How and
when a technology moves from the laboratory to homes, streets,
and businesses depends on economics, politics, and culture.
Guglielmo Marconi, the so-called father of radio, experienced
 The Electronic Media 207 ■

this gap between the laboratory and the world. He began his ear¬
liest broadcasting experiments by testing his wireless telegraph
on his father’s estate in Italy. Thinking that his invention prob¬
ably had great social consequences, Marconi tried to persuade
the Italian government to help him finance his work. But the
Italian government wasn’t interested, and broadcasting lost
some valuable time until Marconi took his ideas to England,
where he was able to patent his device and obtain financial
backing to develop it further.

■ Culture Lag. Why is it that such innovations as Marconi’s are

not more quickly adopted? There are many reasons: economic
realities, government regulation and policy, community inter¬
ests, cultural habits, and others. It is common in industrial so¬
cieties for the technological or material aspects of a culture to
surge ahead of the society’s ability to control and use the tech¬
nology—a phenomenon called culture lag. New discoveries in
atomic weaponry, for example, outpace attempts to find ways to
control existing weapons.
The history of American broadcasting has also been marked
by culture lag. For example, the first experimental televised im¬
age was transmitted between New York and Philadelphia as early
as 1923: five years later the first regular television schedule was
begun. Thirteen years later—in 1941—the federal government
authorized commercial television. By 1948 the great expansion
in television was ready to begin, but television did not reach
most of the American people until the 1950s. As we saw in
Chapter 2, in part the lag in television’s development was the re¬
sult of World War II, when manufacturers turned away from pro¬
duction for consumers in order to make weapons and military
supplies. Also, the government put a freeze on television licenses
from 1948 to 1952 so that it would have time to develop a sys¬
tem of licensing stations in order to avoid the chaos that unfet¬
tered competition for stations might produce. Thus when the
technology of television was ready for widespread use, its expan¬
sion was delayed while social and political systems caught up
with it.
More recently, the federal government’s regulations helped
slow the growth of cable television. The development of other as¬
pects of broadcasting has also lagged behind their potential. By
the mid 1960s some futurists were saying that within ten years
America would be a “wired nation” with a vast system of televi¬
sion channels and information transmission units wired into
every home. Arthur C. Clarke even predicted the end of travel
and the development of an orbiting electronic post office. In fact
many of the devices and uses envisioned by the futurists are
technically feasible now, but most Americans do not have so¬
phisticated information storage and retrieval systems in their
■ 208 The Communication Industries

■ In the early days of radio broadcasting, live orchestras and people

creating sound effects helped create the content of the new medium,
which featured heavy doses of entertainment along with information
and advertising. Later, radio’s information function would out dis¬
tance entertainment as television and other electronic media en¬
tered the field. (NMAH Archives Center, Smithsonian Institution.)

homes, and old-fashioned over-the-air television still dominates

broadcasting. The use of any new technology usually requires
not just technological development but also economic, social,
and sometimes even political adjustments.

■ From Idea to Practice. The history of broadcasting illustrates

the variety of forces, people, and interests that shape the trans¬
formation of technical knowledge into a technology in use. The¬
oretical and applied science, idealists and entrepreneurs,
commercial interests and regulations—all played a role in the de¬
velopment of broadcasting. This coalition of interests, working
and battling together, produced a broadcasting system that is
neither veiy rational nor very systematic. The technology and
the actual uses of the broadcast media have often seemed out of
 The Electronic Media 209 ■

sorts with each other. The technology of radio, for example,

would have permitted the development of rational, efficient sys¬
tems of broadcasting for business, education, or economic uses
in the home. Indeed, some people predicted that radio would
have just such uses. Instead, by the mid 1920s, radio had be-
, come a medium of popular culture with entertainment, news,
and advertising. Even some of the most far-sighted pioneers of
broadcasting failed to see how broadcasting would evolve, or its
potential for massive development—commercially, culturally,
and technologically.
Eventually, a combination of social, economic, and political
forces and decisions determined the role broadcasting would
play as a medium of communication. Three of the most impor¬
tant decisions were:

• The decision to finance broadcasting by the sale of time to ad¬

vertisers, which was an American Telephone and Telegraph
innovation.
• The formation of national networks, also inspired by AT&T.
• The intervention of the federal government to establish order
in the chaos that had arisen as stations competed for fre¬
quencies over which to broadcast. The government provided
a protective framework that allowed the forces of the private
sector to work effectively.4

Both economics and politics thus helped shape how the techni¬
cal knowledge of broadcasting would be put into use. What they
gave us is a broadcasting system composed chiefly of profit-mak¬
ing businesses broadcasting to a mass audience under the con¬

I Broadcasting as a
Production and
Distribution
straints of some government regulation.

Broadcasting is far more than a technological system. We can

imagine a broadcasting system that used basically the same
technology in use today but with a very different organization
System and perhaps different uses. Suppose the federal government had
established a monopoly on broadcasting for use as a way to keep
its citizens informed. We might have only national program¬
ming, with live coverage of Congress and diplomatic visits and
bulletins on new grants available to local governments. Or sup¬
pose that in cities across the nation local merchants had joined
together to buy stations to sell their goods. We might have only
local programming filled with descriptions of local goods and
services for sale. Television and radio would then mean some¬
thing far different to us. But those systems never developed.
Broadcasting is not only a technological system but also a sys¬
tem for producing and distributing messages.
In the United States this system has both local and national
 ■ 210 The Communication Industries

components. Although it includes public, poncommercial ele¬

ments and is regulated by the government, the American broad¬
casting system is mostly made up of private, profit-making
enterprises. It was founded on and remains committed to com¬
mercialism. Commercialism has been blamed for the quality of
programming and for the excessive role of advertising in influ¬
encing broadcast decisions. On the other hand, commercialism
has also been praised for helping to develop the most diversified
system of broadcasting in the world. To understand this system,
we look at both its organization and its economics.

■ The Organization of American Broadcasting. The most visi¬

ble part of American broadcasting is the local station. Even
though they range from tiny fifty-watt radio stations in isolated,
rural communities to large metropolitan television operations,
all radio and television stations have some similarities. The
larger they get, the more complex they are, but they still have
many of the same functions and the same departments.
A medium-sized radio and television station, for example, will
have four main departments—program, engineering, sales, and
business. In the program department a program manager su¬
pervises announcers, disc jockeys, a music librarian, a news di¬
rector or coordinator, reporters, and a public affairs director.
The engineering department is run by a chief engineer who su¬
pervises audio engineers, transmitting engineers, and (in the
case of television) camera operators, projectionists, lighting di¬
rectors, and design and maintenance engineers. The sales de¬
partment is headed by a sales manager who supervises a
national sales manager, a local sales staff, a traffic manager who
handles the scheduling of commercials, as well as public rela¬
tions and promotion people. Finally, a business manager runs
the business department, coordinating accounting and payroll
personnel and dealing with secretarial pools, purchasing, and
janitorial services. Over all these departments and department
heads is the station manager, whose position is similar to that
of a newspaper publisher.
Broadcast news departments are part of the program depart¬
ment, and their personnel differ somewhat from those on a
newspaper. The news director is in charge and has overall re¬
sponsibility for what goes on the air. The news director manages
people, equipment, and the budget. Then there are assignment
editors, who help decide which stories will be covered, which re¬
porters and camera personnel will cover them, and how much
equipment will be used. Producers have direct responsibility for
the content of a newscast. Both the producer and the assign¬
ment editor work with the reporters, who go into the field to
cover stories and then present them on the air, and with writ-
 The Electronic Media 211 ■
cn

■ Operating out of a control room, the radio disc jockey communi¬

cates with an audience eager for musical offerings of all kinds from
recent rock releases to older, classical music. (© Tyrone Hall/Stock,
Boston.)

ers, who stay at the station rewriting stories and taking material
over the phone from reporters. Both reporters and writers work
with editors; at television stations the editors edit the film or
videotape and put together the audio and video portions of the
newscast.
Large radio and television stations may have specialist re¬
porters who cover areas such as science, politics, and consumer
affairs. More common are weathercasters, sportscasters, traffic
reporters (who sometimes report from helicopters), and enter¬
tainment critics. The most prominent members of the news
team are, of course, the announcers and anchorpersons.
Important as the local station is, it is only one part of the pro¬
duction and distribution system. Economist Bruce M. Owen and
two colleagues have explained the workings of the broadcasting
■ 212 The Communication Industries

industry as the interaction of several major components,

including:

1 Stations Local broadcasting stations generate an audience,

which they offer for sale to advertisers. They also transmit the
broadcast message and develop programs. Although stations
may be owned by large nationwide companies, they are asso¬
ciated with a region or even a city, which greatly influences
the content and advertising that the station broadcasts.
2 Networks Many stations are affiliated with a network and give
over a large percentage of their time to the network’s pro¬
gramming. Others are independent and buy their program¬
ming from private production companies. The networks give
American broadcasting a national component that supple¬
ments the localism of most broadcast stations. They provide
a nationwide hook-up for local stations, making possible the
nationwide distribution of some programs, technical ser¬
vices, and advertising. The networks are both suppliers, of¬
fering their own products to stations, and brokers, buying
services and programs from others and then offering them to
stations. The stations pay nothing for the programs they get
from the networks. In fact, they receive a percentage of the
revenue that the networks collect from the advertisers.
3 Viewers and listeners Without an audience, of course, there
is no mass communication, and the size and composition of
the audience determine the effectiveness and profitability of
stations and networks. As Owen and his colleagues have said,
“TV stations [and radio stations] are in the business of pro¬
ducing audiences. These audiences, or means of access to
them, are sold to advertisers.”5
4 Advertisers Commercial broadcasters receive their revenue
from advertisements. To keep advertisers, a broadcaster con¬
stantly courts them and gives them data to show that his or
her station is an effective vehicle for advertising.
5 Production companies Independent production companies
are playing an increasingly important role in broadcasting.
They produce and package programming of various kinds
and sell it to individual stations or networks.

■ The Economics of Broadcasting. Professor Harry J. Scornia

is one person who thinks that broadcasting, especially televi¬
sion, is best analyzed as a business. After all, he wrote, “for over
forty years broadcasting in the United States has been carried
on principally as a business, conducted for profit, by corpora¬
tion-trained leaders with a sales and business orientation.”6
As a business, commercial broadcasting is a somewhat
smaller industry than newspapers. It generates about $13.5 bil-
 The Electronic Media 213 ■

lion in revenues a year—compared with newspapers’ $17.5 bil¬

lion. But this somewhat modest number is rather deceptive.
Assessing the full significance of broadcasting as an industry,
wrote Sydney W. Head, means taking into account not only
those working directly for stations and networks, but also “the
secondary economic activities broadcasting creates or supports:
manufacturing, sales, and servicing of receivers and equipment:
electric power consumption: trade and consumer publications;
advertising, talent, market research, legal and engineering
services.”7
As a business, broadcasting is based on advertising. Both lo¬
cal stations and networks depend on advertising for their reve¬
nues. There is local, regional, and national advertising. What
stations and networks charge for air time depends on the time
and day the commercials are aired and the expected size and
composition of the audience. Since stations are selling audience
attention, they must take care to offer their advertisers adequate
data from rating services to show the number of eyes and ears
in their audience. Advertisers want to know what kinds of peo¬
ple their listeners and viewers are, how many of them there are,
and how closely they pay attention to the advertisers’ messages.
It's the job of a station to convince a sponsor that its advertising
is more effective on that station than it would be on another sta¬
tion—or in a newspaper or magazine.
The relationship between stations and networks complicates
the economics of broadcasting. The radio networks now receive
less advertising revenue than local radio stations, but the oppo¬
site is true in television. If a television station is affiliated with
a network, then its fortunes are closely tied to those of the net¬
work since network shows account for more than half of the af¬
filiate’s programming. The size of the audience for the network’s
shows will determine not only how much money the station gets
from the network but also how much money it can command
from advertisers for the station breaks that the networks leave
open to local stations. If belonging to a network is not profitable
to a station, it will end the relationship. During the late 1970s
and early 1980s, many stations shopped around and changed
their network affiliations.
If a station manages its time well and finds a good mix of in¬
vestment, costs, and revenue, it should make a profit. Broad¬
casting is known for giving excellent returns on investment.
Some stations have annual profits of over 20 percent. In 1981
the industry reported profits of $1.8 billion. British media owner
Lord Thompson once declared rather cynically that “a broadcast
license is a license to print money.”
The profitability of broadcasting has not gone unnoticed by
large corporations. Stations are often part of chains or owned by
 ■ 214 The Communication Industries

national and sometimes multinational corporations and con¬

glomerates. Cross-media ownership is common; that is, the
same person or company owns both print and broadcast outlets.
In fact nearly 30 percent of television stations are owned by
newspapers; in some communities one company owns almost all
the principal media.
Table 6.1, which rates the TV companies in the top one
hundred designated market areas, demonstrates cross-media
ownership. Of the top ten companies listed, only three are pri¬
marily concerned with electronic communication. All the rest
are predominately newspaper firms.
But the tendency toward concentration of ownership has not
gone unnoticed by the government. It has regulated both the
number of stations any one company can own and cross-media
ownership. In this and other ways, as we shall see, government
is an important influence on the broadcast industry.

■ Noncommercial Broadcasting. Not all stations and networks

are privately owned enterprises. There is also what has been
called the “fourth network,” which includes public broadcasting,
stations operated as nonprofit corporations by local groups,
communities, religious institutions, and universities. There has
been substantial growth in Christian broadcasting—the so-
called electronic church. Most of this broadcasting is now com¬
mercial since religious organizations buy time on networks and
local stations. However, some religious stations have a nonprofit
status because of their religious or educational affiliations.
Public broadcasting gets its operating expenses from grants
from the federal Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other
agencies, state governments, universities, religious organiza¬
tions, private donors, and others. Many public stations set aside
time for pledge drives, when they urge the audience to call the
station and pledge money to help support it. In recent years
business gifts underwriting the cost of a program or series have
been important. Thus public television stations announce that
a “grant from Mobil Oil” or some other donor has made a pro¬
gram possible. For the corporation this arrangement means a
chance to be portrayed as a public-spirited supporter of culture
rather than a self-interested reaper of profits. For public broad¬
casting the arrangement has been a financial boon, but it has
also raised questions about the independence of public broad¬
casting from their new-found benefactors.
The nations public television has three main components:
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which receives and dis¬
tributes federal funds for the system; the Public Broadcasting
Service, which manages the production and distribution of pro¬
grams and connections among stations; and the local stations.
The role of the Public Broadcasting Service is similar to that of
Table 6.1 Rating the TV Companies in Top One Hundred Designated Market
Areas

HOW MANY COMPANY-OWNED NO. OF

STATIONS RANK IN TOP FIVE OF STATIONS NETWORK
RESPECTIVE MARKETS NOT IN AFFILIATION
(BY SHARE OF MARKET)? TOP 100
NO. 1 NO. 2 NO. 3 NO. 4 NO. 5 + MARKETS ABC CBS NBC IND.

Capital Cities
Communications 5 1 4 2

Times Mirror Co. 3 3 — — — 1 2 2 3 —

Hearst Corp. 3 2 — — — — 4 1 — —

Pulitzer Publications 3 1 1 — — — 2 — 3 —

Allbritton Communica¬
tions Co. 3 1 1 4 _ 1 _

Harte-Hanks
Communications 3 1 1 2 1 _

Knight-Ridder Newspapers 3 1 — — — — 3 1 — —

Gannett Co. 3 — 4 — — — 4 — 3 —

Taft Broadcasting Co. 3 — 1 2 1 — 3 — 1 3

Park Broadcasting 2 3 — 1 — 1 1 5 1 —

Westinghouse Electric
Corp. 2 2 2 1 2 3 _

Scripps-Howard
Broadcasting 2 2 1 1 _ 1 1 3 1

Washington Post Co. 2 2 — — — — 1 2 1 —

Cosmos Broadcasting
Corp. 2 1 2 1 _ 1 5 ___

Cox Communications 2 1 1 2 — — 2 1 1 2

McGraw-Hill 2 1 — — — 1 2 1 1 —

AH. Belo Corp. 2 — — — — 1 2 1 — —

Outlet Co. 1 3 1 — — — 2 1 2 —

Meredith Corp. 1 2 2 2 — — — 2 2 3

Wometco Enterprises 1 1 1 — 1 2 2 2 — 2

Source: AC. Nielsen Co., February, 1983, sweeps; Advertising Age 100 Leading Media Companies. 1983 edition, Tele¬
vision 8l Cable Factbook, Television Digest Inc. Reprinted with permission from the March 16, 1983 issue of Adver¬
tising Age. Copyright 1983 by Crain Communications Inc,
 ■ 216 The Communication Industries

the commercial networks, but the local stations have a more in¬
dependent role than commercial stations. They produce many of
the programs that are then shown nationwide. This system has
been plagued by financial problems, by bickering between the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Public Broadcast¬
ing Service, and by controversy over how independent local sta¬
tions should be.
One of the best known creatures of public broadcasting is Na¬
tional Public Radio, a well-coordinated network of independent
public stations across the United States. NPR is governed by a
board made up of representatives of the member stations, and
these stations both contribute programming and pay for ser¬
vices received from the network. Programs like “Earplay” and
“All Things Considered” are distributed by NPR. Garrison Keil¬
lor s “Prairie Home Companion,” which has become quite popu¬
lar, was originally distributed by NPR, but eventually became
one of the offerings of American Public Broadcasting, another
public network. Many but not all public stations are associated
with colleges and universities.
Public broadcasting is meant to provide programs that com¬
mercial broadcasting cannot or will not support. The commer¬
cialism of the broadcast industry, it is often argued, has given
us not only the ever-present commercial but bad programs. Yet
public broadcasting has been slow to develop in America not
only because of problems in financing it but because of Ameri¬
cans’ belief in private, profit-making enterprise. It has also been
stifled by the fear that control of broadcasting by the advertising
dollar would be replaced by control by government. But in all
broadcasting, public and private, government has played a sig¬
nificant role.

Government There can be little doubt that the excesses of commercialism—in

Regulation any industry—often run head-on into the “public interest.” The
government’s response to this conflict in the broadcasting in¬
dustry is completely different from its response to the conflict
between the print media and the public welfare. Since the
1920s, the government has had a hand in regulating individual
broadcast stations and the industry generally. In fact, the Fed¬
eral Communications Act of 1934 requires that broadcast sta¬
tions serve “the public interest, convenience and necessity”; an
attempt to demand the same of a newspaper would be consid¬
ered unconstitutional.
Why has the government taken such an interest in broad¬
casting? Looking at British broadcasting, writer Peter Jay said
there were two compelling reasons for intervention and regula¬
tion by government:
 The Electronic Media 217 ■

1 The frequency spectrum is limited; that is, there are a limited

number of channels over which radio and television can
broadcast. There must be some way or someone to allocate
these channels. We can call this the “traffic cop” function of
broadcasting—deciding who will be on what frequency.
2 A power mythology surrounds broadcasting. This is “the
widespread contemporary belief, especially among politicians,
that broadcasting—and particularly television—exercises over
the public some extraordinaiy, almost hypnotic, power,
which is supposed to be much more sinister and dangerous
than anything that the printed word threatens.”8 “Irrespon¬
sible” broadcasting thus presents a special threat to the pub¬
lic interest.

These two reasons for government involvement apply equally

well to the American system, and the two reasons are related.
Scarcity has always been at the heart of government regulation
and control of broadcasting. The need to allocate licenses to
avoid confusion was the impetus for the Federal Communica¬
tions Act of 1934, the basis for our present regulatory system.
That act makes one thing abundantly clear: the airwaves be¬
long to the people and licensees (stations) are temporary custo¬
dians who must have government-granted permission to
broadcast. Moreover, these temporary custodians of public prop¬
erty must serve the public interest—the needs, conveniences, or
necessities of the people. Government is the arbiter of whether
the public interest is being served.
Almost every branch of government can and does get involved
in broadcasting issues. The executive branch suggests policy;
the legislature enacts laws and holds hearings to investigate as¬
pects of the industiy; both the executive branch and Congress
influence broadcasters through their criticisms; the courts re¬
solve disputes. As we pointed out in Chapter 4, most active in
regulating broadcasting are the Federal Trade Commission
(FTC), which deals with advertising and unfair competition, and
the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). These groups
have developed a body of laws and regulations that has some in¬
fluence on most every aspect of broadcasting—from who owns a
station, to the technology used, to what is broadcast.

■ The FCC. The FCC is governed by seven members appointed

by the president for seven-year terms. Its regulation of broad¬
casting has three phases. First is the allocation oj space in the
frequency spectrum; second is the assignment oj stations, with
specific frequency and power, within the allocated frequency
bands: a chief consideration here is avoiding interference with
other stations; and third is regulation oj existing stations to see
 ■ 218 The Communication Industries

that stations operate in accordance with FCC rules and techni¬

cal provisions. When a station applies for renewal of its license,
the FCC also checks whether the station has been operating in
the public interest.9
In fact, the requirement that stations serve the public inter¬
est underlies government regulation of broadcasting. Just what
the “public interest” means has been hotly debated. The answer
depends in part on the FCC’s philosophy, and that changes
along with the composition of the commission. But over the
years the FCC has set forth various principles that have helped
define the public interest, including:

1 The right of the public to broadcast service is superior to the

right of any individual to use the ether [an old term for the
regions of space through which radio waves travel] . . .
2 Broadcasting must be maintained as a medium of free speech
for the people as a whole.
3 Television and radio stations have a definite responsibility to
provide a reasonable amount of broadcast time for controver¬
sial public discussion. . . .
4 Licensees must maintain control over programming of their
own stations, and may not surrender their program respon¬
sibility by contract or otherwise to networks, advertising
agencies, or other program producing organizations.
5 Television and radio stations must be responsive to the needs
and interests of the communities in which they are located. .
6 Television and radio stations may not be used exclusively for
commercial purposes. They must use some of their broadcast
time for sustaining programs and must avoid advertising ex¬
cesses which offend good taste.
7 Television and radio stations are expected to abide by their
promises of program service unless exceptional circum¬
stances supervene. . . .
8 The Commission favors diversity of ownership of radio and
television stations. ...
9 The Commission may not censor any television or radio pro¬
gram in advance of broadcasting.10

The FCC upholds these principles primarily through its abil¬

ity t° grant and renew licenses. This is no simple procedure.
Each license is granted for three years, and community groups
can and do challenge stations’ requests to renew their licenses.
However, they rarely succeed. To apply for renewal, a station
must submit information on its performance, personnel poli¬
cies, and programming. Broadcasters are also required to con¬
sult with community leaders to be sure that the station’s
programming is meeting the community’s needs. The require¬
ment that programming meet the public interest is often
 The Electronic Media 219 ■

equated with providing news programs and public service an¬

nouncements, but the FCC also examines whether religious pro¬
gramming, children’s programming, and service to minority
groups, among other things, are meeting the community’s
needs.
If a company is shown not to have served the public interest,
its request for renewal may be denied. Or the FCC might fine the
station, or grant only a temporary license. It can also revoke a
license and take stations to court for violations of FCC regula¬
tions. The FCC does a good deal more than just grant and renew
licenses. It adjudicates various disputes between broadcasters
and the public, and it sometimes tries to encourage such gov¬
ernmental policies as deregulation by relaxing rules associated
with the content of programs and advertising as well as regula¬
tions related to the timing of programs, such as prime-time pro¬
gramming aimed at children.
Performance is not the only criterion for holding a license.
The FCC has said that diversity of ownership is in itself in the
public interest. No organization is allowed to own more than
seven AM and seven FM radio stations or more than seven tele¬
vision stations, including no more than five VHF stations.
Cross-media ownership has also long concerned the FCC, as
well as the Justice Department, which generally investigates and
tries to break up monopolies. But despite the FCC’s rules pro¬
moting diversity of ownership, when licenses were challenged
because of cross-media ownership, the FCC has often backed
off, failing to take action. Finally, in 1975 the FCC developed
new cross-ownership rules designed to forbid (in the future)
common ownership of a newspaper and broadcast station in the
same community. But existing cross-ownership was allowed to
continue, except in sixteen communities in which one owner
held the only daily newspaper and the only television station.
The rules brought an immediate response. Broadcasters said
the rules went too far. They also argued that cross-ownership
can be beneficial because other, profit-making parts of the or¬
ganization may keep a weak publication or station alive. Public
interest and citizens’ groups such as the National Citizens Com¬
mittee for Broadcasting said the FCC’s rules didn’t go far
enough. The rules were challenged in the courts. Finally, in
1978, the Supreme Court in FCC v. National Citizens Commit¬
tee for Broadcasting upheld the FCC's rules.
The FCC also deals with technical issues, such as engineer¬
ing standards for radio stations and the use of color in televi¬
sion, and with the content of broadcasting. Regulations on two
types of content are especially noteworthy:

1 Advertising The FCC is interested in the total amount of

broadcast time devoted to advertising and the number of
 ■ 220 The Communication Industries

commercial interruptions per hour. Too much advertising is

not in the “public interest.” The government has avoided set¬
ting rigid standards for how much advertising is too much,
but the broadcast industry has set its own limits on advertis¬
ing under the National Association of Broadcasters and Tele¬
vision Codes. Most stations have an average of fifteen to
twenty minutes of advertising per hour.11
2 Discussion oj public issues Through a series of decisions
and rulings the FCC has said that the public is entitled to
hear a reasonably balanced presentation of responsible view¬
points on public issues. As a result of these decisions, which
are known collectively as the fairness doctrine, stations must
sometimes grant equal time to opposing viewpoints on partic¬
ular issues. The fairness doctrine was extended in 1969 when
the Supreme Court ruled that individuals who are personally
attacked on the air are entitled to a chance to respond.

In addition, the FCC enforces the equal time provision estab¬

lished by Congress. It requires that a station that gives time for
one candidate for a political office must give equal time to his or
her opponents. Coverage of bona fide news events are exempt
from this provision.

■ Other Regulatory Forces. Besides the regulations of govern¬

ment, the broadcasting industry is subject to pressures from
other groups both inside and outside the industry. The National
Association of Broadcasters, an industry group, has long urged
self-regulation and has developed a code of ethics for radio and
for television, including both advertising and programming
standards. In addition, professional organizations within broad¬
casting, such as the Radio and Television News Directors Asso¬
ciation, have developed ethical codes to guide their members.
Other industry groups set standards, urge responsible perform¬
ance, and sometimes give awards for exemplary work.
Such codes and standards are a nice idea, but they don’t al¬
ways work. They are strictly voluntary, there is no way to enforce
them, and not everyone follows them. But their very existence
may exert a positive influence on broadcasters. Their real pur¬
pose, however, is not to regulate broadcasting but to act as a
kind of public relations buffer between the industry and the
public and between the industry and government, whose regu¬
lation broadcasters fear.
The industry’s public relations efforts have often failed to per¬
suade private groups that it is acting responsibly. Consumer
groups such as Action for Children’s Television (ACT) have cam¬
paigned vigorously against programming they believe harmful to
children. Former FCC commissioner Nicholas Johnson, an out-
 The Electronic Media 221 ■

spoken critic, organized the National Citizens Committee on

Broadcasting to push for what it sees as the public interest.
These groups and others representing minorities, women, and
the handicapped, as well as industry organizations that oppose
government control, seek to influence government regulators.

■ The Future of Government Regulation. How effectively does

the FCC and other governmental regulations regulate broadcast¬
ing? The answer depends on who is consulted. The broadcasting
industry generally feels that there is too much regulation and
rails against it. Libertarians argue that the First Amendment’s
guarantees of free speech and free press are being violated. Con¬
sumer groups often say that the FCC has been reluctant to can¬
cel licenses and enforce its regulations.
Aside from debates about how well the FCC or other groups
have done their job, some people argue that the broadcasting
industry should be deregulated because the justification for
regulation—a scarcity of channels for broadcasting—no longer
exists. When the FCC was established, only AM radio existed.
When television was first regulated, almost all stations were VHF
stations. The expansion of FM and UHF broadcasting and of ca¬
ble television has multiplied the number of channels available.
A bill to deregulate the industry was proposed in 1979, but it
died in that session of Congress. A number of subsequent bills
have been introduced, including the Freedom of Expression Act
of 1983. It would have given broadcast media parity with print
and would have struck down the fairness doctrine, the equal
time rule, and other restrictions on broadcast content but it was
defeated by the Senate Commerce Committee in 1984. However,
newspaper editorials praised the bill even after defeat and vowed
to continue the fight.

Broadcasting as Put together the technology of broadcasting, the production and

Content distribution system, the pressures from economics and politics,
and finally we get the content of broadcasting. Marshall
McLuhan argued that what is broadcast is not all that impor¬
tant: what matters is the medium, not the message. The
medium itself—broadcasting—has an impact, he said, on the
nature of human beings and our world.
But the messages of broadcasting do matter to us, and they
can be analyzed in several ways. Probably the easiest way is to
examine the types of content that are broadcast, which include
entertainment, advertising, and news and information.
A second, more difficult approach is to assess the impact of
broadcasting messages. Advertisers, for example, want to know
whether their commercials are actually selling soap, mouth¬
wash, beer, whatever. In examining its impact, we can look at
 ■ 222 The Communication Industries

broadcasting as either an aesthetic or a social force. We may

want to ask: Is a program aesthetically good or bad? Does its
content enhance or debase a society’s taste in literature, the
arts, or music? Looking at it as a social force, we might ask
whether the messages distort reality. Do they portray blacks or
women in a way that perpetuates stereotypes and prejudices?
Can violent programs teach children to be aggressive? Can pro¬
grams instill in children values such as respect or disrespect for
authority? We will examine these questions in Part III.
The content of broadcasting, especially on television, seems
to draw critics from all quarters—from those who find its quality
lacking, from those who fear its effect on their children or their
neighbors, from those who object to the lack of coverage the
news gives their cause or the way a group is portrayed. Almost
everything on television has attracted the ire of one critic or
another.
In part the uproar reflects the belief in broadcasting’s
power—the legacy of fear. It also reflects broadcasting’s vast po¬
tential to bring beautiful sounds, beautiful images, and a wealth
of information to millions of Americans any day the broadcast¬
ing industry chooses to do so. Finally, it reflects broadcasting's
constant presence in the daily lives of Americans. Perhaps, too,
some of the criticism arises from the simple fact that broadcast¬
ing is a mass medium, a medium of mass communication, and
thus a part of popular culture. It’s an easy target for simple
snobbery. But in fact the content and quality of broadcasting
vary greatly, and there are interesting differences between radio
and television. We look next at each medium in more detail.

■ Radio Unlike television stations, which are found in urban centers, ra¬
dio stations broadcast from even the smallest towns across
America. In January 1983 there were 9,160 radio stations oper¬
ating in the United States; 1,112 noncommercial stations, 4,668
commercial AM stations, and 3,380 commercial FM stations.
The AM stations operate on medium frequencies (from 535 to
1,605 kilohertz) and FM stations operate on very high frequen¬
cies (from 88 to 108 megahertz). Because they operate on such
widely separated frequencies, the two systems do not interfere
with each other. AM broadcasts reach farther than FM, but FM
broadcasts generate better sound, with less electrical disturb¬
ance and static.
Although a single television program like “Roots” may reach
more people than any radio program, radio still has the largest
composite audience of any medium. It has been estimated that
there are 470 million radio sets in the countiy. Of these, 74 per¬
cent are in homes and 26 percent are in cars, offices, stores, and
so on. The success of radio in the 1980s was almost as big a sur¬
prise as its rapid growth was decades ago.
 The Electronic Media 223 ■

The Rise of Radio It took less than twenty years for radio to grow from a tiny, ex¬
as a Mass Medium perimental enterprise to a great medium of mass communica¬
tion. The technical equipment that made broadcasting possible
moved beyond the wildest dreams of its inventors, and the uses
to which it was put were just as amazing. Radio moved into en¬
tertainment with dramatic presentations and its own star sys¬
tem. It broadcast music and made bands famous. It presented
dramatic news coverage by distinctive commentators and an¬
nouncers. It expanded the consciousness of average Americans
and put them in touch with personalities that were larger than
life. As one account put it:

Powerful personalities who won their followings through the effec¬

tive use of the broadcast world . . . ranged from Franklin D. Roose¬
velt, whose fireside chats, delivered in a personal and intimate
manner, captured the imagination and loyalty of most Americans, to
men like the famous Dr. Brinkley, the patent medicine man who ad¬
vertised his goat-gland pills over the air to distraught men anxious
to regain their lost youth. In between came firebrands like Louisi¬
ana’s Huey Long and Father Charles E. Coughlin, the Detroit priest
who became a storm center when he tried to build up a political
movement through his radio broadcasts.12

As America discovered the amazing possibilities of broadcast¬

ing, the constant interplay of economic and political, public and
private forces shaped it. These forces and the pioneers of radio
in the 1920s and 1930s established the structure and operation
of much of today’s broadcasting industry. Networks developed in
the late 1920s and worked out agreements with local stations.
Radio did battle with newspapers to claim its share of the adver¬
tising market and to define such issues as the “ownership” of
the news. Scared by the competition radio was giving them,
newspapers had tried to stop local stations from using the early
editions of papers as the source for their news. They claimed
that the radio stations were violating copyright laws. But the
courts ruled that although the particular expression of a writer
can be copyrighted, the factual content of news is in the public
domain—no one owns it. The radio stations could broadcast
news shows even if they could not afford to hire their own
reporters.
From 1912 on there had been some government regulation of
radio. During World War I the government took over all radio op¬
erations. The U.S. Navy operated all ship-to-shore stations, and
patent disputes among various radio inventors were set aside for
what the government called “the good of the country.” After the
war, competition for frequencies over which to broadcast was
fierce. For a while, the secretary of commerce assigned frequen¬
cies to transmitters. After much confusion the Federal Commu-
 ■ 224 The Communication Industries

nications Act of 1934 set up a formal system of government

regulations, including the FCC, while retaining the status of
broadcasting as a private, profit-making enterprise. By World
War II, AM broadcasting was a soaring industry, and the govern¬
ment asked for its cooperation in broadcasting messages about
the war to the American people. But because broadcasting was
now a fixture in the private sector, the government made no
move to take over the industry as it had in World War I. Then
came television.

Radio Versus Radio was flourishing as the nation entered World War II. After
Television: Decline the war television expanded and took away part of radio’s finan¬
and Rebirth cial support. Radio profits dropped, and it soon lost its prime¬
time evening audience, which turned to the television set. Some
observers predicted the death of radio.
Radio might have died had it not been for its resourceful
response to the challenge of television. Radio tightened its belt
for a time and took on advertising accounts that could not
afford costly television commercials. The content of broadcasts
changed sharply. Out went the well-developed radio drama, the
soap opera, the quiz program, and other entertainment fare that
now could be found on television. In came the disc jockey, coun¬
try and western music, frequent spot news, weather reports,
and call-in shows. For the most part radio ceased to be a na¬
tional medium. National programming decreased, and radio be¬
came a local medium providing local services to its audiences.
In effect, radio changed its functions. It gave more emphasis
to information and music and less to its older forms of enter¬
tainment. In this way radio survived as a more intimate and lo¬
cal medium.
As a result of these changes, there is some overlap between
the content of radio and television, but not much. In sports, for
example, local radio stations broadcast the games of high school
and college teams that do not generate a large enough audience
for coverage by television. Because it is portable and can be used
for background listening during other activities, radio became
the medium of the beach, the car, the kitchen, and the back¬
yard, as well as a handy source of news, music, and advertising.
After its slump in the 1950s, radio came back vigorously with
its regenerated programming. Other changes helped the come¬
back along. Most early radio was AM, but in 1962 numerous FM
broadcast stations developed, emphasizing audio quality. In
1961 the FCC allowed FM stations to broadcast in stereo. It also
set aside special channels for FM educational stations. Noncom¬
mercial stations began to provide leadership in public affairs
and cultural programs. It became a medium for a more elite au-
 The Electronic Media 225 ■

dience. These developments are similar to recent changes in

magazines, which now cater to carefully targeted audiences.
Although radio was successful in the 1960s, it seemed to take
a decided back seat to television, and no one paid much atten¬
tion to its growing cultural and commercial influence. Because
radio peaked as a mass medium in 1950, the high point of net¬
work radio, advertisers were largely unaware of its capacity for
reaching specialized audiences, not just in a local area, but na¬
tionwide. It took an obscure radio station in New York City,
WKTU, to show that radio has the capacity to draw a large, spe¬
cialized audience.
In 1979 WKTU introduced a new programming format, play¬
ing only disco music. Almost overnight it became the nation’s
most listened-to station. Some nights it captured 16 percent of
New York City’s listener market, where it competed with forty-
three AM and fifty-six FM stations. Although disco music did not
last long, the success of this station’s programming demon¬
strates the popularity of radio, even with competition from
television.
In the 1970s, CBS radio bought the rights to broadcast the
National Football League’s “Monday Night Football’’—an event
staged for television. Immediately the radio broadcasts drew 10
million listeners each week, compared with 45 million television
viewers. Audience research showed that many listeners were
also watching the game on television—but they turned down the
volume and listened to the radio, partly to avoid TV announcer
Howard Cosell! There must have been other appeals to radio cov¬
erage, though, because it continued after Cosell retired in 1984.
While network sports programming was making a comeback
on radio, radio drama returned. During the nostalgia craze of
the 1970s, old programs like “The Shadow,” “The Green Hor¬
net,” and “The Lone Ranger” came back briefly. More important
was CBS’s “Radio Mystery Theater,” a new show that began in
1973. More than two hundred stations carry this program,
which has been so successful it has been followed by other new
radio dramas, on both commercial and public radio. In the late
1970s, the British-inspired “Masterpiece Radio Theater” was
launched, and National Public Radio reported impressive audi¬
ences for its popular “Earplay” dramas.
By 1980 radio was enjoying new prosperity, and Frank Man-
kiewicz, then president of publicly supported National Public
Radio, even speculated that we might be entering a “new golden
age of radio." Radio’s content became somewhat more diversi¬
fied in the 1980s. Popular talk shows and all-news stations
made a comeback. New features include “radio psychologists"
with advice on personal problems and financial advisers and
others offering information to willing listeners. President Ronald
 ■ 226 The Communication Industries

Reagan, who was once a radio announcer, sensed the new im¬
portance of radio and made regular Saturday radio addresses.
Radio continued to have a special appeal and a special reach.
And its profitability soared during the 1980s.

The Continuing "Why,” asked writer Frank Brady, is “radio drama making a
Appeal of Radio comeback when television is still omnipresent?” The answer, he
said, “involves economic, cultural, and psychological factors.”13
Of course, the modest return of radio drama—which does not
come close to its popularity decades ago—is only one indication
of radio s rebirth. Brady s answer applies to the general upsurge
of radio, too.
First, the economic reasons: “Advertisers find they can reach
more people with less money through radio than with more
costly television commercials.”14 Radio has become attractive to
advertisers because its rates have stayed fairly constant while in¬
creases in the costs of equipment, labor, and newsprint have
brought rate hikes in print and television advertising. Nation¬
ally, radio takes in more money than magazines do, although it
takes in only about one-third as much as television and less
than one-fourth as much as newspapers. Radio is also regarded
as a good place for investors to put their money. Compared with
a television station or a newspaper, it takes relatively little capi¬
tal to buy a radio station and a smaller staff—and thus lower la¬
bor costs—to run one.
Second, cultural tastes seem to account for the success of
such high-quality public radio programs as the news program
“All Things Considered” and the dramatization of classics such
as “Wuthering Heights.” Unimaginative television programs and
endless reruns push more discerning viewers back to radio. In
other words, radio may be prospering from a sort of backlash
against television.
Third, psychological factors have always made radio a fasci¬
nating medium, though this was largely ignored after radio
drama disappeared in the 1950s. Radio is a medium in which
the imagination must come into play. As Brady put it:

The listener becomes the costumer, set designer, and the makeup
man and creates the characters and sets in his mind. The basic ap¬
peal of radio has always been to be listened to attentively. This pro¬
cess of mental animation is attractive to many people who over the
years have been fed on a steady diet of the passive experience of
watching television, and who seek a more participatory enter¬
tainment.15

The humorist Stan Freberg once illustrated radio’s power to en¬

gage the listener’s imagination by creating the world's largest ice
cream sundae in the listener s mind. He told the audience how
 The Electronic Media 227 ■

he would scoop out Lake Michigan and fill it with chocolate

syrup. Then came a massive avalanche of ice cream, and then
whipped cream. Finally, the Royal Canadian Air Force placed a
huge maraschino cherry on top while 2,500 extras cheered.
“Now,” said Freberg, “try that on television.”
Thus radio has distinctive advantages for its audience and
for advertisers. Although television and radio sometimes com¬
pete for the same advertising dollars, advertisers are buying dif¬
ferent services from the two media. Both radio and television are
here to stay.

Television About 98 percent of American households have at least one tele¬

vision set, and 50 percent have more than one. To reach this
vast audience, there were, by January 1983, 1,079 television
stations in the United States—including 526 commercial VHF
stations and 276 commercial UHFs, as well as 108 noncommer¬
cial VHFs and 169 noncommercial UHFs.
These statistics indicate the staggering dimensions of televi¬
sion’s reach. Perhaps even more significant is the fact that on
the average American households have a television set on about
seven hours a day. “Television," said Paula Fass, confronts
most of us regularly as an uninvited dinner guest, the sandman
of sleep, often the teacher, and, for many, a daily companion. It’s
a habit, a sedative, even a social mediator as it introduces us to
the facts and fantasies of American society.”16
Doubtless, there is some exaggeration in Fass’s portrait. (Tele¬
vision is, for example, usually an invited—not an uninvited—
guest, and that fact is significant.) But the view of television as
an intimate part of American life cannot be disputed. On the
other hand, just what role it plays in that life—as a directing
force or a bit player, for good or for ill—has been much disputed.
The sheer size of television’s audience makes it an attractive
scapegoat for those looking for the causes of society’s ills. Before
either criticizing or praising its effects, we want to examine the
medium more closely—as a technology, as a production and dis¬
tribution system, and as content.

The Technology of Television personality Steve Allen once mused that “television is
Television a triumph of equipment over people,” a statement that points up
the importance of the technical aspects of the medium. Just
how does television work? How is the action that cameras and
microphones record in a studio transmitted to the home? And
how does network programming stretch all the way across the
country—and sometimes the world?
Television's sound is basically FM radio. Sounds are picked
up from a microphone, turntable, or tape recorder. They are
 ■ 228 The Communication Industries

then mixed in an audio board and sent to the transmitter, where

the waves we described earlier in the chapter are generated,
modulated, and sent out the antenna to be received in the home.
Of course, since not all television is live, the sound (and the pic¬
tures) may be stored on videotape and broadcast or rebroadcast
later.
The picture portion of television begins in the television cam¬
era, which can focus an image and make adjustments for light.
Usually, there are several cameras in a studio, and technicians
select one of several pictures to be aired. The picture then goes
to the transmitter to be sent out the antenna, much like audio
signals, but the video signal is amplitude-modulated rather than
frequency-modulated. After they are modulated, the audio and
video signals are joined and broadcast from the antenna.
In television transmission there are two basic types of radio
waves: very high frequency (VHF) and ultra-high frequency
(UHF). Stations using VHF waves occupy channels 2 to 13,
whereas UHF stations have channels 14 to 83. Both kinds of
waves follow a straight line between the broadcast station and
the television receiver, but UHF signals can be blocked more eas¬
ily by buildings, trees, and hills. They can also be absorbed more
easily into the atmosphere. As a result, UHF signals require
more power for transmission. They also require more sensitive
adjustment, although UHF transmission has the capability of
bringing a more technically perfect picture than VHF. VHF sta¬
tions—the majority of American television stations—require less
power to reach a wider geographic area.
Normally, a television signal travels in a direct line of sight
from the station’s transmitter and antenna to the home antenna
and receiver, the television set.17 But there are other possibilities
if the television signal must be sent beyond its normal reach.
The networks, for example, use microwave relays. Microwaves
are electromagnetic waves like radio waves (and sunlight), but
they have a higher frequency and shorter wavelength than radio
waves. For microwave relays, the networks use relay stations set
about thirty miles apart: these stations are usually on specially
built towers or high buildings. At each station the microwave
signal is received, amplified, and retransmitted to the next sta¬
tion. Thus the network’s signals can be sent across the country
beyond the range of regular VHF and UHF transmission.
Signals are also transmitted by communications satellites. A
giound station sends the signals to a satellite, which beams the
signals to transmitters around the world. Many international
events are transmitted by satellite, whereas most network pro¬
grams come through microwave transmission. With the use of
satellites a television show can now have a worldwide audience.
 The Electronic Media 229 ■

■ Often the early forms of a new technology are cumbersome. Here,

current flowing from the transmitter, through hundreds of wires,
created a pattern of light and dark areas on the tubes to form a pic¬
ture. This picture was taken at the Bell Laboratories in New Jersey
in 1927. (Courtesy of AT&T Bell Laboratories.)

I Technological
Development
By the time television began to reach a mass audience, the
mechanisms for government regulation were already in place.
The FCC has therefore overseen the implementation of techno¬
logical innovations in the industry. In particular it has played a
major role in determining the use of VHF or UHF transmission
and the use of color.

■ VHF versus UHF. When the FCC began authorizing television

licenses, they assigned the VHF channels first. Consequently,
manufacturers began building television sets designed for VHF.
Later, as UHF stations were established, viewers either had
to forego watching UHF programs or equip their sets with a
■ 230 The Communication Industries

conversion device that cost about one hundred dollars. Thus

UHF television grew up in an environment in which the majority
of viewers could not receive its signal. While VHF stations pros¬
pered in the 1950s, UHF stations often went bankrupt.
Naturally, this situation was a thorny problem for the FCC. It
considered several solutions, including the strange idea of reas¬
signing all frequencies, giving VHF one side of the Mississippi
and UHF the other. But in the end the FCC decided to ask Con¬
gress to require all manufacturers of television sets to build
them so that they could receive both VHF and UHF signals. Con¬
gress did so in the 1950s.
After a drop in the number of UHF facilities in the late 1950s,
they have grown steadily, going from 76 commercial UHF sta¬
tions in 1960 to 276 in January 1983. In contrast, there were
441 commercial VHF stations in 1960. VHF stations showed
steady and remarkable growth until the early 1970s. Then the
number began to level off as the available frequencies were used
up. Still, today there are almost twice as many commercial VHF
stations as commercial UHF stations.

■ The Coming of Color. Color television got off to a slow start.

There was much talk about it as early as the 1940s. The net¬
works and manufacturers struggled to perfect a system for
transmitting and receiving color pictures, but the quality of
early color transmission was uneven at best. There were other
problems as well. Many black-and-white sets could not receive
pictures transmitted in color. The FCC insisted that the system
for color transmission be such that black-and-white television
sets could still receive a picture (though not in color). Add to
these problems the need to produce a color television set within
the financial means of large numbers of people, and the slow de¬
velopment of color is not surprising.
In 1953 the FCC approved FCA’s system of color television.
Although the system produced crude colors, it did allow existing
black-and-white sets to receive programs. The networks exer¬
cised much caution in delivering color broadcasts. At first they
broadcast only a few programs in color. By 1967, though, most
network programs were in color, and even local stations began
to produce programs in color. All the black-and-white cameras
had to be phased out, and new technicians trained. But the in¬
dustry made the transition to the new technology smoothly. By
1983, about 88 percent of those homes with a television set had
color television, and it seemed that nearly all American homes
would have a color set by the late 1980s.

H Subscription Television. Despite its large potential, pay, or

subscription, television developed slowly. Subscription televi-
 The Electronic Media 231 ■

sion, which is also called toll television, is a special method of

transmission in which the signal is scrambled at the sender’s
end. Unless the receiver has a device for decoding it, no image
can be viewed.
Whereas regular broadcasting delivers programs for a vast,
heterogeneous audience, programs on subscription television,
like a specialty magazine, can be targeted to limited, homoge¬
neous audiences. First-run movies, leading ballets, and Broad¬
way plays have been part of its programming. It has provided
special entertainment in luxury hotels and some homes. In au¬
ditoriums and theaters, subscription television has provided di¬
rect broadcasts of championship fights and other sporting
events that are kept off the air because of agreements between
sports entrepreneurs and broadcasters.
By the mid 1980s, subscription television still had only a rel¬
atively small audience. Its opponents have been many. Various
commercial interests from television stations to movie theaters
have fought it vigorously. Critics argue that if subscription tele¬
vision succeeds, then “free” commercial television will gradually
wither. Those who cannot afford subscription television, they ar¬
gue, will lose access to many programs. This was discussed in
Chapter 3. Subscription television is competition for cable, and
although cable operators offer their viewers a variety of special
movies and other services, STV still has more recent releases
and some that are not generally available to cable viewers. STV
is available in hotels in a number of cities.

■ Low Power Television. In 1982 the FCC initiated a new

broadcast service: low power television (LPTV), which essentially
is programming originated by television translator stations that
unscramble coded signals. Originally translator stations did
nothing more than rebroadcast the signals of full-service sta¬
tions. Under FCC rules LPTV stations have “secondary status,"
which means they can't interfere with full-power stations. They
are limited to 10 watts VHF and 1,000 watts UHF. There are few
regulations regarding LPTV ownership, but the stations must
obey prohibitions against obscenities and lotteries.
It was estimated that the FCC might grant as many as four
thousand LPTV licenses, and by early 1983 there were more
than seven thousand applicants. Still, only a few hundred were
approved by 1984. The new service organized itself quickly.
Within months of the FCC announcement, there was a national
Low Power Television Conference and Exposition, which drew
one thousand conferees to the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim,
California. The meeting even had a sponsor: the New York-based
National Institute for Low Power Television. One enthusiastic
 ■ 232 The Communication Industries

speaker at the California convention declared that LPTV was

“the last frontier of broadcast television in the United States.”18

Production and The production and distribution of television programs, like

Distribution other media content, is a business that relies on a variety of
managers, specialists, and technicians. Programs are made
somewhat differently depending on their budget, the type of con¬
tent, the style of the people involved, and whether they are net¬
work or local programs. Thus it is difficult to generalize about
how programs are made, but in the case of a network entertain¬
ment program (such as a drama or situation comedy), the pro¬
cess and the division of labor go something like this:
We begin with the producer. The producer is in charge of a
program or series and oversees everything from the budget to
hiring personnel and arranging facilities where the show will be
shot. The producer also works closely with the network, which
is commissioning the series and paying the bills.
Producers are rarely network employees. Instead, either they
are independent entrepreneurs with their own companies or
they work for the major motion picture and television studios,
usually in Hollywood. Producers may have an expensive staff
working with their company, or much of the staff help (called
talent) may be contracted on a free-lance basis. Whether the pro¬
ducer is initiating a new series, preparing an episode of a con¬
tinuing series, or arranging a one-time-only program, the
sequence of events involves the following:

1 An initial story conference. The producer meets with a

writer. In some instances, the producer has a clear idea of
what is desired and tells the writer what to prepare. In other
instances, there is give and take between the writer and pro¬
ducer, a kind of brainstorming out of which comes a story
idea that will be developed in the script. In still other in¬
stances, the writer simply “pitches” story ideas to the
producer.
2 A treatment is prepared. A treatment of a story is a brief pre¬
sentation, usually five to ten pages long, that tells the plot of
the story. It has no dialogue or camera direction. (An actual
script for a one-hour show is about seventy pages long.)
3 The treatment is reviewed. The producer, executive pro¬
ducer, and writer review the proposed plot. The writer is then
either told not to continue or commissioned to prepare a first
draft.
4 A draft is prepared. Once a first draft is done, another con¬
ference is held and a story editor joins the discussions. A va¬
riety of suggestions are made: the draft may not reflect what
the director had in mind or there may be problems in the
tone, dialogue, or flow of the story. Once the director, story
 The Electronic Media 233 ■

Box 6

Networks and
Independents:
Who Ihkes the
Risks?

The NBC miniseries Shogun first aired during Americans: such cultural differences were
the week of September 15,1980. When NBC ex¬ magnified by the difficulty of working in two
ecutives bought the film rights from author languages; there were more than thirty trans¬
James Clavell for $1 million, they no doubt lators on the set every day. As filming pro¬
hoped they had a blockbuster to start off the gressed, weather problems cropped up: during
new season with high ratings. six months of shooting, the production suf¬
NBC made Clavell executive producer of fered two typhoons, enormous amounts of
the miniseries, which meant that he had final rain, and a cave-in that nearly killed several
say about the script, director, casting, and crew members. Filming of scenes on wooden
filming location. Because his novel was set in ships disturbed local fishing grounds, and
seventeenth-century Japan, Clavell felt that it Japanese fishermen had to be paid $25,000 in
should be filmed on location, with a cast compensation. When Shogun was finally com¬
mostly made up of Japanese actors. This pleted, Paramount found that it had spent $25
raised a number of questions for Paramount million ($12 million had come from NBC) and
Television, the independent producers: had 125 hours of film in the can which had to
Should the film crew consist of both Japanese be edited to twelve hours.
and American technicians? Should they use Critics wondered whether American audi¬
existing sites, or build facsimiles? What about ences would tolerate long spells of untrans¬
dialogue—should speeches in Japanese be lated dialogue and complicated cultural
subtitled, dubbed, or left untranslated? mysteries. But they were wrong: Shogun won
Eventually these questions and hundreds NBC its highest weekly ratings ever and be¬
of others were settled: a cast was assembled came the second most successful miniseries
and filming began. At a cost of S3 million, Par¬ in television history. The network was de¬
amount built sets and made costumes that lighted, and so were the producers.
were historically accurate. Japanese crew Not all productions work out so well for
members took a painstaking interest in au¬ everyone involved. Television production is a
thenticity, clashing with the faster-paced risky business, involving millions of dollars
 ■ 234 The Communication Industries

and participants’ reputations. As the net¬ their productions in within budget, and take a
works see it, they are the ones with the most loss if a program flops with viewers.
to lose: most of their programs are made by in¬ Either way, it is the public who ultimately
dependent producers, they pay a lot for these decides the success or failure of a program,
programs, and ratings depend on quality pro¬ the outcome of the risk.
gramming. But the independents argue that
they are the ones who take the risks: they have photo: Courtesy of the National Broadcasting Company,
to find outside financing for production, bring Inc.

editor, and writer agree on the first draft, the writer is asked
to do a second. This time the visualization is added (that is,
directions for camera shots, lighting, and so on). Finally, the
writer is paid for the second draft.
5 The director gets the draft. Now the director, who has au¬
thority over the crew during rehearsal and taping, goes to
work. The director takes the draft, breaks it down into a
shooting script with action notes and an indication of what
individual shots will be like, and gives it a ‘’director’s polish.”
6 The show goes into production. At this point, stage man¬
agers, floor managers, camera personnel, and others begin
their work, as do the actors. A one-hour show is usually shot
in about one week. Motion pictures, in contrast, have been
known for legendary delays in production, sometimes involv¬
ing months or even years.
7 Rehearsals. The director, producer, and story editor read
through the script with the stage personnel and actors pres¬
ent. Changes may be made. Then there is a second rehearsal,
in which everyone runs through the script. At about this
time, musical material is being prepared in sound studios off
the set; music will be lip-sung during the show.
8 The taping or filming takes place.
9 Editing is done. Film or tape editors go to work making
changes to get the best possible production from what has
been captured during taping.
10 The program is prepared for the network. This means ar¬
ranging for its delivery by microwave transmission to local
television stations.

I Television Content In the early 1960s, Newton Minow, who was then chairman of
the FCC, looked at what this complex system produces and de¬
livered a famous verdict. Television, he said, was a “vast waste¬
land of mediocre programs, delivering a “dulling sameness.”
Leaving aside the question of quality for the moment, we would
 The Electronic Media 235 ■

■ Technicians in the television control room monitor sound and

video components of the programs being produced. (© Frank Siteman/
Picture Cube.)

dispute the accusation of “sameness.” The television networks

and local stations transmit content that covers a broad range of
topics, formats, and styles.
The type of content you are likely to see when you turn on
your television set depends greatly on the time. Different kinds
of people tend to watch television at different times, and they
make different uses of television depending on the time. Broad¬
casters aim their programming at the audiences most likely to
watch during certain hours. As a result, we can distinguish
three very general categories: daytime television, prime-time tele¬
vision, and limited-audience periods. The audience is largest
during prime time, which is from about 8 to 11 p.m. EST.
Limited-audience periods include Sunday morning and early in
the morning and late at night on any day.
To decide what to show during these periods, broadcasters
ask themselves, or market researchers: Who is home and awake
■ 236 The Communication Industries

in the early morning? Who is likely to watch *late at night? Who

are the key daytime viewers, and how do they differ from the rest
of the population? What kinds of programs will these groups re¬
spond to, and how do they differ from the rest of the population?
Broadcasters also ask: What is the audience at this time most
likely to want out of television? Do they want a light diversion
while they go about doing housework? Do they want to know
what’s been happening around the world? Programs obviously
have different functions. Some programs inform: others enter¬
tain or persuade; some combine all these functions.
By looking at television programs from the early days of the
medium to the present, we can tell something about what kinds
of programs people liked and how reality has been portrayed by
television. There are sharp contrasts in the portrayal of the
American family, for example, from the 1950s to the 1980s. Ac¬
cording to programs such as “Ozzie and Harriet” and “Father
Knows Best” in the 1950s, the American family was happy, easy¬
going, and middle class, with a mother who seemed to have no
interests or abilities outside the four walls of her home. None of
the family members, in fact, seemed to have any serious concern
with the larger world outside a very small circle of friends. The
shows were almost pure escapist entertainment. In the 1970s
and 1980s, programs such as “Family” and “One Day at a Time”
instead showed us families with problem-filled lives. The pro¬
grams were surely meant to entertain, but not by pure escapism,
and the reality they offered was harsher than that shown in the
1950s. But one characteristic of American families persisted
unrealistically on television until the 1970s—they were over¬
whelmingly white. Programs such as “Good Times” and “The
Jeffersons” in the 1970s and 1980s finally broadened televi¬
sion’s portrait of reality by trying to present black families.
Today about 75 percent of all commercial television can be
classified as entertainment; the other 25 percent is a mix of
news and public affairs, advertising, educational and religious
programming, and sports. The following more detailed classifi¬
cation should illustrate the range of content available on tele¬
vision.

■ Commercial and Other Interruptions. Lodged between regu¬

lar programming are regular interruptions, of several types.
1. Commercials This is paid advertising. Commercials pay
for almost everything else you see on television. They are pro¬
duced both locally and nationally. High-quality technical produc¬
tion characterizes commercials; many are done with more care
and precision than some programs. Obviously, they are de¬
signed to sell products. Commercials vary greatly in their cost to
the advertiser, depending on whether they are broadcast in low-
 The Electronic Media 237 ■

viewing hours or in prime time. To have a commercial carried on

the Super Bowl may cost an advertiser many times as much as
a commercial on an early-morning farm program.
2. Public service announcements A kind of unpaid commer¬
cial, public service announcements “advertise” public services
ranging from cultural events to hotlines for emergency health
care. The station donates this time as a public service, which
counts as part of the service to the “public interest, convenience,
and necessity” required by the FCC. Public service announce¬
ments often promote government services, such as free booklets
on consumer issues.
3. Program promotion Yet another type of commercial is a
kind of house advertising in which the station promotes its pro¬
grams or those of its network.

■ Entertainment Programs. Most entertainment programs are

part of a series and appear weekly or even more often. Included
in this broad category is everything from artistic dramas to
scores of situation comedies that last less than a season and are,
understandably, quickly forgotten.
4. Dramas Most dramatic shows are fictional presentations.
They range from public television’s “Masterpiece Theatre” to dra¬
matic situation comedies like “One Day at a Time” to police-
detective shows, medical shows, and many others. Usually these
programs are pure entertainment, or nearly so, and their char¬
acters and plots are similar to those of motion pictures. They
may also seek to instruct or persuade. For example, “Hill Street
Blues,” a dramatic show set in a police precinct, has dealt with
prostitution, homosexuality, and drug abuse.
5. Action-adventure programs Almost since television’s in¬
ception there have been programs, often police and detective sto¬
ries, that are frequently violent and filled with chase scenes.
Programs like “The A-Team” and “Hart to Hart” are in this
genre. Some are more subtle than others, but all have strong ac¬
tion elements and a good-guys-versus-bad-guys story line.
6. Situation comedies These shows trace the humorous foi¬
bles and activities of a regular cast of characters. They have been
extremely popular for years. Designed to get laughs, the situa¬
tion comedy may also take a serious turn now and then. In the
1960s producer Norman Lear pioneered the inclusion of social
issues in situation comedies with his show “All in the Family,”
which later became “Archie Bunker’s Place.” Lear’s show, “The
Jeffersons,” deals with the problems of affluent minorities. Over
the years, situation comedies such as the “Mary Tyler Moore
Show,” “Laverne and Shirley” and “Three's Company,” have
been among the most popular shows on television.
7. Variety shows A revue format with various musical per-
 ■ 238 The Communication Industries

■ The family has

often been at the
center of American
entertainment pro¬
gramming in broad¬
casting. The family
drama provides a
setting for the play¬
ing out of human
dramas and usually
reflects the values of
a particular genera¬
tion as was the case
with “Father Knows
Best,” starring Rob¬
ert Young. This was
the story of an ideal¬
ized conventional
American family dur¬
ing the 1960s. “One
Day At A Time,” a
popular, long run¬
ning show that be¬
gan during the
1970s, features is¬
sues and topics
faced by a more con¬
temporary American
Family. (© 1954
Screen Gems, Inc. formers, comedians, and other entertainers characterizes the
Courtesy of Columbia variety show. Usually it includes a host who introduces the acts
Pictures, opposite:
and chats with the entertainers during the program. Although
Embassy Television.)
they almost disappeared from television in the late 1970s, some
of the longest running shows on television have been variety
shows. The “Ed Sullivan Show” lasted sixteen years. Rock music
variety shows, country and western music specials, and other
musical fare also use a variety show format.
8. Talk shows These programs are somewhat similar to vari¬
ety shows, but they focus on guests interacting with the host.
The guest may be an entertainer, author of a recent book, or
public figure. Long-standing talk show hosts include Johnny
Carson, Merv Griffin, and Mike Douglas: Phil Donahue and
David Letterman are more recent hosts. Many local shows imi¬
tate the format of these national talk shows. Now and then, talk
shows have sparked real controversy.
9. Personality and game shows These feature people chosen
from the studio audience (or through a national canvass) com¬
peting for prizes or money. They are designed to give a thrill to
home viewers, who imagine themselves in the place of the par¬
ticipants. Some of these programs—“The Hollywood Squares”
 The Electronic Media 239 ■

and “Match Game,” for example—use show business personali¬

ties to enliven the show and draw a larger audience. Almost
since the beginning of television, game shows have been a staple
for audiences of limited sophistication.
10. Soap operas This type of dramatic show began in the
golden years of radio and was eventually transferred to televi¬
sion. Originally, they were sponsored by soap companies and
other producers of household cleaning supplies, and they ap¬
pealed mostly to women who were at home during the day when
they were aired. The “soaps” deal with a range of male-female re¬
lationships; marital infidelity, premarital sex, mate swapping,
and health problems figure often in their plots. Traditionally,
they have been characterized by cheap production, maudlin
scripts, and marginal acting. But today some critics say that
some soaps are superior to some evening fare. Among the best-
known soaps have been “The Edge of Night,” “Days of Our
■ 240 The Communication Industries

Lives,” “General Hospital,” “All My Children?” and “The Young

and the Restless.” So popular are the soap operas that weekly
magazines like Soap Opera Digest summarize their plots. Many
dramatic shows such as “Dallas,” “Dynasty,” and “Falcon Crest”
use a soap opera format.
11. Children’s programs Some of the earliest shows were
aimed at children, and children’s programs are still an impor¬
tant share of entertainment programming. They range from ed¬
ucational programs such as “Sesame Street,” to violence-filled
cartoons. Although most children’s programs are shown during
after-school hours and Saturday mornings, some, like “Pea¬
nuts,” get prime-time evening spots, as do other popular holiday
specials that are aimed at children and adults.
12. Movies Television makes extensive use of movies. The
major studios sell to television relatively recent releases that
have already run at local theaters: the major studios also make
movies for television only. In addition, mahy old movies are
shown, mainly late at night and early in the morning.
13. Specials The special is simply a program that is not part
of regular network programming. It may be a Christmas spe¬
cial—a one-time-only variety show hosted by a famous star—or
a one-person special showcasing the music of a popular singer,
for example. Specials also include award shows, beauty contests,
and holiday parades. They are usually presented to boost ratings
and often take the place of a program that has sagging ratings.
14. Sports and special events Virtually every major sport can
be seen on television almost every week. There are shows that
give play-by-play coverage of professional sports, especially foot¬
ball and baseball; shows like the “ABC Wide World of Sports”
that feature a range of sports on the same program, from frog
jumping to horse racing to skiing: and specials that cover cham¬
pionship events or worldwide contests such as the Olympics.
These broadcasts account for vast chunks of television time.
15. Docndramas This hybrid form, which straddles historical
fiction and public affairs, has become increasingly popular in re¬
cent years. Usually, the docudrama is a fictionalized treatment
of a piece of recent history. One of the most popular programs of
all time, “Roots,” was a docudrama based on Alex Haley's book
by the same title about blacks in America. “The Day After,” a
1983 docudrama about the effects of nuclear war, attracted a
massive audience and was the subject of instructional activities
in schools. The presidency of John F. Kennedy has also been the
subject of frequent docudramas as have such public figures as
Anwar Sadat, Edward VII, and many others.
16. Miniseries These multipart programs are teleplays broken
into several evening programs and have become important in
the ratings wars. For example, the 1983 series “The Thornbirds”
 The Electronic Media 241 ■

was a miniseries. A miniseries is usually based on a fictional or

fictionalized work, although sometimes it is close to the docu-
drama.
These are some of the terms used to describe program for¬
mats. Of course, they overlap considerably, and there is no com¬
pletely satisfactory classification system into which all programs
fit neatly.

■ Other Programs. Most of the content we’ve discussed so far

mainly entertains. There is also television fare that primarily in¬
forms and influences.
17. News and public ajfairs This important category in¬
cludes the network and local news shows, special coverage of im¬
portant public events—political nominating conventions, visits
by foreign dignitaries, and so on—documentaries and news spe¬
cials, and regular interview shows like “Meet the Press” in which
journalists question public figures. Among the most popular
shows in the last few years has been CBS’s “Sixty Minutes.” Dur¬
ing the Iranian hostage crisis in 1980, ABC News initiated a pro¬
gram called “Nightline” with Ted Koppel. The program met with
stunning success, and the other networks soon experimented
with their own late night—and early morning—news programs.
CBS, for example, developed a program called “Late Night.” By
1984 two networks had news shows running in the early morn¬
ing, but had backed off from four-to-six am hour-long programs
and cut back considerably. The future of these programs was in
doubt as this is written. Mostly the news programs concentrate
on covering events, although they include some background re¬
ports, interpretation, and editorial comment.
18. Religious programs Religious programs, sometimes called
“the electronic church,” range from the elaborately produced
specials of Billy Graham and Oral Roberts to religious talk shows
such as the “PTL Club” and regular broadcasts of Robert
Schuller’s “The World Tomorrow” and Jerry Falwell as well as lo¬
cal church services. All the major religions in America are usu¬
ally represented on local stations on Sundays, when religious
programming is at its most intense. Included are traditional re¬
ligions, faith healers, and interviews with theologians as well as
with people who promote spiritualism. Several religious net¬
works produce religious programming and offer it to local sta¬
tions. Religious programs sometimes cross the fine line into
politics. When a religious program deals mainly with social and
political issues, local stations find themselves offering equal
time to opposing viewpoints.
19. Cultural and educational programs At one time educa¬
tional and cultural programming was little more than a dull pre¬
sentation of “talking heads,” panel shows of educators lecturing
 ■ 242 The Communication Industries

to their audiences. But in recent years public television pro¬

gramming has become more competitive, especially among the
better-educated audience. Much but not all cultured and educa¬
tional programming appears on noncommercial public broad¬
casting. This category overlaps with the other types of content
we’ve described, but it is distinguished by efforts to teach about
something or to explicate a cultural theme. The rise in the diver¬
sity and popularity of these programs probably began when
shows such as “Upstairs Downstairs,” “Masterpiece Theatre,”
and the zany “Monty Python” were imported from the British
Broadcasting Company. Often the imported programs were
high-quality productions of serialized novels, docudramas, or
classics of literature and drama. Today there are also many
American-produced dramas of high quality. The programs avail¬
able range from symphony orchestras, jazz concerts, ballets, and
documentaries on great artists, to public affairs programs such
as “Washington Week in Review,” to “The French Chef” with
Julia Child and “National Geographic.”

Criticizing In its earlier days television was regarded as beneath the dignity
Television of critical comment by serious writers. Today there is a growing
body of criticism of television in both scholarly and popular
sources, including newspapers, television, and magazines. Crit¬
ics differ greatly. Jeff Greenfield and Michael Arlen, for example,
have earned reputations for literate and inspired criticism.
Besides professional reviewers, the critics of television in¬
clude a diverse cast of characters—from technical authorities to
politicians to social scientists to political activists. They take on
a wide range of issues with vaiying intensity, but the content of
television and its effects probably fuel the hottest debates. The
diversity that we have glimpsed in that content does not support
the claims of some critics that the medium is merely a “vast
wasteland.” It is, rather, a cafeteria that offers the equivalents of
everything from junk food to caviar. It offers different programs
for different tastes: simplistic cartoons for the Saturday morn¬
ing audience, which is made up mostly of children; turbulent
soap operas for daytime viewers who are mostly homemakers;
simple comedies for those in need of diversion; and serious dra¬
mas for those who want more demanding fare.
We should not overstate the case for television’s diversity,
however. The comedian Fred Allen once remarked that “imita¬
tion is the sincerest form of television,” and many television pro¬
grams are unimaginative copies from other shows or movies
that proved popular. Whether this hurts the quality of programs
is open to debate. But it has given us some seasons when police
shows kept cropping up in prime time and others when doctors
were everywhere. In some communities, shows like “M.A.S.H.”
have appeared several nights a week in multiple reruns.
 The Electronic Media 243 ■

Television news shows have come in for their own share of

criticism. “Happy news” shows—with their chatty, personable
anchorpersons, frequently trivial stories, and inane comments—
have been sharply denounced. Critics say that serious attention
to important issues is being displaced by a search for entertain¬
ing stories. What goes on television news, say the critics, is
greatly influenced by a search for visual appeal, spectacle, and
entertainment. They may have a point. Television stations reg¬
ularly hire consultants who survey the viewing public and then,
armed with their survey data, suggest changes in the news show
to boost ratings. News shows, like entertainment programs, de¬
pend on audience ratings.
To all this criticism, defenders of the industry sometimes an¬
swer that they are giving viewers what they want to see, that the
American people would not watch more of the higher brow fare
that some critics seem to be looking for. Television, they say, is
just a mirror of American values, not their creator.
Those who disagree with this assessment worry not only that
the quality of television is poor but also that its effects are harm¬
ful. Game shows and “I Love Lucy” reruns, some argue, are not
just “brain candy” but also contribute to a kind of mindlessness.
Some critics ask whether television is muting the rich, regional
accents of America. Will the time come when all Americans
sound like Dan Rather or Diane Sawyer? The dirt-obsessed
women of many commercials do not mirror American women or
harmlessly sell a product, critics say; rather, they help maintain
a view of women—and an anxiety about housekeeping—that are
harmful. As broadcast historian Erik Barnouw said, “One of the
most fascinating things about television is the continual over¬
lapping of everything. Drama is inevitably propaganda, it’s poli¬
tics, it’s also merchandising. It is continually selling a way of life
or a pattern of consumption.19
But how effective is it in selling these things? Is television a
mirror or a force in itself? Some critics have argued that the
effects of television go far beyond responses to the obvious
messages it broadcasts. As Richard Adler explained, Marshall
McLuhan “insisted that trying to understand television by ex¬
amining the programs it offers is as futile as attempting to com¬
prehend the impact of the printing press in the 15th century by
interpreting the contents of Gutenberg’s Bible.”20 In Adler’s
words, McLuhan has portrayed television “as nothing less than
a major landmark in the evolution of human consciousness.”21
To critic Michael Novak, television “is the molder of the soul’s
geography. It builds up incrementally a psychic structure of ex¬
pectations. It does so in the same way that school lessons slowly,
over the years, tutor the unformed mind and teach it ‘how to
think.’ ”22
In Chapters 8—10 we will assess television’s influence, as well
 ■ 244 The Communication Industries

as that of other media. Here we offer a very general assessment

of television by quoting commentator Eric Sevareid. There was
a thoughtful expression on Sevareid’s face as he looked into the
television camera one evening in 1978. Of course, Sevareid was
always thoughtful, but on this occasion he was thinking about
television. This was to be Sevareid’s final commentary on the
CBS Evening News: “Television,” he said, “has learned to amuse
well; to inform up to a point; to instruct up to a nearer point; to
inspire rarely. The great literature, the great art, the great
thought of past and present make only guest appearances. This

I Cable TV: An
Extension of
can change.”

All the broadcasting services discussed so far have a common

characteristic: there are a limited number of channels. Beyond
a certain point, if you try to broadcast more signals over the air
Television
in one area, the signals interfere with one another. This scarcity
of channels not only led to government regulation of television
but also influences its content. In any area the number of chan¬
nels is small and each station tries to appeal to all the people in
the area; its content is therefore aimed at a heterogeneous, not
a specialized, audience.
Cable television differs in a fundamental way. It is character¬
ized not by channel scarcity but by channel diversity. It is the
“television of abundance” because its signals are sent not over
the air but through coaxial cables stretched from place to place
like telephone wires.

I The Potential of
Cable and Fiber
Coaxial cable has several special characteristics. It has two con¬
ductors, like two wires, one inside the other. The cable is a mix¬
Optics ture of copper and aluminum and is tightly sealed in plastic.
Such a cable has the capacity to prevent signal linkage, so it can
transmit a very clear picture. In addition, it can carry many
more signals than a single wire or even a wireless system can.
With appropriate technology, cable can bring in signals from cit¬
ies hundreds, even thousands, of miles away. The “cable” was
joined by another technology—fiber optics—which uses thin
tubes of glass or plastic to carry a wide band of frequencies.
These characteristics give cable operators many choices. They
can carry all the local stations and import other distant chan¬
nels. They can put together their own programs and still have
channels to lease to others. Groups that could not afford to buy
time on an over-the-air station might be able to afford time on
cable, which is far cheaper.
For consumers, cable also offers choices, possibly vast
choices. They can receive more than thirty-six channels on cable
television. Theoretically, at least, they can mix and match pro¬
grams from local and distant stations, specialized and general-
 The Electronic Media 245 ■

ized programs. Although network television has been ingenious

in creating programs for a mass audience and has captured mil¬
lions of viewers, it has virtually ignored people’s specialized in¬
terests. Cable television might satisfy those interests.
Futurists considering cable television found its possibilities
mind-boggling. Ethnic groups might have their own channels.
People making television programs would no longer be restricted
by the need to reach the mass audience; they could produce pro¬
grams for a specific audience with special interests. Two-way
communication between the home and the transmission facility
has also been tried, notably in Columbus, Ohio, where a system
called Qube operated during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Ca¬
ble television, however, has never been able to move as fast as
its futurist promoters would have liked. They once envisioned
more than one hundred channel systems available to everyone.
A few such systems do exist, but most cable operators offer only
about a dozen different channels. In many cities it is possible to
get thirty or more by paying for additional tiers, or layers of ser¬
vice. Almost as soon as cable reached about 30 percent of U.S.
households, there was enormous competition among many pro¬
gramming companies. In the 1980s, public demand did not
keep pace with the offerings of the programmers and the cable
industry generally. But cable still had come a long way from the
days when it was merely a “community antennae.”

A History of Cable Cable television was first used for a very practical reason. In the
in America late 1940s, as television began to reach a large audience, two
problems became obvious. First, because the few existing sta¬
tions were in large cities and were not very powerful, people who
lived outside those cities either got no picture at all or got a
hazy, snowy image that all but disappeared every time a car
drove past their home. Second, because television signals travel
basically in a line of sight, bouncing off obstructions, mountains
and skyscrapers can block their signals. But cable can solve
both these problems.
There is some dispute about just when cable television was
first used, but one likely story credits Robert Tarlton with begin¬
ning it in 1950. Tarlton owned a radio and television repair shop
in Lansford, Pennsylvania. Although Lansford is only sixty-five
miles from Philadelphia, a mountain outside Lansford blocked
television signals. Tarlton knew that his chances of selling tele¬
vision sets would increase if signal reception in Lansford could
be improved. So Tarlton organized the Panther Valley Television
Company, placed an antenna on the mountain that was interfer¬
ing with signals, and strung cable down to the homes of people
who owned television sets. The antenna picked up the television
signals, and the cable brought them to the homes.
■ 246 The Communication Industries

As Tarlton’s idea caught hold, cable corppanies sprang up

elsewhere. They brought a sharp picture to distant rural areas
and to large cities where skyscrapers interfered with broadcast
signals. Thus cable brought television to additional viewers, ex¬
panding the audience for television programs—and for the ad¬
vertisements—to the delight of the broadcasting industry.
In 1960 fewer than 2 percent of American television house¬
holds had cable television, and there were only 640 cable com¬
panies. Cable was being used only to bring in a clear signal.
Then a few cable companies saw the other possibilities for cable;
they began to bring in signals from other cities. To local broad¬
cast stations, the cable companies were now unwanted compe¬
tition, taking away some of their audience and giving it to the
distant, imported stations. To the distant stations, the cable
companies were thieves, using their programs without paying
for them. Under pressure from the broadcast industry, the FCC
in 1965 declared that cable television was under its jurisdiction.
From then until the 1970s, the FCC slowed the development of
cable in order to protect the broadcasting industry.
For cable to offer a diversity of channels and specialized pro¬
gramming, two things were necessary: economic feasibility and
favorable government regulations. But at first the FCC’s rules
were very restrictive. In 1972 the regulations included require¬
ments that the cable company cariy all stations licensed within
thirty-five miles of the system as well as guidelines for rates,
complaint procedures, and construction schedules. Local gov¬
ernments actually grant the franchises to cable systems to op¬
erate in their area, and they, as well as state government, can
add other rules. The FCC also ruled that a cable system in the
hundred largest television markets had to have at least a twenty-
channel capacity, to set aside one channel for public access and
others for schools and local government, and to have the facili¬
ties to originate programs itself. Perhaps most important, the
FCC restricted the number of signals that the cable companies
could import.
Then the FCC began to loosen its regulations. In 1979 it al¬
lowed cable operators to bring in as many signals from distant
broadcast stations as they wished. Also in 1979 a Supreme
Court decision freed cable operators from the FCC’s rule that
they must provide public-access airtime to almost any group
that put together a show. State and local governments, however,
can still require some public service programming as long as
their rules do not interfere with the federal government’s
policies.
By 1979 cable television seemed on the verge of becoming a
major medium of communication. Not only were government
regulations relaxed but the economic picture for cable television
 The Electronic Media 247 ■

was improving. Advertising agency executives say that a me¬

dium must be able to attract 30 percent of the potential audi¬
ence for national advertisers to find it economically worthwhile.
It was when over-the-air television reached 30 percent of Ameri¬
can households in the 1950s that it became a significant mass
medium that could attract sufficient amounts of national adver¬
tising, and it was this number that made color television a com¬
mercial reality by the 1970s. At the end of 1978 there were over
four thousand operating cable systems, reaching almost 18 per¬
cent of American households. By 1980, 20 percent of American
households were hooked up with cable systems. By 1984,
39.3 percent of American homes were wired for cable. Cable
companies were originating more of their own programs and
bringing in more specialized programs from distant stations.
The cable industry seemed on the verge of challenging conven¬
tional network television.

Cable Television in Two kinds of cable services are available: basic cable and pay ca¬
the 1980s ble. With basic cable the subscriber pays a one-time fee, and the
local cable company strings a wire to the back of the television
set much as Ma Bell used to put in a phone. Then the subscriber
also pays a monthly service fee. In return subscribers view mul¬
tiple channels, compared with the more limited number of chan¬
nels that a standard in-house or rooftop antenna can bring in.
In addition to the local UHF and VHF channels, cable subscrib¬
ers in many areas can see out-of-town stations, special telecasts
of sports events, shows in foreign languages, and special edu¬
cational programming. They often receive programs from the
so-called superstations as well—independent television stations
that lease space on a communications satellite. There were four
superstations in 1983 including WTBS in Atlanta, WQR in New
York, WGN in Chicago, And KTVU in San Francisco-Oakland.
They provide programming that includes sports events and re¬
runs of old television shows. One of the best-known supersta¬
tion-type services is Home Box Office (HBO), a popular movie
and entertainment channel. By 1984 the superstations had pro¬
duced relatively little programming of their own, but they were
responding to criticisms of their poor quality by promising to
produce original shows for children and other programs. Ted
Turner’s twenty-four-hour news network was initiated in 1980.
Cable subscribers who want more and better programming
than basic cable provides can buy it for additional fees. For their
money they get high-quality motion pictures only a few weeks
after they have been shown in local theaters, sports events not
available on regular TV or basic cable, and entertainment spe¬
cials from Las Vegas and other entertainment capitals. Some
viewers especially like one aspect of pay cable—no advertising.
■ 248 The Communication Industries

Also, films are left intact in their original form, not censored for
sexual content as they are on network television.
Television critic Nicholas Johnson used to tell TV viewers to
“talk back to your television set.” Of course, he was not speaking
literally but meant that people should find ways to communicate
with the networks and the FCC. By the late 1970s, some viewers
in the United States really could talk back to their television
sets. Some were talking back to their sets by playing electronic
games. In an experiment in Columbus, Ohio, Warner Cable Cor¬
poration developed the two-way cable system (QUBE) that al¬
lowed viewers to talk back to their sets by pressing buttons on a
hand-held console. The programs that viewers saw were mainly
local news and talk shows in which questions were asked of the
audience. For example, consumer advocate Ralph Nader, on a
visit to Columbus, asked QUBE viewers whether they would
back a petition to change advertising directed at children. View¬
ers could push a “yes” or “no” button. (The yeses won.) The pos¬
sibilities for greater citizen participation in public affairs and for
more rapid marketing research for advertisers are obvious. The
service was discontinued, however, in 1984 owing to lack of
profitability, but a variety of other talk-back cable services was
being developed, such as home shopping.
As impressive as cable seems, its content by 1984 was still far
from what futurists had anticipated ten years earlier. Cable
companies still were not producing much of their own program¬
ming. But the future is likely to see the development of special
news and opinion channels, public affairs programming, more
personal involvement shows, as well as richer entertainment
and cultural programming—perhaps including the best of the
Broadway stage and opera, ballet, and symphony orchestras. As
a result of cable, the average home could also have electronic tie-
ins to commercial establishments, stock reports, and connec¬
tions to libraries. People could make commercial transactions
with banks and department stores without leaving their homes.
Some of these services have been started but have failed for lack
of use. This does not suggest failure for cable, just a shakedown
of programming in a growing and volatile market. A Canadian
system, called Teledon, is already doing these things and more
on an experimental basis in several Canadian cities. Teledon can
create pictures and graphs through computer graphics, order up
information about the economy, help a person pick out a local
restaurant, and much more. Some of the U.S. services such as
Viewtron and Viewdata are also doing this. These and other in¬
novations were discussed in Chapter 3.
Cable television could also deliver a wide range of special
services to institutions and community organizations. Local
communities have expanded their sources of public health.
 The Electronic Media 249 ■

educational, and consumer information through cable hookups.

Much of the activity anticipated by cable operators is not mass
communication at all but the communication of specialized in¬
formation to specific, targeted audiences.
It may not be unreasonable to think that in the future people
will create their own shows by selecting certain features and re¬
jecting others. Imagine a news show in which you decide that
you want more news about your own neighborhood, less world
news, a special feature on cross-country skiing, and a detailed
report on a particular stock on the New York Stock Exchange. Of
course, some people are already making their own entertain¬
ment packages through the use of cassettes. This capability,
linked to cable television and computers, conjures up an image
of an information-rich future. Critic Alvin Toffler has predicted
that cable will contribute to the “demassification” of the media,
encouraging many channels and increasingly fragmented and
diversified audiences. Naturally, the national networks fear this
development.

■ Summary This chapter has reviewed the American broadcasting media,

which have both commercial and noncommercial components.
Our emphasis has been on commercial broadcasting, with pass¬
ing reference to the public systems.
Broadcasting can be defined as a technology, as a production
and distribution system, and as content. The actual use of
broadcasting's great capabilities has often lagged behind tech¬
nology. The principal components of the broadcasting industry
are the local stations, the national networks, the audience, and
the advertisers. Commercial broadcasters sell access to their au¬
diences to advertisers. This is the source of revenue in the
broadcasting industry, and as a result the industry has been
profitable and programming has been influenced by advertisers
and interrupted frequently by their messages.
As a result of the scarcity of broadcasting channels, broad¬
casting is subject to government regulation and to the regula¬
tions of the FCC in particular. The FCC licenses stations and
monitors their performance to see that, as custodians of the
public's airwaves, the stations act in the public interest. Among
the factors the FCC has looked for as evidence that the public
interest is being served are diversity of ownership and fair cov¬
erage of public affairs. In addition, broadcasting must adjust to
social pressure and criticism.
Radio was the first of the broadcasting industries, and it sur¬
vived competition from television by becoming a more special¬
ized and more intimate medium. To the surprise of many, radio
is prospering today.
Radio’s resurgence does not seem to have hurt television,
 ■ 250 The Communication Industries

which Americans watch, on the average, about seven hours a

day. Despite its great range of programs, the content of televi¬
sion is frequently attacked for poor quality, imitation, and
harmful effects. Yet television unquestionably does much to in¬
form and entertain Americans. It has done less well as a source
of inspiration and in appealing to people’s specialized interests.
The growth of cable television might make up for these deficien¬
cies. Cable offers the possibility of more diverse and more spe¬
cialized communication, a potential demassification of the
media.

Notes and 1 John Crosby, “The Age of Noise,” in Radio and Television,
References Readings in the Mass Media, ed. Allen and Linda Kirschner
(New York: Odyssey Press, 1971), p. 183.
2 For a useful discussion of these concepts, see Reed H. Blake
and Edwin O. Haroldsen, A Taxonomy of Concepts on Com¬
munication (New York: Hastings House, 1975), p. 42.
3 Lynn S. Gross, Hear/See; An introduction to Broadcasting
(Dubuque, Iowa: W. C. Brown, 1979), p. 45.
4 Giraud Chester, Garnet R. Garrison, and Edgar E. Willis, Tel¬
evision and Radio, 4th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-
Hall, 1971), p. 42. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
5 Bruce M. Owen, JackH. Beebe, and Willard G. Manning, Jr., Tele¬
vision Economics (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1974), p. 4.
Some of the other material in this section is also derived in
part from pp. 6—12.
6 Harry J. Scornia, Television and Society (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1965), p. 7.
7 Sydney W. Head, Broadcasting in America; A Survey of Tel¬
evision and Radio, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976),
p. 207.
8 Peter Jay, “The Future of Broadcasting,” Encounter, April
1977, p. 69.
9 “The Fifth Estate,” Broadcasting Yearbook (Washington,
D.C.: Broadcasting Publications, Inc., 1983), p. A-2.
10 Chester, Garrison, and Willis, Television and Radio, pp.
122-123.
11 Mary B. Cassata and Molefi K. Asante, Mass Communication:
Principles and Practices (New York: Macmillan, 1979),
p. 175.
12 Chester, Garrison, and Willis, Television and Radio, p. 34.
13 Frank Brady, “Move Over, TV—Radio Is Booming,” Parade,
October 7, 1979, p. 5. Also see, “Striking It Rich in Radio,”
Business Week, February 5, 1979, pp. 58—62.
 The Electronic Media 251

14 Brady, “Move Over,” p. 5.

15 Ibid.
16 Paula S. Fass, “Television as Cultural Document: Promises
and Problems,” in Television as a Cultural Force, ed. Rich¬
ard Adler and Douglass Cater (New York: Praeger, 1976),
p. 37.
17 This section draws on the fine introduction in Gross,
Heart See.
18 David Crook, “Low Power TV: Airwave of the Future,” Boston
Globe, January 28, 1983, p. 23.
19 Quoted in Douglass Cater, ed. Television as a Social Force
(New York: Praeger, 1975), p. 8.
20 Richard Adler, “Understanding Television: An Overview of the
Literature of the Medium as a Social and Cultural Force,” in
ibid., p. 36.
21 Ibid.
22 Michael Novak, “Television Shapes the Soul,” in Cater, ed..
Television as a Social Force, p. 23.
 ■ 252 The Communication Industries

■ Special effects
have played a major
role in creating the
illusion of reality in
the mass media
since the earliest
days of radio. The
first sound effects—
footsteps on stairs,
even the call of a
raven and its flap¬
ping wings, were du¬
plicated in the
studio and broadcast
live, and technicians
had little control if
things went wrong.
Today sound effects
are often created
electronically and
recorded for techni¬
cal ease. (Right and
below: Culver Pictures.)
 Photo Essay: A History of Special Effects in the Media 253 ■

■ To film King Kong

in 1933, special-
effects technicians
made scaled-down
props,then posed
their ape-suited ac¬
tor behind a frame
mockup of Manhat¬
tan. Flying planes
were projected onto
a screen behind the
actor to provide real¬
istic motion. Fifteen
years later, movie¬
goers were en¬
thralled by the
effects of stereo¬
scopic films, which
had to be viewed
through special 3-D
glasses. (Above: His¬
torical Pictures Service,
Chicago. Right: Culver
Pictures.)
 ■ 254 The Communication Industries

■ Makeup has proved

to be especially ef¬
fective in creating il¬
lusions in horror
and fantasy films.
For the series of
movies “The Planet
of the Apes,’’ makeup
artists developed
flexible, individualis¬
tic ape faces for the
entire cast; for
“Something Wicked
This Way Comes,”
they showed an ac¬
tor aging dramati¬
cally in seconds.
(Above: Dennis Stock/
Magnum. Right: Nancy
Moran/Sygma.)
 Photo Essay: A History of Special Effects in the Media 255 ■

■ Special effects are

essential for large-
scale scenes that are
too expensive and
difficult to film real¬
istically. The 1983
TV movie “The
Winds of War,” for
example, included
several naval battle
scenes. Here minia¬
ture ships were set
on a pond against a
painted backdrop;
the technicians used
a fan to make waves
and set fire to those
models that were
“hit” in the script
(Right and below:
R. Hewett/Shooting
Star.)
 Some day someone with an authentic movie mind will make a cheap
and simple motion picture that will arrest the notice oj the civilized
minority [and] when that day comes, the movies will split into two
halves. .. . There will be huge, banal, maudlin, idiotic movies for the
mob, and . .. there will be movies made by artists for people who
can read and write.
H. L. Mencken

The Movies

From a quick description, movies sound much like television:

moving images plus sound. Some of their differences appear at
first to be disadvantages: You have to go to the movies and pay
for them rather than having them come to you for free. And, of
course, the same movies shown in theaters are often shown on
television. Not surprisingly, the movie industry lost a lot of its
audience to television. But the dark theater, the large screen,
and the uninterrupted film continue to exert a special force and
to draw people out of their homes.
Perhaps as television continues to change, it will draw even
more people away from the movie theater. But today film re¬
mains an important and a separate medium. In this chapter we
ask what films are, what their functions are, how they are made,
and what their content has been. We examine, too, the links be¬
tween films and economic, political, and social forces and some
of the ways film makers receive feedback. As we will see, the
movies in America have been marked from their beginnings
both by a search for formulas that would sustain audience en¬
thusiasm and by a turbulent battle between the profit motive

I
and artistic standards.

Defining Motion No other medium of mass communication has enjoyed the glam¬
Pictures our and public acclaim of the movies. From The Birth oj a Na¬
tion to Star Wars, from Douglas Fairbanks to Robert Redford
and Meryl Streep, movies, movie stars, and the intrigue of the
 The Movies 257 ■

industry have been in the public eye. Screaming tabloids, gush¬

ing movie magazines, and caustic television commentators pass
on the latest Hollywood gossip and speculation to a fascinated
public.
This publicity may do more to hinder than to help our under¬
standing of what movies are. Behind the gossip and the glamour
lies the reality of the movies. A comment in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Last Tycoon is worth considering:

You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it
with the contempt we reserve for what we don’t understand. It can
be understood too, but only dimly in flashes. Not a half dozen men
have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their
heads.1

That “whole equation” includes both economic realities and ar¬

tistic considerations. Motion pictures are both an industry and
an art form. They are also a mass medium of communication
and a social force.
The many facets of motion pictures are reflected in the exist¬
ence of different names for them. Take the terms film, cinema,
and movie. French film theorists make a clear distinction be¬
tween film and cinema. To them the term film describes the re¬
lationship of the medium to the world around it, whereas
cinema describes its cultural standards and internal structure.
Add to this the American word movies, and we have a conveni¬
ent label for a third aspect of motion pictures—their character¬
istics as an economic commodity.2 As film scholar James
Monaco wrote:

One person’s “movie” is another person’s “film." But in general we

use these three names for an art in a way that closely parallels this
differentiation: “movies,” like popcorn, are to be consumed: "cin¬
ema” (at least in the American parlance) is high art, . . . “film" is the
most general term with the fewest connotations.3

For this reason we use the word film most often in this chapter.
As art, film includes the whole spectrum of art forms. Like
the theater and dance, it is a performing art; like painting and
literature, it is representational; and like music, it is a recording
art. Evaluating the artistic merit of films, however, is beyond the
scope of this book, and film as a social force is the topic of later
chapters. Here we are most concerned with film as a medium of
mass communication and film as an industry.
 ■ 258 The Communication Industries

I Film as a
Medium of Mass
For the people who make films, they provide an avenue for
expression, an opportunity to practice their craft, a chance to
influence and to entertain, and a livelihood. The film itself may
be frivolous entertainment, it may make a political or a social
Communication statement, or it may have important artistic qualities. For the
audience the film may be an escape or a lesson in fashion, lan¬
guage, or human relationships. Throughout their history, how¬
ever, American films have been primarily, though not
exclusively, a medium for entertainment. They have been fanta¬
sies, taking their viewers away from the mundane details of
everyday life. No matter what the fortunes of the marketplace or
the competition from other media such as television, this me¬
dium has held onto the function of entertaining as its main rea¬
son for being. We can find explanations for this emphasis both
in the history of film and in the conflicting forces that still shape
American films today.

I An Overview of
American Film
Film history, according to James Monaco, “is a matter of de¬
cades and half-decades.” That is, changes are frequent because
History of the explosive impact of films, the fast development of technol¬
ogy, and the large size of movie audiences.1 2 3 4 5 6 Monaco distin¬
guished seven periods in American film history:

1 A prehistory, which includes all the precursors of the camera

and projector and other developments that contributed to the
motion picture, though some indirectly.
2 A transition from 1896 to 1912, when film evolved from a
side-show novelty into a full-fledged economic art. At the end
of this period came the full-length feature film. With this
change of form the movies became entertainment in their
own right, not just something to fill out the vaudeville bill.
3 The silent period, which lasted until 1927, when the “talkies”
and the star system began and the major studios had become
established in Hollywood.
4 The growth of world cinema from 1928 to 1932. During this
same period sound movies became commonplace.
5 The Golden Age of Hollywood from 1932 to 1946. The film
was dominated by major American studios, and movies had
their greatest economic success. During this period color
came to the screen.
6 The assault from television from 1947 to 1960. The movies
suffered severe economic losses during this period. Hollywood
lost its grip on the industry and confronted increasing gov¬
ernment regulation. Greater international involvement also
began.
 The Movies 259 ■

7 The period of readjustment from 1961 through the mid

1980s. Hollywood recovered somewhat; technology advanced;
movie content continued to diversify; new film makers and
styles had an impact on film.5

During the 1980s we add to this the appearance of films on

cable television, STV, and VCRs, which has created a new kind
of demand for films.
Styles of exhibition changed through these periods. The
rather primitive theaters of nickelodeon era gave way to gilded
motion picture palaces during the 1920s. By the 1930s and
1940s the massive motion picture palace was commonplace.
Theater chains, mostly owned by the major studios, erected im¬
pressive structures. As use of the automobile increased and the
suburbs expanded, drive-in movies became popular. Some drive-
ins could handle more than two thousand cars and were con¬
nected to amusement parks, swimming pools, and even laundro¬
mats. As the cities declined economically and in population,
theaters moved to the suburbs and shopping malls. By the
1960s and 1970s, a combination of audience tastes and televi¬
sion’s competition brought about smaller, more intimate thea¬
ters. Meanwhile, stricter zoning laws reduced the number and
size of the drive-ins.
The form of the movies changed, too, as technology and the
art of film making matured. In the late 1920s the first talkies
were produced; color appeared in the 1930s. Increasing sophis¬
tication with lenses and cinematography allowed a host of inno¬
vations. Film makers constantly experimented with their art and
craft. Wide-screen movies appeared in the early 1950s; three-
dimensional viewing was tried; wraparound sound systems
expanded. Competition of all kinds—artistic, economic, intel¬
lectual, and technical—brought about change.

The Functions of Throughout their history films have provided entertainment of

Films all kinds, from tragedy to comedy, from realism to fantasy. Some
films are made to be pure entertainment, to serve as an escape.
Others seek to entertain while they enrich or inform or per¬
suade. In some films, such as documentaries, entertainment is
at most a secondary function. Especially during wartime, some
films have been made as propaganda.
The function, of course, is partly in the eye of the beholder.
Most people see Walt Disney films as harmless, perhaps gushy,
family entertainment. But others have seen them as ideological
statements praising an unrealistic image of America with artifi¬
cial, antiseptic communities devoid of social problems or racial
and ethnic identities. Still, despite some variety and many
 ■ 260 The Communication Industries

■ right: Nickelode¬
ons featured the
gadgetry of the cam¬
era and projector
over the content of
the film itself. This
1903 theater in Ta¬
coma, Washington,
is typical of the early
movie houses.
(Library of Congress.)
■ top right: During
the 1930s and
1940s, ornate movie
palaces with large
seating capacities
played the popular
films of the period.
(FSA Photo by Russell
Lee/Library of
Congress.)
■ BOTTOM RIGHT:
Modern movie
houses often show
several films at once,
as this theater in
Boston indicates.
(Jeff Thiebauth/ changes in films, most have been made and watched primarily
Lightwave.) for the purpose of entertainment. A closer look at the early his¬
tory of American films helps explain why.
Magazines grew out of newspapers and television from radio;
thus their origins were related to media in which providing in¬
formation and influencing opinion were important functions.
But films were related to the traditions of strolling players, the
theater, and similar popular amusements. In other words, their
origins had little to do with the media of information and opin¬
ion but much to do with entertainment.
Early films, however, were not a form of mass entertainment.
They were shown as novelties to small audiences. Their transfor¬
mation into a mass medium early in this century was nurtured
by an expansion of leisure time—a “recreation revolution” in the
words of historian Garth Jowett. An increasingly prosperous
America at the turn of the century had more leisure time, which
led to a growing interest in various forms of recreation and
entertainment.
By the early 1920s films “had become the largest and most
widespread commercial entertainment form the world had ever
seen.”6 It was the coming of the full-length feature film that
made a solid place for movies in American entertainment, trans¬
forming them into a mass medium. At first film makers believed
 The Movies 261 ■

that audiences would not sit still for more than ten or fifteen
minutes. Movies were just one reel long. But producer Adolph
Zukor rewrote the rules in 1912 when he imported the four-reel
French film Queen Elizabeth, starring Sarah Bernhardt. The
film was an hour and a half long, and it was an immediate suc¬
cess. Zukor could not provide prints to theaters fast enough.
With longer films came better photographic and acting quality,
 ■ 262 The Communication Industries

which assured audience appeal. With the full-length film, the

movies could compete with the stage, opera, and musical
comedy.
Movies joined music, drama, sporting events, novels, and
popular magazines as part of America’s entertainment fare. They
all flourished as citizens looked for diversions and amusements
to fill their leisure hours. But movies came to have a special
place because they could do something better than all the rest:
it is said they provide a channel for dreams. As critic Hollis Al-
pert has written,

Never in history has so great an industry as the movies been so na¬

kedly and directly built out of the dreams of a people. Any hour of
the day or the evening you can go into a darkened theater . . . and
as the figures move across the wide screen you sail off on storm
tossed seas of sex, action, and violence, crime and death. . . . When
you come home to sleep, your dreams are woven out of the symbols
which themselves have been woven out of your dreams, for the mov¬
ies are the stuff American dreams are made of.7

How Films Are Making movies is a communal process. They are the product not
Made of one person but of many. As a result, according to Professor
John L. Fell,

The substance of any particular production is likely to change ap¬

preciably between its early idea stages and the final release print.
These changes may be dominated by some individual’s vision, or¬
dered by his own evolving understanding of what the movie is, but
such a happy circumstance is never altogether the case, . . . even if
most of the time someone pretends to be in charge.8

Moreover, every film requires the solution of both mechanical

and aesthetic problems. The many people that are part of the
team making the film must have different skills. Just consider
the various unions involved in film making: the Writers Guild of
America, American Cinema Editors, Directors Guild of America,
Screen Actors Guild, International Association of Theatrical and
Stage Employees. Films are put together under chaotic condi¬
tions with a variety of artistic, technical, and organizational
people.
Fell has identified seven stages or elements in the process of
film making:

1 Conceptualization The idea for a film may come from any

one of various people. Early directors often wrote their own
films.
2 Direction The director chooses the film script and solves the
problems it poses during production.
 The Movies 263 ■

■ With the help of modern technology, the film editor transforms

rough footage into a refined production for the audience. (Philip
Jon Bailey/Jeroboam, Inc.)

3 Visualization The planning and execution of the actual

filming involves cinematographers, lighting technicians, and
others.
4 Performance Actors must be chosen and their perform¬
ances calibrated to the script and to other personnel involved
in the film.
5 Editing This process involves choosing takes from all the
film that has been shot and processing a finished film.
6 Special erffects Everything from camera trickery to mon¬
sters to stuntmen and stuntwomen comes under this
heading.
7 Production To produce a film means to get the money to¬
gether, organize all the people involved in the schedule, and
put the film on the screen.

The producer is a key figure in putting all these elements to¬

gether. In most cases he or she is part of a film studio that has
 ■ 264 The Communication Industries

the space, facilities, and personnel to complete the film. It is the

producer who carries the responsibility for most of the central
decisions—other than technical ones about acting, editing, and
so on. The producer initiates the development of a film by ac¬
quiring a story or a script. The producer may merely take an op¬
tion on a story (that is, an agreement giving one the right to
purchase at a later date) until he or she sees if the talent and the
money are available to produce the film. If financial backing is
available and suitable acting talent can be placed under con¬
tract, then a director is found and the rest of the film-making
team is assembled. Directors direct the shooting.

The Content of From this varied group of people with different needs and differ¬
American Films ent interests comes the film. Its content is almost always shaped
by conflicting forces. The audience, technology, economics, and
the film makers themselves play a part. Producers look carefully
at the balance sheet, continually worried about audience inter¬
ests. They ask. What is technically and economically possible,
and what does the audience want? They are seeking, in the
words of one film historian, efficient dreambuilding.

Efficient means meeting production demands of cost and time while

developing an intelligible visual narrative within the prescribed
single-double or multi-length reel length. Dreambuilding means sat¬
isfying audiences’ appetites for formula structure in comedy and
melodrama with accepted standards of moral and philosophical
thought.9

What films constitute efficient dreambuilding varies with the

times. The search for efficiency led, for example, to standardized
lengths for films, though the lengths changed through the de¬
cades. Efficient dreambuilding also calls for coherent plot struc¬
tures. Old westerns, for example, were usually melodramas with
a hero, villain, a beautiful girl, and perhaps Indians. The audi¬
ence had particular expectations of what they would see, and
plots were usually standardized to meet those expectations.
Over time the audience wants to see changes. Anxious to find
out more about their audiences, studios hire the services of
groups like the Opinion Research Institute of Princeton, which
puts together a profile of moviegoers. In the early 1980s, for ex¬
ample, about 76 percent of moviegoers are under the age of
thirty; less than 6 percent are fifty years or older; 31 percent are
teen-agers.10
But often, rather than finding out more about their audience,
producers may assume that if one movie is popular then another
one like it will be, too. Thus they may take the search for effi¬
cient dreambuilding a step further and just repeat a formula or
produce a sequel. Because of the success of The Godfather
 The Movies 265 ■

(1972), Jaws (1975), and The Exorcist (1973), we soon had The
Godfather II (1974), Jaws II (1978), and The Exorcist II (1977).
There was also Rocky I, II, and III and the various Star Wars and
Raiders of the Lost Ark sequels in the mid 1980s. Nothing suc¬
ceeds like success.
But the balance sheet is not the only factor that determines
the shape of films. Directors, actors, and even producers may
also want to put the mark of their own imagination on a film.
According to one film historian, “It was this dialectic [working of
opposing forces] . . . that drove the Hollywood cinema: the clash
between the artist’s sensibility and the classic mythic structure
of the story types that were identified and popular.”11
Out of this clash came a broad range of films. We can look at
their diverse content in terms of differences in themes, styles,
and genres.

■ The Development of Themes and Styles. The early movies

looked to the established forms of drama (comedy, tragedy, mu¬
sical) for their patterns. They often turned to books for ideas
and screenplays. Early silent film comedies relied on the art of
mime. But soon American films developed their own forms and
traditions. In the silent period, Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin,
Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and others created their own forms
of acting or storytelling: later, directors such as Eric von Stro¬
heim and Cecil B. De Mille added their mark. These film makers
and others who created films with a distinctive style are known
as auteurs.
Eventually, the content and style of the film was less influ¬
enced as a dramatic form by material from plays or books and
more by its own emerging traditions. A glimpse at those emerg¬
ing traditions is provided by the research of Edgar Dale in the
1930s. As part of the Payne Fund Studies of the effects of the
movies, Dale analyzed the content of five hundred films that
were released in 1920, five hundred released in 1925, and five
hundred released in 1930. He found that only three major
themes—crime, sex, and love—accounted for approximately
three-fourths of the movies studied.
In general, directors were the dominating force shaping films
until the 1930s. Then in the 1930s and 1940s the studios were
dominant. Several studios came to have recognizable styles.
MGM was long known for its richly produced, glossy epics aimed
at middle-brow tastes. The 1939 film classic Gone with the
Wind is a splendid example of this style. Paramount was said to
give its films a European sensibility. Warner Brothers often shot
on location because creating the sets would have been too ex¬
pensive. Thus Warner developed a reputation for realism.12
Today these studio styles have disappeared as the influence
 ■ 266 The Communication Industries

■ Charlie Chaplin’s
“Little Tramp” mov¬
ies of the 1920s set
a high critical stan¬
dard for comedy and
were also enor¬
mously successful
financial enterprises.
Chaplin and Jackie
Coogan in “The
Kid,” exemplify the
kind of film that
Chaplin starred in
and later made.
(Library of Congress.)

of the major studios has declined. But even in the heyday of the
studios some individuals marked their films with their own dis¬
tinctive stamp. Different members of the film-making teams may
dominate at any time and in any film. Although films are most
often associated in the public mind with actors, directors and
producers have also had their day in the sun. In the 1970s and
1980s it was popular to see the director as the king of film. On
the whole, directors have gained greater control over their films,
and awareness of their varying styles has grown.
 The Movies 267 ■

■ Genres. Balanced against the film maker’s desire for individ¬

uality is the need to give the audience a message it will under¬
stand and accept—the need for efficient dreambuilding. As a
result of this need, plots become more or less standardized.
Story types—genres—develop. Literature developed genres, and
so did American films.
Probably the most popular film genre of all time has been the
western. It was a completely American invention, with brave
men and women moving across the frontier, where they met
hardship in battle with the elements, Indians, and the law. The
Republic studio in particular made large numbers of early
westerns.
Musicals were also immensely popular in the past, and some
studios like Warner Brothers virtually specialized in this form. It
was Warner Brothers that produced Busby Berkeley’s elaborate,
geometrically choreographed dance films of the 1930s, featuring
such stars as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
Comedies have also attracted wide audiences. They have
ranged from dry-witted, British-inspired parlor comedies to
screwball films by the Marx Brothers. Other genres include
gangster films, horror films, historical romances, thrillers, and
war films.
Through the years the various forms have been altered to suit
changing public tastes and interests. Popular singers, from Bing
Crosby and Rudy Vallee in the 1930s to Barbra Streisand and
Kurt Russell in the 1980s, have found their way into musicals.
By the 1970s some westerns were serious dramas and some
were concerned with social issues. Some genres are parodied to
suit changing tastes. For example the Italian-made “spaghetti
westerns” were parodies of westerns and are best appreciated by
those who know and understand westerns. Producer Mel Brooks
created a parody of horror films in Young Frankenstein (1974)
and of silent movies in Silent Movie (1976). Woody Allen took on
historical documentaries in his Zelig (1983).
Occasionally, public taste dictates creation of a new genre
such as the science-fiction thrillers of the 1970s and the teen-
horror movies of the 1980s. Similarly, public attitudes and so¬
cial conditions have often influenced (some would say dictated)
the treatment of racial and ethnic minorities in film. For many
years it was difficult for blacks and hispanic Americans to get
good film roles. They were often depicted in a subservient fash¬
ion wherein racial stereotypes were intensified. In more recent
years, there have been new images for minorities in screen roles.
Beginning in the early 1970s, several major studios distributed
films that depicted black heroes, unity among blacks, and
usually victory over the white establishment. Some, such as
Sounder (1972), were sensitive and sympathetic portrayals, but
■ 268 The Communication Industries

■ The 1930s were known for lavish, elegant movie productions as

the 1933 film, ‘‘Flying Down to Rio” with Fred Astaire and Ginger
Rogers, demonstrates. (Culver Pictures.)

others, such as Shaft (1971), Superfly (1972), and Buck and the
Preacher (1972), which had less sympathetic themes, are ex¬
amples of this genre. Moreover, although blacks often wrote,
directed, and acted in these films, they were owned and
distributed by white-run studios. In the mid 1980s, black co¬
medians such as Richard Pryor starred in popular films, but
black performers and artists still complained (with justification)
that the number of roles for them and for members of other ra¬
cial minorities were still too few. Films such as Ragtime and A
Soldier’s Story provided unusual, though rare, important black
roles.
Films depicting women and women's issues have also gone
through a number of phases. In early films, women were often
melodramatic heroines, pretty girls who were saved by virile
 The Movies 269 ■

cowboys and other heroes. In the 1930s and 1940s, actresses

such as Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Barbara Stanwyck por¬
trayed strong women. In the 1950s, the “dumb blonde” role in,
for example, films starring Marilyn Monroe brought a still differ¬
ent and much weaker image of women. During the 1970s and
1980s, the role of strong women returned to film. Indeed, a
number of popular films took on clear feminist themes wherein
women had strong and important roles in dealing with issues
and problems of special interest to women. Films like The Turn¬
ing Point (1977), An Unmarried Woman (1978), Julia (1977),
My Brilliant Career (1980), Nine-to-Five (1982), and Terms of
Endearment (1983) are examples of these films. Some film
makers responded to the women’s movement by portraying men
as they had often portrayed women—as sex objects. In both mov¬
ies and TV dramas, handsome and usually well-built young men
played roles not unlike those of the women portrayed as sex ob¬
jects in earlier decades and, of course, actresses such as Bo
Derek, who are admired mostly for their physical beauty, con¬
tinue to make commercially successful movies.

■ Documentaries. Most of the films we have discussed have fic¬

tional themes. But nonfiction films, called documentaries, are
also important. The term documentary was first introduced by
British film maker John Grierson, whose early nonfiction film,
The Drifters (1929), depicted the lives of herring fishermen in
the North Sea.
In the purest form of the documentary, the film maker in¬
trudes as little as possible; the director, for example, does not
direct actors or set up scenes. The cinema verite technique
takes this idea further; it is spontaneous, direct filming. To
make Titicut Follies (1967), for example, Frederick Wiseman
wandered through a mental hospital capturing representative
snatches of life in the institution; then he edited these snatches
into a coherent portrait of what he saw. Some directors feel that
it is impossible not to intrude on the subject in some way, not
to include one’s own interpretation, consciously or uncon¬
sciously. Others feel that intrusion and interpretation are nec¬
essary if the film is to be coherent.
Through the years documentaries have dealt with people at
work, the efforts of nations at war, social problems, and other
issues. Some are artful classics like Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of
the North (1922), which depicted Eskimo life. Others like Fred¬
erick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967), High School (1969), and
Law and Order (1970) portrayed the grim reality of institutions
in contemporary America. Some documentaries take bits and
pieces of a process and weld them into a film. For example,
Emile de Antonio and Daniel Talbot’s award-winning Point of
■ 270 The Communication Industries

Order! (1963) put together film that others had taken of the
Army-McCarthy hearings; he creatively used the work of other
film makers and of camera operators not under his direction.
Documentaries often cany a powerful message, like Peter
Davis’s Hearts and Minds (1975), which traced the painful re¬
lationship between the United States and Vietnam. An unusual
documentary was My Dinner with Andre (1982), which filmed a
lengthy dinner conversation between two men—one an actor,
the other a director—which touched on a range of modern is¬
sues and emotions.
An offshoot of the documentary is the docudrama: quasi-
historical re-creations of recent historical events. A docudrama,
in fact, is not a documentary because it uses actors and stages,
and sometimes fictionalizes the story. In the 1980s docudramas,
ranging in topics from the life of actor Humphrey Bogart to the
Watergate scandal, gained popularity as television movies. The
Right Stuff (1983), which was based on Tom Wolfe’s book about
the space program, and Frances (1983), the story of actress
Frances Farmer, are other examples.

■ Public Preferences. For all their visual power and artistic

achievement, documentaries have never been able to challenge
the dominance of the fictional entertainment film. More people
want to see entertainment films than want to see documentar¬
ies. Many genres have been popular—including science fiction,
adventure-thriller, gangster, supernatural, musical, and histor¬
ical epic films.

Table 7.1 gives some indication of public preferences at var¬

ious times for different film genres. Film critic Bosley Crowther
found that film audiences around 1945 preferred musicals and
light comedies (see Table 7.1). Between 1947 and 1954 (a period
that embraces both the high point of movie attendance and the
beginning of the downslide because of television), the studios
seemed to prefer to make westerns.13 In the late 1970s another
list of top-grossing motion pictures showed that the public still
liked comedies.
Another view of public preferences is given by the annual list
ol all-time box-office champions compiled each year by Variety,
the show business trade paper. Variety’s financial yardstick is
the rental fees paid to distributors in the United States and Can¬
ada in the years since a film was first released. The champions
as of January 1980 were:

Star Wars (1977) $175,849,000

Jaws (1975) $133,429,000
Grease (1978) $ 93,292,000
 The Movies 271 ■

Table 7.1 Film Content Preferences in the United States,

1945

TYPE MALES FEMALES

Musicals 35 49
Light comedy 35 42
Serious drama 23 42
Excitement, adventure 39 25
Slapstick comedy 43 18
Army, navy, aviation 40 23
Detective, mystery 36 24
Romance, mystery 9 32
Westerns 16 7

Source: Bosley Crowther, "It's the Fans Who Make the Films," New
York Times Magazine. June 24. 1945, p. 14. Copyright © 1945 by The
New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.

The Exorcist (1973) $ 88,100,000

The Godfather (1972) $ 86,275,000
Superman (1978) $ 81,000,000
The Sound ojMusic (1965) $ 79,000,000
The Sting (1973) $ 78,889,000
Close Encounters (1977) $ 77,000,000
Gone with the Wind (1939) $ 76,700,000

The Variety figures infuriate some critics because they show

heavily hyped films such as Star Wars and ET—The Extraterres¬
trial making more money than the old all-time box-office attrac¬
tion, Gone with the Wind. By 1982 Gone with the Wind had
slipped to number 13 in the annual list—behind newcomers
such as Jaws and The Exorcist and just above Saturday Night
Fever. Saul F. Leonard, a partner in the accounting firm of Lav-
enthol and Horwath, devised a ranking that takes into account
both inflation and changes in the size of the population. After
computing film rental revenues in terms of constant 1982 dol¬
lars and the relative numbers of actual moviegoers who have
seen the films, he came up with the list of top films shown in
Table 7.2.
Many factors influence preferences—trends in morality, pop¬
ular passions, current events, plus various styles and standards.
The 1930s fostered stark realism and grim depression themes as
well as cheerful musicals that helped the public escape from its
 ■ 272 The Communication Industries

Table 7.2 Earnings of Leading Movies

INFLATION-ADJUSTED
REVENUES SINCE REVENUES, IN 1982
TIME OF RELEASE DOLLARS*
TITLE, YEAR OF RELEASE (IN MILLIONS) (IN MILLIONS)

1. Gone with the Wind (1939) $ 76.7 $321.6

2. Star Wars (1977) 193.5 272.0
3. Jaws (1975) 133.4 213.5
4. The Sound of Music (1965) 79.8 208.8
5. E.T.—The Extraterrestrial 187.0 187.0
(1982)
6. The Godfather (1972) 86.3 177.8
7. The Empire Strikes Back (1980) 140.0 160.1
8. The Exorcist (1973) 86.6 152.7
9. The Sting (1973) 79.4 139.7
10. Grease (1978) 96.3 130.9
11. The Ten Commandments (1956) 43.0 129.9
12. Dr. Zhivago (1965) 46.6 118.7
13. Raiders oj the Lost Ark (1981) 112.0 117.4
14. Ben-Hur (1959) 36.7 113.5
15. Mary Poppins (1964) 45.0 110.1
16. Close Encounters oj the Third 77.6 109.0
Kind (1977)
17. Love Story (1970) 50.0 107.9
18. The Graduate (1968) 49.1 105.8
19. Superman (1978) 82.7 104.7
20. Airport (1970) 45.6 102.1

♦Because of inflation a 1982 dollar was worth only 48.2 cents in relation to the 1972 dollar.
source: Saul F. Leonard. National Partner, Leisure Time Industries, Laventhol & Horvath Accounting.

troubles. Historical and patriotic themes and war films were

popular during World War II and after, but so were light come¬
dies. In the 1950s, films seemed to reflect the light-headed mood
of the country. Comedies and westerns were increasingly popu¬
lar, and sexual themes were becoming more explicit. In the late
1960s, during a period of dissatisfaction with prevailing stand¬
ards and styles, films celebrated the antihero and began to take
on controversial social topics. Films in the late 1960s, 1970s,
 The Movies 273 ■

■ The films of each

generation have
their distinctive
character and style.
Vivian Leigh and
Clark Gable in Gone
with the Wind, repre¬
sented the elegant
high-style movie
making with a ro¬
mantic flair. Star
Wars in more recent
times reflects a sci¬
ence fiction/new
technology bent
where special effects
are as important as
the acting, (top: From
the MGM release Gone
with the Wind © 1939
Selznick International
Pictures, Inc. Ren 1967
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Inc. bottom: © Lucas-
film Ltd. (LFL) 1977. All
rights reserved. Cour¬
tesy of Lucasfilm Ltd.
Prints courtesy The
Museum of Modern ArtJ
Film Stills Archive.)

and 1980s explored racism, drug use, war, and homosexuality.

Still, there was time for the nonsense comedy and the light¬
headed musical. Films in the 1980s also explored international
espionage and organized crime as well as labor strikes, sports,
and the supernatural.
Although fewer motion pictures are made in the United
States today than decades ago, their content may be more di¬
verse as films continue to skirmish with other media for audi-
 ■ 274 The Communication Industries

ences. Film offerings seem as diverse as the people who see

them. There are films for small audiences of intellectuals and
films aimed at the masses. To fight the competition from televi¬
sion, which attracted the mass general-interest audience, film
makers sought first the superhit, but second the specialized
audience.

Film as an Charlie Chaplin, whose “Little Tramp” films are now regarded as
Industry art, put it bluntly in 1972: “I went into the business for money
and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that re¬
mark, I can’t help it. It’s the truth.”14 There can be no doubt that
film making is a process in which money talks. To sketch a pro¬
file of this industry, we will look briefly at Its organization—own¬
ers, studios, and employees—at the source and size of its
revenues—the number of theaters and films and how many peo¬
ple watch them—and at profits.

The Film Makers By the late 1920s the movies were a billion-dollar industry em¬
ploying thousands and claiming a large share of America’s enter¬
tainment dollar. It was in Hollywood that the early studios
created their huge dream factories with back lots that could be
made into a western town or a jungle paradise. Hollywood soon
became as much an elusive symbol of glamour as a real place. As
editor Peter Buckley wrote, “Hollywood was synonymous with
everything that came out of the U.S. film industry, yet few films
were actually made there. . . . Hollywood was a wonderful, fan¬
ciful state of mind: the film capital that never really was.”15

■ Owners and Studios. The myth of Hollywood overstated the

geographic concentration of the film industry. From its begin¬
nings the film industry in Hollywood made financial links with
Wall Street as well as artistic and production ties with European
countries, and movies were often filmed on location. Neverthe¬
less, concentration of control and ownership was always part of
the equation in American film. A few major studios such as
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Columbia, and Paramount have been the
dominant force in Hollywood since its early days. The studios or¬
ganized early and gained tight control over the whole production
process as well as distribution and exhibition.
Founded by legendary motion picture moguls such as Samuel
Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer, the studios set their huge produc¬
tion plants in high gear producing films. If you wanted to work
in the movies in the heyday of the studios in the 1930s and
1940s, you worked for a studio. They had their own writers, di¬
rectors, actors, and actresses under contract, as well as their
own technicians, equipment, and lots. Through a practice
known as block booking, they forced theater owners to show the
 The Movies 275 ■

Hollywood. The word itself is synonymous about “empty sound stages,” about “death
with glitter and glamour. To many people, Hol¬ knell” after “death knell” sounding for the
lywood is a myth; to some, it is a reality. In the Industry.
following excerpt from her essay, “In Holly¬ In fact the Byzantine but very efficient eco¬
wood,” Joan Didion presents us with her view nomics of the business render such rhetoric
of contemporary Hollywood, the reality: the even more meaningless than it sounds: the
business of Hollywood. studios still put up almost all the money. The
studios still control all effective distribution.
One afternoon not long ago, at a studio In return for financing and distributing the av¬
where my husband was doing some work, the erage “independent” picture, the studio gets
director of a picture in production collapsed of not only the largest share (at least half) of any
cardiac arrest At six o’clock the director’s profit made by the picture, but, more signifi¬
condition was under discussion in the execu¬ cantly, 100 per cent of what the picture brings
tives’ steam room. in up to a point called the “break,” or break¬
“I called the hospital,” the head of produc¬ even, an arbitrary figure usually set at 2.7 or
tion for the studio said. “I talked to his wife.” 2.8 times the actual, or “negative,” cost of the
“Hear what Dick did,” one of the other men picture.
in the steam room commanded. “Wasn’t that a Most significant of all, the “break-even”
nice thing for Dick to do.” never represents the point at which the studio
This story illustrates many elements of so¬ actually breaks even on any given production:
cial reality in Hollywood, but few of the several that point occurs, except on paper, long be¬
non-industry people to whom I have told it fore, since the studio has already received 10
have understood it. For one thing it involves a to 25 per cent of the picture’s budget as an
“studio,” and many people outside the Indus¬ “overhead” charge, has received additional
try are gripped by the delusion that “studios” rental and other fees for any services actually
have nothing to do with the making of motion rendered the production company, and con¬
pictures in modern times. They have heard the tinues to receive, throughout the picture’s re¬
phrase “independent production,” and have lease, a fee amounting to about a third of the
fancied that the phrase means what the words picture’s income as a “distribution” charge. In
mean. They have been told about “runaways,” other words there is considerable income hid-
 ■ 276 The Communication Industries

den in the risk itself, and the ideal picture breach, we all recognize your right to pull
from the studio’s point of view is often said to out,” the agent said carefully. The agent rep¬
be the picture that makes one dollar less than resented many of the principals, and did not
break-even. More perfect survival bookkeep¬ want the director to pull out On the other
ing has been devised, but mainly in Chicago hand he also represented the director, and the
and Las Vegas... . director seemed unhappy. It was difficult to as¬
A few days ago I went to lunch in Beverly certain what anyone involved did want, except
• Hills. At the next table were an agent and a di¬ for the action to continue. “You pull out,” the
rector who should have been, at that moment, agent said, “it dies right here, not that I want to
on his way to a location to begin a new picture. influence your decision.” The director picked
I knew what he was supposed to be doing be¬ up the bottle of Margaux they were drinking
cause this picture had been talked about and examined the label.
around town: six million dollars above the “Nice little red,” the agent said.
line. There was two million for one actor. “Very nice.”
There was a million and a quarter for another I left as the Sanka was being served. No de¬
actor. The director was in for $800,000. The cision had been reached. Many people have
property had cost more than half a million; the been talking these past few days about this
first-draft screenplay $200,000, the second aborted picture, always with a note of regret It
draft a little less. A third writer had been had been a very creative deal and they had run
brought in, at $6,000 a week. Among the three with it as far as they could run and they had
writers were two Academy Awards and one had some fun and now the fun was over, as it
New York Film Critics Award. The director had also would have been had they made the
an Academy Award for his last picture but one. picture.
And now the director was sitting at lunch
in Beverly Hills and he wanted out The script SOURCE: Joan Didion, from “In Hollywood." The White Al¬
bum. © 1979, by Joan Didion. Reprinted by permission of
was not right Only 38 pages worked, the direc¬
Simon & Schuster, Inc.
tor said. The financing was shaky. “They’re in PHOTO: UPI/Bettman Archive.

studio's bad films if they wanted a chance to show the good

ones. The studios even owned their own chains of theaters.
Thus they had an assured outlet for their films—good or bad_
while other producers found it difficult to have their movies ex¬
hibited. In short, the studios had control from idea to camera to
box office. It is no wonder that smaller companies had difficulty
breaking into the business.
Then the federal government stepped in. The courts ruled
that the major studios must stop block booking and give up
their theaters. Film making was to become a riskier business,
and the major studios less powerful. The final appeals of the
court decision ended in 1950. By then the studios began to face
another economic problem: competition from television.
In the 1960s various corporations bought up studios and
theaters, integrating these holdings with other kinds of invest¬
ments. Large corporations bought up the old major studios. Gulf
 The Movies 277 ■

& Western bought Paramount. Warner Brothers was bought by

Kinney National, which also owned funeral parlors, parking lots,
and magazines, among other things, and eventually the whole
conglomerate became Warner Communications. In the 1970s
the trend toward conglomerate ownership of studios abated. In
the 1980s, emphasis on independent production companies
continued, and America saw the rise of more channels on cable
systems that were owned by other types of media companies.
The big six studios today are Columbia, Paramount, Twen¬
tieth Century—Fox, United Artists, Universal, and Warner Broth¬
ers. RKO, which was powerful in the 1930s and 1940s, dis¬
banded in 1953. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, once a leader, stopped
distributing films in 1973, concentrating its financial interests
instead on hotels and film rentals from its library. Another ma¬
jor studio, Walt Disney Productions, is in a separate category be¬
cause it produces mainly children’s and nature films and made-
for-TV movies.
The movie industry is more diverse and scattered today than
it was in the first half of the century, with independent produc¬
ers making many films. But the major studios continue to lead
the industry, financing and distributing most films produced by
independents as well as producing their own. They collect more
than 90 percent of the total income of movie distributors, al¬
though they share this income with the independent producers
and directors whom they hire for particular services or
assignments.

■ Employees. Working for the studios are electricians, makeup

artists, property workers, grips, projectionists, studio team¬
sters, costumers, craft workers, ornamental plasterers, script
supervisors, actors, extras, film editors, writers, composers, mu¬
sicians, cameramen, sound technicians, directors, art directors,
and set directors, not to mention the stars. Almost all the tech¬
nical workers are unionized. The Bureau of Labor Statistics es¬
timated that about 211,100 people were employed in the
industry, full time or part time, in 1982, with a total payroll of
more than $250 billion. Some superstar actors make several mil¬
lion dollars per film while poorly paid ushers make very little. If
actors’ salaries seem high, it should be noted that people in the
movie industry rarely work steadily; they may have months with¬
out work between pictures.

I Revenues Wages of course are only part of the cost of movies. By one esti¬
mate, the stars and cast account for only 20 percent of the costs,
whereas sets and physical properties account for 35 percent.16
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) had a production
budget of some $19 million, plus a promotion budget of $7 or $8
■ 278 The Communication Industries

million. The money that the studios take in to balance such

costs obviously depends on the number of films they distribute,
the size of their audience, and the cost of admission.

■ Films Released. From 1917 to 1975 the low for film distri¬
bution was just under 400 per year and the high was around
850, according to the Film Yearbook Daily, which includes
shorts as well as full-length feature films. The number of films
the major studios release has gone down steadily from a high of
well over 300 films per year during the period 1931—1942. From
1942 to the late 1950s, the number released each year stayed
around 250; then it dipped under 200. Since 1980 the major
studios have released fewer than 100 films per year.
One cause of these decreasing numbers is the retirement of
RKO and MGM from the ranks of production and distribution
companies. In their heyday each major studio produced fifty or
sixty films per year; by the 1980s each was producing fewer than
twenty per year.
Inflation and conservative corporate management have
helped lower the number of pictures produced each year. So has
the search for the superhit, a movie that can generate more than
$40 million in domestic revenues. (A cartoon in the New Yorker
spoofed Hollywood's search for the superhit with a cartoon
showing a theatergoer looking at a billboard that declares, “See
the movie with the fabulous $8,000,000 promotional budget
that everyone’s talking about.”) Mindful of financial losses in the
early 1970s, when Hollywood’s inventory of films exceeded the
capacity of the world market to use them, the industry is mak¬
ing fewer films, but films with massive budgets. These films
have the potential for great earnings and for disastrous losses.

■ Theaters and Theatergoers. In the late 1940s there were

20,000 theaters in the United States. By the early 1980s there
were about 17,500, including about 13,500 indoor theaters; the
rest are drive-ins. About 12.5 percent of all theaters are con¬
trolled by six major movie theater chains. Whereas in 1950 the
average indoor movie theater had about 750 seats, by the 1980s
the average theater had 500. At any one time America’s theaters
can seat about 7.3 million patrons.
The average weekly attendance at movies reached more than
90 million in the late 1940s; it was just over 22 million by the
mid 1980s. Of course, the price of attendance rose from a low
average of 23<t in 1933 to an average of $2.23 in 1977. (These
are averages: admissions to first-run motion pictures were much
more expensive.) By the mid 1980s many first-run motion pic¬
ture houses were charging between $4 and $5 for a single adult
admission. Thus Americans were spending more money on mov-
 The Movies 279 ■

ies by the 1980s than they had before, but movies accounted for
a much smaller part of their entertainment dollar than formerly.
For example, in 1943 Americans spent more than 25 percent of
their recreational expenditures on movies. By the 1980s this fig¬
ure had dropped to less than 5 percent. These numbers, how¬
ever, and the movie industry’s data, do not reflect the growing
use of movies by network, independent, and cable television sys¬
tems. Figures that reflect television audiences would give a bet¬
ter index of the public’s total exposure of films and of the
studios’ activity.

■ Home Audiences. Some critics argue that a movie seen in a

theater and a movie seen on television are not really the same
thing. By this they mean that the experience for the viewer is
different, depending on the setting in which the film is seen.
Whether this is true or not, television networks and cable pro¬
gramming services had become heavy “users” of movies by the
1980s. Home Box Office (HBO), Showtime, and the Movie Chan¬
nel were only three of the major programming services that were
buying recent motion pictures and recycling them through cable
systems. And studies demonstrated that movies were among the
most watched type of programming by cable and pay television
viewers. Many of the economic problems that have put a squeeze
on the movie industry since the 1940s are eliminated in cable,
which has no expensive physical plants to maintain, no elabo¬
rate system of distribution, and relatively few union problems.
Of course, as movies become more a part of television fare, they
cease to be a medium of their own and are a subset of a larger
programming context wherein they compete with news, sports,
half-hour and hour TV program formats.
Whether the popularity of movies on cable television is a
boost for the industry—it is in the short run, of course—or a
death knell for an old medium prior to the time when a new me¬
dium (cable) develops its own distinctive programming remains
to be seen. Some critics have likened the present system to
newspapers serializing novels in earlier times. The analogy may
be useful, although it is possible to point out that both novels
and newspapers survived with their own distinctive medium
and content.

I Profits To be labeled a success, a film must bring in revenue that ex¬

ceeds its original costs by two and a half times. At that point the
film starts making a profit since expenses are taken care of and
there is a respectable (and attractive) profit for investing. It was
estimated that Close Encounters oj the Third Kind, for example,
had to bring in $40 to $45 million before it turned a profit.
In general the major studios’ profits declined in the 1950s,
 ■ 280 The Communication Industries

when they lost their theater chains and then faced competition
from television, but they began to regain grotmd in subsequent
years. The British journal the Economist has traced a detailed
picture of the studios’ profits. From 1932 to 1976, there was a
cyclical pattern of boom and slump.17 In part this pattern re¬
sulted from overstocking films as the studios rushed to imitate
earlier successes. For example, efforts to imitate the success of
The Sound of Music (1965) in the late 1960s led to losses in the
early 1970s. As commentator Cobbett Feinberg wrote:

Although the industry throughout its history has attempted to find

ways to reduce the horrible risks of spending millions of dollars up
front without knowing whether a film will succeed or not, none of
those ways have been foolproof. The star system has worked often,
but not in a consistent and predictable fashion. Studio ownership of
theaters was another way to reduce risk, but that policy was de¬
clared illegal almost thirty years ago. Stepping up investment to
make films noticeably better than television fare has also failed to
work regularly. Movie making remains a risky enterprise.18

Still, the possibility of making great profits in films exists.

This fact has not been lost on the corporations that have bought
studios and theaters. The economic indicators that we have re¬
viewed chart an industry that has seen great glory in a golden
past but has suffered hard times and is now back on the mend.
The mission of the movies has been refined. Less of the enter¬
tainment produced is for the relatively small theater audience,

I From
Censorship to
Social
and more is for the massive audience that sits in front of the tele¬
vision set.
As movies became a part of American life, they brought prob¬
lems. They challenged old ways of thinking and gave people new
images and concepts to consider. The industry’s massive growth
in its early years, its ability to reach huge audiences, and the
Responsibility public belief that films are “powerful” led to efforts to control
films and film makers. Many people believed the new medium
was having too great an impact on their lives. Many civic and re¬
ligious leaders feared the movies would bring harmful political
and moral changes to American life. As a result of all these con¬
cerns, the industry was pressured to “clean up" its product.
Most of the concern has centered on films with “mature”
themes—by which people usually mean films that dead with sex.

I Sex and the Movies The film industry responded to mounting pressure in the 1920s
by appointing a former postmaster general. Will H. Hays, to head
their trade association, the Motion Picture Producers and Dis¬
tributors Association. Part of Hays’s charge was to develop a sys¬
tem of self-regulation and to create a better public image for the
movies. Hays and his group cooperated with religious, civic, and
women’s groups who had set up motion picture councils. Dur-
 The Movies 281 ■

ing this early period Hays’s office was a buffer between the film
industry and the public. Hays developed a tough self-censorship
code, which all producers had to follow. Without code approval,
a film could not be shown in American theaters. Film producers
who tried to do so were subjected to costly legal battles. The code
restricted depictions of sex in particular. From the mid 1930s
until the rise of television threatened the industry, movies
avoided direct treatment of sexual themes and sexual behavior.
Meanwhile, a number of local governments screened and cen¬
sored films. Even through the 1960s Chicago gave this assign¬
ment to its police department, which called on a group of
citizens to screen controversial films. Among the private groups
most active in efforts to censor films was the Catholic Legion of
Decency, which was established in 1934. It developed a list of
recommended and nonrecommended films, and it promoted the
list with both Catholics and the general public. The legion’s rat¬
ings carried a special moral force and occasionally were rein¬
forced by bishops who warned Catholics to stay away from
certain films. Although the legion’s most celebrated activities oc¬
curred in the 1930s and 1940s (including a boycott of all thea¬
ters in Philadelphia), it could still stir controversy in the 1960s
by denouncing The Pawnbroker.
Eventually, the Legion of Decency was replaced by the Cath¬
olic church’s Office for Film and Broadcasting, which published
regular newsletters and film guides. A group within the U.S.
Catholic Conference continues to promote this system of
ratings:

A—1: Morally objectionable for general patronage

A—2: Morally objectionable for adults and adolescents
A—3: Morally objectionable for adults
A-^4: For adults with reservations
A—5: Morally objectionable in part for all
C: Condemned

These are published in Catholic diocesan newspapers as ad¬

visories for Catholic parents. Several Protestant groups have
also been active in making recommendations about films.
Efforts like those of the Legion of Decency stimulated crea¬
tion of the code that Hays developed for the industry, the Motion
Picture Production Code. Although the code was not tough
enough for some groups, such as the Legion of Decency, others
regarded it as harsh, repressive, and too legalistic. Some film
historians think the code hindered the development of American
motion pictures.
By the late 1960s the production code had been modified
greatly. Numerous legal actions had broken efforts to apply rigid
censorship. The industry entered a new era of self-regulation by
establishing a movie classification system. Instead of barring
 ■ 282 The Communication Industries

certain films from theaters, the new system, required that the
public be warned of what to expect in the film. The result, after
three modifications since it was adopted in 1968, is the
following:

G: All ages admitted, general audiences

PG: Parental guidance suggested, for mature audiences
PG—13: Parents are strongly cautioned to give special guid¬
ance for children under thirteen
R: Restricted, children under seventeen must be accom¬
panied by a parent or other adult
X: No one under seventeen admitted

The classification does not indicate quality; it is only a guide to

parents considering what motion pictures their children should
see. The industry, through the Motion Picture Association of
America, in effect puts its seal of approval on the first four cate¬
gories of films and denies it to the fifth. This system won public
support and stilled some criticism, but some film producers feel
that the system is too restrictive. There has been no active move
to overturn it, however.

Censorship and Although their treatment of sex has been the center of most of
Politics the outcry against movies over the years, politics too has been
the basis for censorship. Many hard-hitting political films of the
1930s were widely criticized. Battles to organize unions, fights
between unions and producers, charges that some unions were
tools of Communists, and accusations that some films were
Communist propaganda split Hollywood in the years before
World War II. During the war, political differences were sub¬
merged as the industry united behind the war effort. But when
fear of Communism ignited again in the late 1940s and 1950s,
political censorship came to Hollywood as never before. The
House Un-American Activities Committee had held hearings and
charged people in the film industry with communist activity
during the 1930s. The hearings were followed by some prison
sentences and blacklisting of people in the film industry.
Blacklisting was the work not of government but of private
groups. Various lobby groups put together lists of people they
suspected of being Communists, circulated the lists privately,
and threatened to boycott advertisers who sponsored shows that
hired anyone on the list. Thus the blacklist affected not only the
film industry but also newspapers and broadcasting. Most of
those blacklisted were not publicly accused, so they had no
chance to defend themselves. Actors, producers, writers, and
others simply found that suddenly no one wanted to hire them.
For a time performers had to be “cleared” by one of the anti¬
communist groups before they would be hired. This period.
 The Movies 283 ■

when unsupported charges were frequent, is one of the darkest

in movie history. Postwar fear of Communism was the culprit
and the film industry was hard hit by the informal censorship
that resulted.
The blacklisting of the 1940s and 1950s seems like an un¬
likely worry in the 1980s, but even so actor-director Warren
Beatty was quite cautious when he directed, produced, and
acted in Reds, a film about the life of American Communist
writer John Reed. When asked why he granted no press inter¬
views during the making of the film, Beatty said, “It was like
making a giant souffle and not wanting anyone to stomp on the
floor.” Some critics suggested that Beatty was being very careful
in presenting a film that treated a Communist as a hero. The
film won both commercial and critical acclaim, even during the
conservative Reagan presidency. It even won an Academy Award.
The groups outside the movie industry exerting influence on
the content of films have been many. Congress has summoned
actors and directors to public hearings, the Supreme Court has
tried to define what is and is not obscene, and church groups
and local officials have tried various strategies to shape Ameri¬
can movies. The result is a constraint on the artistic freedom of
film makers, but little if any useful feedback for them. The
groups pressuring the film makers are too small and their inter¬
ests too narrow for their efforts to constitute effective feedback
for a medium intended for a mass audience. Their efforts can se¬
riously distort communication between film maker and audi¬
ence. Still, consumers of films have the same First Amendment
rights that the film makers do, and this includes the right to
protest against content they do not like.

Evaluating Film ratings are only one of the many assessments that film
Films: Criticism makers get. The writings of critics, the selections made for film
festivals and awards, and surveys that tiy to ascertain the “best”
and Awards films of all time provide other evaluations. All these things also
give the public help in judging films. These assessments might
suggest that there are uniform standards of excellence in films,
but that is not the case. Although occasionally there may be
widespread agreement on which film was the best film this year
or this decade, there are about as many standards for criticism
as there are critics and awards.

The Critics Some people distinguish between reviewers, who make assess¬
ments for a general audience, and critics, who judge a film by
more artistic and theoretical criteria and try to ascertain its so¬
cial importance. The terms are used interchangeably by most
people, as they are in this book.
All critics have standards against which they judge a film, al¬
though the standards differ. Because the film has gained status
 ■ 284 The Communication Industries

as an art form, a good deal of film criticism is based on artistic

standards and concerns. Some critics judge a film on the basis
of artistic potential and compare it with other films and theat¬
rical productions. They consider factors such as the film’s origi¬
nality and its ability to project universal themes. A critic might
be interested in any number of things about a film: the technical
aspects such as photography, sound, use of close-ups, and color;
the quality of the screenplay as a piece of writing; the perform¬
ance of the actors; the unity and cohesiveness of the production.
Some critics discuss the film in terms of the way it fits into a
particular actor’s or director’s career. For example, a critic might
ask whether the direction and acting in the latest Woody Allen
film is as good as in his previous films.
Film criticism appears in many places. Specialized film mag¬
azines speak mainly to the movie community and to film schol¬
ars. Many other magazines have movie reviews and criticisms.
Time and the New York Times, as well as other publications,
publish annual “ten best movie” lists. NBC’s popular “Today”
show has a regular movie reviewer, Gene Shalit. Local television
and radio stations review films on the air. There are local critics
who speak mostly to local audiences, and there are critics with
considerable national followings. There are even annual awards
for the best film criticism.

I The Awards The granddaddy of all the movie awards is the Oscar—the gold-
plated statue about a foot high given each year in a nationally
televised spectacle by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences. The Oscars are prizes from the industry itself to its
honored few, and they are the most coveted of all the movie
awards. They also have real economic value since they are worth
a good deal of money at the box office. Usually when a film wins
an Oscar, it is rereleased and draws thousands more viewers.
The academy makes awards in many categories, including
best picture, best director, best actor, best actress, best sup¬
porting actor, best supporting actress, best screenplay adapta¬
tion, best original screenplay, best cinematography, and best
foreign-language film. There are also awards for art direction,
sound, short subjects, music, film editing, and costume design
as well as various awards for service to the industry, honorary
awards, and scientific and technical awards.
The Academy Awards have not been without their critics.
Some charge that those giving the awards concentrate on the
most popular films rather than on the best or most socially sig¬
nificant. Some of the best films of all time—for example, Orson
Welles’s brilliant Citizen Kane (1941)—did not fare well with the
academy (it got only one award, for best screenplay). Still, the
list of Oscar winners is a who’s who of well-known films and film
makers.
 The Movies 285 ■

■ The Academy Awards with their “Oscar” still stand as the most
prestigious and coveted honors for the movies. This 1984 photo¬
graph of Jack Nicholson, Shirley MacLaine and James Brooks with
their Oscars for best actor, best actress and best director in “Terms
of Endearment” (Bill Nation/Sygma)

Other honors and prizes are less well known. Both the Writ¬
ers Guild and the Directors Guild give awards, and there are a
number of awards by groups independent of the industry. The
National Board of Review Awards is given for films that are rec¬
ommended for children. Both the National Society of Film Crit¬
ics and the New York Film Critics give annual awards for
exemplary films, and the foreign press corps covering Hollywood
gives annual Golden Globe Awards. The awards at these festivals
usually honor artistic quality.
Finally, there have been a number of efforts to identify the
greatest films of all time by surveying directors and critics. One
of the most ambitious efforts to identify the “greatest American
film of all time” was carried out by the American Film Institute
in 1977. The 35,000 members of the institute across the na¬
tion—including academics, critics, and industry people—were
asked to select five choices, in order of preference, for the best
 ■ 286 The Communication Industries

American film. Some 1,100 film titles were mentioned in the bal¬
loting, and the institute compiled a list of the top fifty films. The
list was heavily weighted with films produced since 1970, and
the silent era in particular was underrepresented. Andrew Sar-
ris, critic for the Village Voice, commented, “I suspect that
many AFI voters were simply not familiar with many great
films.”19
Nevertheless, the institute unveiled the list of the top fifty
films at a dazzling ceremony attended by the president of the
United States. The top ten films in their list were:

1 Gone with the Wind (1939)

2 Citizen Kane (1941)
3 Casablanca (1942)
4 The African Queen (1952)
5 The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
6 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
7 Singing in the Rain (1952)
8 Star Wars (1977)
9 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
10 The Wizard of Oz (1939)

To balance all the self-congratulation of the movie industry and

its friends, the Harvard Lampoon presents annual worst movie
awards.

■ Summary American film has gone through many changes in its short his¬
tory. For the most part, it has been a medium for entertainment.
Despite technological and artistic changes and competition from
television, its primary function today is still entertainment.
Every film is a product of technology and artistry, managerial
skill and showmanship. It involves a wide range of professionals
and craftsworkers. At various times different members of the
film-making team have tended to be the dominant voice in shap¬
ing films. In early films, for example, directors had the dominant
role. But almost always the content of the film is shaped by con¬
flicting forces: the desire for efficiency, a view of what the audi¬
ence wants, and an individual’s desire to shape the film. The
result of this conflict has been a wide range of genres and styles
in American films.
After enjoying great success in the 1940s, the American film
industry declined in the 1950s. Today conglomerates control
some of the major studios, and the studios themselves are less
important than they were in the 1940s. Independent producers
make more films, although films are usually financed as well as
distributed by the major studios. Small, intimate theaters have
replaced the old movie theaters, and the young make up a large
part of their audience. Although fewer movies are made now and
 The Movies 287 ■

the average weekly attendance at movie theaters is less than a

fourth what it was in the 1940s, movie companies today still
make a profit because of higher admission prices, an occasional
superhit, and revenue from television's use of films.
Film was once a more important entertaining medium than
it is today, but the film industry has responded to the demands
of new competition, changing technology, and changing audi¬
ences. It is a lively and still significant medium.

Notes and 1 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon (New York: Charles Scrib¬
References ner’s Sons, 1941).
2 James Monaco, How to Read a Film (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1977), p. 195.
3 Ibid.
4 Monaco, How To Read a Film, p. 195.
5 Ibid., p. 196.
6 Garth Jowett, Film: The Democratic Art (Boston: Little, Brown,
1976), p. 139. See also Jowett and James M. Linton, Movies as
Mass Communication (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1980).
7 Hollis Alpert, “Sexual Behavior in the American Movies.” Satur¬
day Review, June 23, 1956, pp. 9—10.
8 John L. Fell, An Introduction to Film (New York: Praeger, 1975),
p. 127.
9 Thomas W. Bohn and Richard L. Stromgren, Light and Shad¬
ows: A History ojMotion Pictures (Port Washington, N.Y.: Alfred,
1975), p. 170.
10 Opinion Research Institute of Princeton.
11 Monaco, How to Read a Film, p. 246.
12 Ibid., p. 208; also see an excellent summary history of the major
studios in Cobbett Feinberg, Reel Facts: The Movie Book oj Rec¬
ords (New York: Vintage, 1978), pp. 376—389.
13 John Cogley, Report on Blacklisting 1: Movies, p. 282.
14 Feinberg, Reel Facts, p. xiii.
15 For an excellent abbreviated analysis of the movies, see Garth
Jowett and James M. Linton, Movies as Mass Communication
(Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1980).
16 Warren K. Agee, Phillip H. Ault, and Edwin Emery, Introduction to
Mass Communications, 6th ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1979),
p. 301.
17 See The Mass Media, Aspen Institute Guide to Industry Trends,
Christopher Sterling, ed. (New York: Praeger, 1978), pp. 184—
185.
18 Feinberg, Reel Facts, p. 392.
19 Andrew Sarris, “The Night They Left Garbo Alone," Village Voice,
December 12. 1977, p. 51.
WMHH msm
«w»
■ Impact and Consequences
of Mass Communication

\
[The penny papers} are willing to fan into destroying flames the
hellish passions that now slumber in the bosom of society. The guilt
of murder may not stain their hands ; but the fouler guilt of making
murderers surely does.
Horace Greeley, The Tribune, 1841

■ The Media’s Influence on

Individuals

Do the mass media produce direct, immediate, and powerful in¬

fluences on the individuals who make up their audiences? That
has been a question of concern ever since the first penny papers
appeared on the streets of New York. Their influences were
widely debated during the nineteenth century. Most intellectuals
were soon convinced that the press was dangerous because of its
great power to sway elections and shape public opinion. At first,
the majority of the public didn’t seem to care very much. Later,
as new media arrived, they became very concerned indeed.
There was never much doubt that media advertising was ef¬
fective. In a society devoted to free enterprise and the profit mo¬
tive, that did not seem much of a problem. But after the new
centuiy began, when the movies came, and then radio, and then
television, people began to fear that the media had other un¬
wholesome and even dangerous effects. They worried that polit¬
ical demagogues would use the media to lead the masses into
accepting totalitarian societies. But most of all they feared the
effects of mass communication on their children.
How can we obtain trustworthy knowledge concerning the re¬
lationship between media content and people’s behavior? The
only reliable way is to conduct careful and objective research.
Because research on communication is complex, perplexing,
and often frustrating, it is not easy to compile simple answers.
Nevertheless, it is from research that an understanding of media
influences will come. This understanding will not come from the
 The Media’s Influence on Individuals 291 ■

pronouncements of preachers or politicians or the untested

views of critics. Debate on the issues is stimulating, but it does
not lead to verifiable conclusions. Today, extensive efforts are
being made to understand both the direct and indirect influ¬
ences of mass communications on individuals and on society as
a whole.
This chapter examines one aspect of those effects: the me¬
dia’s influences on individuals. We look first at the legacy of fear
of mass communication that underlies both public attitudes
and most of the research on the subject. We ask why people to¬
day are quick to blame the media for all kinds of harmful influ¬
ence. Second, we ask, what are the facts as we know them about
the media’s effects? To get at least a partial answer to this ques¬
tion, we examine six studies that have been milestones in the
search for scientific understanding of the media’s influence.

The Legacy of If a time machine could transport the generation of the 1920s
Fear into the present, the attitudes, sexual conduct, and values of to¬
day’s youth would probably shock them out of their wits. There
is little doubt they would blame it all on mass communication.
In fact, since the mass media first emerged, critics have accused
them of exerting a powerful negative influence on individuals.
The ink was scarcely dry on the first mass newspapers of the
1830s before conservative people began to denounce them. Ed¬
ucators, jurists, the clergy, and others believed the mass press
provoked crime by reporting so much about it. They also feared
that people would turn away from books and that, as a result,
literary standards would fall.
When the movies, radio, and television appeared, they too be¬
came objects of fear, scorn, and accusation. In the 1920s the
movies were accused of destroying moral values and leading the
nation’s youth into crime. As radio became popular, it was said
to be undermining musical taste; after commercials became
commonplace, radio was charged with shamelessly exploiting
the public for the sake of profits. More recently, television has
been blamed for almost every problem that plagues American so¬
ciety. In 1977 a youngster in Florida robbed and killed an elderly
woman. His lawyer argued that he was innocent and television
was guilty. The young man, said his lawyer, had viewed so much
violence on television that he could not distinguish right from
wrong. The jury did not agree, found the young man guilty, and
sent him to prison.
Defenders of the mass media deny that they cause personal
and social problems. They point to the benefits of the media:
that millions now hear serious music, at least occasionally: that
ballet and opera are available to the masses for the first time in
history: that news analyses make citizens better informed; that
 ■ 292 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

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newspaper accounts
in the British press
describing atrocities
fanned hatred of the
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discovered that
many of the stories
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ONG KONG, May 7. —This is the result of the great light in Manila Bay:
Eleven Spanish ships destroyed.
Eight Spanish ships captured.
Four shore batteries at Cavite demolished.
Three forts on Corregidor Island reduced.
Four hundred Spaniards killed.
Six hundred Spaniards wounded.
Spanish supplies lost and captured to the amount of $5,000,000.
;* American loss :
Eighr men slightly wounded.
One thousand dollars damage.
' I 1|OM: are . the figures of victory. The story of the battle will live forever. The names of
Its heroes can never die.
f he fighting began at n o’clock in the morning.
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educational broadcasts are available daily; that the press, as an

adversary of government, can help root out corruption even in
the presidency; and so on. Obviously, there is much truth in
these claims.
How, then, can we gain a balanced perspective on these is¬
sues? Are the media blameless benefactors that improve life for
us all? Or do the media corrupt individuals? Answering a simple
yes to either question would oversimplify reality. To understand
the media influences better, we first look at why people came to
believe that they have such awful power and harmful effects.
 The Media’s Influence on Individuals 293 ■

I Public Beliefs
About the Media
Anything new generates fear. This dictum has held true in every
age and every society and for almost every advance in science,
technology, and thought that has occurred in Western civiliza¬
tion for centuries. Like dozens of other social changes, the
growth of mass communication stimulated widespread anxiety.
This anxiety received much publicity as the media themselves
published the charges against first the penny press, then mov¬
ies, and then radio and television. As a result, the idea that the
media have great power became a part of our society’s shared
system of beliefs about mass communication.
The events of the Spanish-American War and World War I, in
particular, reinforced the belief that the media could shape and
mold the opinions, attitudes, and behavior of the masses. Pub¬
lisher William Randolph Hearst was even accused of starting the
Spanish-American War in 1898. When an employee asked to re¬
turn from Cuba because nothing was going on there, Hearst
supposedly sent a telegram saying, “Please remain. You furnish
the pictures and I'll furnish the war.” Many historians deny that
Hearst’s role in the war was important, but the story became
part of American folklore. And shortly before war did break out,
many newspapers and magazines inflamed public opinion
against the Spanish. During World War I the government used
propaganda to try to marshall American support for the war,
sway public opinion in neutral nations, and confuse the enemy.
Stories in British papers claimed that the Germans had com¬
mitted atrocities, that they were barbarians and butchers. Peo¬
ple believed them even though truths were often badly distorted,
blatantly denied, or simply ignored. After the war the revelations
of ex-propagandists made sensational reading—and more fodder
for critics of the mass media’s power.
These experiences of society, plus many that would follow, es¬
tablished among the general public a conviction that mass com¬
munication is dangerous. The public developed a contradictory
orientation toward the mass media, loving and hating them si¬
multaneously. People eagerly adopted each new medium, but at
the same time they could easily tick off complaints about their
effects.
The belief that mass communication is powerful and danger¬
ous has persisted in our society; we call it the legacy offear. It
has been and will be passed on from one generation to the next.
We can therefore call it a culture complex: a related set of beliefs
and behaviors shared by a group of people and passed on from
parent to child. Denouncing the media for their awesome power
and bad effects is as American as apple pie.

I Social Scientists
and the Legacy of
The general public has not been alone in its fear of the media.
Experts have often reinforced that fear. Scholars joined the pub¬
Fear lic in the outcry against the mass press in the nineteenth cen-
 ■ 294 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

tuiy. Gabriel Tarde, an outstanding nineteenth-century crim¬

inologist, blamed newspapers for the sharp rise in juvenile
delinquency that he observed in France between the 1860s and
1890s. Noting the growing popularity of the mass press, with its
emphasis on reports of crime during the same period, he con¬
cluded: “It is the trashy and malicious press, scandal monger-
ing, riddled with court cases, that awaits the student when he
leaves school. The little newspaper, supplementing the little
drink, alcoholizes his heart.”1 Tarde denounced the press not
only for stimulating juvenile delinquency but also for encourag¬
ing immorality, crime, and alcoholism among adults. “Pornog¬
raphy and slander," he concluded, “have become the two breasts
nourishing the newspaper.”2
Tarde’s belief in the media’s power was consistent with the
social science of his time. Indeed, the term mass media came
out of a view of society, people, and the media that supported
fear of the media’s power. As we noted in Chapter 1, early in this
century intellectuals believed that the emerging urban society
was composed of diverse individuals without strong social ties;
they called such a group of people a mass. In the view of these
observers, such people would be especially easy to influence be¬
cause social ties would not soften the impact of the media.
These were thought to be characteristics of the audiences for the
media that were developing early in this century—which were
therefore called mass media.
Early research in the 1920s and 1930s tended to reinforce
the legacy of fear. It seemed to show that the media had powerful
effects on their audiences. Later research, we shall see, did not
support this view. But as scientists shifted from a conviction
that the media have great power to the conclusion that their
power is clearly limited, the public did not follow. Thus the leg¬

I
acy of fear is alive and well, flourishing in the dark suspicions of
the majority of Americans concerning the mass media.

Early Research: The legacy of fear prompted much of the research that has been
A Belief in done on mass communication. Public anxiety has influenced
Maximum which research projects the government and private foundations
have been willing to finance. As a result, most research has ig¬
Effects nored the positive contributions of the mass media.
Research on mass communication did not begin until early in
the twentieth centuiy. The social sciences have ancient origins
and were established as separate fields of knowledge in the nine¬
teenth century. But the capacity to do rigorous research in so¬
cial science lagged far behind the ability to theorize and
speculate about human behavior. It was not until the 1920s that
statistical research techniques were sufficiently developed to
permit investigation of the effects of mass communication.
 The Media’s Influence on Individuals 295 ■

The first large-scale study of a mass medium was conducted

in the late 1920s and published in 1933. By the mid 1940s and
early 1950s, important discoveries had been made, some by ac¬
cident. As television became a significant medium, it too came
under scientific scrutiny.
In this half-century accumulation of research there have been
thousands of investigations on every conceivable aspect of mass
communication and a few key studies that shaped scientific
thinking about the mass media. In this and the sections that
follow, we review six of these milestone studies. The earliest
studies show a view of human behavior, research techniques,
and conclusions quite different from those that prevail today.

The Movies and Social scientists interested in the effects of mass communica¬
Children: The Payne tion first turned to the movies to apply their new techniques of
Fund Studies research. There were clear reasons for this choice. During the
first decade of the new century, movies were a novelty. During
the second decade, they became one of the principal media for
family entertainment. By the end of the 1920s, feature-length
films with sound tracks were standard, and the practice of going
to the movies once a week or more was widespread.
Meanwhile, the public had become particularly uneasy about
the influence of the movies on children. In 1929 an estimated
28 million minors—including more than 11 million children un¬
der the age of fourteen—went to the movies weekly.3 Critics
raised alarming questions about what the movies were doing to
the nation’s children. Were they destroying parents’ control over
their children? Were they teaching immorality? Films with
themes that were thought to be unwholesome—such as horror,
crime, immoral relationships, and the illegal use of alcohol (dur¬
ing Prohibition)—were especially troubling.
No government agency existed to give money to investigators
who wanted to assess the impact of films on children, but a pri¬
vate agency was formed to seek data in order to develop a na¬
tional policy concerning motion pictures. This agency called
together a group of educators, psychologists, and sociologists to
plan large-scale studies to probe the effects of motion pictures
on youth, and a private foundation called the Payne Fund was
persuaded to supply the necessary money. The resulting Payne
Fund Studies were the first large-scale scientific effort to assess
the effects of a major mass medium.
When they were published in the early 1930s, the Payne Fund
Studies were the best available evaluation of the impact of mo¬
tion pictures on children. The Payne researchers used ap¬
proaches that ranged from collecting and interpreting anecdotes
to experiments measuring and analyzing responses to question¬
naires. But by today’s standards of research many of these stud-
■ 296 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

■ Many of the movies produced during the late 1920s presented

content and themes that alarmed the older generation, whose moral
values were formed during the Victorian era. Pictures that showed
easy money, fast cars, fast women, and illegal booze were feared as
unwholesome influences on children. (Culver Pictures.)

ies seem quaint and naive. The way data were collected and
analyzed limits the usefulness of the conclusions the Payne re¬
searchers reached. Still, the studies are worth examining for two
reasons: they present monumental data on the impact of the
movies during the 1920s, and by their failures they illustrate
some essentials of good research. To illustrate the approaches,
data, limitations, and conclusions of the studies, we will sum¬
marize two of them. They dealt with two perplexing questions:
how did the movies influence the everyday behavior of children,
and can movies change children's attitudes?

■ Influences on Everyday Behavior. One of the most interest¬

ing, if least rigorous, of the Payne Fund Studies was done by so¬
ciologist Herbert Blumer.4 Blumer wanted to provide a general
picture of how viewing films influenced children’s play, their
everyday behavior—such as dress, mannerisms, and speech—
their emotions, their ideas about romance, their ambitions and
 The Media’s Influence on Individuals 297 ■

temptations, and their career plans. His method was simple. He

had adolescents and young adults recall and record influences
from films that had occurred in their childhood.
As a first step, Blumer asked two groups of university stu¬
dents to describe in detail their memories of how movies had af¬
fected their ideas or behavior from as early an age as they could
remember. The students were assured that the descriptions
would remain anonymous and were asked to be as natural,
truthful, and detailed as possible. From these reports, Blumer
identified recurring types of experiences and influences, (for ex¬
ample, influences on play, mannerisms, fantasies, and emo¬
tions) and compiled a list of such general topics. This list guided
the main body of subjects in preparing their autobiographies.
Eventually, Blumer collected accounts from more than 1,200
persons. Most were college and university students, but some
were office and factory workers. The result was an immense
number of recollections about how people thought that seeing
films had influenced their daily behavior.
Blumer attempted to draw conclusions from these accounts,
but he did not subject them to quantitative or statistical analy¬
sis. He preferred to “let the facts speak for themselves” by
quoting liberally from the autobiographies to illustrate his
conclusions. The movies were, he said, a source of imitation,
unintentional learning, and emotional influence.
According to Blumer, the movies had a powerful impact on
children’s play. Youngsters impersonated cowboys and Indians,
cops and robbers, pirates, soldiers, race drivers, and every con¬
ceivable hero and villain they had seen in films. Reenacting
movie plots, children battled each other with wooden swords,
spears made from broom handles, and shields from washboiler
tops. They rode horses made of scraps of lumber, shot rifles and
pistols made of sticks, and flew airplanes built with apple crates.
They dug trenches in their back yards and assaulted forts in va¬
cant lots. They became Dracula, Cleopatra, the dreaded Dr. Fu
Manchu, Tarzan, The Red Baron, and Mary Queen of Scots.
The people in Blumer’s study generally recalled these experi¬
ences with pleasure and warmth. In spite of a few harmful inci¬
dents and a number of accidents, most of it was fun. For the
most part, these activities seemed to have little lasting influence
on later life.
Blumer concluded that children and teen-agers copied many
mannerisms, speech patterns, and other behaviors from the
people portrayed on the screen. There were hundreds of ac¬
counts of how youngsters had tried to imitate the way a favorite
movie star smiled, leered, smirked, laughed, sat, walked, or
talked. Their attempts were usually unsuccessful and short¬
lived, but they often perplexed and mystified parents. Although
it would seem harmless for children to adopt hair and dress
 ■ 298 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication
*mmw/

■ Early research showed that the movies of the 1920s had strong
influences on children’s play. The plots were reenacted as children
imitated what they had seen on the screen. Influences of this type
continue even today as youngsters act out the fantasy world they
encounter in the content of the mass media. (© Judy S. Gelles/Stock,
Boston.)

styles from film characters, remember that the 1920s were the
age of "flaming youth” and “flappers.” The movies showed speak¬
easies, easy money, powerful cars, and fast women. Parents were
accustomed to books and magazines that followed the strict
standards of the Victorian era. But by the time of World War I,
Victorian morality began to fade, and the automobile was being
used for more than just transportation. When they saw movies
mirroring the new styles and the new morality, many people be¬
lieved the movies were the cause of the changes. By showing
that children copied the behavior they saw in films, Blumer gave
some support to this view.
Blumer’s data revealed another facet of the movie experience.
Movie viewing was often an intensely emotional experience. His
 The Media’s Influence on Individuals 299 ■

subjects reported that often while watching films they experi¬

enced what he called emotional possession. As the plot un¬
folded, they had intense feelings of terror and fear, sorrow and
pathos, thrills and excitement, or romantic passion and love.
They often left the film emotionally drained, anxious, or sexually
stimulated—depending on the film. The impact of these experi¬
ences was difficult to assess, but the findings testified to the
powerful emotions that the movies of the time could generate.
Blumer’s procedure was clever, and it permitted some in¬
sights into the experiences of the people he studied. It reveals a
more innocent time. But his subjects were the first movie gen¬
eration, and it is scarcely surprising that he concluded that this
new and widely used medium had influence. His data do reveal
a fascinating and detailed picture of how his subjects thought
the movies had influenced them as children. Since the movies
did offer young people a panoply of gods and goddesses to imi¬
tate, it seems reasonable to think that the films reinforced cer¬
tain behaviors copied from the stars. But that is only specula¬
tion—and we certainly do not need Blumer’s study to suggest it.
What can we learn from Blumer’s study, and what can we do
with his conclusions? Can Blumer’s study tell us whether the
films caused certain behaviors? Can it give any objective meas¬
ure of the influence of films on children, or even just on Blu¬
mer’s subjects? Can it tell us whether any influence they might
have had lasted?
The answer to each of these questions is no. First, whatever
Blumer found out about the first generation of moviegoers may
or may not apply to today’s youth, who have a great deal of ex¬
perience with various media. Second, the methods of Blumer’s
study are not adequate to provide indisputable answers to these
kinds of questions. Notice first that Blumer’s sample—the sub¬
jects who wrote the autobiographies—might have been unrep¬
resentative, or biased, in many ways. Perhaps his sample in¬
cluded an unusual number of veiy intelligent people, or an
unusual number of males or wealthy people. Perhaps the re¬
quirement that people write down their experiences kept less lit¬
erate people from responding. Blumer made no attempt to see
that his subjects were representative of the larger population.
We therefore don’t know what, if anything, his study might tell
us about other youths, even of that time. Furthermore, although
Blumer reinterviewed some subjects six months later to check
for consistency, it is difficult to tell how faithfully their recollec¬
tions reflected events that occurred years earlier. Blumer's study
may or may not be a true picture of the actual influences of
moviegoing even on his own subjects.
Stated in more technical terms, Blumer's study falls short in
meeting two fundamental criteria for scientific research: validity
■ 300 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

and reliability. A study is valid if it measures what it claims to

measure. In this case, the study is valid if it actually shows the
influences movies had on the children under study and others
like them. A study is reliable if a repetition of the study using
the same techniques would yield similar results. In other words,
if Blumer had repeated his research, would his findings have
been the same? Or if another researcher had duplicated Blu-
mer’s study, would the conclusions have been parallel? We don’t
know.
Yet we don’t want to write off Blumer’s study as inconsequen¬
tial. It was very imaginative, and it opened important lines of re¬
search. Blumer did not give us precise measures of behavior or
conclusions that we can apply to children in general. He gave us
interesting, informative anecdotes rather than the hard data
that have become customary in the social sciences. Another
study in the Payne Fund, however, did attempt to use more pre¬
cise methods.

■ Changing Children’s Attitudes. Ruth C. Peterson and L. L.

Thurstone focused on the question of how movies influence chil¬
dren’s attitudes toward social issues.5 In its research design and
precision of measurement, the Peterson-Thurstone study resem¬
bles social science research today more closely than does Blu¬
mer’s study. First they reviewed hundreds of films to select a few
that dealt clearly with specific issues. To be included in the re¬
search, a film had to be recent, acceptable to school authorities,
and clearly focused on attitudes toward one of the issues under
study. Eventually, Peterson and Thurstone selected thirteen
films that depicted attitudes toward (1) the Germans and World
War I, (2) gambling, (3) Prohibition, (4) the Chinese, (5) punish¬
ment of criminals, and (6) “the Negro.” In some experiments
they assessed the ability of one film to change attitudes; in oth¬
ers they measured attitude change resulting from viewing two or
even three films.
Each of the eleven experiments had four steps. First, the sub¬
jects’ attitudes toward an issue under study were measured us¬
ing specially designed questionnaires. Then they were given a
free ticket to see one of the selected films at the local theater a
day or two later. The day after they saw the film, their attitudes
were measured again. In some cases, the subjects were tested
yet again from 2Vi to 18 months later to see whether any effects
of the films had persisted.
The subjects in these experiments were some four thousand
junior and senior high school students from small communities
near Chicago. For any given experiment the subjects were just
those students who were at school on the day the study began,
who went to the movies according to plan, and who were at
school the next day, when their attitudes were retested.
 The Media’s Influence on Individuals 301 ■

Peterson and Thurstone used sophisticated attitude scales

that had only recently been developed, and their results were
subjected to careful statistical analysis. But notice several weak¬
nesses in the design of their study. To begin with, they took no
precautions to see that their sample was not in some way
biased. Also, they made no attempt to study those students who
did not complete all stages of the study. Perhaps those students
who completed the study were more interested in films or in
school than those who did not; perhaps their responses to films
were different from the responses of the students who completed
the study.
Notice, too, that Peterson and Thurstone did not follow one
procedure that is now commonplace. They did not use both a
control group and an experimental group. They used only an ex¬
perimental group. A control group is a set of subjects that is as
similar as possible to those in the experimental group but is not
given the crucial manipulation that is being studied in the ex¬
perimental group. Thus researchers can compare the experi¬
mental and control groups to see whether the experimental
manipulation made a difference. In this study, for example, a
control group would have been treated just like the experimental
group except that it would have watched a neutral film, one with
no relationship to the attitudes being studied. Then the two
groups would have been compared. Simply put, if the experi¬
mental group then showed a change in attitude and the control
group did not, the researchers would be more confident in say¬
ing that the attitude change was the result of the film and not of
some other undetermined factor. Since Peterson and Thurstone
did not use a control group, we can speculate about factors
other than films that might have altered the subjects' attitudes.
For example, perhaps some event in the news caused a change.
Despite these weaknesses in the study by today’s standards,
its findings were influential. Thurstone and Peterson concluded
that films could change children’s attitudes, sometimes dramat¬
ically. In one experiment, for example, the subjects saw a movie
called Son oj the Gods, which told the story of Sam Lee. It
showed Sam Lee as a fine young man who was not accepted by
his non-Chinese neighbors, and it portrayed Chinese people and
their culture in a positive way. After watching the film the teen¬
agers in the study showed more positive attitudes toward the
Chinese. From a statistical point of view, the shift toward more
positive attitudes was significant.6
Other youngsters in another town watched Birth of a Nation
(1915), a classic silent film to which a sound track was added.
The movie is clearly antiblack and sympathetic toward the Ku
Klux Klan. In this case questionnaires showed that the subjects’
attitudes toward blacks became considerably more negative after
seeing the film. In tests of the same subjects five months later,
 ■ 302 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

the shift toward negative attitudes persisted. (Such research

provoking negative attitudes would violate tine ethics of research
today.)
In other experiments Peterson and Thurstone concluded that
attitudes toward war, gambling, and punishment of criminals
could be altered with a single film. They found that two or three
films dealing with the same general topic could shift attitudes
even if any one of the films alone could not. In other words, the
influence of movies appeared to be cumulative.
With their impressive statistical graphs and experimental for¬
mat, the Peterson-Thurstone studies were regarded as very im¬
portant. They not only stimulated others to study attitude
change but also supported a kind of magic bullet theory of mass
communication. This view has also been called the hypodermic
needle theory or the jtimulus-response theory.7 Basically, it
sees the movie as a stimulus that is received in more or less the
same way by each subject and brings about an essentially uni¬
form effect in each. The characteristics of persons are unimpor¬
tant in this theory, and the stimulus—in this case, a film—is
seen as immediately and directly changing the person’s atti¬
tudes. Moreover, a change in attitude was thought to be equiv¬
alent to a change in conduct. As W. W. Charters, chairman of
the Payne Fund Studies, explained: “Because a close relation¬
ship between the attitudes of an individual and his actions may
be assumed, the study of the effect of motion pictures upon the
attitude of children toward important social values is central in
importance.”8 (Italics added.)
We shall soon see how social scientists outgrew this simple
and mechanical view of human behavior. But in the 1930s the
magic bullet theory had considerable support, and it reinforced
the legacy of fear. The entire Payne Fund series, in fact, seemed
to support the strongest critics of the media, who argued that
the media were both powerful and harmful. Today the technical
shortcomings of the Payne studies are glaring. They offer us few
guides to understanding the impact of movies—or any me¬
dium—on today’s communication-saturated youth. Even when
the studies were published, experts criticized their technical
shortcomings. But to the public the criticism sounded like de¬
bates over navigation while the ship was sinking. The Payne
studies reinforced the belief that the movies were responsible for
bad ideas, bad morals, and bad behavior among the nation’s
youth. That belief was soon applied to the broadcasting media
as well.

The Great Panic: If there had been any doubt that radio could have a powerful im¬
Reactions to the pact on its audience, that doubt was dispelled one evening in
Invasion from Mars 1938. On Ociuber 30, 1938, horrible creatures from Mars in-
 The Media’s Influence on Individuals 303 ■

■ In this famous
1938 broadcast di¬
rector Orson Welles
(hands raised) terri¬
fied many Americans
with a radio dramati¬
zation of H. G.
Wells’s science fic¬
tion thriller War of
the Worlds, pre¬
sented as a news re¬
port Hundreds of
thousands of lis¬
teners actually be¬
lieved that Martians
were invading the
United States. Their
panicked reaction
raised troubling
questions about the
power and responsi¬
bilities of the media.
(UPI/Bettman Archive.)

vaded the United States and killed millions of people with death
rays. At least, that was the firm belief of many of the 6 million
people who were listening to the CBS show “Mercury Theater of
the Air" that evening. The broadcast was only a radio play, a
clever adaptation of H. G. Wells’s science fiction novel War of the
Worlds. But it was so realistically presented as a newscast that
hundreds of thousands of listeners who tuned in late, missing
the information that it was only a play, thought that Martian
monsters were taking over.
Among those who believed the show was a real news report,
tens of thousands went into mindless panic. They saw the in¬
vasion as a direct threat to their values, property, and lives—as
the end of their world. Terrified people prayed, hid, cried, or fled.
A high school girl later reported:

I was writing a history theme. The girl upstairs came and made me
go up to her place. Everybody was so excited 1 felt as [if] I was going
crazy and kept on saying, "what can we do, what difference does it
■ 304 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

make whether we die sooner or later?” We were holding each other.

Everything seemed unimportant in the face olf death. I was afraid to
die, just kept on listening.9

Among those who believed that the Martians were destroying

everything and that nothing could be done to stop them, many
simply abandoned all hope:

I became terribly frightened and got in the car and started for the
priest so I could make peace with God before dying. Then I began to
think that perhaps it might have been a stoiy, but discounted that
because of the introduction as a special news broadcast. While en-
route to my destination, a curve loomed up and traveling at between
seventy-five and eighty miles per hour, I knew I couldn’t make it
though as I recall it didn't greatly concern me either. To die one
way or another, it made no difference as death was inevitable. After
turning over twice the car landed upright and 1 got out, looked at
the car, thought that it didn’t matter that it wasn’t my car or that it
was wrecked as the owner would have no more use for it.10

Many such accounts showed that the broadcast was accepted as

real and that many people thought they were going to die.
CBS, the Mercury Theater, and the actors had no intention of
deceiving people. The script was written and the program was
presented in the tradition of telling “spook stories” for Hallow¬
een. The program was clearly identified as a play before and after
the broadcast and in newspaper schedules.11 But the newscast
style, the powerful directing, and the talented performance of
the actors conspired to make the presentation seem very real.
The result was one of the most remarkable media events of all
time.
Needless to say, the public, the FCC, and the broadcast in¬
dustry were deeply disturbed by the event. Although no one was
killed in the panic, tens of thousands all over the country felt
like fools when they discovered what had happened. Within a
few weeks CBS faced lawsuits totaling three-quarters of a mil¬
lion dollars for injuries, miscarriages, and assorted other dam¬
ages alleged to have been caused by the broadcast. (None of
these claims held up in court.) More important, new guidelines
for American broadcasters banned fictional news broadcasts.
The invasion broadcast and its aftermath once again rein¬
forced the legacy of fear. It seemed clear to many that radio, like
other media, was a powerful and dangerous force capable of
profoundly influencing the mass audience. Some people de¬
manded more rigid control of the medium by the federal
government, but radio, like newspapers, remained under the pro¬
tection of the First Amendment.
For social scientists, the great panic created by the broadcast
 The Media’s Influence on Individuals 305 ■

presented a rare opportunity to study behavior triggered by

mass communication. Hadley Cantril of the Office of Radio Re¬
search of Princeton University hastily began a research study to
uncover the causes of panic in a general sense, as well as reac¬
tions to the radio broadcast. More specifically, the Cantril study
sought to discover the psychological conditions and the circum¬
stances that led people to believe that the invasion was real. Al¬
though the scope of the investigation was limited and its flaws
numerous, the Cantril study became one of the classics in radio
research.12
Actually, only 135 persons were interviewed in depth. Most
were people who had been frightened by the broadcast, and all
came from the New Jersey area, where the panic was greatest
because the Martians were said to have landed there. Most of the
subjects were located as a result of the interviewers’ personal in¬
itiative. No pretense was made that those interviewed were a
representative sample. However, just prior to the start of the in¬
terviews, two extensive tabulations of listeners, commissioned
by CBS, were made available to the researchers. Also, they ana¬
lyzed all the mail received by the Mercury Theater, CBS station
managers, and the FCC, and they reviewed 12,500 newspaper
clippings related to the broadcast.
The result was a sensitive study of the feelings and reactions
of people who were badly frightened by what they thought was
the arrival of Martians. (Our earlier quotations of reactions come
from this study.) The study also yielded a hypothesis about the
effects of the broadcast. The researchers concluded that critical
ability was the most significant variable related to the response
people made to the broadcast. Critical ability was defined gen¬
erally as the capacity to make intelligent decisions.
Those who were low in critical ability tended to accept the in¬
vasion as real and failed to make reliable checks on the broad¬
cast; for example, they did not cadi authorities or listen to other
stations. Especially vulnerable to misconception of the nature of
the program were those with strong religious beliefs, who
thought the invasion was an act of God and the end of the world.
Some thought a mad scientist was responsible. Others were dis¬
posed to believe in the broadcast because war scares in Europe,
where World War II was about to begin, made catastrophe seem
more plausible.
Those high in critical ability tended not to believe the broad¬
cast was real. They were more likely to be able to sort out the
situation even if they tuned in late. These people tended to be
more educated than those low in critical ability. In fact, statis¬
tical data obtained from CBS revealed that amount of education
was the single best factor in predicting whether people would
check the broadcast against other sources of information.
 ■ 306 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

Notice that the conclusions of the Cantril study were a depar¬

ture from the magic bullet theory. According to that theory, the
broadcast should have had about the same effect on everyone.
But the Cantril study isolated characteristics of the listeners
that strongly influenced their response: critical ability and
amount of education. The War of the Worlds broadcast rein¬
forced the legacy of fear of the media among many, but some re¬
searchers were beginning to suspect that the magic bullet theory
had flaws.

Beyond the The magic bullet theory had assumed that a given message
Magic Bullet reached every eye or ear in the same way or provoked essentially
uniform responses. Whose eye or ear didn't much matter. This
view followed the approaches to human behavior that prevailed
in social science early in this century. Psychology, for example,
was dominated by a fascination with stimuli and responses.
Stimuli were seen as evoking responses automatically. Moreover,
the relationships between stimuli and responses were thought
to be governed by inherited biological mechanisms, or instincts.
People were thought to inherit basically the same instincts, so
social or psychological differences between people seemed rather
unimportant.
Around the end of the 1920s, however, psychology and soci¬
ology developed new theories that eventually influenced research
on mass communication. Individual differences became a focus
of psychological studies. These studies showed that individual
differences in needs, attitudes, values, intelligence, and other
personal factors played key roles in shaping people’s behavior.
Meanwhile, sociologists gave increased attention to the impor¬
tance of social categories. They were most concerned with the
nature of social structure, how it changed, and the characteris¬
tics of categories of people who had different positions in that
structure. Comparisons of categories of people—such as racial
and ethnic groups, social classes, rural and urban people, age
groups, and males and females—became a focus for research.
The new perspectives on both individual differences and so¬
cial categories inevitably were brought to the task of studying
the effects of mass communication.13 New formulations then be¬
gan to replace the magic bullet theory. In fact, Cantril’s study
already shows this change: it looked to individual differences in
critical ability and to social categories based on amount of edu¬
cation to account for differences in the effects of mass commu¬
nication. We next review two studies that were milestones in
replacing the magic bullet theory: one examining soldiers in
training during World War II, and the second analyzing the pres¬
idential election of 1940. Both studies helped build a new way of
 The Media’s Influence on Individuals 307 ■

understanding the power of the media to influence ideas, opin¬

ions, and behavior.

Persuading the By World War II social scientists had developed fairly sophisti¬
American Soldier: cated techniques of experimentation, measurement, and statis¬
Experiments with tical analysis. The military therefore felt that social scientists
Film could contribute to the war effort. In particular, the army formed
a special team of social psychologists to study the effectiveness
of films that were designed to help teach recruits about the
background of the war and to influence their opinions and
motivation.14
The chief of staff, General G. C. Marshall, had decided that
the troops needed a common core of beliefs. When America en¬
tered the war in 1941, many citizens were ill-informed about all
the reasons for America’s participation. Everyone knew about
Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, but not everyone knew about
the rise of fascism. Hitler’s and Mussolini’s strategies, or the rise
of militarism in Japan. Moreover, the United States is a nation
with diverse regions, subcultures, and ethnic groups. The newly
drafted soldiers included farmers from Nebraska, ethnic males
from big-city slums, small-town youths, and young men from
the ranches of the West. All were plunged into basic training,
and many understood only dimly what it was all about. They
needed to be told why they had to fight, what their enemies had
done, who their allies were, and why it would be a tough job that
had to be seen through to unconditional surrender by the Axis
powers.
General Marshall thought that special orientation films could
give the diverse recruits the necessary information and a shared
set of beliefs. A top Hollywood director, Frank Capra, was hired
to produce a series of films called Why We Fight both to instruct
the recruits and to help shape their opinions. This use of films
testifies to the fact that the media were seen as powerful forces
capable of creating clear effects among their audiences. But the
Research Branch of the U.S. Army’s Information and Education
Division was also aware that social scientists believed that, be¬
cause of individual differences, the types or degrees of effects
would vary among different kinds of people.
The Army gave the job of studying the effectiveness of the
films to social psychologists. Their principal questions were how
well the films could provide draftees with factual information
and how well they could alter their specific and general opinions.
The researchers also asked if the films could foster:

1 A firm belief in the right of the American cause

2 A realization that the job would be tough
■ 308 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

3 A confidence in their own abilities and those of their com¬

rades and leaders to do the job
4 Confidence, insofar as possible under the circumstances, in
the integrity and ability of the Allies
5 Resentment, based on knowledge of the facts, against Ger¬
many and Japan for making the fight necessary
6 A belief that through military victory the political achieve¬
ment of a better world order would be possible

■ The Experiments. Four films in Capra’s Why We Fight series

were studied. We can summarize the procedures used in many
of the experiments rather simply. Several hundred men who
were undergoing training were given a “before” questionnaire. It
included two types of items: questions of fact and questions that
measured opinions. These questionnaires had been carefully
pretested on at least two hundred soldiers to minimize ambi¬
guities. Then the men were divided (by company units) into
an experimental group and a control grohp. The companies
designated as the experimental group saw one of the films in the
Why We Fight series. The control group saw a film that did not
deal with the war. After they had seen a film, all subjects in both
groups answered an “after” questionnaire. It measured the same
knowledge of facts and the same opinions as the first question¬
naire. The questions, however, were rephrased so that repeated
exposure to the test could not account for changes in responses.
Thus, by comparing the amount of change in the experimental
group with the change in the control group, the effect of the film
could be assessed.

■ The Results: Minimal Effects. The films did produce

changes in their audiences, but the changes were limited. For
example, seeing The Battle of Britain (one of the films in the se¬
ries) increased the recruits’ factual knowledge about the air war
over Britain in 1940. It also changed specific opinions about
many issues treated in the film. But it produced no broader
changes, such as increased resentment of the enemy or willing¬
ness to serve until the Axis powers surrendered unconditionally.
The results were much the same for the other films studied.
All increased the subjects' factual knowledge and modified their
opinions on specific items but failed to achieve broad changes in
orientation. The researchers also found that seeing two, three,
or four films in sequence was somewhat more effective than
seeing any one film alone. This finding seemed to support the
conclusions of the Peterson-Thurstone study that the effect of
films is cumulative.
Generally, the researchers concluded that the Why We Fight
films were modestly successful in teaching soldiers about events
 The Media’s Influence on Individuals 309 ■

■ A series of documentary films entitled Why We Fight were pro¬

duced for the U.S. Army during World War II. They were used to ex¬
plain to recruits why the war started and why it would be a tough
fight. It was hoped that seeing the films during basic training would
not only teach the soldiers facts but achieve significant changes in
their attitudes. While the troops did learn from the movies, and did
form some new opinions, they did not develop a lasting hatred of
the enemy or high confidence in the allies of the U.S. Thus, the pic¬
tures had only limited effects. (Defense Audiovisual Agency.)

leading up to the war. They were also modestly effective in mod¬

ifying rather specific opinions related to the facts covered. But
they had no great power to fire soldiers with enthusiasm for the
war, create lasting hatred of the enemy, or establish confidence
in the Allies. Moreover, the effects were different for soldiers
with low, medium, and high levels of education. Generally, sol¬
diers with more education learned more from the films (see Ta¬
ble 8.1).
Thus the effects of the film were clearly limited. This finding
did not confirm earlier beliefs in all-powerful media. And the
finding that variations in education modified the effects of the
film contradicted the old notion that communications were
magic bullets penetrating every eye and ear in the same way and
creating similar effects in every receiver. Thus the studies of
training films and their effects provided an important link in the
evolution of theory concerning the effects of the media.

The Media in a After World War II, research on mass communication blossomed.
Presidential Social scientists were armed not only with new theories of the
Campaign nature of human beings but also with increasingly precise tech¬
niques. Some researchers tried to sort out the factors in com¬
munication through laboratory studies. Professor Carl Hovland.
for example, launched a large-scale research project involving
■ 310 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

Table 8.1 Percentage of Items Learned by Subjects of

Different Educational Levels

EDUCATIONAL LEVEL
DIFFICULTY OF GRADE HIGH
MATERIAL SCHOOL SCHOOL COLLEGE

Least 35.1 60.7 75.3

Medium 11.6 30.3 49.9
Greatest 2.6 14.3 31.7

Source: Adapted from C. L Hovland, A. A. Lumsdaine, and F. D. Shef¬

field, Experiments on Mass Communication in World War II . Copy¬
right © 1965. Reprinted by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists.15 He and

some thirty associates explored several broad issues, including
the nature of the communicator, the content of the communi¬
cation, and the response of the audience. But real-life media
campaigns and mass communication were not part of this re¬
search. It used mostly laboratory situations and student sub¬
jects. The research produced advances in the theory of mass
communication, but the applicability of the program’s findings
to the real world was not clear.
One major study first published in the mid-1940s did focus
directly on the real-life media. Professors Paul Lazarsfeld, Ber¬
nard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet probed the web of influences
within which voters made up their minds during the 1940 pres¬
idential election. In The People’s Choice they reviewed what
their research had revealed about the role of mass communica¬
tions.16 Their conclusion was that the media play only a minimal
role in directly influencing the intentions and behavior of voters.
(Note that this research was conducted before television was a
major mass medium.)
This study is a landmark for two reasons. First, its scale was
large and its methodology was sophisticated. In fact few later
studies have rivaled it in these respects. Second, the findings re¬
vealed new perspectives on both the process and the effects of
mass communication.

■ Improvements in Methodology. Lazarsfeld and his col¬

leagues interviewed some 3,000 people from both urban and ru¬
ral areas of Erie County, Ohio. Interviewing began in May and
ended in November of 1940, when Franklin D. Roosevelt de¬
feated Wendell Willkie in the presidential election. In May all
3,000 subjects were interviewed, and they agreed to give further
 The Media’s Influence on Individuals 311 ■

interviews as the election campaign progressed. This repre¬

sented a new type of research method: the researchers randomly
divided 2.400 of the subjects into four “panels" of 600 people
each. One panel was the main panel. These people were inter¬
viewed each month from May to November for a total of seven
interviews. The other three panels were control panels, each of
which was interviewed only one more time. One control panel
was given a second interview in July, another in August, and an¬
other in October. These interviews were compared with those of
the main panel. This procedure allowed researchers to see how
repeated interviews were affecting the main panel. They found
that the repeated interviews had no measurable cumulative ef¬
fect. Thus the researchers could feel confident that their find¬
ings were meaningful and not an artificial result of their
procedure.
Some respondents decided whom to vote for early; some late.
Some shifted from one candidate to another; some fell back into
indecision. Always the interviewers tried to find out why the vot¬
ers made these changes, and they noted the changes carefully.
They also focused on the characteristics of the subjects. Rural
and urban dwellers were compared; people at various income
levels were contrasted. People of different religious backgrounds,
political party affiliations, and habits of using the media were
studied. Using complex methods, the researchers found that
these characteristics could be used with fair success to predict
voting intentions and actual voting behavior.
Through these efforts the researchers were able to reveal in
an elaborate and detailed way how voters shifted and finally
made up their minds in a presidential election. Personal and so¬
cial characteristics as well as the media played a role in their de¬
cisions. We review here some of the researchers' most important
findings.

■ The Influence of the Media. Much of a political campaign is

waged in the media, both through paid advertising and news re¬
ports. But Lazarsfeld and his colleagues did not find all-powerful
media controlling voters' minds. Instead, the media were just a
part of a web of influence on voters. Their families, friends, and
associates as well as the media helped people make up their
minds. Nor did the media affect all voters in the same way. When
the media did have an effect, three kinds of influences were
found: activation, reinforcement, and conversion.
Activation is the process of getting people to do what they are
predisposed to do. of pushing people along in ways they are
headed anyway. For example, for almost fifty years in Erie
County most well-to-do Protestant farmers usually voted Repub¬
lican; most Catholic, blue-collar, urban workers usually voted
 ■ 312 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

Box 8

A Little Fib
Will Do It

Does the mass media affect our behavior in that he reminds you of your grandfather.
elections? Or do we affect the mass media dur¬ Or say you voted for Mondale because he
ing elections? During the 1984 presidential reminds you of Johnny Travolta
primaries, members of Congress and the The pollsters will take your answers and
press were worried that exit polls might influ¬ feed them to a computer, which will chew on
ence citizens’ voting decisions. Syndicated them, digest them, and finally burp a sheet of
columnist Mike Royko gave some thought to paper. The networks’ high priests of politics
this problem and came up with the following will stare at the numbers, then announce: “I
suggestions: project the winner as . . . .”
Even before the polls close and one vote
In 20 years of writing a column, I've never has been counted, the TV anchors will be on
once asked anything of the readers. But this the air telling the world how Illinois voted.
one time I’m asking readers in Illinois to join But if enough of you lie, the entire nation
me in a noble cause. will be treated to one of the finest evenings of
I’m asking you to lie. This is a good lie, a television viewing since the tube was
worthwhile lie, a lie that will put bounce in unleashed.
your step, a giggle in your voice, and make you Don’t doubt that it can be done. I once saw
feel wonderful. Let me explain: it happen on a smaller scale.
Tomorrow many of you will be voting in the A few years ago, I was asked to spend an
Illinois Democratic primary. election night at a Chicago TV station talking
Some of you will come out of your polling about the results.
place and be grabbed by exit-pollsters working One hour before the polls closed, a polling
for one of the networks. guru came in and announced the result of the
If you voted for Mondale, say you voted for race for state’s attorney.
Hart If you voted for Hart, say you voted for He said: “Bernard Carey has won with 63
Mondale. percent of the vote. But there is a margin of er¬
When they ask you why you voted for Hart, ror, so we are calling it at 57 percent”
say it is because he is so mature and serious “You’re nuts,” I said. “He not only won’t get
 The Media’s Influence on Individuals 313 ■

63 percent or 57 percent, he might lose. ” nation, has now become accustomed to exit
By midnight, when the real votes had been polling. Some people probably believe that
counted, the polling guru looked suicidal, the they are required by law to answer.
TV whizbangs were sweating through their So it will take a conscious effort in and be¬
pancake makeup, and Carey lost with 49 per¬ yond Chicago to turn the networks’ projec¬
cent of the vote. tions on their ears.
“How did you know?" a whizbang asked But it can be done. Tomorrow Illinois can
me. be the toast of the nation’s TV viewers.
I explained that many Chicagoans would All you have to do is tell a little fib. Then go
not dream of telling a stranger how they voted home, sit back, relax, and watch the anchor¬
in an important local election. They have a men slowly swallow their tongues.
deep sense of privacy. They also fear a brick
source: Mike Royko, “A Little Fib Will Do It” Reprinted by
through their window.
permission: Tribune Media Services.
Unfortunately, Chicago, like the rest of the photo: c Jim Anderson/Woodfln Camp & Associates.

Democratic. Indeed, all across the country, many voters tend to

have certain socially based predispositions for and against the
political parties. Yet as the 1940 campaign progressed, many
voters in Erie County were undecided about whom to vote for.
The media eventually helped activate voters to follow their pre¬
dispositions through four steps:

1 The political propaganda in newspapers, magazines, and ra¬

dio broadcasts increased interest in the campaign among po¬
tential voters.
2 This increased interest led to greater exposure to campaign
material.
3 But the exposure was selective. Background characteristics
such as religion and occupation led persons to read or listen
to the output of just one party. For example, rich Protestant
farmers tended to pay attention mainly to Republican mate¬
rial, whereas poor Catholic workers in the city turned to
Democratic material.
4 As a result of increasing interest and selective exposure, the
voters’ intentions eventually crystallized in directions that
were generally predictable from the voters' characteristics.

Thus, activation by media influences changes no one's mind,

but it can affect an election's outcome.
Fully half of the people studied, however, already knew in May
how they would vote in November. They made up their minds
early and never wavered. Does this mean that the media had no
effect on such voters? Not at all. The media were also important
as reinforcers of the voters' intentions. Political parties can ill
■ 314 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

afford to concentrate only on attracting ne\v followers; they must

prevent the loss of supporters. The intentions of the party faith¬
ful must be constantly reinforced through campaign materials
that show partisans they have made the right choice. The media
can be used to provide some of this reassurance. Clearly, rein¬
forcement is not a dramatic effect. It merely keeps people doing
what they are already doing.
Finally, the campaign in the mass media did convert a few
voters from one party to the other. Most people had either made
up their minds in May, or went with the party they were predis¬
posed toward, or paid attention only to the campaign of their
own party. But a very small number who were only weakly tied
to a party were persuaded from one party affiliation to the other.
Perhaps the major conclusion emerging from this study is
that the media had very limited influence on voters. When peo¬
ple talk of the media’s power, the ability to convert is what they
usually have in mind. But Lazarsfeld and his colleagues found
that of their subjects approximately

16 percent showed no effect of the media

9 percent showed mixed effects
14 percent were activated
53 percent were reinforced
8 percent were converted

The media activated the indifferent, reinforced the partisan, and

in a very few cases converted the doubtful.
Thus The People’s Choice opened a new era in thinking
about the mass media. It seemed to deny flatly the old hypothe¬
sis that the media have great power. Instead it supported a new
hypothesis: that the media have minimal consequences and
are only one set of influences among many. Although some ear¬
lier studies had suggested much the same thing, the large
scope, sophisticated methods, and impressive findings of The
People's Choice set it apart as a major milestone in media
research.

■ The Two-Step Flow. One totally unexpected but extremely

important finding emerged from The People's Choice. It oc¬
curred almost by accident, in a way that scientists call serendi¬
pitous. About halfway through the study, the researchers began
to see that a major source of information and influence for vot¬
ers was other people. Individuals turned to other individuals to
obtain information about the candidates and the issues. Inevi¬
tably, those who provided the information also provided inter¬
pretation. Thus the flow of information between people also
 The Media’s Influence on Individuals 315 ■

included a flow of influence. The researchers called this per¬

sonal influence (in contrast with media influence).
Those who served most often as sources of information and
influence had two important characteristics. First, these opin¬
ion leaders had given great attention to the media campaign.
Second, their socioeconomic status was similar to the status of
those whom they influenced. In other words, voters were turning
for information and influence to people who were like them¬
selves but whom they regarded as knowledgeable.
To summarize their findings, the researchers described what
they called a two-step Jlow oj communication. Basically, they
said, content moves from the mass media to opinion leaders,
who then pass it on to others whom they inevitably influence.
Since The People’s Choice presented these findings, hundreds
of other studies have tried to understand the nature and impli¬
cations of personal influence as part of mass communication. It
has been found to play a major role in spreading innovations
and bringing about technical and cultural change.17
Thus, in less than twenty years, the view of the mass media's
influence presented by social scientists had changed drastically.
No longer were the media compared with a magic bullet. Instead
their influence was shown to be clearly limited. The media are
more likely to provide information than to shape opinions; and
they are more effective at activating the indifferent than at con¬
verting people. Moreover, the media’s influence depends on per¬
sonal and social characteristics. In addition, often that influence
is not direct. Instead the media may first influence opinion lead¬
ers who in turn influence other people.

Television and The 1950s saw the rise of television as the dominant mass me¬
Children dium in America. By the end of the decade television was reach¬
ing almost every corner of the country, and only one in eight
homes did not have a television. Just as the public grew alarmed
over the movies during the 1920s, they saw television as a threat
in the 1950s. What was it doing to them, and, most of all, what
was it doing to their children? Is television, as critic Michael No¬
vak said, “the molder of the soul’s geography”?
A trickle of research in the early 1950s did little to quiet (he
public’s fears about television. Several social scientists had
found in small studies that the arrival of television had changed
the lives of children in several ways. For example, it reduced the
time they spent playing, postponed their bedtime, and modified
what they did in their free time. Children spent less time watch¬
ing movies, reading, and listening to the radio.18 But no one
knew whether television limited or broadened children's knowl¬
edge, raised or lowered their aesthetic tastes, modified their val-
 ■ 316 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

ues, created passivity, or stimulated aggression. Research was

needed to clarify the influence of the new rnedium.
Today, a huge literature has developed on the subject of chil¬
dren and television. Two investigations stand out as landmarks.
The first was a comparison of television viewers and nonviewers.
The second was a series of studies on the relationship between
portrayals of violence and aggressive conduct by children.

Children’s Uses of In 1960 Professors Wilbur Schramm, Jack Lyle, and Edwin Par¬
Television: Viewers ker published the first large-scale American investigation of chil¬
Versus Nonviewers dren s uses of television.19 The study was concerned mostly not
with what television does to children but with what children do
with television. The researchers looked at the content of televi¬
sion shows, the personality of young viewers, and the social set¬
ting of television viewing. In eleven studies they interviewed
nearly 6,000 children, along with 1,500 parents and a number
of teachers and school officials, in both the United States and
Canada. They used in-depth interviews and standardized ques¬
tionnaires, with statistical analyses of the results. In the end
they had an impressive mass of quantitative data plus detailed
insights about children’s viewing patterns and their uses of
television.

■ Patterns of Viewing. Very early in the life of the children

studied, television emerged as the most-used mass medium. By
age three, children were watching about forty-five minutes per
weekday, and their viewing increased rapidly with each addi¬
tional year. By the time children were five years old, they
watched television an average of two hours per weekday, and by
age eight the average viewing time had risen to three hours. In
fact, from ages three to sixteen, children spent more time watch¬
ing television than they spent in school. About one-sixth of the
waking hours of the children studied were devoted to television.
Only sleep and perhaps play took up as much or more of their
time.
Of course, some children watched television much more than
these average numbers of hours and some much less. Compared
with light viewers, the heaviest viewers had a characteristic
profile:

1 They were in grades six through eight (that is, they were
about eleven to thirteen years old).
2 They were less intelligent (this pattern was reversed until
about age ten to thirteen: that is, for children under ten,
brighter children tended to watch television more).
3 They were poor.
 The Media’s Influence on Individuals 317 ■

Children’s tastes in television programs varied with their age,

sex, and intelligence, but their families were the chief influence
on taste. Middle-class children tended to watch realistic, self¬
betterment programs. Working-class children viewed more pro¬
grams that provided sheer entertainment or fantasy.

■ Uses of Programs. The researchers were most interested in

finding out how children used what they saw on television. Chil¬
dren, they concluded, used television primarily in three ways: as
fantasy, diversion, and instruction.
Fantasy was one of the most important uses, for several rea¬
sons. It gives the passive pleasures of being entertained, of iden¬
tifying with exciting and attractive people, and of getting away
from real-life pressures. It provides pleasurable experience free
from real-life limitations. Fantasy, in other words, provides both
escape and wish fulfillment.
Children often turned to television for diversion, but in fact
they often received instruction. This teaching was neither for¬
mal nor planned, nor did the youthful viewers intend to learn
anything. Such unplanned, unintentional learning is called in¬
cidental learning. What is learned is related, of course, to the
child's abilities, needs, preferences, and patterns of viewing. The
lessons of television are not necessarily either objective or cor¬
rect. Television portrays the world—sometimes realistically,
sometimes not. But whatever their merits, television’s portrayals
of reality are a source of instruction for young viewers.
The occurrence of incidental learning supports one argument
of television’s defenders: it broadens our knowledge. When the
researchers compared children in an American community that
received television signals with a similar Canadian community
that had no television, they found that children in the commu¬
nity with television had higher vocabulary scores and knew
more about current events. This held true even among those
with low mental ability. The researchers concluded that televi¬
sion accelerates a child’s intellectual development during his or
her early years.

■ Other Findings. Schramm and his colleagues also found that

children’s social relationships were related to their use of televi¬
sion. Children who had conflicts with their parents, they found,
sought escape through watching television. They also discovered
a three-way relationship among conflict, viewing, and aggres¬
sion: the more severe the child-parent conflict and the higher
the child’s score on several measures of aggression, the more
likely he or she was to turn to fantasy programs on television.
The study reached other conclusions, but in general it re¬
vealed no truly dramatic problems arising from television view-
 ■ 318 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

ing. Although the researchers found that children were pre¬

occupied with television, they did not find that children were
passive receivers of evil influences from it. Instead the effects of
television depended on factors such as the child’s family, mental
ability, group ties, age, sex, needs, and general personality.
Although the study had some flaws in its methods, its find¬
ings remain important. It offered no support whatever for the
magic bullet view that television is an all-powerful stimulus
achieving uniform responses in all viewers. On the contrary, it
offered evidence that the medium has limited effects. Finally, it
showed that these effects differ from child to child and from one
category of children to another.

The Impact of The legacy of fear in modern dress was the source of the largest
Televised Violence: research effort ever aimed at understanding the effects of mass
The Report to the communication in America. We have seen that, as each new me¬
Surgeon General dium appeared, vocal critics pronounced it to be a major factor
in society’s mounting ills. The fact that these ills are rooted in
the long-term trends of urbanization and industrialization is not
readily accepted by most of the public. The media are visible tar¬
gets to blame. Thus it is not surprising that many people linked
the rising rates of crime and violence and changes in values that
occurred in the late 1960s directly to the growth of television in
the 1950s and 1960s.
This public concern brought pressure on Congress to “do
something. In March of 1969 Senator John Pastore said he was
“exceedingly troubled by the lack of definitive information which
would help resolve the question of whether there is a causal con¬
nection between televised . . . violence and antisocial behavior
by individuals, especially children.” With Pastore's urging, Con¬
gress appropriated $1 million to the Department of Health, Ed¬
ucation and Welfare to conduct research into the effects of
television.
HEW, defining the issue as a “potential hazard to public
health,” turned over the task of organizing the project to its Pub¬
lic Health Service, which turned it over to the National Institute
of Mental Health, which in turn appointed a committee of distin¬
guished social scientists to design the project and a staff to do
the day-to-day work. All the social scientists on the committee,
however, were first approved by the networks. The surgeon gen¬
eral charged the committee with two goals: to review what was
already known about television’s effects, and to launch new
studies on the subject.
Eventually some sixty studies plus reviews of hundreds of
prior investigations were published in 1971 in five volumes plus
a summary volume, all under the title Television and Social Be¬
havior.20 Many issues were studied, including the impact of ad-
 The Media’s Influence on Individuals 319 ■

vertising, activities displaced by television, and the information

learned from television. The focus, however, was on televised
violence and its influence on children. We review here some of
the main findings on this topic.

■ Media Content Just how violent were television shows? Vol¬

ume 1 of the study presented some striking answers. For exam¬
ple, Professor George Gerbner studied one week of prime-time
television in the fall of 1969. He found that eight of every ten
programs contained violence. Even more striking, the hours
during which children viewed most were the most violent of all.
Violence was carried out mostly by men who were free of family
responsibilities. About three-fourths of all leading characters
were male, American, middle or upper class, unmarried, and in
the prime of life. Killings occurred between strangers or slight
acquaintances, and few women were violent. In fact, in real life
most killings involve people who know each other. Overall, tele¬
vision's portrayals of violence were very frequent and very
unrealistic.
Television professionals who were interviewed defended their
portrayal of violence. Violence, they said, was necessary in order
to hold the audience’s attention. Additionally, they claimed, it
was used not for its own sake but mainly when it was essential
to develop a plot or a character. They claimed, too, that televised
violence reflects real life and that watching it tends to reduce a
child's propensity to act aggressively. Finally, they argued that
parents should monitor their children’s viewing.
These defenses seemed weak to many critics of the networks.
Research had shown clearly that television’s portrayal of violence
was unrealistic, to say the least, both in the amount and the
kinds of violent behavior portrayed. The claim that such portray¬
als lowered childrens’ propensities to behave aggressively has lit¬
tle factual basis. There is no convincing research evidence
supporting the catharsis theory, which assumes that watching
violence reduces aggression.

■ Social Learning and Modeling Behavior. Television content

presents large amounts of violence. But do such portrayals alter
children’s behavior and actually make them more aggressive? In
an attempt to answer this question, one volume of the report to
the surgeon general reviewed all the research that had been pub¬
lished on what psychologists call observational learning. This
kind of learning is just what the term implies. A person changes
behavior, knowledge, attitudes, or values as a result of seeing
the actions of someone else. At an earlier time it would have
been called imitation: a more contemporary term is modeling
behavior. We will review the idea in detail in the next chapter.
 ■ 320 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

but some findings from research on modeling behavior are im¬

portant to the issue of whether violent television stimulates
aggression among children.
The most widely known work on modeling was done by Albert
Bandura and his associates in the early 1960s. In his early re¬
search Bandura had children watch a live or filmed model per¬
form aggressive acts against a large inflated Bobo doll. One
group saw the model rewarded for this behavior. A second group
saw the model receive no consequences for the aggression. A
third group observed the model being punished.
The children were then left in a room full of toys, including a
doll like the one the model had beaten. The groups who had seen
the model rewarded or receive no consequences showed a great
deal of direct imitation: they too beat up the doll. Those who had
observed the model being punished for aggression were much
less likely to be violent.
Later, to check to see if the subjects had understood the ac¬
tions of the models, the children in all three'groups were asked
to show the experimenter what the model had done. They were
able to do so without difficulty. In other words, observational
learning had taken place regardless of whether the model had
been rewarded or punished.21 But whether the children also im¬
itated the behavior depended on what they had observed to be
the consequences of being aggressive.
Psychological research of many kinds has shown that imita¬
tion occurs, and most people believe that modeling is an impor¬
tant factor in personality development. Still, Bandura’s study
and others like it have become controversial. The question is. Do
they adequately represent reality? British social scientists Den¬
nis Howitt and Guy Cumberbatch maintain that they are merely
scientific “metaphors.”22 A metaphor is a figure of speech imply¬
ing that two objects share some quality. For example, when the
ardent young man declares to the sweet young maiden that
“your lips are precious rubies,” he may not be very original, but
he is using a metaphor. Declaring or assuming that the activi¬
ties of subjects in an experimental setting are what they would
be in the real world is also using a metaphor. The activities are
certainly not identical, and the differences, critics say, may be
more important than the similarities. For one thing, real-life
social constraints are absent in the laboratory. No authority fig¬
ures known to the child are present. Furthermore, the ag¬
gression is against a doll, and children know full well that it
does no harm to a human being. Thus, they can feel free to have
fun beating up the doll, knowing that no one will restrain or
punish them and that there are no real consequences for their
victim.’ Thus, although children may enthusiastically beat a
 The Media’s Influence on Individuals 321 ■

doll in an experiment after watching a model do so, they would

not beat their mother after watching violence on television.
There is no final answer to this challenge. Bandura’s experi¬
ments—and all similar experiments—suggest important hy¬
potheses concerning the influence of television on violent
behavior among children, even if they do not provide conclusive
answers. There is little doubt that modeling theory is an impor¬
tant perspective for understanding the influence of television on
many kinds of human behavior, not just violence. And, as we
will see in the next chapter, modeling theory is by no means tied
exclusively to laboratory experiments.

■ Adolescent Aggression. Other studies in th< report to the

surgeon general did look at attitudes and behavior in real-life
settings. In Television and Adolescent Aggression, eight proj¬
ects are reported that attempt (1) to measure adolescent use of
television, (2) to measure adolescent aggressiveness, and (3) to
relate use of television to violent behavior. Perhaps the most in¬
teresting of these studies is one by M. Lefkowitz and his
associates.
Lefkowitz’s study was a ten-year longitudinal project; that
is, it covered one set of subjects over a period of time. This kind
of study is somewhat unusual in social science; more often,
studies compare different children of different ages, rather than
the same children at different ages. Children in Columbia
County, New York, were tested in their third-grade classrooms
and again ten years later. The researchers asked the children to
rate each other on aggression, and they interviewed the chil¬
dren’s parents.
The interviews yielded some interesting results. For example,
a child who was unpopular in the third grade tended to be un¬
popular ten years later, and an unpopular child in the third
grade tended to watch television more as he or she got older.
More to the point, the television habits of eight-year-old boys
were related to their aggressive behavior through their child¬
hood and adolescence. The authors concluded that the more vi¬
olent the programs preferred by boys in the third grade, the
more aggressive their behavior—both in the third grade and ten
years later. They saw the effects of television violence as being
cumulative.
Lefkowitz and his colleagues also found that the greater the
child’s preference for violent programs, the more likely he or she
was to think that these programs were a realistic depiction of
life. Furthermore, the more violence a child viewed, the more
time he or she was likely to spend watching television overall.
Also, the greater the total amount of television viewing, the
 ■ 322 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

lower the child s IQ and level of educational accomplishment. A

preference for violent programs, however, \vas unrelated to IQ
and educational accomplishment.
In summary, these studies found that specific kinds of ado¬
lescents were more likely both to watch televised violence and to
be aggressive. These were males, younger adolescents, those of
lesser intelligence, and those in lower socioeconomic levels. In
short, among youths in these categories, viewing violence on
television and aggressiveness went together. But the relation¬
ship between these behaviors was not strong enough to imply
that television caused the aggressiveness. To show that two
things tend to occur together is not the same as showing that
one of those things causes the other.

■ Television in Day-to-Day Life. The fourth volume of the re¬

port provided an overview of the kind of television that people
watched in 1970. Both laboratory and field studies were re¬
ported. Surprisingly, diaries and interviews showed that fami¬
lies did not necessarily prefer violent programs, as the rating
services claimed they did. Also, only one-third of the programs
seen were likely to be watched all the way through! People
thought they watched more than three hours a day on the aver¬
age, but the diaries revealed that they were viewing less than
two hours. Most programs were watched simply because they
came on.
One fascinating study by R. B. Bechtel used cameras
mounted on top of the television set. For three hours each day
the cameras recorded the viewing activities of twenty Kansas
City families. While watching television, these people did many
other things. They looked out the window, picked their noses,
scratched themselves (or others), rocked, untied knots, threw
objects at each other, mimicked the television actors, paced
around, or crawled on the floor. In other words, although people
may spend a great deal of time in front of their television sets,
they may or may not be giving the programs their full attention.
Television is part of a pattern of relaxation that includes many
elements. It may or may not be watched closely.

■ Conclusions. A fifth volume in this project reported on thir¬

teen research projects that were unfinished. Under study were
such issues as facial expressions while viewing (an attempt to
assess emotions) and the potential influence of violent television
on sleep and dreams. Because the research was incomplete, no
definitive conclusions were reported. Finally, the report of the
advisory committee, Television and Growing Up, contains a
summary of the first five volumes, recommendations concerning
 The Media’s Influence on Individuals 323 ■

further research and public policy, plus a statement about the

relationship between televised violence and aggressive behavior.
The advisory committee advocated further research to study
television viewing in the context of other media and in the con¬
text of the total environment of the child, with special emphasis
on the home. They also suggested that all aggression is not bad;
for example, viewing vigorous competition may be beneficial.
Also, they noted that any antisocial influence that television may
have on a child might be balanced by its prosocial effects. Per¬
haps, for example, television encourages children to care for
their friends and show affection toward their parents.
Nevertheless, the committee concluded that televised portray¬
als of violence could be harmful to some children. As they put it,
the issue posed a potential public health problem:

Thus the two sets of findings (laboratory and survey) converge in

three respects: a preliminary and tentative indication of a causal re¬
lation between viewing violence on television and aggressive behav¬
ior; an indication that any such causal relation operates only on
some children (who are predisposed to be aggressive); and an indi¬
cation that it operates only in some environmental contexts. Such
tentative and limited conclusions are not very satisfying (yet) they
represent substantially more knowledge than we had two years
ago.23

The research findings created a storm of controversy. Senate

hearings were held in 1972 to explore what it all meant. The
public, disregarding all the hedges, limitations, and qualifica¬
tions of the scientists, focused on the idea that television causes
kids to be aggressive. The television industry, seizing mainly on
the shortcomings of the research and the tentative nature of the
conclusions, declared the findings to be of little importance.
Many media critics were outraged; a number of the researchers
charged that their work had been misrepresented. Perhaps the
final vrord went to J. L. Steinfield, the surgeon general:

These studies—and scores of similar ones—make it clear to me that

the relationship between televised violence and anti-social behavior
is sufficiently proved to warrant immediate remedial action. Indeed
the time has come to be blunt: we can no longer tolerate the present
high level of violence that is put before children in American
homes.24

In other words, the surgeon general of the United States con¬

cluded that televised violence may be dangerous to your
health!
 ■ 324 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

I Further Research Ten years after publication of the report to the surgeon general,
the National Institute of Mental Health issued a new report doc¬
umenting “ten years of progress and implications for the
eighties.”25 The new report was hot based on new research spon¬
sored by the government. Instead, it was a compilation of the
main findings of more than 2,500 studies of the influence of
television on individuals, many of which had been published be¬
tween 1979 and 1981. The issue of violence and aggression re¬
mained as one of some eight major topics of interest to the
federal government’s Public Health Service. The new report was
more concerned with prosocial influences, and it probed TV’s
health-promoting possibilities, influences on imagination and
creativity, conceptions of social reality, family and interpersonal
relationships, and several similar issues.
The report noted that the portrayal of violence on television
has continued since the 1950s with only a few minor variations
and fluctuations. In fact, over the ten-year period, there was an
increase in violence in children’s week-end programs: which are
now more violent than prime-time television. There no longer is
any question that a correlation exists between exposure to vio¬
lent television programs and increased tendencies toward ag¬
gressive behavior. As is the case in the correlation between
smoking and cancer, one cannot predict whether violent pro¬
grams will cause a particular person to become more aggressive.
However, the totality oj correlational evidence for inferring that
violent programs actually cause aggression is even clearer to¬
day than it was in the earlier report to the surgeon general.
The question for research now is not whether exposure to vio¬
lence raises the probability that a person will engage in aggres¬
sive behavior. That conclusion has been well-established. The
problem now is to discover who will become more aggressive
after being exposed to portrayals of violence, to what extent, and
exactly why.

I Effects on
Individuals: An
Do the mass media produce direct, immediate, and powerful in¬
fluences on the individuals who are members of their audi¬
ences? After reviewing the highlights of more than a half
Overview
century of research, it is abundantly clear that a simple yes or
no answer is not possible. What, then, are the research conclu¬
sions that stand out? Also, do these give us the final word on
the influence of the media in modern society?
As research began, the early findings did little to challenge
the magic bullet idea that the media had great power. Those
findings also did little to dispel suspicions that the media were
to be feared for their negative effects on children and others. But
as research accumulated and as experiments became increas-
 The Media’s Influence on Individuals 325 ■

ingly sophisticated in their scientific methods, few really power¬

ful effects could be demonstrated.
This was perplexing because the conclusions from the scien¬
tists did not seem to square with observations that almost any
intelligent citizen could make. For example, in World War I, me¬
dia propaganda obviously had been used successfully to create
hatreds and loyalties among civilians. Later, there was the Or¬
son Welles broadcast that triggered a nationwide panic. Media
advertising continued to produce results. Sometimes the media
seemed so powerful, yet the experiments showed so little.
Adding to public confusion has been a continuing flow of
well-publicized cases in which the media clearly triggered some
dramatic and dangerous behavior. For example, in the late
1950s the television program “The Doomsday Flight” was the
first in a pattern that has been duplicated many times in later
years. The program featured a mad extortionist who placed a
bomb on a plane and demanded a huge sum of money to prevent
an explosion. After the show was aired here and abroad, there
were sixteen bomb-extortion attempts in various parts of the
world. Other grim events were also triggered. On September 23,
1973, a gruesome “Sunday Night Movie” portrayed sadistic teen¬
agers who doused tramps with gasoline and set them on fire.
Two days later, a young woman in Boston was dragged by a gang
of vicious youths to a vacant lot, beaten, and burned with gaso¬
line. She died in a few hours. Three weeks after the film was
shown, a group of youngsters in Florida poured lighter fluid on
three sleeping derelicts and set them on fire. They laughed when
the men screamed. One man died. And in 1980 two teen-agers,
after reading Illusions by Richard Bach, talked of committing
suicide in order to be reincarnated on a “higher plane of exist¬
ence”; they smashed a car through a concrete wall, and one
died.26
Do these events mean that the media have direct, immediate,
and powerful effects? For the individuals involved there is little
doubt that they do. On the other hand, the media are not alone
in providing suggestions and stimulations that can result in de¬
viant behavior. Almost any stimulus can trigger outrageous con¬
duct by demented or dangerous persons who are already
disposed to such acts. Through the ages spectacular crimes
have been triggered by every conceivable source, from the scrip¬
tures to the comics. We should not be lured into the illogical
conclusion that if one disturbed individual, or a vicious gang of
youths, imitates a pattern portrayed in the media, then the me¬
dia must have great power over the majority of normal people.
The spectacular events must be left to psychiatrists to deal with:
they do not characterize the impact of the media on the majority
of people.
■ 326 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

What are the important lessons from the research studies

that have focused on individuals and the media? Actually, they
provide us with several significant and well-established conclu¬
sions. Most of all, the major milestones in media research have
revealed much of the dynamics of mass communication. They
have clarified very effectively the way in which information flows
from the mass media to individual members of the audience.
First, it is clear that individual differences among members of
the audience are critically important. Each human being brings
a unique pattern of predispositions to mass communication. An
individual’s needs, attitudes, values, prior beliefs, and other cog¬
nitive or emotional states play an important part in screening
and selecting media exposure and interpretation. This means
that members of an audience are very selective in what they
read, listen to, or view from the media. It also means that the
pattern of understanding and interpretation of one person may
be very different from that of another when attending to identi¬
cal media content. The old idea of the magic bullet theory—that
a given media message penetrated every eye and ear in the same
way and to the same degree—is simply false.
A recognition of individual differences was one of the first re¬
sults of scientific research on media influences. Another impor¬
tant conclusion was recognition of the important part played by
the social categories into which we can classify members of a
media audience. Men and women attend to and are influenced
by the media in different ways; the same is true of young and
old, rich and poor, urban and rural, black and white, blue collar
and professional, nonreligious and the orthodox, and so on
through the enormous numbers of classifications that make up
a modern society. The significance of social categories is that
they indicate the subcultural influences that affect individuals
as they seek exposure to the mass media. For example, few sen¬
ior citizens avidly follow the rock videos of MTV, but many peo¬
ple in their early teens find them irresistible. On the other hand,
few in their early teens watch panel shows of experts analyzing
economic trends; many older citizens love them. The norms and
shared interests of senior and teen-age subcultures create sharp
differences in the media content selected by people in these cat¬
egories, and in how they are influenced by that content.
Finally, virtually every member of an audience is part of a net¬
work of active social relationships. These can exert a powerful
influence on the person’s exposure to and uses of mass com¬
munications. Few of us decide what movie to go to in isolation
from others; the same is true of the magazines, newspapers, and
books we read. Families, friends, and even acquaintances at
work or school can play a part in shaping our selections and
interpretations of media content. In addition, many people get
 The Media’s Influence on Individuals 327 ■

much of their information and interpretations, not directly from

the media, but from other people who have had firsthand con¬
tact with a news story, a movie, or a magazine article. Thus, an
individual’s contact with others and evaluation of the opinions
of those others are an important part of the dynamics of mass
communication.
These are not the only lessons that emerged from the main¬
stream of media research on individuals and the media, but they
are the ones best supported by evidence. In some ways, they
seem less than satisfying because many people want different
kinds of answers. They want to know exactly what can be used
to manipulate people. What clever techniques, words, presenta¬
tions, or suggestions will get people to take on new beliefs, buy
things, vote a certain way, abandon their prejudices, convert to
a religion, adopt a new fashion, or do something else. People also
want to know what media content leads people to engage in de¬
viant, unacceptable behavior. If only we understood that, we
might reverse some of the unwanted trends of our contemporary
world. In any case, this is precisely what research Jails to reveal.
So far, research has not uncovered the “magic keys” to persua¬
sion so that through communication people might be molded
and led to engage in behavior that someone desires. And al¬
though some minor results seem to be emerging in the study of
violence and aggression, it will be a long time indeed before we
understand what media content to screen out to prevent un¬
wanted social behavior. Even if we find out, our political values
may prevent us from doing so.
Does this mean that the media have very few influences on
people? This conclusion would be veiy premature. In the two
chapters that follow, we will examine several significant influ¬
ences that are very difficult to investigate in the experiments
and surveys of the social scientist. We will look less at direct, im¬
mediate, and powerful influences and more at indirect, long¬
term, and subtle effects.

I Summary Debates about the power of newspapers to cause unwanted ef¬

fects, the influence of propaganda during World War I, and the
rapid growth of movies after the war all contributed to the
growth of a legacy of fear of the mass media. This fear plus the
development of better research methods helped lead to attempts
to apply scientific techniques to the study of mass communica¬
tion in the late 1920s. These first efforts to study the effects of
the media reinforced the public’s fears. The Payne Fund Studies
reported that the movies were having powerful effects on chil¬
dren’s learning, attitudes, emotions, and general conduct. The
panic that followed the radio broadcast of War of the Worlds in
 328 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

1938 further reinforced the belief that the media have great
power.
As research became more sophisticated in the 1940s, how¬
ever, the old magic bullet theory came under increasing attack.
Studies of the effectiveness of the army’s Why We Fight films
showed that the films added somewhat to soldiers’ information
and modified some specific opinions, but they did not produce
major changes in attitudes. It was the research on the presiden¬
tial campaign of 1940, however, that dealt the death blow to the¬
ories about direct media power. The research reported in The
People’s Choice showed that the newspapers and radio did ac¬
tivate some voters to follow their predispositions, and they did
reinforce the positions of other voters, but their power to con¬
vert people from one position to another was slight. The study
also demonstrated that personal influence is an important factor
in political campaigns.
In the 1950s television became the major focus of research on
the media. The earliest studies seemed to suggest that the me¬
dium might have a powerful influence on children, but later
studies showed no dramatic effects. In the late 1960s a massive
effort was mounted to assess the influence of television, espe¬
cially its portrayal of violence, on children. The findings were
complex. There seemed to be some evidence that children readily
imitate what they see and that adolescents watch a lot of vio¬
lence. Adolescents who had below-average intelligence and were
in lower socioeconomic classes were more likely to watch a lot of
violence on television and were more aggressive. Although the
research could not show that televised violence caused aggres¬
sion, the surgeon general concluded that the evidence was suf¬
ficient to indicate that there might be a causal relationship
between the two.
Research on the effects of mass communication on individu¬
als has not given us a set of simple principles capable of describ¬
ing or predicting the relationship between the media and
individual behavior. But it has brought about a transformation
in scientific thinking about the relationship. The early view was
that the relationship was direct, universal, immediate, and
causal. This view was abandoned for more complex theories in
which the influence of the media is seen as selective, indirect,
and long term. Individual differences, social categories, and so¬
cial relationships are now seen as important determinants of
that influence.

Notes and 1 Gabriel Tarde, Etudes de Psychologie Sociale (Paris: Giard and
References Brier, 1898). See especially pp. 195-204 and 209-225.
2 Ibid.
 The Media’s Influence on Individuals 329 ■

3 Edgar Dale, Children's Attendance at Motion Pictures (New York:

Amo Press, 1970), p. 73: originally published in 1935.
4 Herbert Blumer, The Movies and Conduct (New York: Macmillan,
1933).
5 Ruth C. Peterson and L. L. Thurstone, Motion Pictures and the
Social Attitudes ojChildren (New York: Macmillan, 1933).
6 Speaking more technically, this conclusion emerges from com¬
parisons of the distributions, their central tendencies (averages
or means), and the probable error of the difference (between
means). The results were

Mean! (before) =6.72 P.E.M.^.073 CTj = 1.46 t12 = .57

Mean2 (after) =5.50 P.E.M.2=.077 ct2=1.54
dmi~m2 =1.22 P.E.d =.0698 D/P.E. = 17.5

7 For a review of this theory, see Melvin L. DeFleur and Sandra Ball-
Rokeach, Theories of Mass Communication, 3rd ed. (New York:
David McKay, 1975), pp. 202-206.
8 W. W. Charters, Motion Pictures and Youth: A Summary (New
York: Macmillan, 1933), p. 11.
9 Hadley Cantril, The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychol¬
ogy of Panic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940), p. 96.
10 Ibid.
11 Howard Koch, The Panic Broadcast: Portrait of an Event (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1970).
12 The full account of the study and its findings can be found in Can¬
tril, The Invasionfrom Mars.
13 DeFleur and Ball-Rokeach, Theories of Mass Communication,
pp. 202—206.
14 C. J. Hovland, A. A. Lumsdaine, and F. D. Sheffield, Experiments
on Mass Communication, Vol. Ill of Studies of Social Psychology
in World War II (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1965).
15 C. J. Hovland, I. L. Janis, and H. H. Kelley, Communication and
Persuasion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953).
16 Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, The Peo¬
ple's Choice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948).
17 Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (New York: Free Press
of Glencoe, 1962).
18 Eleanor E. Maccoby, “Television: Its Impact on School Children,”
Public Opinion Quarterly, 15 (1951), 421^144; also Paul I. Ly-
ness, “The Place of the Mass Media in the Lives of Boys and Girls,"
Journalism Quarterly, 29 (1952), 43—54.
19 Wilbur Schramm, Jack Lyle, and Edwin Parker, Television in the
Lives of Our Children (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1961).
■ 330 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

20 Each volume has this title with a different subtitle; the subtitles
are Media Content and Control (Volume 1), Television and Social
Learning (Volume 2), Television and Adolescent Aggression (Vol¬
ume 3), Television in Day-to-Day Life: Patterns oJUse (Volume 4),
Television’s Effects: Further Explorations (Volume 5). The var¬
ious reports were prepared by George A. Comstock, John P. Mur¬
ray, and Eli A. Rubenstein. They were published by the
Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., in 1971. The
summaiy volume, Television andGrowing Up, appeared in 1972.
21 A. Bandura and S. A. Ross, “Transmission of Aggression Through
Imitation of Aggressive Models,” Journal of Abnormal and Social
Psychology, 63 (1961), 575-582.
22 Dennis Howitt and Guy Cumberbatch, Mass Media, Violence
andSociety (NewYork: HalstedPress, 1975).
23 Television and Growing Up, p. 11.
24 J. L. Steinfield, “TV Violence is Harmful,” The Reader’s Digest,
April, 1973, pp. 34—40.
25 Television and Behavior: Ten Years of Scientific Progress and
Implications for the Eighties (Rockville, Md.: National Institute of
Mental Health, 1982).
26 New York Times, May 15, 1980.
Please don’t uplift me when I go to see a moving-picture show. I
don’t pay cash, or chisel passes to hear about the toiling masses.
Mary Caroline Davies, Saturday Evening Post. 1930

■ Effects of the Media on

Society and Culture

Mass communication can affect not only individuals but also a

society or culture as a whole. It can influence a group’s shared
beliefs and values, its choice of heroes and villains, its public
policies and technology. In particular, the continuing flow of
information from the media can profoundly influence social
change.
Unfortunately, less is known about the media’s effects on so¬
ciety and culture than about their effects on individuals, for at
least two reasons. First, social and cultural effects are more dif¬
ficult to study because they occur over long periods of time and
are not easily observed in the laboratory or through surveys.
Second, because the public has been less concerned about social
and cultural change, financial support for studies of these pro¬
cesses has been more difficult to come by.
Nevertheless, there has been an accumulation of research on
the media's social and cultural influences, and in this chapter
we set forth three of the major ways in which the media exert
such influence. First, the media can help bring about and
spread social change. Second, the media influence the public’s
perception of reality—of what current public issues are about
and what importance they have as well as which conditions are
social “problems" requiring action. Finally, the media are vehi¬
cles of popular culture. They bring to millions a constant flow of
unsophisticated music, drama, and media-created personalities.
The quality and effects of popular culture, we shall see, have
been hotly debated.
 ■ 332 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

Social Change: Rapid change is familiar to Americans. We, are constantly con¬
The Spread of fronted with innovations—new technologies, new ideas, new
fads and fashions, and new standards of behavior. An innova¬
Innovations
tion can be something borrowed from another society or an in¬
vention. Invention is the process by which an individual or
group puts together elements that already exist in the culture
into some new pattern. When many individuals decide to adopt
the innovation and it comes into common use in a society, we
say that diffusion of the innovation has occurred.
Obviously, people do not always adopt an innovation, even if
adopting it is logical and beneficial. Decades ago, for example,
seat belts for cars were introduced. Many thousands of lives
could be saved by using them. They were not particularly expen¬
sive, and they were not much of an inconvenience. Yet the vast
majority of Americans simply ignored them. The federal govern¬
ment tried many media campaigns to increase the use of seat
belts, and federal legislation required that all new cars have
them. Today virtually all cars have the devices, yet only 14 per¬
cent of American drivers use them regularly.1 Thus the seat belt
is an innovation that by and large has failed, at least so far.
But for each such failure dozens of other innovations have
been adopted with enthusiasm: the small electronic calculator,
the digital display wrist watch, instant breakfast bars, micro-
wave ovens, hot tubs, cable TV, home computers, and so on. All
around the globe societies have been replacing age-old customs
with modern ways and modern devices. This process of social
and cultural change has fascinated scholars and scientists for
decades. Media researchers have been particularly interested in
the adoption of innovations in recent years. Research has shown
that the media can play a significant role in it.

I The Process of
Adoption
Studies of the spread of social change go back at least to the
nineteenth century, when Gabriel Tarde said that imitation ex¬
plained the spread of new social forms.2 Later, sociologists made
quantitative studies of the spread of ham radios, hybrid seed
corn, new teaching methods, and public health measures.3 By
the 1950s research on this process was an established tradition
in all the social sciences.
In order to spread through a society, an innovation must be
taken up, or adopted, by individuals. Everett Rogers has dis¬
cussed the process in terms of the following five stages:4

1 Awareness stage The individual learns of the existence of the

new item, but lacks detailed information about it.
2 Interest stage The individual develops an interest in the in¬
novation and seeks additional information about it.
3 Evaluation stage The individual mentally applies the new
 Effects of the Media on Society and Culture 333 ■

■ Fads are a short-term form of social change. Their spread is often

accelerated when potential adopters see them portrayed by the me¬
dia. Breakdancing is a popular example that has a special appeal to
inner city youth. Young people’s interest in breakdancing was stim¬
ulated by its appearance in movies and on television. (0 John P. Ca¬
vanaugh/Archive Pictures, Inc.)

item to his or her present and expected future situation and

decides whether to try it.
4 Trial stage The individual applies the new idea on a small
scale to determine its utility.
5 Adoption stage The individual uses the new item or idea con¬
tinuously on a full scale.

Obviously, these stages do not apply exactly to every individual

and every innovation. Some things, for example, cannot be tried
out on a small scale; others may be adopted temporarily but
then abandoned.
Where do the media fit into this? Rogers’s stages suggest that
the spread of information via the media and the adoption and
 ■ 334 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

diffusion of innovations are closely related.^ In older societies in¬

novations were adopted in the absence of mass communication;
they came to people’s attention by word of mouth. Today infor¬
mation about an innovation can spread without adoption occur¬
ring, but as Rogers pointed out, the first stage in adoption is
learning about an innovation. Obviously, then, wide diffusion of
a change requires first that news of the innovation be available.
Mass media can facilitate the fast and widespread availability of
that information and thus stimulate social change.
In America today the mass media present information on a
great many possible innovations to large numbers of people, and
person-to-person communication supplements this diffusion of
information. As a result, Americans adopt many innovations
over short periods of time. Thus, studying the diffusion of infor¬
mation is one step in understanding social change. One way this
process has been studied is by investigating the spread of news.

Diffusion of Some news reports spread through the population in minutes;

Information others take days to reach more than a small minority. Some re¬
ports have eventually reached close to 100 percent of adult
Americans; others remain forever unknown to all but a few. To
find out what's behind these differences in the diffusion of news,
dozens of studies have been done on topics such as Alaskan
statehood, the Soviet Union’s launching of the first Sputnik sat¬
ellite, President Kennedy’s assassination, and many more recent
events.5 Typically, when the diffusion of news is plotted over
time, the percentage of the relevant population that learns about
the event at any given time shows a characteristic pattern: an
approximately S-shaped curve. This pattern has been called a
carve of diffusion.
Figure 9.1 shows what diffusion curves look like for the
spread of news through a population. The diffusion curve for
very dramatic and significant news might look like curve A. That
is, news of a vital event typically spreads rather quickly and
reaches a high percentage of the population. For example, a
study by Paul Sheatsley and Jacob Feldman showed that within
thirty minutes after President Kennedy was shot, 68 percent of
the adult population of the United States was aware of the
event.6 In this case, within a few hours almost everyone in the
country learned of the event, either directly from the media or by
word of mouth. Curve B in Figure 9.1 is typical of the diffusion
of less dramatic news. Curve C represents the pattern for a mi¬
nor event. Such news typically spreads more slowly and eventu¬
ally reaches only a small part of the population.
Why does some information diffuse more rapidly and reach a
 Effects of the Media on Society and Culture 335 ■

higher percentage of the population (that is. a higher level of sat¬

uration) than others? Obviously the level of people’s interest is
veiy important. Reports of obscure events of little inherent inter¬
est diffuse slowly and reach only a few people. News about vital
events that may affect many people spreads quickly and reaches
large portions of the population. Two other factors, however, are
worth discussion: the amount of attention that the media give
to the event, such as the number of repetitions of the message,
and person-to-person communication.

■ Repetition of Messages. How does the diffusion of informa¬

tion relate to the attention that the media give it? DeFleur and
Otto Larsen predicted that as stimulus intensity—defined as the
repetition of a message—increases, the percentage of a popula¬
tion that receives the information will also increase. The in¬
crease. however, will not match the number of repetitions.
Instead, they predicted, it will follow a curve of diminishing re¬
turns.7 That is, as we add equal increases in stimulus intensity,
the increase in the number of people receiving the message di¬
minishes. Doubling the number of messages, for example, will
increase but not double the number of people who learn the
message. To see how the curve of diminishing returns works
■ 336 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

and how well the theory matched reality in an experiment, we

examine one study in Project Revere.
Project Revere was a large-scale examination of the diffusion
of information conducted in the 1950s. Its objective was to find
out how to spread vital messages to large populations during a
civil defense emergency. Because newspapers and broadcast sta¬
tions might be shut down in such an emergency, Project Revere
spread information by dropping leaflets from aircraft and by
word of mouth. Leaflets are a medium of communication widely
used under adverse conditions. They are a medium of last resort
in situations where other means of communication are forbid¬
den or unavailable. They are used in politically repressive socie¬
ties as well as on the battlefield to reach populations with
information that cannot be supplied in other ways.
To test their theory, DeFleur and Larsen conducted one of the
sixteen studies in Project Revere.8 In eight communities with
similar characteristics, they dropped varying numbers of leaflets
carrying a civil defense message. The local media cooperated by
not publicizing the event in any way. Four days after the leaflet
drop, a sample from each community was carefully polled.
The percentage of people in each community that learned the
message varied with the number of leaflets dropped per inhibi-
tant. In the community that received only one leaflet for eveiy
four inhabitants, only about 25 percent of the population
learned the message. When the ratio was doubled, so that one
leaflet for every two inhabitants was dropped, 37.4 percent of
the population learned the message, an increase of more than
12 percent. When the ratio was increased fourfold, to two leaflets
per inhabitant, 44.1 percent learned the message—an increase
of less than 17 percent, or only slightly more than the increase
achieved by a doubling of leaflets. When thirty-two leaflets per
person were dropped, 87 percent of the inhabitants learned the
message.
Overall, the results showed a pattern predicted rather accu¬
rately by the theory. That is, as stimulus intensity (the number
of leaflets per person) increased, the percentage of people learn¬
ing the message also increased, but the increase showed dimin¬
ishing returns. Figure 9.2 shows both the results of the
experiment and the results predicted by the theory. The match
is close—much closer than can be accounted for by chance. If
the repetition of a message and the number of people who learn
the message are related in this way, then important implications
follow for communicators who try to use repetition to get their
messages across. Repetition can help diffuse information. But
presenting a commercial or a political announcement over and
over can be expected to have diminishing returns in terms of the
percentage of the audience who learn the message.
 Effects of the Media on Society and Culture 337 ■

■ Interpersonal Communication. The Project Revere studies

had another important finding: the people in the towns played
an active role in spreading the messages that were on the leaf¬
lets. Thus the study verified the importance of interpersonal
channels in spreading information. In place of the two-step flow
described in The People's Choice, however (see Chapter 8), the
study found a multistage flow. Even persons who had not seen
a leaflet helped spread the message. The information presented
to some people through the leaflets was passed on and on
through chains of residents, much like a rumor being passed
from person to person (and with many of the same distortions).9
The flow of information after the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy provided a dramatic example of the role that
person-to-person communication can play in the diffusion of
news, especially if the news is of immense importance. Almost
half the population first heard about the assassination from
other people, not from the media. Then, after hearing about the
assassination, they rushed to the media for confirmation and
further information.10
Thus information is spread through a population by the me¬
dia, by people who have heard the message from the media, and
by people who have heard it only from other people. The time
 ■ 338 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

pattern by which the information reaches the population de¬

pends on many factors—including the importance of the infor¬
mation, the number of repetitions of the message, and the
degree to which the original receivers of the message pass it on
to others.

The Media and Diffusion of information is the first and a crucial step in social
National change. Traditional societies, which have only limited mass
Development communication, tend to change slowly. Many countries have
found that when mass media are introduced numerous changes
take place, even changes disliked by the country’s leaders. For
example, fast foods, blue jeans, rock music, and other elements
of American popular culture have been widely adopted in various
parts of the world. Often such changes occur after content pro¬
duced in the United States, such as television programs and
films, has penetrated the country. To traditional societies, the
American media may be seen as a corrupting influence.
Nonetheless, bringing newspapers, radio, and television to
these societies does not automatically bring social and cultural
change. In fact, leaders in Asia, Africa, and Latin America have
often been frustrated in trying to force change on their develop¬
ing societies. Many of these nations are seeking what is called
modernization, or national development—a moving away from
their customs toward the methods of Western industrial na¬
tions. Specifically, national development may include mechaniz¬
ing agriculture, increasing literacy, raising public health
standards, spreading information about nutrition, introducing
Western legal systems, and reducing population growth through
birth control.
To modernize, a country's leaders must influence the deci¬
sions of ordinary citizens. It is the farmer who must decide
whether to take up improved agricultural methods. It is the vil¬
lager who accepts or rejects new techniques of rodent control,
water purification, or food preservation.
In some cases mass communication can influence the adop¬
tion and diffusion of these changes. The mass media, in other
words, can be important agents of deliberate social change.11 In¬
deed, in all parts of the world they have helped bring innova¬
tions in health, education, and family planning to millions of
people.
Just bringing news of a change and urging it on people
through the media, however, may not be enough. One of the
most interesting examples of the deliberate and sophisticated
use of television to foster social change occurred recently in Mex¬
ico. Although Mexico is a developed society in many respects, it
lags far behind many Western nations in some ways. In partic¬
ular, it has chronic undereducation. On the average its citizens
 Effects of the Media on Society and Culture 339 ■

■ Mass media and specialized media are used for the purpose of na¬
tional development in countries anxious to persuade their popula¬
tions to adopt new ways. This family planning billboard is part of a
multimedia campaign for reducing population growth in China. Its
message (approximate translation) is “Having only one child is
nice." (© Len Speier 1984.)

have only three years of education. The Mexican government al¬

locates from 15 to 20 percent of its annual budget to education
(compared with only 3 percent in the United States), but the
population grows so fast that it constantly outstrips the coun¬
try's efforts to provide new schools. With half the population un¬
der fifteen years old. many receive no education at all. Illiteracy
is widespread, and the low educational attainment of the major¬
ity of adults results in serious problems for a country that is
trying to raise its citizens' standard of living.
In an effort to provide educational opportunities for adults,
the Mexican government developed the National System of Open
■ 340 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

Education (NSOE). Adults enrolled in the program receive both

books and help in achieving literacy and basic education. But in
1975, despite attempts to publicize the NSOE programs in the
media and elsewhere, fewer than 100,000 adults were partici¬
pating in the program.
Clearly a new approach was needed to persuade people to en¬
roll, so the Mexican authorities decided to experiment. Miguel
Sabido, general director of the Mexican Institute of Communi¬
cations Studies, designed and directed a special soap opera,
“Come with Me,” to interest adult viewers in NSOE, to provide
them with information about its goals, and to make clear its
benefits and procedures. The project attempted to use the theory
of modeling developed by Albert Bandura (Chapter 10).12 That is,
as the plot unfolded, actors in the drama who would be attrac¬
tive “models” for the viewers enrolled in NSOE. Moreover, char¬
acters in the serial who enrolled in NSOE and completed their
training received benefits. Those who did not, or who scoffed at
the idea, were shown as losers. Viewers were also shown how to
enroll and how NSOE worked. All this was skillfully woven into
the drama.
Mexicans, like Americans, avidly view daytime television se¬
rials, and “Come with Me” was broadcast regularly over govern¬
ment television and radio for more than a year. The program
was very popular, but did it achieve its objectives? Before the
soap opera was broadcast, enrollment in NSOE was 99,800.
During the year that “Come with Me” was shown, enrollment
rose to a high of 839,000. Then, a year after the soap opera was
terminated, enrollment declined to 398,700. To evaluate
whether the program accounted for these changes, Ana Chris¬
tina Covarrubias studied a sample of 600 adults through de¬
tailed interviews.13 The study found that those who had already
completed some years of school were more likely to enroll in
NSOE than those with less schooling. Still, Covarrubias found
that the soap opera did have a substantial influence in persuad¬
ing viewers to continue their education. Even a year later its im¬
pact was evident. Clearly, this attempt to use mass communi¬
cation to achieve national development was a success.
It is interesting to note that an experiment oi this kind would
not be possible in the United States. Although close to 30 mil¬
lion Americans watch the soap operas each day, their produc¬
tion and distribution are controlled by private corporations for
profit. No systematic attempt has ever been made in America to
use soap operas as a means of formal instruction or persuasion
toward prosocial goals. Even so, American soap operas include
numerous incidental “lessons” on a variety of issues, from the
use of alcohol to the meaning of mental illness.14
"Come with Me" succeeded because it was carefully designed
by people intimately aware of the culture in which they were
 Effects of the Media on Society and Culture 341 ■

working. When outsiders come with plans to make life better for
local people in seemingly logical ways, their plans often backfire.

Campaign after campaign [using communication media] had failed,

in developing countries, because the campaigners misjudged or mis¬
understood the local situation. In a South American country, for ex¬
ample, there was a major effort to introduce a new maize which
seemed in every way superior to the old variety. The new maize was
hardier, had more food value, produced a higher yield, and so forth,
and there were high hopes that it would improve the diet and health
of both humans and animals. There was only one flaw in the plans.
The maize (because it was so hardy and disease-resistant) was too
hard to grind by hand, and villagers did not want to haul it to the
mill in town. But it proved to make excellent commercial alcohol,
and thus the campaign resulted not in improving diets but promot¬
ing alcoholism.15

Not ail attempts to use media deliberately to promote change

are as dramatic as the Mexican example, and the majority do not
fail as badly as the attempt to bring in new maize. Thousands of
media campaigns have promoted changes in health practices,
farming procedures, domestic activities, and other forms of be¬
havior. For the developing society, mass communication can be
an important agent of deliberate social change.

Setting the For decades Walter Cronkite, a popular news anchorman, closed
Agenda his evening news program with the assertion "And that’s the
way it is, on Tuesday, ..." The New York Times masthead
proclaims that it publishes “All the News That’s Fit to Print."
Similarly, Richard Salant, former president of CBS News,
maintained: "We don’t make the news; we report it.”16
The problem with all these claims is that they blatantly ignore
the realities of the news industry, and the people who make
them are fully aware of this fact. The news media do not just tell
us how things are; they do not and cannot tell us everything;
and they are not and cannot be totally unbiased. The news me¬
dia cannot reflect reality perfectly.
Does the discrepancy between the real world and the world
presented by the media matter? Decades ago Walter Lippmann
noted that people cannot possibly experience most of the events
of the world firsthand. Yet those events often require some re¬
sponse. Lacking firsthand access to reality, Lippmann said, cit¬
izens must make their choices in response to the pseudoenvi¬
ronment created by the press. In other words, people must
respond to the social construction of reality created by the me¬
dia. Many problems arise, said Lippmann, because of the lack of
correspondence “between the world outside and the pictures in
our head.”17
 ■ 342 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

Agenda theorists offer one way of studying the relationship

between “the world outside,” the media, and “the pictures in our
heads. " An agenda is a selection of items arranged to give some
items more importance than others. Agenda theory says that
the news media present the public not with a picture of the
world as it is but with an agenda of their own—a selection of re¬
ports about what is happening in the world. Agenda theorists
try to describe and explain (1) how stories are selected, pack¬
aged, and presented—a process known as gatekeeping; (2) the
resulting agenda; and (3) how this agenda affects what people
think about the relative importance of the issues presented.

The News Media There is little doubt that some news media deliberately slant
and Reality: their content to reflect the biases of those who own or control
Gatekeeping them. Most newspeople, however, try to be balanced, objective,
and thorough. The fact is, though, even the most objective and
thorough newspeople are faced with an inpossible task: some¬
times there is too much news; sometimes tdo little. They cannot
simply reflect the world’s events; they must select events and as¬
sign relative importance to them.
Should the audience be informed about the latest pronounce¬
ments of the candidates for mayor, or what about the hint of
scandal in the governor’s cabinet? In international news there is
the bomb that blew up the embassy in Bangladesh, the bomb¬
ings in Ireland, and the plane crash in India. What about the
instability of the rupee in Sri Lanka? And there is always a con¬
gressman whose sex life is indiscreet. Which stories out of all
these are most important? Which can be dropped, or at least
buried in a small paragraph in the back pages? And what if
nothing much has happened? The newspaper and the newscast
must still be filled. If nothing has happened that will truly inter¬
est the audience, then a selection of events must be made to ap¬
pear important.
In short, the news media do not just tell us how it is. They
select which stories to cover, which details of a story to include
and emphasize, and how much space or time to give to a story.
Gatekeeping is the name given to this process. It results in
some stories being in the news and some not, in some being
given strong emphasis and others being buried. Thus gatekeep¬
ing results in a news agenda presented by the media to the
public.
The study of gatekeeping has a long tradition in the study of
the media. A whole series of factors—cultural, social, psycholog¬
ical, and so on—operate at various stages to influence what is
presented and how. Some journalists maintain that economic
considerations often outweigh conceptions of the public interest
in determining what is reported.18 In accordance with the law of
 Effects of the Media on Society and Culture 343 ■

Box 9

Fast Food
News?

Why does TV news in Florida look and sound ence surveys and computer analyses to for¬
like TV news in Nebraska? Frank N. Magid As¬ mulate recommendations for its clients. And
sociates, known as “news doctors,” have although the firm insists that each case is
found that the anchorperson who is intelli¬ considered individually, some news directors
gent, experienced, sincere, self-confident, ma¬ and reporters have accused Magid of promot¬
ture, businesslike, warm, enthusiastic, and ing “franchised news—like McDonald’s.”
calm is the most desirable to viewers. Magid, Imagine that your local station has fol¬
who consults with more than 100 stations to lowed the suggestions that Magid gave to
help increase news shows’ ratings, uses audi¬ WTVJ in Miami in 1971:

• Replace_[one of the current reporters].

• Develop team atmosphere through conversational interchange . . .
• New, distinctive set allowing personalities to be shown sitting
together.
• More stories should be covered; a number of stories should be
shortened.
• Use field reporters as extensively as possible.
• Broward County [local] news should not be reported in great
detail.
• Neither editorials nor analysis should last more than 60 seconds.
• Initiate Action Reporter feature.
• Utilize brief, rapid-fire newsworthy items on well-known people.
• Long-range [weather] forecast is desirable if viewers can be per¬
suaded of accuracy.
 ■ 344 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

• A slogan emphasizing friendliness and warmth of WTVJ news

should be employed.

Sound familiar? Many Magid clients run as tainment Response Analysts has viewers
many as twenty-seven news stories in an hit one of a series of buzzers to indicate
hour, use a great deal of film footage, and how they feel about what they are watching.
stress an “action-oriented, on-the-spot” re- But the consultants’ aims are the same: to
portorial style. Anchors and others some¬ raise their clients’ ratings. As Magid once
times attend Magid’s television “school” in wrote, “Research indicates ratings rise
Iowa, where they are trained to move, dress, when the broadcaster is successful in ex¬
and speak in ways that are thought to be ap¬ posing the listener to what he wants to
pealing to viewers. Those who don’t make hear, in the very personal way he wants to
the grade often find themselves looking for hear it In terms of news, this means ratings
a job with someone who believes, like one are improved not when listeners are told
news director, that consultants’ influence what they should know, but what they want
is “extremely dangerous.” to hear.” No wonder the news in Florida
Of course, Magid Associates is not the looks and sounds like the news in
only firm consulted by television stations; Nebraska.
McHugh and Hoffman, for example, the first
of the TV consultants, uses independent re¬
searchers to gather statistics, and Enter¬ photo: ® Michael Heron 1981/Woodfin Camp & Associates.

large numbers (Chapter 4), the media present what people will
find interesting in order to attract the largest audience possible:
“I say television news is entering the beer and pizza era. Give
them what they want, not what’s nutritious. What is good for
them and what’s attractive and tasty are not always the same.”19
Numerous other factors affect gatekeeping at various stages, in¬
cluding the ethics of individual journalists; the policies of edi¬
tors or publishers,20 a desire to get ahead, to protect one's job,
or to avoid conflict; time and space limitations; dependence on
handouts from government or from public relations offices as
the source of news; and fear of a libel suit.
In addition, the media are under constant pressure to fill
their pages or time slots with something. Many publicity agents,
campaign managers, and leaders of protest organizations have
learned to use the media to gain publicity. They stage press
meetings, stunts, and confrontations to make news. Because
the news media are notified of these events in advance and can
therefore schedule them, the media tend to cover them. Daniel
Boorstin called these pseudoevents and maintains that a larger
and larger part of what we see and hear is this type of manufac¬
tured “news.”21
 Effects of the Media on Society and Culture 345 ■

Out of this welter of pressures and limitations, the daily

agenda of the news media emerges. (In Chapter 12 we look at
these factors and the process of deciding what’s news in more
detail.) Clearly news reports don’t just mirror the world. The
world outside is only loosely correlated with this pseudoenviron¬
ment of symbols and images created by the press.

The Media’s Agenda Does the agenda of issues presented by the news media actually
and the Audience influence the audience? More specifically, does it affect their
agenda—their awareness of issues and their evaluations of the
relative importance of issues? We saw that the experiment by
DeFleur and Larsen supports the idea that repetition of a mes¬
sage in the media will increase the number of people learning
the message. The agenda-setting hypothesis, however, goes be¬
yond this idea. Its central hypothesis, according to Jack McLeod
and his associates, is that “an audience member . . . will adjust
his or her perception of the importance of issues in the direction
corresponding to the amount of attention devoted to those is¬
sues in the medium used.”22 In other words, the public’s agenda
will come to match the media’s agenda.
Some people believe in the agenda-setting hypothesis almost
fervently. This is especially true of political campaign managers,
media commentators, and public relations specialists. During
an election campaign politicians and their aides may repeatedly
denounce the opposition’s position on an issue in order to keep
it high on the public’s agenda if they feel it will embarrass or
hurt the opponent.
But is such a conviction valid? Does the public’s agenda
come to match the media's agenda? The best-known research
into the issue is the work of Donald L. Shaw, Maxwell E. Mc¬
Combs, and several associates.23 They studied the presentation
of political issues by the media during the 1972 presidential
elections and the responses of voters in Charlotte, North Caro¬
lina. They carefully recorded the agendas of issues set by the lo¬
cal newspapers and by the three television networks. They
measured the reading and viewing habits of the audience, their
attention to specific issues, and their judgments about the im¬
portance of issues.
Maxwell and his associates did not find a simple match be¬
tween the agendas set by the media and the public’s beliefs
about the importance of the issues. Members of the audience,
they found, had different sets of beliefs depending on their so¬
cial categories.24 That is, young people had different perceptions
of the importance of issues than older people, and men’s pat¬
terns were different from women’s. Differences in attention to
issues and evaluations of their importance also varied among
 ■ 346 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

■ Selecting which is¬

sues of the day to
report as news
through the process
of gatekeeping can
differ greatly from
one newspaper to
another. What
seemed important to
the editors of the
Wall Street Journal
on July 3, 1984 was
very different from
the issues selected
by the editors of the
New York Post on
the same day.
(Reprinted by permis¬
sion of the Wall Street
Journal, © Dow Jones
& Company, Inc. 1984
All Rights Reserved.
From the New York
people with different income levels and different political pref¬
Post, © 1984 News
erences.25
Group Publications,
Inc.)
But the authors did find some support for the agenda-setting
hypothesis. Among their specific conclusions were these:

1 "There is a progressive increase in the use of mass commu¬

nications during a presidential campaign. In fact, the major
political role of the mass media may be to raise the salience
of politics among the American electorate every four years.”26
(This finding supports the idea that the media activate vot¬
ers, as discussed in Chapter 8.)
2 The influence of the media's agenda on an individual’s con¬
cern with issues is directly related to how much he or she is
exposed to mass communication. Those individuals most fre¬
quently exposed to mass communication show higher levels
of agreement between personal agendas and mass media
agendas.

Thus the study did not “prove” the agenda-setting hypothe¬

sis. The researchers concluded that the influence of the media’s
agenda must be interpreted in long-range terms and depends on
social categories, changing patterns of media use, and frequency
of media exposure. Do people adopt the agenda set for them by
those who select, package, and present the news? At present re¬
search has not yielded a complete answer, but there is consid¬
erable suspicion that agenda setting is one indirect way in
which the media can change society over a long period of time.
 Effects of the Media on Society and Culture 347 ■

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Social Problems The media deal not only with specific events and political con¬
and the Media flicts but also with general conditions, some of which they de¬
fine as problems. Thus part of the agenda of issues they present
is a list of social problems. In the early 1960s hunger, poverty,
and racial discrimination were prominent items on the agenda.
By 1970 draft evasion, runaway children, the “generation gap."
drug abuse, and ecological issues made the list. In the 1980s
toxic chemicals, nuclear weapons, drunk driving, and the abuse
of children have risen to the fore.
 ■ 348 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

Sociologists have long debated whether^some conditions are

inherently troublesome or pathological—whether the public rec¬
ognizes them or not.27 Some people say the answer is no, that
social problems are just a set of conditions that large numbers
of people say are troublesome.28 In any event, out of a large num¬
ber of conditions that we could worry about, a few become
widely known and objects of deep social concern. We could, for
example, be as concerned with the ravages of fire as with those
of crime, or as worried by infant mortality as we are about the
health of the elderly.29
In fact, public attention to social conditions comes and goes,
often passing through several stages. First, some individual or
group identifies a condition as a threat to society. They point
out to others that the condition is a problem that should con¬
cern everyone and should be remedied by collective action. If
enough people become convinced that a social problem exists,
agencies and programs are established and supported to deal
with it. Media attention then dies away and public concern usu¬
ally begins to fade. But those who must deal with the problem
(and whose careers depend on the continued existence of agen¬
cies and programs to deal with it) fight this loss of concern with
a flow of reports to the public and the media concerning the fre¬
quency and continued dangers of the problem.
In this natural history of social problems, the media often
have significant effects at two stages: in raising public con¬
sciousness and concern about a condition so that it comes to be
defined as a social problem requiring some action, and in keep¬
ing the problem alive in public concern as part of the ongoing
agenda.

■ Defining Problems. The "creation" of a social problem is a

complex process.30 Those who believe that a condition is a seri¬
ous social problem may not be heard by the majority, even if
what they say makes sense. For example, for years a small num¬
ber of scientists and environmentalists maintained that insec¬
ticides were harmful. They received little attention. Then a
specific medium—a book on the problem by Rachel Carson
called Silent Spring—won a broad audience, and public concern
began to grow. Seeing the public’s interest, other media gave the
issue wide coverage, and the unrestricted use of insecticides
came to be defined as a social problem. Legislation and govern¬
ment programs to deal with the problem followed.
Similarly, the plight of whales was decried for years by a
handful of environmentalists. As time went on, the media gave
more and more attention to the topic. Now, many citizens see
the fate of whales as a problem, even though they have never
had, nor are likely to have, personal contact with a whale.
 Effects of the Media on Society and Culture 349 ■

■ Mass communications play a part in the “creation”of social prob¬

lems in modern societies. The complex process begins when a seg¬
ment of society defines an existing condition as unacceptable and
sets out to convince the majority that it is a problem to be cor¬
rected. The media publicize the issue. The discontented group tries
to gain media coverage, hoping to convince people that a serious
problem exists. If this occurs, various groups will be organized to
try to do something about the problem. (GatewoodThe Image Works,
Inc.)

Automobile safety, child abuse, taxes, wife beating, rape, the

killing of eagles, and carcenogenic food additives have all at¬
tracted widespread concern recently, although all these condi¬
tions have existed for decades. Only after they received wide
publicity were they defined as problems. Responsibility for doing
something about the issues was then delegated.
Sometimes a crisis or dramatic event helps put a condition
on the public agenda as a problem to be dealt with. Thus, when
the parents of Karen Quinlan went to court for permission to
stop the machines that were keeping her alive, the debate about
 ■ 350 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

the wisdom of using machines to prolong life versus “death with

dignity” suddenly received publicity. The “problem” had not sud¬
denly increased. But what had been an abstract debate of medi¬
cal ethics had become a personal drama that the media covered
with enthusiasm, and a new social problem appeared. Similarly,
many people have recognized for years that the dumping of toxic
chemicals poses serious hazards, but such dumping gained
widespread publicity only after toxic chemicals at Love Canal,
New York, provided an especially dramatic illustration of the
hazards.
If no dramatic event has caught the public's eye, those con¬
cerned about a condition may, in effect, use the media to create
one. Not only protest groups but also political extremists, terror¬
ists, and disturbed individuals often do outrageous things so
that the media will draw attention to them or their cause. Dis¬
sident groups often stage public events to attract the media be¬
cause they believe publicity will help to get the problem solved.
Are these people right in ascribing such power to the media?
Relatively little research exists on how the media create public
conceptions or awareness of social problems, although it is
widely believed that they do. In an early study F. James Davis
focused on the role of newspapers in “creating” crime waves.31
He studied cases in which newspapers created the belief that a
community was experiencing a serious increase in crime by de¬
liberately increasing their coverage of certain types of crimes in
a disproportionate way. Thus the newspapers raised public con¬
sciousness about the extent of crime as a social problem. More
recently Bob Roshier found a similar situation in England.32
We can hypothesize that the media’s role in creating an
agenda of social problems, defining what is and is not a prob¬
lem, is similar to its role in shaping the public’s agenda of issues
generally. But additional research on the media's role is clearly
needed.

I Public Beliefs About Relative Incidence. To cope with social

problems, Americans have created a host of federal, state, and
local agencies. Examples include the Social Security Administra¬
tion, juvenile courts, public health services, welfare programs,
even the police and prisons. How well an agency does in the
competition for funds and job security may depend in part on
the public’s beliefs about the continued importance and fre¬
quency of the problem with which it deals. Relative incidence (or
frequency compared with the frequency of other problems) may
be one measure of a problem's significance.
Agencies themselves usually produce reports describing the
problems they deal with and their incidence. Of course, the me¬
dia report on these conditions as well. Thus an interesting ques-
 Effects of the Media on Society and Culture 351 ■

tion arises: Once an agency assumes responsibility for a prob¬

lem, what role does it play in shaping citizens' beliefs about a
problem, and what role do the media play?
A recent study probed the role of the media versus the role of
agencies in shaping public beliefs about the relative incidence of
a set of established social problems.33 The research was con¬
ducted in Spokane, Washington, a community of approximately
175,000 inhabitants with two local dailies and three major tele¬
vision stations. The researchers used two criteria to select the
ten social problems to be studied: first, the problem had to be
widely recognized in the society, and. second, it had to be pos¬
sible to obtain official data on its frequency. Then they studied
and compared (1) public beliefs about the relative incidence of
these problems; (2) relative emphasis on the problems by the lo¬
cal media: and (3) the relative incidence of each problem accord¬
ing to the files of official agencies.
To determine public beliefs, the researchers interviewed 150
residents of Spokane, who were selected carefully to represent
three socioeconomic levels. Specially constructed questionnaires
were used to assess the beliefs of these citizens regarding the
relative frequency of the ten problems. The researchers judged
the media's presentations of the problems by the relative
amount of attention given to each during the eighteen months
prior to the survey. The space or time devoted to incidents rep¬
resenting each of the problems was defined as its relative em¬
phasis. To determine the agencies' view of relative incidence,
the researchers reviewed records of social agencies such as the
city and state police, juvenile courts, the State Department of
Mental Health, and the State Board Against Discrimination.
Table 9.1 presents the basic findings of the study. Each col¬
umn represents one view of the relative incidence or numerical
importance of the problems. The basic question is whether pub¬
lic beliefs about the occurrence of problems are closer to official
agency rankings or to the emphasis that the media give them.
Obviously, this question is related to the agenda-setting hypoth¬
esis that the media's treatment of issues creates parallel public
beliefs about the importance of the issues. In this case, the hy¬
pothesis to be tested is slightly different: that the public derives
a belief about the relative frequency of the problem from the rel¬
ative emphasis given it by the media.
As it turned out, the overall relationship between the media’s
emphasis on the problems and citizens' beliefs about their prev¬
alence was statistically insignificant. The media's attention to a
problem had no noticeable influence on what people believed
about its relative prevalence. The relationship between media
emphasis and prevalence as indicated in official records was also
statistically insignificant. Thus, the media's attention to a prob-
 ■ 352 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

■MlBimriwmilllMlll.n..... —. .. ^..-. ...

— ———

Table 9.1 Prevalence Rankings for Ten Social Problems

RANK

COMMUNITY MEDIA AGENCY

SOCIAL PROBLEM SURVEY EXPOSURE RECORDS

Unemployment 1 4 1
Crime 3 1 2
Transportation 6 2 4
mishaps
Juvenile delinquency 2 6 5
Drug abuse 4 5 8
Alcoholism 5 10 3
Mental illness 7 8 6
Discrimination 9 3 9
Sexual deviancy 8 7 7
Suicide 10 9 10

Source: Jeffrey C. Hubbard, et al., ‘‘Mass Media Influences on Publir.

Conceptions of Social Problems.” Reprinted with permission of the So¬
ciety for the Study of Social Problems and the authors.

lem neither shaped public beliefs nor reflected official data on

the frequency of the problems. On the other hand, the research¬
ers found a fairly high relationship between the frequency of the
problems revealed by official records and citizens’ beliefs regard¬
ing their prevalence.
One hypothesis we might derive from these findings is that
the agencies themselves provided information shaping public
beliefs to protect their budgets and jobs. In any event, these data
contradict the agenda-setting hypothesis. Media attention to
these ten issues did not seem to influence people’s perceptions
of their prevalence.

Some Tentative These findings underline the conclusion reached in Chapter 8:

Conclusions the old magic bullet theory is mistaken; the media do not have
simple uniform influences that are the sole causes of individual
and social behaviors. The agenda-setting hypothesis is based on
a similar kind oi thinking, and it needs some reworking We
have seen evidence that the media’s agenda is not, in the short
term, immediately matched in the public's ranking of the issues
presented. We have also seen evidence that the public does not
 Effects of the Media on Society and Culture 353 ■

translate the media’s emphasis on established social problems

into beliefs about the frequency of these problems. Since we saw
in Chapter 8 that the media’s influence on individuals depends
on many factors, including individual differences, social cate¬
gories, and other channels of communication, we should not be
surprised that the media’s role in shaping the public agenda
and view of social problems is similarly complicated.
Obviously, however, the media do have some role in shaping
public beliefs. In particular, the media are likely to be important
in the early stages of defining a social problem. Dramatic media
stories may be especially influential in raising public awareness
and focusing concern on specific conditions. By showing that
white middle-class children, not just poor or minority children,
suffer from drug abuse and alcoholism, for example, the media
raise the level of public concern about these problems. Once a
problem has been turned over to an agency, media interest and
influence appear to decline. But the media also seem to have
some long-term influence on the public agenda in general, al¬
though that influence is greatly affected by individuals’ member¬
ship in social groups, their political preferences, and their
exposure to the media.
Overall, the influence of the media appears mainly in identi¬
fying emerging social problems and in modifying from time to
time people’s levels of concern about specific problems closely re¬
lated to their values. We can conclude that the media play a part
in creating demand for new programs and agencies and in mod¬
ifying priorities regarding problems. This appears to be one way
that the media promote social change.

Debates About One of the most controversial (and most fascinating) social and
cultural effects of the media is the invention and spread of a
Popular Culture
constant deluge of popular songs, cheap paperback novels, for¬
mula TV drama, low-grade film thrillers, comic strip characters,
and other unsophisticated content. Such material often reaches
large portions of the population and becomes a part of people’s
daily lives. People hum the latest popular tunes, suffer the latest
problem of the soap opera heroine, exchange analyses of the lat¬
est big game based on news reports, and organize their activities
around the weekly television schedule. This media output is
often called popular culture.
People have debated the artistic merits of media-produced
culture and its impact on society for generations.34 Media critics
and media defenders have disagreed hotly about whether delib¬
erately manufactured mass “art" is a blasphemy or a blessing.
These analyses of mass communication and its products as art
forms take place outside the framework of science. Media criti¬
cism is an arena of debate where conclusions are reached on the
 354 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

basis of personal opinions rather than carefully assembled data.

Nevertheless, those who praise or condemn the content of mass
communication perform an important service. They offer us con¬
trasting sets of standards for judging the merits of media con¬
tent. We may choose to accept or reject those standards, but by
exercising some set of criteria we can reach our own conclusions
about the artistic merits of popular music, the soap operas,
spectator sports, and so on.
In the sections that follow we discuss two issues: the merits
of various forms of popular culture manufactured and dissemi¬
nated by the media, and the levels of cultural taste that charac¬
terize segments of the American population. These discussions
are based on the strong opinions, clear biases, and specific sets
of values of a number of critics. You may find these admittedly
biased opinions consistent with your own views, or you may dis¬
agree violently. In either case, they illustrate the types of anal¬
yses found in debates over popular culture and should help you
clarify your own views.

Folk Art, Elite Art, Critics teil us that prior to the development of the mass media
and Kitsch there were essentially two broad categories of art: folk art and
elite art.35 Both, it is said, are genuine and valuable.
Folk art develops spontaneously among people. It is unso¬
phisticated, localized, and natural. It is a product of many anon¬
ymous creators and users. It is a grassroots type of art produced
by its consumers and tied directly to their values and daily ex¬
periences. Thus, villages or even regions and nations develop
characteristic furniture styles, music, dances, architectural
forms, and decorative motifs for articles of everyday use. Folk art
never takes guidelines from the elite of the society. It emerges as
part of the traditions of ordinary people. It does not consist of
widely known classics.
Elite art, on the other hand, is “high culture.” It is deliber¬
ately produced by very talented and creative individuals, who
often gain great personal recognition for their achievements.
us, elite art is technically and thematically complex. It is also
very individualistic; its creators aim at discovering new ways of
interpreting or representing their experience. Elite art includes
the music, sculpture, dance forms, opera, and paintings that
originated mainly in Europe and are given acclaim by sophisti¬
cates from all parts of the world. Although it has its great clas¬
sics, it is marked by continuous innovation. Novelists, com¬
posers, painters, and other creative artists constantly experi¬
ment with new forms and concepts.
But in modern times, some say, both folk art and elite art are
^r+t inedAThe arrival of the media brought radical change.
With the advent of cheap newspapers, magazines, paperback
 Effects of the Media on Society and Culture 355 ■

■ Elite art, while

often experienced in
museums, sym¬
phony halls, or thea¬
ters, sometimes
finds its way into
our daily lives in un¬
expected ways. In
this advertisement
for cat food, “Mona
Lisa” is shown wear¬
ing a T-shirt depict¬
ing “Morris the
Cat” (9-Lives Cat
Food.)

books, radio, movies, and television, a new form of art made its
debut, catering to the undeveloped tastes of massive, relatively
uneducated audiences. Its content, say its critics, is unsophis¬
ticated, simplistic, and trivial. Its typical literary forms are the
“whodunit” detective story and the true confession magazine: its
typical musical composition is the latest popular tune; its typical
dramatic forms are the soap opera, the comic strip, and the
western movie. A term that has been widely used to label such
mass-mediated art is the German word kitsch.
 ■ 356 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

■ Criticisms of Kitsch. In manufacturing kitsch, critics

charge, its producers often “mine” the other categories. They do
so “the way improvident frontiersmen mine the soil, extracting
its riches and putting back nothing.”^ As Clement Greenberg
put it: “The precondition of kitsch ... is the availability close at
hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, ac¬
quisitions and perfected self-conscious kitsch can take advan¬
tage of for its own ends.”37
But why do the critics see kitsch as such a problem? They
maintain that the older separation between elite art and folk art
once corresponded to the distinction between aristocracy and
common people. Although they do not necessarily approve of the
aristocracy, they believe that it was critical to the existence of
the most developed forms of art. Prior to the development of
mass communication, the critics claim, folk art and elite art
could coexist because they had clearly defined constituencies.
Then came the dramatic spread of the media to all classes of so¬
ciety. The result was a deluge of inconsequential kitsch, which
affected all levels of society and all forms of art because kitsch
competes for the attention of everyone. Its constant presence
and attention-grabbing qualities are the sources of its popular
appeal. Thus, critics conclude, those who earlier would have
read Tolstoy now turn to Ian Fleming; those who might have
found entertainment at the symphony, ballet, or theater now
tune in on “Dukes of Hazzard”; those who would have gained po¬
litical wisdom from modern versions of Bryce and de Tocqueville
now listen to Rather or Brokaw. In other words, say the critics,
bad culture drives out good culture as bad money drives out
good money. In the words of Dwight MacDonald:

It is a debased, trivial culture that voids both the deep realities (sex,
death, failure, tragedy) and also the simple, spontaneous pleasures.
The masses, debauched by several generations of this sort of thing,
in turn come to demand trivial and comfortable cultural products.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg, the mass demand or its
satisfaction (and further stimulation) is a question as academic as
it is unanswerable. The engine is reciprocating and shows no signs
of running down.38

Furthermore, it is charged, kitsch represents a double¬

ban eled form of exploitation. Those who control the media not
only rob citizens of a chance to acquire higher tastes by engulf¬
ing them with less demanding media, products but also reap
high profits lrom those whom they are depriving.
I hus, the condemnation of kitsch by media critics is based
on three major assumptions. First, kitsch presumably dimin¬
ishes both folk and elite art because it simplifies their content
and in using them exhausts the sources of these arts. Second
 Effects of the Media on Society and Culture 357 ■

it deprives its audiences of interest in developing tastes for more

genuine art forms. Third, it is mainly a tool for economic exploi¬
tation of the masses.
If true, these are serious charges. To examine them further,
we look at one specific aspect of popular culture: the heroes of
the media. Does the presence of media-created personalities
tend to diminish the stature of genuine heroes, as the criticism
of kitsch suggests? Does a fascination with media-created
heroes lessen interest in meritorious accomplishments in real
life? Is economic exploitation a real factor?

The Heroes of the Media. In an earlier America, the critics

say, heroes and heroines were extraordinary individuals with
rare personal qualities who performed admirable deeds.39 The
list of heroes admired by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Americans included George Washington, Robert E. Lee, Sacaja-
wea. Sojourner Truth, Daniel Boone, Harriet Tubman, Geron-
imo, Davy Crockett, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. These men and
women were real people who did real things. Their deeds had a
significant impact on history. The critics point out that they did
not win acclaim because they were pretty or entertaining but be¬
cause they had powerful determination. They faced great danger
or confronted situations that required courage, dedication, and
self-sacrifice.
Even as the media were rising in the twentieth century, the
tradition of heroes lingered. Alvin York and Eddie Rickenbacker
emerged as the great heroes of World War I. But perhaps the last
great individualistic hero, and one of the most adulated of all
time, was Charles A. Lindbergh. His solitary flight across the
vast Atlantic in a frail single-engine aircraft required steel nerves
and an iron will. In his single deed were focused all those quali¬
ties that Americans admired in their heroes up to the early de¬
cades of the present century.
Are the days of such heroes gone? Some people feel that they
may be. As the media gained ascendancy, their critics maintain,
a new figure began to replace the hero and heroine of the deed.
These new objects of public adulation are not individuals with
extraordinary personal qualities. Instead, they are media heroes
known for their profiles on the movie screen or the appeal of
their throbbing voices, the skill with which they strike a ball
with a stick or the sincerity with which they portray characters
in films or television dramas. Media heroines are cut from simi¬
lar cloth. An endless parade of "awards” presented by the media
reinforces the idea that these are the people who count.
Thus, contemporary pseudoheroes are media creations made
famous on pulp paper, movie celluloid, microgrooves, and elec¬
tronic images. Some are real people who sing, act, tell funny sto-
 ■ 358 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

% #JK
■ Heroes used to be real individuals who earned their place in the
public imagination because of their significant deeds. Like Charles
A. Lindbergh, perhaps the last American hero of this type, they be¬
came universally known and acclaimed. As the mass media devel¬
oped, other types of heroes replaced them. Today’s heroes are
individuals who are widely known for their skill in athletics or en¬
tertainment Some of today’s heroes are merely characters in the
fantasy world of movies, comics, and television. (Library of Congress.)

ries, or play games. Others are pure inventions—imaginary

characters of the soap opera or the prime-time drama. There is
ample reason to believe, say the critics, that for at least some
people, fantasy merges with reality.
We can identify several categories of media-created heroes.
First, there is the hero of ball and stick. A long list of athletes
have been made into celebrities by the attention of the media,
from Fy Cobb and Babe Ruth to Red Grange, Jack Dempsey, Joe
Louis, Joe Di Maggio, Ted Williams, and Lou Gehrig, to today’s
 Effects of the Media on Society and Culture 359 ■

athletes such as Larry Bird, Alexis Arguello, Martina Navratilova,

and Herschel Walker. These individuals clearly demonstrate well-
developed athletic skills, and they have commanded extraordi¬
nary financial rewards. Yet, say the critics, it would be difficult
to account for their immense popularity on any other grounds
than the status conferred by the media.40 Striking a ball skill¬
fully with a bat, racket, or club contributes little to the national
destiny. Athletic skill is scarcely the stuff of which advances in
civilization are made.
Another significant category is the hero of the titillating tune.
Their voices are instantly recognized by millions of fans. Not
many members of the older generation in the United States
would fail to identity the voices of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra,
or Elvis Presley. More recently the sounds of Bruce Springsteen
and Michael Jackson receive instant recognition. The hits that
these and other popular singers have made famous through the
media constitute an important part of popular culture. Here, the
dependence of what the critics call kitsch on the folk and elite
art is especially clear. Many songs that have made the Top Ten
have been based on either classical music or American folk tra¬
ditions, including early American ballads and grassroots jazz
(see Chapter 14).
Of even greater interest to those critical of mass media cul¬
ture are the heroes oj superhuman power. Characters of the
imagination have long intrigued people. For example, one could
easily speculate that the various “supermen” of today’s media
are the counterparts of ancient myths about deities with fantas¬
tic powers who appeared in human form. There is a timeless at¬
traction to fantasies of power and success. Millions have been
entertained for decades by the unusual deeds of a long list of fic¬
tional characters with truly extraordinary capacities. For gener¬
ations audiences have admired and coveted the powers of such
fantasy creatures as Superman, the Shadow, Wonder Woman,
Batman, Spiderman, and the Incredible Hulk.
Other contemporary media characters have more human lim¬
itations, but they are remarkably capable of combating the
forces of evil. Here the critics include the police heroes of
screeching tire, the cloak-and-dagger heroes of international
spydom, and the all-seeing private eye. The list would not be
complete without mentioning the heroes of legal ploy and the
venerable heroes of suture and scalpel. What hard-working pri¬
vate eye measures up to Magnum? Who can defeat James
Bond—or even Scarecrow and Mrs. King? The capacities of real
people in the real world are pale and flabby by comparison.
The enemies of kitsch may have a point. Their charge that
popular art draws from elite culture can be substantiated in
many cases. Whether this should be condemned is an open
 ■ 360 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

question. Their charge that the public is forced to pay for pop¬
ular culture also seems to have some basis. Ultimately, it is the
public that pays the high salaries of media heroes and heroines
when they are added to the costs of advertising and marketing
the products of sponsors. Whether this truly represents “eco¬
nomic exploitation of the masses” is another matter. Finally, the
charge that media heroes diminish interest in accomplishments
in real life may have some basis. Most of the significant achieve¬
ments by ordinary people that make the news do so in the
back pages of the paper (except in local weeklies), while gossip
about media heroes often makes headlines.
Overall, then, the critics of popular culture seem to be mak¬
ing an important argument. However, the degree to which these
aspects of popular culture represent a threat to more serious art
forms—or to the public as a whole—remains debatable.

The Media’s Why, one must ask, do the media continue this outpouring of
Dependence on kitsch? The answer is that popular culture is as necessary to the
Popular Culture media as water is to a fish. It is the critical element in the pro¬
cess that keeps the media functioning. We pointed out in Chap¬
ter 4 that the media in the United States are privately owned
profit-making enterprises. To make a profit, the media must
capture and sell consumer attention. Sponsors, who must pay
huge prices for media time and space, demand the largest pos¬
sible audiences for their advertisements. This economic base
brings pressure to produce and disseminate content that will at¬
tract the largest possible number of listeners, viewers, or read¬
ers. It is this law of large numbers that brings popular culture,
geared to the taste levels of the majority of the consuming pub¬
lic, to mass communication. Thus, both media needs and audi¬
ence needs are served by what the critics call kitsch. The law of
large numbers, the production of popular culture, and the taste
levels of the consuming public are all closely related parts of the
basic system supporting the media in the United States.
We must recognize, however, that the vast public that
chooses and consumes the products of the mass media is di¬
vided into many categories. Some are well educated, some are
only partially literate; some are rich, some are poor. We could
classify media audiences into dozens of categories. Many of
these categories are important in determining what kinds of
tastes characterize a given segment of the public. For example
people who have been educated at an excellent college or univer¬
sity, who have always enjoyed wealth, and who live in a large city
are likely to have tastes veiy different from those of people who
have less education and a lower income and who live in a small
rural community. In other words, we can divide the media au¬
dience into several taste publics in terms of the kinds of artistic
 Effects of the Media on Society and Culture 361 ■

products and media content that they enjoy. By analyzing taste

publics we can gain additional insight into popular culture, the
reasons why the media produce and disseminate a great amount
of unsophisticated content, and the probable economic conse¬
quences of changing this pattern.

I Taste Publics The analysis of taste publics, like debates about the merits of
popular culture, is outside the framework of science. It proceeds
from individual opinions and standards. Judgments must be
made about whether enjoying a particular artistic product rep¬
resents “high” or “low” taste, or something in between, and
judgments about good and bad taste depend on subjective val¬
ues, not scientific criteria. Nevertheless, such analyses focus our
attention on significant factors in the basic support system of
American media.
Because the task is difficult and the risk that others will dis¬
agree strongly is great, not many scholars have analyzed taste
publics in the United States. Sociologist Herbert Gans, however,
identified five major levels of taste in American society.41 In the
sections that follow, we describe these taste publics and the con¬
tent they prefer. The description is based largely, but not exclu¬
sively, on Gans’s analysis. Education seems most important in
defining taste levels, but many other social categories and fac¬
tors are also involved.

■ High Culture. This is the culture of the “serious” writers,

artists, and composers. It is found in the little magazines, in
off-Broadway productions, a few art-film theaters, and on rare
occasions on educational television.
High culture values innovation and experimentation with
form, substance, method, overt content, and covert symbolism.
Styles tend to change often. Art, for example, has been domi¬
nated at one time or another by expressionism, impressionism,
abstraction, conceptual art, and so forth. In fiction high culture
emphasizes complex character development over plot. Modern
high culture explores psychological and philosophical questions;
alienation and conflict have been frequent themes.
Clearly, this form of culture would have little appeal to the
majority of the media’s usual audience. For this reason, it is sel¬
dom found in mass communication. Members of the small seg¬
ment of the public that prefers high culture consider themselves
elite and their culture exclusive.

■ Upper-Middle Culture. The American upper middle class—

which is composed mainly of professionals, executives, man¬
agers, and their families—represents another taste public.
These people are well educated and relatively affluent, but they
 ■ 362 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

are neither creators nor critics. For the most part they are con¬
sumers of literature, music, theater, and other art that is ac¬
cepted as “good.”
The fiction preferred by the upper-middle public stresses plot
more than characters or issues, and this group favors stories
about people like themselves who develop careers, are success¬
ful, and play important parts in significant affairs. They like
films and TV plays about likable upper-middle-class people in
upper-middle-class settings. The upper-middle taste public
reads Time or Newsweek avidly, as well as the kind of popular¬
ized social science that appears in Psychology Today. They are
familiar with standard symphonic works and traditional operas
but dislike contemporary or experimental compositions. They
purchase hardcover trade books, support their local symphony
orchestra, and occasionally attend the ballet. They subscribe to
Harper’s, the New Yorker, Ms., and Vogue.
Although this group is fairly numerous, its influence on
media content is very limited. Some plays on television, public
affairs programs, and FM music represent the upper-middle
level, but most media content is at the level below it.

■ Lower-Middle Culture. The dominant influence in mass

communication is lower-middle culture, for two reasons. First,
the lower-middle taste public includes the largest number of
Americans; second, it has sufficient income to purchase media-
advertised products. The people of this level are mostly white-
collar workers (for example, public school teachers, accountants,
government bureaucrats, druggists, and higher-paid clerical
workers). A substantial number are college educated, many with
degrees in technical subjects. This public often consciously re¬
jects the culture preferred by the taste levels above it, but occa¬
sionally it uses some of their forms, especially when they have
been transformed into popular culture.
The lower-middle public continues to support religion and its
moral values. It likes books, films, and television drama in
which old-fashioned virtue is rewarded. Thus it does not ap-
prove of positive portrayals of gays, promiscuity, or other “de¬
viant” lifestyles. John Wayne was their idol; the lower-middle
public likes heroes who accept the traditional virtues and clear
plots. Neither complexity of personality nor philosophical con¬
flicts are dominant themes. People of lower-middle tastes read
the Reader's Digest and condensed books. They purchase mil¬
lions of paperbacks with fast-action plots. They enjoy “Dallas” as
well as cop-and-crook dramas. They like family and situation
comedy, musical extravaganzas, soap operas, and quiz shows.
They followed “All in the Family” faithfully (many supported
Archie s racial and ethnic biases). In music, Lawrence Welk still
 Effects of the Media on Society and Culture 363 ■

has considerable appeal for the older members of this group, as

do such figures as the Beach Boys for the younger. These types
of music make few intellectual demands, and, like other forms
of kitsch, they are often derived from classical sources.

■ Low Culture. Skilled and semiskilled blue-collar workers in

manufacturing and service occupations make up most of the au¬
dience for low culture. In the past, their education was likely to
consist of vocational high school or less. Recently, younger
members of this category have been attending vocationally ori¬
ented community colleges. Although still numerically large, this
taste public is shrinking. More blue-collar families send their
children to four-year colleges and the smoke-stack industries are
being replaced.
It was this taste public that dominated media content in the
1950s and 1960s and it still plays an important part. But be¬
cause its purchasing power is somewhat less than that of the
lower-middle level, it is being replaced by the lower-middle pub¬
lic as the dominant influence on the media. But the media
continue to produce a substantial amount of unsophisticated
content for this level.
This taste public likes action—often violent action—in film
and television drama. Thus, to please this public the media re¬
sist efforts to censor the portrayal of violence. This group likes
simpler western and police dramas and comedy shows with a lot
of slapstick (older examples were the Lucille Ball and Jackie
Gleason shows). They like “The Dukes of Hazzard,” “The A-
Team,” wrestling, and country-western music. For reading they
like the National Enquirer, confession magazines (for women),
and the sports page (for men).

■ Quasi-Folk Low Culture. This type of art resembles that of

the low culture level. Its taste public is composed mainly of
people who are very poor and have little education and few oc¬
cupational skills. Many are on welfare or hold uncertain and
unskilled jobs. Many are nonwhite and of rural or foreign origin.
Although this group is numerous, it plays only a minor role in
shaping media content, primarily because its purchasing power
is low.
These people read mainly comic books and occasional tab¬
loids. They like simpler television shows. In many urban areas
foreign-language media cater to their needs. These people also
preserve elements of their folk culture. For example, they hold
religious and ethnic festivals and social gatherings; many dis¬
play religious artifacts and prints on the walls of their homes;
and colorful wall paintings adorn the streets of some ethnic
neighborhoods.
 ■ 364 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

Overall, popular culture as media content must be under¬

stood in terms of the purchasing power and taste preferences of
various segments of the public. Regardless of the protests,
claims, and counterclaims of the critics, the media will continue
to produce content that appeals to the largest taste publics be¬
cause it attracts attention that they can sell to sponsors. There
is little likelihood that the media will bring about a cultural
revolution by emphasizing high or even upper-middle culture.
The obvious prediction for the future is that lower-middle and
lower tastes will continue to dominate American mass
communication.

■ Summary Media researchers have been less concerned with the effects of
the media on social and cultural processes than on individuals.
Research on social and cultural effects is more difficult, of less
interest to the public, and harder to fund, although it is cer¬
tainly important.
One way in which the media influence sbcieties and cultures
is by helping to spread information about new ideas and new
techniques. How fast and how far news spreads depends on its
importance, its inherent interest, and other factors. In Project
Revere, researchers found that increasing the number of repeti¬
tions of a message increased the percentage of the population
that learned the message, but the increase followed a curve of
diminishing returns. Researchers also found evidence of a
multistage flow of communication.
In developing countries governments have often used the me¬
dia to spread information about new ideas and technologies.
That is, they have tried to use the media as deliberate agents of
social change in their efforts to modernize a country. In Mexico,
for example, information and positive attitudes about an edu¬
cational program were skillfully woven into a specially produced
soap opera; the result was an increase in enrollments. Attempts
to diffuse innovations have often failed, however, sometimes be¬
cause the efforts were not attuned to local beliefs and values.
The agenda-setting hypothesis proposes another effect of the
media: that people judge a topic to be significant to the extent
that it is emphasized in the media. The agenda of public issues
is said to be set by the media when they present certain items
and ignore others and give varying emphases to news reports. At
least one experiment suggests that the media’s agenda does not
have an immediate and direct effect but a long-term influence
contingent on other factors such as a person’s exposure to the
media.
Related to this agenda-setting hypothesis is the claim that
the media play a key role in creating social problems, that is, in
identifying a condition as troublesome and in need of correction.
 Effects of the Media on Society and Culture 365 ■

Once a problem is identified and a system is established to deal

with it, the media’s role in shaping beliefs about the importance
of the problem seems to decline.
By manufacturing and disseminating a continuing flow of art
forms, the media also influence culture. Many critics refer to
mass-mediated popular culture as kitsch, meaning trashy and
trivial. They claim that the manufacturers of kitsch (1) imitate
both folk art and elite art without contributing to either;
(2) keep media audiences from developing tastes for better forms
of art; and (3) force consumers to pay for popular culture.
To understand the media’s continued production of popular
culture, we must see American society as consisting of distinct
taste publics. The lower-middle taste public is the great con¬
sumer of popular culture. Its large numbers and high purchas¬
ing power make it the most significant target for advertisers who
pay the bills for the media. Because other taste publics have less
purchasing power, their influence on the media is less.
Generally, then, modern media alter social arrangements and
bring new cultural forms. They spread information and innova¬
tions, help modernize traditional societies, influence the agenda
for public concerns, shape the public’s awareness of social prob¬
lems, and provide a continuing flow of popular culture.

Notes and 1 Consumer Reports, 45 (April 1980), 226.

References 2 Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, trans. E. C. Parsons (New
York: Holt, 1903).
3 Everett M. Rogers and F. Floyd Shoemaker, Communication ojln-
novations: A Cross Cultural Approach (New York: Free Press,
1971), pp. 52-70.
4 Ibid., p. 100.
5 Ibid., p. 67.
6 Paul B. Sheatsley and Jacob J. Feldman, “The Assassination of
President Kennedy: A Preliminary Report on Public Reactions and
Behavior,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 28(1964), 189—215.
7 The predicted curve was derived from a well-known generalization
in classical psychophysics called the Weber-Fechner Function.
8 Melvin L. DeFleur and Otto N. Larsen, The Flow of Information:
An Experiment in Mass Communication (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1958). See especially Figure 10, p. 130.
9 Melvin L. DeFleur, “Mass Communication and the Study of Ru¬
mor,” Sociological Inquiry, 32 (Winter 1962), 51—70.
10 Bradley S. Greenberg and Edwin B. Parker, eds.. The Kennedy
Assassination and the American Public (Stanford, Calif.: Stan¬
ford University Press, 1965).
 ■ 366 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

11 Wilbur Schramm, Mass Media and National Development: The

Role of Information in Developing Countries (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1964), p. 114.
12 Albert Bandura, Social Learning Theory (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1977); seepp. 39-50.
13 Ana Christina Covarrubias, “Social Change and Television: The
Experience of‘Come With Me,’ ” Unpublished report of the Mexi¬
can Institute of Communication Studies, Mexico City. 1978.
14 A variety of these issues will be discussed in Chapter 10.
15 Schramm, Mass Media, p. 123.
16 David L. Altheide, Creating Reality: How TV News Distorts
Events (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1976), p. 17.
17 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1922).
See Chapter 1 “The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads,”
pp. 1-19.
18 Altheide, Creating Reality, pp. 20-21.
19 M. T. Malloy, “Journalistic Ethics: A Rainbow of Gray," National
Observer, July 26, 1975.
20 Warren Breed, “Social Control in the News Room,” Social Forces
33 (May 1955), 326-335.
21 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in
America (New York: Atheneum, 1961).
22 Jack M. McLeod, Lee B. Becker, and James E. Byrnes, “Another
Look at the Agenda-Setting Function of the Press,” Communica¬
tion Research, 1 (April 1974), 137.
23 Donald L. Shaw and Maxwell E. McCombs, The Emergence of
American Political Issues: The Agenda-Setting Function of the
Press (St. Paul, Minn.: West, 1977).
24 For a discussion of the social categories perspective, see Melvin L.
DeFleur and Sandra Ball-Rokeach, Theories of Mass Communi¬
cation, 3rd ed. (New York: David McKay, 1975) pp. 206-208.
25 Shaw and McCombs, American Political Issues, pp. 40-42.
26 Ibid., p. 153.
27 Robert K. Merton and Robert A. Nisbet, Contemporary Social
Problems (San Francisco: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966).
28 John I. Kitsuse and Malcolm Spector, “Toward a Sociology of So¬
cial Problems: Social Conditions, Value Judgements, and Social
Problems,” Social Problems, 20 (Spring 1973), 407-419.
29 Robert L. Lineberiy, Government in America: People, Politics,
and Policy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980) p. 300.
30 Howard S. Becker, Social Problems: A Modem Approach (New
York: Wiley, 1966).
31 F. James Davis, “Crime News in Colorado Newspapers,” Ameri¬
can Journal of Sociology, 57 (July 1952), 325-330.
 Effects of the Media on Society and Culture 367 ■

32 Bob Roshier, “The Selection of Crime News by the Press,” in The

Manufacture of News. ed. Stanley Cohen and Jack Young (Bev¬
erly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1973), pp. 28-39.
33 Jeffery C. Hubbard, Melvin L. DeFleur, and Lois B. DeFleur, "Mass
Media Influence on Public Conceptions of Social Problems," So¬
cial Problems 23 (October 1975), 23—34.
34 The term culture is being used here in an aesthetic sense rather
than in the way anthropologists and sociologists use the term be¬
cause in the literature on popular culture the term is used consis¬
tently to refer to art, music, drama, and other aesthetic products.
35 Michael Real, Mass-Mediated Culture (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1977), pp. 6—7.
36 Dwight MacDonald, “The Theory of Mass Culture,” Diogenes
(Summer 1953), 2.
37 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review
(Fall 1939). Reprinted in Bernard Rosenbery and David Manning
White, Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (New York:
Free Press, 1957), p. 103.
38 MacDonald, “Mass Culture,” p. 14.
39 For an interesting analysis of popular heroes, see Ray B. Browne,
Marshall Fishwick, and Michael T. Marsden, Heroes of Popular
Culture (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular
Press, 1972).
40 Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton, “Mass Communication,
Popular Taste and Organized Social Action,” in Mass Communi¬
cations. ed. Wilbur Schramm (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1960), p. 497.
41 Herbert Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture (New York:
Basic Books, 1974), pp. 69—94.
 ■ 368 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

■ Since the average

adult watches more
than six hours of TV
every day, it is not
surprising that tele¬
vision is probably
our most ubiquitous
medium. Coin-oper¬
ated TVs help pas¬
sengers wile away
the time in airports
and bus stations,
and portables pro¬
vide entertainment
for bored workers
from Tokyo to Tim¬
buktu. But how
much influence does
TV really have on
people’s lives?
(above: © Alan Carey/
The Image Works, Inc.
right: Kent Reno/Jero-
boan, Inc.)
 Photo Essay: The Prevalence of Mass Media in Our Lives 369 ■

■ Some people claim

that TV is altering
the nature of society
itself. They think the
constant, central
presence of TV in
most homes is
changing patterns of
relationships within
families. In Samoa,
evening TV-watching
has replaced tradi¬
tional communal ac¬
tivities, and children
are less obedient
and more demanding
than they were be¬
fore television en¬
tered their homes.
right: © Mary Ellen
Mark/Archive, below: ©
Thomas, Nebbia 1983/
Woodfin Camp &
Associates.)
 ■ 370 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

■ Today, people take

the presence of the
media everywhere
for granted, but this
sometimes has seri¬
ous consequences
for individuals.
Those in the public
eye, such as celebri¬
ties or accused crim¬
inals, can expect to
face a barrage of
flashing cameras
wherever they go,
and more and more
often ordinary peo¬
ple too are objects of
media attention.
(above: Bob Daemmrich/
TexaStock ©. right: ©
Jill Cannefax/EKM-
Nepenthe.)
 Photo Essay: The Prevalence of Mass Media in Our Lives 371

the lovable character

ET.
14.99

■ Media images are

so pervasive that
often we do not even
notice them. But
they can affect the
way we see our¬
selves and one an¬
other. Children often
learn what qualities
are desirable by em¬
ulating favorite
movie characters
such as E.T. We also
try to imitate celebri¬
ties such as Groucho
Marx. The media
thus become a part
of our common cul¬
tural heritage.
(above: Gatewood/The

Image Works, Inc. above

right: Michael Hayman/
Stock, Boston, right:
Cary Wolinsky'Stock,
Boston.)
 I must confess. Lone Ranger, that lately I have been having some
uneasy feelings about you and what you did to me. You were the
creation of a commercialized image, an image that made us both
believe that reality was something other than what we experienced.
Richard Quinney,
The Insurgent Sociologist, 1973

■ Indirect Effects of the

Media

If one generalization stands out from the previous two chapters,

it is that we do not yet understand fully the effects of the mass
media. Overall, the application of scientific techniques to the
study of mass communication has been only modestly success¬
ful. One strategy for advancing our understanding is to look at
the media in new ways. The media may have influences that
cannot be readily detected by the research strategies of the past.
For example, their effects may be less direct than we have imag¬
ined. Their influence both on individuals and on social and cul¬
tural processes may be long term, indirect, and subtle.
This chapter is concerned with the media's indirect effects. It
presents two distinct theoretical frameworks within which to
study the effects of long-term exposure to media content: mod¬
eling theory and meaning theory. These theories explain differ¬
ent kinds of media influence, but both assume that the media
are unwitting teachers of adults and children, providing long¬
term, cumulative lessons that guide their audiences’ interpreta¬
tions of reality and overt behaviors. Each theory looks to the
content of the media to explain their influence; so after exam¬
ining the theories themselves we will look briefly at methods for
analyzing the content of the media. Finally, we will review re¬
search that is based on each of these theories. But first, it will
be helpful to illustrate the potential indirect influence of the me¬
dia with a specific case.
 Indirect Effects of the Media 373 ■

Media In 1977 a group of scientists filed complaints with the Federal

Communications Commission and other authorities against
Portrayals as
both NBC and the Reader’s Digest. NBC had aired “quasi docu¬
Representations mentaries” dealing with subjects such as Bigfoot, a legendary
of Reality hairy monster said to walk like a man and roam the forests of
the Northwest, and the Bermuda Triangle, a supposedly danger¬
ous area of the ocean near Florida, where it is claimed that many
ships and aircraft have vanished under unnatural circum¬
stances. The Reader’s Digest had published an article entitled,
“What Do We Really Know About Psychic Phenomena?” which
implied that such events are real. The scientists complained
that the broadcast misrepresented reality and that the article
was based on hearsay evidence and anecdotal claims that were
unacceptable as proof.1
Certainly the mass media have catered to the public’s fasci¬
nation with witchcraft, UFOs, scary animals, star wars, posses¬
sion by demons, clairvoyance, communication with the dead,
levitation, and similar phenomena. Often the media present
these topics in a way that seems to offer “proof” that the phe¬
nomena are real. In fact, the media have done this sort of thing
since their beginnings. For example, in the mid 1830s Benjamin
Day hired a writer to increase the circulation of his newspaper,
the New York Sun. The writer invented a professor in South Af¬
rica who was supposedly building the world’s largest telescope.
The instrument, reported the Sun, was so powerful it would be
possible to see the surface of the moon as though it were only a
hundred yards away. Periodic reports about progress aroused
great reader interest. Finally the Sun reported that the work had
been completed. The first accounts mentioned strange and ex¬
otic plants. Then the professor reported that he could see a hu¬
man footprint! By this time a rival paper exposed the whole
thing as a hoax. But what was the reaction of the public? Mainly
they felt that even though the telescope was a fake, it was a lot
of fun to read about. And the hoax did increase the Sun's
circulation.
What possible damage could result from such exciting pre¬
sentations? Clearly, Bigfoot and the Bermuda Triangle are
hokum, but they are exciting to hear about. The scientists who
complained to the FCC, however, did not see the situation as a
harmless spoof. Calling themselves the Committee for Scientific
Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, they maintained that
by pouring a steady torrent of claims about paranormal phenom¬
ena into the marketplace the media create “cults of unreason.”
They said that many people cannot distinguish the “evidence"
advanced in quasi documentaries from the evidence that scien¬
tists require before accepting a claim as true. The result, these
scientists claimed, is to lead people away from valid sources of
 ■ 374 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

■ Scientists and
others are concerned
that televised “quasi¬
documentaries , ’ ’
based on conjecture
and heresay evi¬
dence convince
some members of
the public that phe¬
nomena such as
"Bigfoot” (shown
above in what one
observer claimed is
an actual photo¬
graph), the “Ber¬
muda Triangle,” and
so on have a factual
scientific basis. Con¬
cerned critics feel
that such represen¬
tations of “reality”
make it difficult for
citizens to sort out
the truth as they at¬
tempt to cope with
the increasingly
complex world
around them. (UPI/
Bettman Archive.) truth and reliable procedures of assembling evidence toward a
world of unreality.
The scientists may be right. Perhaps the media are influenc¬
ing both what the public believes is real and what the public be¬
lieves is sufficient evidence for a “fact.” The media may have
long-term, indirect, and subtle effects of this type. It is not dif¬
ficult to accept the idea that at least some people will be misled
by “documentary” accounts of little green men, large hairy
monsters, or even things that go bump in the night.
But what about the rest of the content of the media? Do they
faithfully represent reality? In other words, is it possible that
equally serious misrepresentations occur in the daily soap op¬
eras, the evening news, commercials, or even children’s books
about Dick and Jane? If the media do indeed misrepresent real¬
ity, what difference does it make? What kind of impact do por¬
trayals of reality of any kind have on people’s beliefs and

I Theories of
Indirect
behavior?

We noted earlier that much popular thinking about the influ¬

ence of the media on individuals remains at the level of the
magic bullet theory. Many people still assume that there must be
Influence
immediate and direct linkages between specific content (such as
 Indirect Effects of the Media 375 ■

portrayals of violence on television) and clearly identifiable forms

of behavior (such as acts of youthful aggression). We have al¬
ready pointed out that researchers have not been able to dem¬
onstrate such a one-to-one correspondence between the media
and behavior.
The formulations of modern scholars differ from the magic
bullet theory in several ways. For one thing, contemporary theor¬
ists seldom assume that a single exposure to some content can
motivate us to act. Instead, they assume that it is the accumu¬
lated effects of many similar exposures that eventually increase
the probability that a person will act or think in a given way. In
addition, contemporary theorists believe that many factors inter¬
vene between the media’s content and responses to it. For ex¬
ample, we have seen in Chapter 8 that education can increase
critical ability and can lead people to check the authenticity of a
news program. Similarly, religion, rural versus urban residence,
and occupation can influence voting preferences. Thus, con¬
temporary theorists try to explain outcomes that are contingent
on the presence or absence of intervening circumstances or
conditions.
Both of the formulations to be discussed in this chapter—
modeling theory and meaning theory—assume that the influ¬
ence of media content depends on intervening circumstances
and is accumulative. They are far more complex than the old
magic bullet theory. Each assumes that a variety of psychologi¬
cal, social, and cultural conditions are part of the sequence by
which the content of the media produces effects.

Media Portrayals As we saw in Chapter 8, modeling theory holds that under cer-
as Models tain circumstances individuals who view a particular behavior
may adopt that behavior. It is a psychological approach that fo¬
cuses on the acquisition of new forms of individual behavior. As
an explanation of the effects of the media, modeling theory is rel¬
evant mainly to television and motion pictures, which actually
show actions, rather than to radio and print, which only de¬
scribe actions.
There are several stages in the modeling process. In some¬
what simplified terms> they are:

1 An individual sees a form of action portrayed by a model.

2 The individual identifies with the model; that is, the viewer
believes that he or she is like (or wants to be like) the model.
3 The individual remembers and reproduces (imitates) the ac¬
tions of the model in some later situation.
4 Performing the reproduced activity results in some reward
(positive reinforcement) for the individual.
■ 376 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

5 The positive reinforcement increases the probability that the

person will use the reproduced activity again as a means of
responding to a similar situation.2

Notice that viewers may adopt a behavior whether or not the

people who created the portrayal intended it to serve as a model.

■ Identification. The second stage, identification, is central to

modeling theory, but the term is not easily defined. In general,
it refers to circumstances in which the observer approves of the
portrayal and either wants to be like the model or already be¬
lieves that he or she is like the model. In some cases we can add
another possibility: that the viewer finds the model different
from self but attractive and therefore sees the modeled behavior
as a suitable guide to his or her own actions.
There is little doubt that audiences identify with characters
portrayed in the media. Sociologist Shearon Lowery has con¬
cluded that audience identification is widespread, not only in
the United States but in other countries as well.3 Researchers
Wilbur Schramm, Jack Lyle, and Edwin Parker found that chil¬
dren readily identify with characters, real or fictional, and that
“the child can more easily store up behaviors and beliefs which
he has imagirlatively shared with characters with which he can
identify.”4
The process of identification appears to be common enough
among children. But what of adults? Loweiy believes that adults
may be more likely to identify with the characters in the daytime
soap operas than with characters on other types of shows be¬
cause the soap operas are broadcast eveiy day. Thus viewers
who follow them faithfully see the characters on a continuing ba¬
sis, which makes identification truly accumulative. Each week
the networks receive thousands of letters addressed to these fic¬
tional characters—evidence, says Lowery, of strong identifica¬
tion. For example, when Julie on the serial “Days of Our Lives”
mulled over the problem of having an abortion, viewers who op¬
posed abortion sent pictures of fetuses to the actress playing her
part. Another actress, playing the part of a woman who had a
mastectomy, was swamped with letters regarding the operation.
“Its creepy," she said, “I almost feel I had the mastectomy.”5
CBS has eliminated some soap opera characters who were por¬
trayed as very poor because the network was receiving many
packages of food and clothing.6
Such bizarre confusion between fantasy and reality illus¬
trates that the strong feelings for fictional characters built up by
cumulative exposure can serve as a powerful basis for identifi¬
cation. When identification is coupled with the belief that the
modeled actions have social utility, adoption of the behavior be¬
comes more likely.
 Indirect Effects of the Media 377 ■

Box 10

Does the
World Judge
Us by Our TV?

While you are reading this, the following

events (or some just like them) are probably
taking place around the globe:

• A grocer’s family in Nairobi, Kenya, is settling down after supper

to watch a five-year-old rerun of “The Jeffersons.”
• Third-graders of a Cree Indian tribe in Northern Manitoba, Can¬
ada, are being taught geography in reference to events they have
recently seen on “The A-Team."
• Sports fans in Thailand are haggling over the chances of their
teams in the Super Bowl, which will be broadcast live on Thai TV
in the near future.
• People everywhere (except in Japan, where viewers don't seem in¬
terested) are wondering what will happen on the next episode of
“Dallas.”

American television is present throughout Lumpur. But what effect does all this have
the world. In some countries, such as Italy, on the way the world views the United
it makes up 90 percent of the entertainment States?
programming. American-produced films are Anthropologists at the University of Win¬
almost as common, and cable TV is now in¬ nipeg discovered that many Indian children
suring that American products are seen on who watched “Hawaii Five-O” believed that
television screens as far away as Kuala the hero, McGarrett, was a real person, and
 ■ 378 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

even the British, according to a reporter for proval of religious leaders of Islam and the
Variety, “see New York purely as a nasty Dutch Reformed Church, among others.
city of muggers and guns ... and ... Califor¬ Some cite the show’s “zippy, arrogant
nia as a sunshine state of cliffside glamour” as typically American, while oth¬
highways, automobiles speeding .. . and ers believe that its portrayals of torrid love
smart-suited criminals making getaways affairs and underhanded business dealings
after killings in luxury ranch houses.” It reflect universal human experiences, but
would be interesting to find out how many most people might agree with Philip Capice,
Americans agree with this perception. Many executive producer of “Dallas,” who replied
Americans, like their counterparts else¬ to a question about “Dallas” as America’s
where, are glued to the screen when “Dal¬ primary cultural ambassador with three
las” is on—but then “Dallas” is the most succinct words: “Lord help us.”
popular show everywhere in the world, de¬
spite critical denigration and the disap¬ photo: ® Berxy/Magnum.

■ Imitation and Adoption. Much controversy has centered

around the last three stages of the modeling process. That is,
under what circumstances will a viewer imitate a form of activity
observed on television or in a movie? And even if the person im¬
itates the action once, what will lead him or her to adopt it on a
more permanent basis?
One answer is that on at least some occasions a person is
confronted with a situation to which some sort of response must
be made, but for which he or she lacks an appropriate, previ¬
ously learned response. In this situation a mode of response re¬
membered from television or a movie may seem worth trying. If
it works as a way of responding to the situation, that alone pro¬
vides positive reinforcement of the imitation. If the response
generates even more valued rewards—such as approval from
others or a strong feeling of self-satisfaction or achievement—
then the reinforcement is even stronger.
In short, modeled behavior will be adopted if (1) an individual
identifies with the model; (2) an appropriate situation occurs in
which the individual needs a guide for behavior; and (3) the im¬
itated behavior is reinforced.

| Media Content and Modeling theory explains the effects of the media in terms of
■ Shared Meanings linkages between stimuli—that is, media events—and re¬
sponses, or individual behavior. In contrast, the meaning theory
of mass communication sees behavior as a product of inner un¬
derstandings; that is, it is a product of our personal meanings
for the symbols, images, or events to which our culture gives
shared interpretations.
Personal structures of meaning are shaped by many forces.
Through participation in a variety of communication processes.
 Indirect Effects of the Media 379 ■

■ The soap operas, such as General Hospital (above), present

attractive characters who suffer through a variety of problems. Many
people in the audience identify with the characters portrayed. At
least some appear to have difficulty separating fantasy from reality
because the networks receive a daily flow of letters and even pack¬
ages addressed to the fictional characters. (American Broadcasting
Companies, Inc.)

our meanings are shaped, reshaped, and stabilized so that we

can interact with others in predictable ways. These processes
take place in our families, among peers, and in the community
and society at large. Each of these processes has its own char¬
acteristics and special impact.7 In modern society the mass me¬
dia are one important part of these communication processes.
Thus the content presented by the media plays an indirect part
in forming our habits of perception and interpretation of the
world. In this significant but indirect way the media's portrayals
of reality can strongly influence our behavior. In this section we
attempt to develop this idea and to set forth a meaning theory
oj mass communication ejfects in brief terms.

I Words as Constructions of Reality. In Chapter 1 we said

that the meaning for our every word and grammatical pattern
 E 380 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

can be understood as consisting of subjective experiences im¬

printed in neural cells in the brain; these imprinted experiences
we called traces. One implication of this imprinting is that the
language that we create and use together separates us in many
ways from the real or objective world. That is, every word in our
culture for which we have trace configurations tends to separate
us from the detailed and objective characteristics of the thing or
situation for which the word stands. This is because no word or
other kind of symbol can capture all aspects of the objective
reality to which it refers. But we become accustomed to the word
and follow the shared rules concerning the subjective experi¬
ences that it is supposed to arouse in each of us. We use the
word not only to communicate with each other but also to per¬
ceive and think about the reality for which it is a substitute.
In other words, the word itself becomes Jar more important
to as in many ways than the objective reality for which it orig¬
inally was a substitute. In fact, most of us have never had any
firsthand contact with the realities to which the majority of the
words in our language refer. For example, only a few of us have
ever put on scuba gear and dived to a tropical coral reef. Yet we
feel that we have a reasonably good understanding of what
scuba diving would be like. We have this feeling because we have
communicated about coral reefs and scuba diving with others or
have seen representations of them on television or in the mov¬
ies. The fact is we subjectively respond to these representations
(in words or in media portrayals) rather than to the objective
realities of an actual coral reef. In a similar way we share conven¬
tions of meaning about army life, ancient Greece, marriage, phy¬
sicians, homosexuals, and so on. We “know” what these are
because we participate in communication, even though we may
never have served in the army, visited Greece, been married,
gone to medical school, or been a homosexual.
Thus the meaning configurations we share for symbols con¬
stitute the world to which we adjust. We cannot relate accurately
to the objective world of reality itself because our access to that
world is limited. We create both our cultural and private worlds
of meaning through communication. It is through these shared
representations that we perceive, think, and shape our re¬
sponses to what Walter Lippmann called the “world outside." If
we believe a situation to be real, we respond to it as real. Our
ideas, interpretations, and understanding of the social and
physical world shape our behavior toward that world. In short,
meanings shape behavior.

■ Portrayals as Influences on Behavior. How are these prin¬

ciples related to the mass media? The obvious answer is that
mass communication is an important part of the way in which
 Indirect Effects of the Media 381 ■

we collectively shape our meanings for words. According to

meaning theory, people learn or modify at least some of the
meanings they associate with words through exposure to mass
communication. Then in their personal interactions the mean¬
ings they derived from the media are further shaped, reshaped,
and eventually stabilized into conventions that are shared with
others as part of the general language and culture. The media
also play a key role in stabilizing these meanings. Thus the mass
media are a source both of changes in language, as they modify
meanings for individuals, and of stabilization, as they reinforce
conventional usages. These meanings, in turn, shape our ac¬
tions as well as our interpretations.
We can summarize the basic stages in this process as follows:

1 Meaning is linked to a label (a language symbol or pattern of

symbols) by a written, audio, or screen presentation describ¬
ing an object, event, or situation.
2 A member of the audience perceives the portrayal and under¬
goes some change in his or her personal interpretation of the
meaning of the label. The individual’s subjective meanings
may then shape behavior toward the object, event, or
situation.
3 More often, the individual communicates with others using
the new or revised meaning. In this interpersonal communi¬
cation, the revised meanings are further shaped and re¬
shaped until the interacting parties hold parallel (shared)
interpretations, which then constitute cultural conventions
of meaning.
4 Individual behavior toward an object, situation, or event is
guided by the meanings people hold, either individually or
collectively, toward those objects, situations, or events.

As an example of the meanings conveyed by the media, con¬

sider a television commercial that shows a woman doing domes¬
tic chores—such as cleaning, cooking, and raising children—or
gushing about the virtues of some detergent or underarm deo¬
dorant. Such portrayals can provide meanings for the somewhat
abstract concepts of women or the female role. A television com¬
mercial for Arrid deodorant that was shown in the early 1970s
provides another example. A burly, hairy, and very dirty Mexican
bandit was about to use Arrid when a voice in the background
proclaimed, “If it can help him, think of what it can do for you!"
The portrayal implied, of course, that Mexicans (the label) are
the dirtiest, and presumably smelliest, people imaginable (the
meaning). Needless to say, the commercial offended many peo¬
ple, and it was hastily withdrawn.
Through such portrayals, the media can modify the relation-
 ■ 382 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

ship between a symbol and a set of trace patterns. In other

words, the media can shape meanings for people exposed to
their content and establish similar meanings among large audi¬
ences. The media may not intend to do this, any more than we
intend to be influenced by them when we enjoy their content.

■ Types of Effects. The influence that the media have on our

meanings may be simple or complex. For example, by viewing
the daily soap operas, viewers unaccustomed to using alcohol
can learn that there is a drink called a Brandy Alexander and
that it is appropriate to order it in a cocktail lounge when having
a discussion with a friend. At a more complex level, viewers can
learn from news reports that there are substances called carcin¬
ogens in foods and other products that cause cancer. They can
also learn such terms as biodegradable, ecological, and geo¬
thermal that were once highly technical words known only to
people in specialized fields of science. Today( such words arouse
more or less parallel configurations of traces in the memories of
millions of television viewers.
There are at least four ways in which media portrayals can
play a part in shaping the process whereby we achieve social
constructions of reality. We call these establishment, extension,
substitution, and stabilization. Each term refers to a relation¬
ship between a symbol and the imprinted subjective experiences
of meaning to which that symbol refers.
Through exposure to media portrayals of a given aspect of
reality, new individuals are brought into the cultural conven¬
tions (rules) regarding a language symbol. That is, people ac¬
quire meanings for symbols that they were not familiar with
earlier (such as carcinogens). We refer to this as the establish¬
ment function of such portrayals. It was called the “expansion”
function of the press by Charles Horton Cooley shortly after the
turn of the century.8 By establishing meanings, the media not
only expand the number of people who share a meaning for a
particular symbol but also expand the understandings of each
person who shares the experience.
People can also learn additional meanings for symbols with
which they are already familiar. For example, a child accus¬
tomed to his or her own friendly dog can learn from media por-
trayals that dogs can also be dangerous. Thus the media’s
portrayals can extend the meanings of symbols.
Media portrayals can also displace existing meanings. This
process can be called substitution. For example, in recent years
the news media and the film industry have been giving increas¬
ing attention to the problems of Vietnam veterans. The result
has been to provide the public with alternative meanings for the
term Vietnam veteran. Instead of being defined as courageous
 Indirect Effects of the Media 383 ■

people who served their country well in a difficult time, they

have been defined as a group of people with deep psychological
problems who would probably be dangerous as employees, hus¬
bands, friends, and so on.
We noted that the media can also reinforce established mean¬
ings. In this case, members of the audience already share a more
or less similar set of meanings for symbols in the portrayal. By
repeatedly showing the accepted meanings for these symbols,
the media more firmly establish the conventions regarding their
interpretation. This can be called the stabilization function of
media portrayals. For example, the public now holds a number
of beliefs about juvenile delinquents. Generally, they are thought
to be dangerous and aggressive. Conventions concerning the
expressions we use to refer to such delinquents—"punk,’
“hood,” and so on—link these symbols to inner experiences of
potential danger and apprehension. When the media show delin¬
quent youths engaged in vandalism, muggings, theft, and other
deviant acts, they reinforce and stabilize these conventions.
Media portrayals that establish, extend, substitute, or stabi¬
lize our meanings are important at two closely related levels. At
the personal level, inner meanings and the symbols we use to
activate them govern our perception, understanding, and re¬
sponse to the physical and social world. At the collective or cul¬
tural level, changes in meaning systems are at the heart of social
and cultural change.
Despite their importance, the effects of changes in meanings,
and their influence on behavior, are not detected easily by the
methods that have characterized communications research for
decades. The media’s influence on our subjective meanings is
undoubtedly a long-term and cumulative process. Thus, the link
between media portrayals that establish, extend, substitute, or
stabilize our symbolic constructions of reality and the specific
actions that we take in coping with our external world are un¬
doubtedly very indirect.

Analyzing Media Both meaning theory and modeling theory indicate that it is im¬
portant to study the content of media portrayals with great care.
Content
We may not be able to show direct one-to-one correspondences
between the components of their content and the details of overt
behavior, but the representations of reality in the modern print,
film, and broadcast media are an important source of models for
behavior and individual meaning structures. They are also a
source of shared cultural definitions.
In other words, portrayals are the lessons the media ojfer
as. Unwittingly, they teach us: (1) what society is like, (2) how
we should behave toward each other, (3) what others expect of
us, (4) what the consequences of an action can be, (5) how we
 ■ 384 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

should think about the physical and social world around us, and
(6) how we should evaluate ourselves. The lessons may be con¬
fused, contradictory, and distorted. Nevertheless, they cannot be
ignored. For these reasons, understanding the lessons that the
media provide can best be based on systematic content anal¬
yses of their presentations. By studying the portrayals of the
physical and social world in print, film, or broadcasts, we can
assess the exact manner in which they provide models for be¬
havior or play a part in the social construction of reality.
Technically, content analysis refers to a range of procedures
and techniques for assessing what is presented in any form of
communication. The procedures may be quantitative, qualita¬
tive, or a combination of both. Usually the analyses are based on
counting some defined unit or set of units. A unit can be almost
any attribute that can be carefully defined and assessed, such as
specific words, qualitative themes, types of action, and so on.
Analyses of printed material often use units such as the number
of column inches devoted to a particular theme. Film and tele¬
vision content is more difficult to analyze. The frequency with
which a topic occurs or the amount of time devoted to a topic or
theme can be convenient units. For example, in a news broad¬
cast, a researcher might determine the relative amount of time
given to local versus national or international events.
In studying television, the portrayal is another way of analyz¬
ing the content. A widely cited early study of the world of work
as portrayed on television illustrates this approach.9 The unit
was the portrayal of an actor carrying out the duties of a recog¬
nizable occupation for at least one minute. By this means the
investigator found that in the mid 1960s television concentrated
heavily on professional and managerial occupations and largely
ignored blue-collar work. Most of the people shown working were
involved with either the criminal justice system or the medical
profession. In reality, only a small part of the labor force worked
in those occupations.
Systematic content analyses reveal concentrations and trends
that are not apparent to the audience. For example, some years
ago the biographies of popular heroes in Colliers and the
Saturday Evening Post from 1900 to 1940 were subjected to
an elaborate content analysis.10 It was discovered that the kinds
of people presented as heroes changed dramatically during
this period. Early in the century the magazines concentrated
on “idols of production”—leaders in business, the professions,
and political life. In later decades attention shifted to “idols
ol consumption." These were mainly singers, actors, and
other representatives of the popular arts. Many other trends
were discovered that reflected changes in both public interest
and editorial policy. But the major point for our purposes is
 Indirect Effects of the Media 385 ■

■ For many years television has been preoccupied with crime, po¬
lice, and detective shows. If one had only TV’s portrayal of the Amer¬
ican labor force as a guide to what type of work is done in the
United States, one would have to conclude that a very large propor¬
tion of America’s workers are devoted to fighting crime as part of
the official criminal justice system or as self-appointed agents for
protecting people from evil-doers. Photo: Actor Ed Marinaro and actress
Betty Thomas in a scene from “Hill St Blues.” (© 1984 MTM Productions.)

that these trends could be accurately described only through

careful and systematic analysis. Thus content analyses provide
clear and unbiased descriptions of what is contained in
communications.11
Content analyses have many important uses, but there are a
number of cautions to observe in interpreting them. First, we
cannot assume that readers, listeners, or viewers respond to any
particular element of content in a direct way. Second, we cannot
assume that what we find is there because the communicator
 ■ 386 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

deliberately intended it to be there to stimulate some thought or

action. For example, although the study of the world of work as
shown on TV found that television concentrated on professional
and managerial jobs, it would be silly to assume that the net¬
works were trying to convince viewers that those jobs were more
important. In some cases the intent of the communicator may
be obvious (for example, in advertising, information campaigns,
or political propaganda); but in most cases intent cannot be in¬
ferred from the content analysis. Content analyses are impor¬
tant, however, in helping us to understand both the models for
behavior and the meanings that a medium presents.

Research on Content analysis provides the tool that allows researchers to ap¬
Media Models ply both modeling theory and meaning theory to the study of
mass communication. In this section we summarize two studies
done within the perspective of modeling theory. Recall that this
approach implies that there are linkages between specific ele¬
ments of media content and particular forms of behavior. The
first study focuses on sex-role models that presumably influence
children’s self-concepts. The second study focuses on the les¬
sons about drinking behavior that are presented to viewers of
soap operas. These two studies are important not only because
they focus on socially significant topics but also because they ex¬
amine models that millions of Americans confront each day.

Sex-Role Models Learning to be a male or female is one of the most important as¬
pects of early childhood. Becoming either masculine or feminine
is not simply a product of one’s biological sex. Masculinity and
femininity are behavior patterns and self-concepts that must be
learned from contact with people. There have been many cases
in which a baby’s sex has been misclassified at birth. When the
error is corrected later, reclassified people must undergo a very
difficult learning process in order to match their behavior and
psychology to their biological sex.12
But how do people learn to be masculine or feminine? For
generations of Americans this learning began when the infant
boy was placed on a blue blanket and the infant girl on a pink
blanket. In other words, society responded very differently to the
two sexes even at birth. From the start of a child’s life,'society
demanded different behavior from girls and boys, and it trained
them to think differently about themselves. Girls were given
dolls, little tea sets, miniature ranges,, washing machines, and
mops to play with. They were taught to be clean, pretty, and de¬
mure. Boys were given toy trucks, cowboy hats, and little ma¬
chine guns. They were taught to be tough and active. Thus, by
the time children were ready for kindergarten, they were verv
aware of their sex roles. Each child learned to behave in ways
 Indirect Effects of the Media 387 ■

that society deemed appropriate: and each developed a self-con¬

cept as a male or female. Although treatment of the sexes has
been changing, many of these traditional patterns persist.
The mass media have long offered a rich set of role models to
help children learn their sex roles. These models range from the
fantasies of Saturday morning cartoons to the deliberate lessons
of Sesame Street. Models of many kinds show the child what lit¬
tle girls and little boys are made of. In spite of the women’s
movement, by the time they are four years old, most children
can explain that the major activity of women in America is
housekeeping and that the primary expectation of males is to
provide for their families.

■ Depictions of Children in Picture Books. How the media

helped children achieve these definitions in the recent past is il¬
lustrated by a content analysis of picture books for preschool
children by Lenore Weitzman and her associates. They examined
several hundred books published between 1938 and the early
1970s but concentrated on prize-winning books published from
1965 to 1970. Children’s books that receive prestigious awards
enjoy high sales; thus the content analysis focused on books to
which American children had been widely exposed.
The study’s authors maintained that picture books have long
been important in the lives of preschool children. Sales of mass-
circulation children’s books (like the Little Golden Books) can
exceed 3 million per year. Parents often read the stories to their
children over and over, thereby reinforcing the values and inter¬
pretations that are portrayed.

Picture books ... are a vehicle for the presentation of societal values
to the young child. Through books, children learn about the world
outside of their immediate environment: they learn about what
other boys and girls do, say, and feel: they learn about what is right
and wrong: and they learn what is expected of children of their age.
In addition, books provide children with role models—images ot
what they can and should be like when they grow up.13

The content analysis of the picture books was largely quali¬

tative. The researchers gave some numerical data, but they em¬
phasized the qualitative way in which males and females were
shown and described in the pictures and stories. One very sig¬
nificant quantitative finding was that few females appeared in
the books at all. Females make up more than half of the Ameri¬
can population, but they were all but invisible in the children's
books. For example, of the eighteen books that had won or been
nominated for the Caldecott Prize during the five-year period,
there were 261 pictures of males. There were only 23 of females.
 ■ 388 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

Even the animals shown in the pictures ^ere overwhelmingly

male, by a ratio of 90 to 1.
In the few pictures that did show female children, they were
portrayed as passive rather than active. Boys were pictured and
described as active, vigorous, and even boisterous. Most of the
girls were shown sitting quietly in the corner or merely looking
on. The few girls shown in some sort of activity were performing
domestic chores. They were helping mother cook, sew, sweep, or
feed babies. Boys, on the other hand, were pictured mowing
lawns, marching in parades, hammering wood, playing baseball,
and so on. Even the clothing shown in the books suggested that
females have a passive-dependent role. Girls were usually shown
in frilly long dresses, with ribbons in their pretty and neatly ar¬
ranged hair; boys usually wore clothes suitable for action and
adventure.

H Adult Role Models in Picture Books. Adults also provide role

models for children. As Weitzman and her associates noted:

By observing adult men and women, boys and girls learn what will
be expected of them when they grow older. They are likely to identify
with adults of the same sex, and desire to be like them" Thus, role
models not only present children with future images of themselves
but they also influence a child's aspirations and goals.14

The adult models in the picture books followed very tradi¬

tional lines: women were passive; men were active. Women per¬
formed domestic chores; men were the breadwinners. By these
portrayals the books departed from reality At the time of the
study, about half of the women in the United States were in the
labor force, and that fraction has continued to grow. The picture
books provided no hint of this fact. In the sample of Caldecott
books, for example, not one woman had a job or profession. The
books stressed that a woman’s highest aspiration is to be a
mother. Whereas "mommies" were shown wearing aprons and
doing the housework, children were instructed that

Daddies drive the trucks and cars.

The buses, boats and trains.
Daddies build the roads and bridges.
Houses, stores and planes.
Daddies work in factories and
Daddies make things grow..
Daddies work to figure out
The things we do not know.15

In general, then, the preschool children's books studied gave

clear and forceful role models for both children and adults. Boys
 Indirect Effects of the Media 389 ■

■ Until recently, fe¬

male adults por¬ While Martin was standing with his shoes in his hand, he
trayed in picture heard a key turning in the front door lock. Then the door
books for pre-school
opened and his mother’s voice called out, "Martin, I’m home.’
children were shown
performing domestic
tasks such as clean¬
ing, cooking, and
tending children.
Adult males were
shown as breadwin¬
ners in the labor
force. Change is tak¬
ing place, as shown
by the illustration
here. However, the
majority of Ameri¬
cans living today re¬
ceived their earliest
definitions of the
adult male and fe¬
male roles from tra¬
ditionally oriented
picture books when
their stories were
read to them by their
parents. (Illustration
by Lynn Munsinger. Re¬
printed by permission
of Houghton Mifflin
Company.)

were instructed that they were expected to train for a job or

profession, for theirs would be the breadwinner’s task. With few
exceptions, girls were given a different set of messages: they
were expected to be clean, pretty, and passive. Their main aspi¬
ration would be to a life of cooking, cleaning, and raising babies.
Thus a careful content analysis of children's picture books re¬
vealed that the models placed before the very young of a partic¬
ular generation concerning what boys and girls should be like
were not appropriate for the world into which they would grow.
In a society in which the division of labor in the family followed
traditional lines, these models would have prepared children for
their activities as adults. In today's America, they may have done
both sexes a disservice by creating false expectations that many
of the current generation of young adults will have to modify.16
 390 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

Models in the Soap The daytime serial has been part of American popular culture for
Operas about fifty years. The first soap opera was broadcast sometime
during the late 1920s or the very early 1930s on radio. In 1947
the first televised soap opera appeared, “A Woman to Remem¬
ber. It failed for lack of viewers. By 1960, however, the last epi¬
sode of the final radio soap opera was broadcast, and the soaps
moved totally to television.
At first the television soap operas were almost identical to
their radio forebears. The plots, characters, problems, and
themes were the same ones that radio listeners had heard for
years. Like the early soaps, contemporary soap operas are played
out against a white, middle-class background, and they empha¬
size both personal and social problems. But unlike their prede¬
cessors, today s soap operas deal with themes that were taboo in
earlier decades such as rape, abortion, venereal disease, and
incest.17
The soap operas present many kinds of models—occupa¬
tional, sexual, and romantic, among others'. They also present
behaviors such as the use of alcohol. By examining one study of
the modeling of alcohol use, we can better understand the na¬
ture and utility of modeling theory.

Modeling Influences on the Use of Alcohol. Do people ac¬

tually imitate others in their use of alcohol? The answer seems
to be yes. There is reasonably clear evidence that a person's con¬
sumption of alcohol can be increased or decreased by modeling.
In several kinds of controlled studies in which confederates were
used to influence the subjects, people increased their drinking
in the presence of models who drank heavily. Similar results
have been obtained in a real-life tavern, a simulated tavern, and
many laboratory settings. Likewise the drinking rate of heavy
consumers has been reduced by the presence of models who
drank lightly.18
But the important question for our purposes is whether the
mass media provide such models and, if so, what they are like.
What patterns do the media show that could influence the
drinking of the many millions of viewers? One study cannot an¬
swer this question in terms of all content. For this reason Shea-
ron Lowery singled out the soap opera for study. Her content
analysis focused on the models for the use of alcohol that are
presented by daytime soap operas.19

Drinking as Depicted in Soap Operas. Lowery's content anal¬

ysis tried to ascertain: (1) the frequency with which alcohol was
used in the soap operas, and (2) the qualitative patterns of its
use. That is, how much alcohol was consumed, for what pur¬
pose, under what circumstances, and with what effect? To an-
 Indirect Effects of the Media 391 ■

swer these questions, specially trained analysts systematically

studied fourteen soap operas, encompassing 172 hours of pro¬
gramming. Accounts were prepared of each scene in which al¬
cohol was used, including detailed information about the plot,
characters, social relationships, and other relevant factors.
During the 1,801 scenes viewed, there were 520 incidents in¬
volving alcohol use, or about three incidents for each hour of
programming. Clearly, the soap operas frequently model the use
of alcohol. But more important than the numbers are the quali¬
tative patterns that were modeled. The researcher classified the
drinking incidents into three broad categories: social facilita¬
tion, crisis management, and escaping reality. Table 10.1 lists
the frequency of each category.
Social facilitation is a pattern in which alcohol is served and
consumed as a more or less incidental part of ongoing social in¬
teraction. It is a background factor, not a focus of attention. In
portrayals of this kind of drinking, people seldom become intox¬
icated, and alcohol contributed only incidentally to the action.
This was the largest category of drinking in the soap operas, ac¬
counting for 46.7 percent of the incidents. Over half of the social
facilitation drinking was ritualistic, such as serving cocktails at
a party. There was also a second kind of social facilitation drink¬
ing: tension-control drinking, which means using alcohol to
help deal with a problem. For example, when a couple needed to
discuss a proposed divorce, having drinks was shown as making
the interaction simpler. Still, drinking was a background factor.
Crisis management accounted for 22.9 percent of the drink¬
ing incidents. Here alcohol was portrayed as a temporary meas¬
ure to aid in the immediate management of a crisis, such as an
auto accident. The idea that “a drink will help” was initiated
sometimes by the individual suffering the trauma, sometimes by
friends, relatives, or others. In some cases it was not even ver¬
balized. The model simply poured a stiff drink on hearing the
bad news. Sometimes the person became intoxicated, but this
was by no means the rule. In any event, the use of alcohol was
shown as a means for coping with sudden problems on a tem¬
porary basis.
The pattern called escaping reality involved 30.4 percent of
the total. In these incidents the problems were chronic rather
than sudden or temporary, and alcohol was used as a con¬
tinuing means of dealing with a problem too difficult to face.
Examples of these problems included death of a loved one,
interpersonal conflicts, financial difficulties, broken romances,
and loss of status. For the most part, the characters were iden¬
tified as alcoholics, with the implication that they had been
driven to drink by ill fate, ill fortune, or personal weakness.
Clearly, the soap operas suggest that drinking alcohol is a
 ■ 392 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

10.1 Drinking Patterns Portrayed in the Daytime Television Serial

DRINKING PATTERN FREQUENCY PERCENTAGE

Social facilitation 243 46.7

Ritualistic drinking (157) .
Tension control (86) _
Crisis management 119 22.9
Escaping reality 158 30.4
Total 520 100.0

Scmrce: Shearon A. Lowery, “Soap and Booze in the Afternoon: An Analysis of the Portrayals of
Qoc°n01 USC m 016 Daytime Seria1’’ Journal of Studies on Alcohol, 41, No. 9 (September 1980)
835 Reprinted by permission from VoL 41, pp. 829-838, 1980. Copyright by Journal of Studies on
Alcohol, Inc., Rutgers Center of Alcohol Studies, New Brunswick, NJ 08903.

normal part of life and that it is unquestionably acceptable. In

over 70 percent of the cases in which models used alcohol, they
suffered no negative consequences. Even when alcohol was used
to escape reality, it was not always clear that the habitual drunk
suffered veiy much. In a few cases the alcoholic lost a wife or
lover, or even a job. But the alcoholics of soapland seemed to be
much easier to rehabilitate than those in real life. Usually, when
the problem that touched off the drinking was resolved, the ad¬
diction ended. Needless to say, this view departs considerably
from reality.
We cannot estimate the degree to which this modeling stim¬
ulates behavior on the part of viewers—if it stimulates behavior
at all. Inferences from content analyses to behavior are treach¬
erous. At the same time, we have seen that there is considerable
research evidence that models in real life can and do influence
people s drinking behavior. Lowery’s study clearly shows that
the daytime soap operas present a considerable number and va¬
riety of portrayals of the use of alcohol. These episodes are fol¬
lowed daily by millions of women, a category among whom
alcoholism is on the rise. Whether the televised portrayal of
drinking is one of the causes of this increase has not yet been
established.

Both the study of preschool children’s picture books and the

study of soap operas are excellent examples of content analyses
within the tradition of modeling theory. They show very clearly
the kinds of lessons that are available for audiences. Other
kinds of research can determine the degree to which the models
have stimulated similar behavior among the people exposed to
 Indirect Effects of the Media 393 ■

the communications. Whether there are point-by-point corre¬

spondences between the activities portrayed by the models and
behavior in real life is an open question. The main point, how¬
ever, is that without such systematic content analyses we can¬
not understand the “hidden curriculum” contained in mass
communication.

I Research on
Meaning Theory
The assumptions of meaning theory differ sharply from those of
modeling theory. Recall that meaning theory assumes that the
media play an important part in forming social constructions of
reality by shaping the trace configurations of individuals, the
meanings of specific language symbols. Thus the media estab¬
lish, extend, substitute, and stabilize both personal and cultural
meanings through their portrayals of reality.
How meaning is influenced by the media could be studied in
many contexts. To understand better the implications of mean¬
ing theory, we turn to a study of how the mentally ill have been
portrayed on television.20 There is no assumption that viewers
will imitate the mentally ill persons portrayed in these programs.
The analysis is intended to illustrate some of the ways that por¬
trayals in mass communication link meaning to particular sym¬
bols and to show how meaning theory helps us understand how
mass communication may influence a particular set of be¬
haviors.

I Traditional
Meanings of
The mentally ill have long been treated as social outcasts. To un¬
derstand this pattern of social rejection, we need to note the his¬
Insanity tory of meanings for mental illness. Our intention is to show the
power of culture over interpretations and behavior and then to
illustrate the role of the media in perpetuating culture.

■ The Ship of Fools. In medieval times attitudes toward those

we would now call mentally ill were far more benign than they
are today. But during the Renaissance the insane were often
confined on ships that moved from place to place, exhibiting the
“crazies” to people for a small fee:

“Ships of Fools” crisscrossed the seas and canals of Europe with

their comic and pathetic cargo of souls. Some of them found pleas¬
ure and even a cure in the changing surroundings, in the isolation
of being cast off, while others withdrew further, became worse, or
died alone and away from their families. The cities and villages
which had thus rid themselves of their crazed and crazy, could now
take pleasure in watching the exciting sideshow when a ship full of
foreign lunatics would dock at their harbors.21

Practices like the ships of fools began to stabilize the meaning of

madness among Europeans. It became a repulsive state—a curse
to be concealed, a condition to be punished and dreaded.
 ■ 394 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

■ During the Renais¬

sance the mentally
deranged were con¬
fined to ships that
moved from place to
place in European
countries. People
came to see and be
entertained by the
“fools” and “crazies,”
who often acted in
bizarre ways for the
benefit of their audi¬
ence. The small fees
paid to see the exhi¬
bition helped sup¬
port those confined.
(Giraudon/Art Re¬
source, NY.)

As time went on, slow changes took place. A few humanitari¬

ans agitated for better treatment of the insane. Toward the end
of the nineteenth century, the belief spread that they should be
placed in hospitals rather than dungeons. Late in the century
psychoanalysts provided a new view of insanity, arguing that it
is not a curse or possession by demons or inherited bad blood,
but a sickness. This medical model of mental illness was widely
accepted by professionals by the early twentieth century Thus
the deranged were seen as "ill,” capable of being cured by treat-
 Indirect Effects of the Media 395 ■

ment, and able eventually to return to normal social roles. Un¬

fortunately, public attitudes lagged far behind these develop¬
ments in the medical profession. The general culture does not
change quickly.
Although the meanings associated with madness today differ
greatly from those of earlier times, many elements of the older
beliefs persist. As a result, those who have been mentally ill as
well as those still afflicted suffer a considerable stigma. Public
attitudes and beliefs about the mentally ill continue to focus on
the likelihood that they will exhibit bizarre and unpredictable
behavior and above all that they are dangerous. In reality, the
mentally ill as a whole are no more dangerous than citizens in
general, in spite of the few who make headlines.

■ How the Stigma Is Reinforced Today. Why does the idea that
mentally ill people are dangerous persist? What are the modern
counterparts of the “ship of fools” that continue to teach us that
the mentally ill are mindless lunatics, only a hair’s breadth away
from serious forms of deviant and dangerous behavior?
One important factor is the way the news media report on
mentally ill killers. Even though they are very rare, the press
gives them great attention. The tradition was established as
early as the 1880s, when the relatively new mass newspapers
gave great attention to Jack the Ripper. The public was both fas¬
cinated and horrified, but, above all, the reports sold news¬
papers. In fact, we are still interested in the case a century later.
The Boston Strangler, Charles Manson, Richard Speck, the Son
of Sam, John Gacy, and similar cases receive intense attention
from the modern media. This handful of men seems to repre¬
sent, for many people, about all one needs to know about the
mentally ill.
Yet all the blame for the stigma attached to the mentally ill
cannot be placed on journalists. Our daily use of language also
plays a part. Colloquial expressions describe irrational behavior
as “nuts,” “kooky,” “kinky,” “freaky,” “wacky,” “looney,” and so
on. Many people judge as “sick” any behavior of which they do
not approve. The list could go on and on. The point is that any¬
thing that departs from the normal—anything that is alien, ir¬
regular, or merely inexplicable—is described in the terms that
we use for the mentally ill. Thus, by repeatedly emphasizing the
connection between the symbols for mental illness and the bi¬
zarre, we stabilize our meanings for madness.
The mass media also play a significant part in maintaining
the stigma attached to mental illness. Books, movies, the com¬
ics, and especially television frequently portray the mentally ill
in very negative ways. Their depictions are meant to amuse us,
but unwittingly they are influencing our social constructions of
reality.
 ■ 396 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

■ Today, both news¬

papers and televi¬ WEATHER
TOOAY
sion display the Partly sunny
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of the Ship of Fools. Telephone (617) 426-3000 ★★★ 25 Cents Tuesday, August 10, 1962
However, media por¬
trayals are a very in¬
accurate source for
learning about the
mentally ill. News¬
IT’S OFFICIAL
papers, following the
tradition set by the
London Times re¬
ports of Jack the
Ripper, select a few
truly dangerous
HINCK
cases and give them
massive publicity.
On television, a con¬
tinuous flow of
crime and detective
NUTS Jodis rosier to T«l Driver'

OVER
He ha9 expressed
sexual and aggres¬
dramas show them sive ideas about
Foster . . When
as extremely danger¬ asked if he were
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he replied, ’Not
permission of the Bos¬ now. If released, I
would go the other
ton Herald.) way, but In one or

JODIE
two years, if things
go on the same, no
response from her,
I I! kill her.”
—From b psychiatric
report on John Hincktmy
paqji a

vivs rLu evacuation plan

U.S.-drafted peace timetable awaits Bogin's approval. Six die In Paris massacre. Pages 4-5

6 Chelsea cops Sears levels Nun stabbed, Blue Jays get

suspended in new charges beaten by man three in 8th,
motel beatings of tax ‘deals’ she helped top Sox, 4-2

ITfelevision’s
Portrayal of the
To understand precisely how the mentally ill are portrayed on
evening television drama and to show how meaning theory aids
Mentally Ill us in understanding the implications of these portrayals, we will
review a study completed in 1980 that focused on the portrayal
of the mentally ill in all crime-adventure dramas broadcast by
the major networks in a southwestern city during a four-month
period. A pilot study had established that few other types of
television programs had content related to mental illness. A few
news stories were found, and there had been a recent documen-
 Indirect Effects of the Media 397 ■

taiy and a movie (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) dealing
sympathetically with mental illness. But the overwhelming con¬
centration of depictions of mental illness were found in the eve¬
ning police and detective shows. For this reason, the study
focused on “Adam 12,” “Baretta,” “Barnaby Jones,” “Charlie’s
Angels,” “Hawaii Five-O,” “Kojak,” “Police Story,” “Police
Woman,” “Quincy,” “Richie Brockleman,” “Rockford Files,”
“Sam,” and “Starsky and Hutch.” Many of these programs re¬
main on television as reruns.
Overall seventy-five dramas were analyzed in which official or
unofficial representatives of law and order acted against wrong¬
doers or forces for evil. Thirty-one of these programs (41 per¬
cent) had content in which persons portrayed as disturbed
openly committed serious, deviant acts. A total of thirty-four
such portrayals were identified and analyzed. (Several programs
had more than one portrayal.) Twenty-one programs depicted se¬
rious deviance but not mental illness. These programs served as
a kind of control. The number and quality of negative labels
used to describe their villains were carefully analyzed in order to
see what level of dangerousness was implied for deviants who
were not mentally ill. Thus the researchers could see if mentally
ill villains were portrayed in a more negative way than just plain
crooks.
One or more trained monitors viewed each program and
made (1) a lengthy audio-recording of the details of the plot, the
characters, and so on; (2) detailed descriptions of how the men¬
tally ill were shown; and (3) a complete list of labels, words, and
phrases used to describe or communicate about the mentally ill.
For control programs a similar procedure was followed. In addi¬
tion the programs were studied as whole plots so that the mean¬
ings of actions, labels, and incidents could be interpreted within
their context.
The researchers assigned a number, from 0 to 4, to rate the
level of dangerousness implied by each portrayal of wrongdoing.
Although the scale was somewhat subjective and not precise,
these ratings allowed numerical comparisons of the actions of
the mentally ill with the behavior of the non—mentally ill villains.
In addition, the programs were classified into three categories;
(1) those in which people were verbally identified as “crazy,"
“nuts,” and so on, as they were shown carrying out deviant acts;
(2) programs in which only nonverbal cues—such as close-ups
of strange-looking eyes, fixed grins, odd twitches—indicated
that a character engaged in deviant acts was “nuts"; and (3) pro¬
grams that made extensive use of the vocabulary of madness but
did not show mentally ill people acting in deviant ways.
Overwhelmingly, these portrayals were definitely not sympa¬
thetic. The writers were clearly using the mentally ill as the bad
 ■ 398 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

guys. They were murderers, rapists, slashers, snipers, and

bombers. In other words, the cues, either verbal or nonverbal,
that identified the actors as mentally ill were linked to activities
that were extremely harmful to others. Moreover, by comparison
with the (presumably sane) regular crooks, the mentally ill were
shown as more dangerous. The average level of dangerousness
for the portrayals of the mentally ill offenders was midway be¬
tween “very dangerous” and “moderately dangerous.” For non—
mentally ill crooks, the average rating was only halfway between
slightly and moderately dangerous. These portrayals were vivid
and powerful lessons that the meaning of mental illness in¬
cludes elements of severe danger to others.
The mentally ill offenders were not only shown to he danger¬
ous but also portrayed in ways calculated to arouse fear in the
audience. While the mentally ill were shown in deviant acts ex¬
tremely harmful to others, they grimaced strangely, had glassy
eyes, or giggled incongruously. Some laughed strangely and
sobbed or cried. Others mumbled incoherently or screamed ir¬
rationally. Another bared his teeth and snarled as he jumped on
his victims to suck blood from their jugular veins. Still another
squeezed raw meat through his fingers and rubbed it on his gun
as he prepared to kill his next victim. Unusual music often ac¬
companied these scenes to enhance the effect. In some shows
actions were timed to startle the audience. Such portrayals pro¬
vide far more intense lessons about the meaning of madness
than were ever possible by merely exhibiting the ‘loonies” on the
ship of fools.
In addition to showing the overt behavior of the mentally ill
in very negative terms, prime-time television makes abundant
use of the popular vocabulary of madness. Table 10.2 shows a
number of examples of television’s vocabulary for the mentally
ill. Any kind of behavior that was unusual, eccentric, or merely
difficult to explain with the facts at hand was likely to be cate¬
gorized by the actors as that of “kooks,” “chuckleheads,” “fruit¬
cakes,” “cuckoo-birds,” and so forth. More technical terms for
neurotic or psychotic conditions, such as schizophrenic and
paranoid, were used far less frequently.
The content analysis revealed many additional nuances and
connotations concerning the meaning of insanity, but the essen¬
tial conclusions are that scriptwriters for crime-adventure
shows in prime time use the mentally ill to represent evil,
against which the forces for law and order fight and win to pro¬
tect society. Since the heroes and heroines of popular culture
are virtually invincible, the mentally ill never get away with their
foul deeds. They are hauled off night after night to “hospitals for
the criminally insane," where they will presumably remain for
life. The audience breathes a sigh of relief; the ratings go up:
 Indirect Effects of the Media 399 ■

■■■■■■■■■■

Table 10.2 Television’s Labels for the Mentally Ill

WORD OR PHRASE FREQUENCY WORD OR PHRASE FREQUENCY

Crazy 25 Lunatic 1
Sick (mentally) or Loony 1
sickie 10 Strange bird 1
Nut or homicidal nut 9 Crippled mentally 1
Creep or creepy 7 Modern-day
Needs help Frankenstein 1
(psychiatric) 7 Jekyll and Hyde 1
Weird or weirdo 6 Looking at a full moon 1
Maniac 5 Nuttier than a pecan
Aggression (displaced, pie 1
etc.) 4 Should be in a cage 1
Psycho 4 Needs her shrink 1
Psychotic 3 Fugitive from mental
Wacko or el wacko 3 hospital 1
Disturbed 2 Escaped from hospital
Freak or dumbbell for mentally insane 1
freak 2 Released from
Insane 2 psychiatric
Paranoid 2 institution 1
Psychopath or Crashed out of local
psychopathic 2 funny farm 1
Schizophrenia 2 Was pushed out of
Screwball or screwy 2 hospital six months
Animal 1 too soon 1
Going bananas 1 Bomb waiting to
Conversion symptoms 1 explode 1
Demented 1 Delusions (person
Flipped out 1 with) 1

products are sold; actors and writers make money: the networks
prosper; and stockholders smile. As a byproduct, millions of peo¬
ple who are or once were mentally ill suffer discrimination and
rejection as we continue to reinforce the trace configurations
that are the basis of our ancient stereotypes. Thus the media
serve as a modern ship of fools.
Although these data do not forever “prove” that television
 ■ 400 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

causes people to fear or reject the mentally.ill, they clearly show

the linkage between television’s vocabulary for mental illness
and depictions of deviant actions that are extremely harmful to
others. By offering such portrayals repeatedly, night after night,
the medium is probably playing an important role in the long¬
term shaping of the meanings we associate with mental illness.
We can hypothesize with some conviction that television is
establishing new stigmatizing meanings among some categories
of people (such as children who know little about mental illness),
extending such meanings to include more implications of dan¬
ger for many viewers, substituting new meanings for members of
the audience who may entertain more benign interpretations,
and certainly stabilizing the meanings of madness that have
come down to us from earlier times.
Much remains to be done to understand fully the implica¬
tions of meaning theory. Yet this perspective—like that of mod¬
eling theory—leads us to suspect that the media may have
powerful but very indirect influences on the way we think, talk,
interpret the world around us, and respond to situations and
people. Older approaches to research on the effects of the media,
through surveys and experiments, are not appropriate to study
these long-range and indirect influences.

■ Summary The most important influences of mass communication may be

long term, indirect, and difficult to uncover by the techniques of
social science research. These influences include modeling be¬
havior and the shaping of meanings that are important to both
individual and collective definitions of reality.
Modeling theory holds that people may adopt behaviors that
they have seen depicted in the media. The probability that an in¬
dividual will adopt the modeled behavior on a lasting basis is
increased if the imitated behavior is reinforced and if the
individual identifies with the model.
The meaning theory of media influence is an extension of the
trace theory of human communication. The media construct
reality by using symbols and providing portrayals—in sounds,
images, or words—of the referents of those symbols. These rep¬
resentations provide shared meanings for the members of the
audience. By this means, the media provide us with “pictures in
our heads" (specific trace configurations) of “the world outside”
(objects, issues, or situations as they exist independent of media
portrayals). By so doing, the media establish, extend, substitute,
and stabilize the meanings that members of the audience share
with others.
To study both the models and the meanings offered in mass
communications, systematic analyses of their content are
 Indirect Effects of the Media 401 ■

important. Content analysis is a term applied to a variety of

techniques and procedures for quantitative and qualitative
assessment of what is presented in any form of communication.
Content analyses cannot reveal in a direct way the intent of com¬
municators or the influence of messages on receivers. However,
they can show trends and emphases that are unlikely to be de¬
tected by members of the audience. Moreover, they show the
models and the meanings in media content that may influence
people's behaviors and beliefs.
Content analyses of children's picture books and alcohol use
in soap operas provide specific examples of models in media con¬
tent. Many factors influence the learning of sex roles; the passive
role models for girls and the active models for boys shown in pic¬
ture books for young children are one important source for this
learning. For adults the soap operas provide attractive models
that show how alcohol may be used.
The meaning theoiy of media influence is illustrated by an
analysis of the portrayal of the mentally ill in crime dramas on
prime-time television. These programs use a rich colloquial vo¬
cabulary to label the mentally ill, and they show mentally ill vil¬
lains committing very deviant and dangerous acts. By this
means, it can be hypothesized, television perpetuates ancient
stereotypes about madness (stabilizes meanings) and teaches
new generations that the mentally ill are very dangerous people
(establishes meanings). Since the mentally ill as a whole are not
particularly dangerous, the media appear to be creating false
pictures in our heads of this particular aspect of the world
outside.
Overall, the models and the meanings provided by the media
may be far more significant than the information or opinions on
specific issues that they present. Such indirect, long-term influ¬
ences are contingent on many conditions that need to be sorted
out by future research.

Notes and 1 Associated Press. New York, August 11, 1977.

References 2 Albert Bandura, Social Learning Theory (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1977).
3 Shearon A. Lowery, “Soap and Booze in the Afternoon: An Anal¬
ysis of the Portrayals of Alcohol Use in the Daytime Television
Serial,’’ Journal oj Studies on Alcohol. 41, No. 9 (September
1980), 829—838.
4 Wilbur Schramm. Jack Lyle, and Edwin B. Parker, Television in
the Lives of Our Children (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1969), p. 78.
■ 402 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

5 See “Soap Operas: Sex and Suffering in the Afternoon,” Time,

January 12, 1976, pp. 46-53.
6 Ibid.
Marshall McLuhan, for example, has developed numerous specu¬
7
lations concerning the special impact of each medium. Marshall
McLuhan, chapter 1. “The Medium Is the Message,” in Under¬
standing Media: The Extension oJMan (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1964), pp. 7-21. See also an older research literature on the spe¬
cial effects of each medium. For example, several classic studies
are reprinted in Wilbur Schramm, Mass Communications
(Urbana; University of Illinois Press, 1960), pp. 487-582.
8 Charles Horton Cooley, Social Organization (New York: Charles
Scribner and Sons, 1929), originally published in 1909.
9 Melvin L. De Fleur, “Occupational Roles as Portrayed on Televi¬
sion,^"Public Opinion Quarterly, 28 (Spring 1964), 57-74.
10 Leo Lowenthal, “Biographies in Popular Magazines,” in Radio Re¬
search, 1942—43, ed. Paul Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton (New
York: Duel, Sloan and Pearce, 1943), pp. 507—548.
11 For more detailed discussions of content analysis procedures and
techniques, see Bernard Berelson, Content Analysis in Commu¬
nication Research (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952): Ithiel de Sola
Pool, ed., Trends in Content Analysis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwest¬
ern University Press, 1963); George Gerbner, et al.. The Analysis
of Communication Content (New York: Wiley, 1969); and Ole
Holsti, Content Analysis for the Social Sciences and Humanities
(Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1969).
12 For example, see the account of Jan Morris, who lived until mid¬
life as James Morris, a well-known British journalist. After
undergoing surgery to clarify sex identity, the transformation in¬
volved in becoming a woman in a behavioral sense proved to be a
trying experience. Jan Morris, Conundrum (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1974).
13 Lenore Weitzman, et al., “Sex Role Socialization in Picture Books
for Pre-School Children, "American Journal of Sociology. 77 (May
1972), 1125.
14 Ibid., p. 1139.
15 Lonnie C. Carton, Daddies. Copyright © 1960. Reprinted by per¬
mission of Random House, Inc.
16 A recent unpublished study (1980) showed that a sample of over
fifty children's picture books sold in major book stores in a south¬
western city still contained many of the role models and portrayals
of the earlier study. Although women's groups have exerted pres¬
sure for changing children's reading materials, those efforts have
not been particularly successful.
17 Madeline Edmondson and David Rounds, The Soaps (New York:
Stein and Day, 1973).
 Indirect Effects of the Media 403 ■

18 Barry D. Caudill and G. Alan Marlatt, “Modeling Influences in So¬

cial Drinking: An Experimental Analog," Journal of Consulting
and Clinical Psychology. 43, No. 3, pp. 405—415.
19 Lowery, Soap and Booze in the Afternoon, p. 95.
20 Brigitte Goldstein, “The Television’s Portrayals of the Mentally Ill,”
M.A. thesis. University of New Mexico, 1980.
21 Michel Foucalt, Madness and Civilization (New York: Random
House, 1965), p. 11.
There is, of course, a large and dull literature that claims to have
overthrown empirical behavioral research. It condemns quantifica¬
tion and controlled observation as arid, naive, banal, and even re¬
actionary and immoral. .. . The important point here is that, if
knowledge of the world is a good thing to have, there is no other
way of acquiring it except by observing carefully with well-designed
controls.
Ithiel de Sola Pool, Ferment in the Field.
Journal of Communication, 1983

■ Ongoing Concerns in
Mass Communication
Research

Because research is the most reliable way we have of gathering

accurate information, scholars continue to use the scientific
method to investigate the elusive principles behind the opera¬
tion of the mass media and their effects. No research project has
ever been or ever will be perfect. Sometimes misleading data are
assembled; at other times conclusions are reached that later
prove to be incorrect; at still other times invalid theories are ac¬
cepted as true explanations of events. But the rules of scientific
inquiry include impressive safeguards that sooner or later result
in corrective scrutiny of data, rejection of false conclusions, and
elimination of incorrect theories. No other system for achieving
understanding and developing explanations incorporates such
protections.
One of the most important aspects of science and research is
their cumulative nature. Because of the research efforts of the
past, we know more about mass communication and the effects
of exposure to media content than we did even a decade ago.
There is much that is new in current research, but the paths
that are being followed are extensions of well-worn trails along
which researchers already have traveled a considerable distance.
In this chapter we provide selected examples of recent find¬
ings that have proved to be important or that have broken new
ground. Our purpose is twofold. The first is to gain a better ap¬
preciation of the nature of scientific research in the study of
mass communication. To achieve this end, we will examine
 Ongoing Concerns in Mass Communication Research 405 ■

cases in which conclusions and theories had to be re-evaluated.

The second purpose is to sketch briefly some of the continuing
directions of scientific investigation of mass communication.

I A Framework for
Studying Mass
Nearly forty years ago Harold Lasswell stated that communica¬
tion could conveniently be described by answering the following
question:
Communication
Who
says what
in what channel
to whom
with what effect?1

We can classify much of the research of the past four decades in

terms of this complex question, and in many ways it still cap¬
tures the primary concerns of contemporary research on mass
communication. To study the “who" in Lasswell’s question, re¬
searchers look at issues such as ownership trends in the news¬
paper industry, decision making in television programming, and
the division of labor in the film industry. The “what” factor is
the focus of content analysis. Studies of the agenda of topics
presented to the public, the amount of violence shown on tele¬
vision, children's advertising, and portrayals of women, minori¬
ties, and social problems all fall into this category. To study the
“channels” of communication, researchers compare the effec¬
tiveness of various media and examine the implications of new
channels such as cable television and satellites. Researchers also
study audiences, their composition, and the uses and gratifica¬
tions that various groups find in the content provided by the
media. Finally, we have seen that the effects of mass communi¬
cation on public opinion, shared beliefs, personality develop¬
ment, patterns of aggression, and so on remain the focus of
much research.

I Where Research
Findings Are
Each year literally hundreds of research reports on these and
other issues are published. Many appear in scientific journals
Reported that are concerned almost exclusively with research on com¬
munication, such as those listed in Table 11.1. Other outlets
include journals in sociology (for example, the American
Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, and
Social Forces) and psychology (including the American Journal
of Psychology, the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, and
the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology). In fact, jour¬
nals in many fields carry articles on media research. Examples
are the Public Opinion Quarterly and journals of education, lin¬
guistics, journalism, psychiatry, and political science. Still other
research is reported in books and monographs.
 ■ 406 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

Table 11.1 Professional Journals Devoted Mainly to

Research on Communication

Audio-Visual Language Journal

Central States Speech Journal
Communication
Communication Arts
Communication Education
Communication Monographs
Communication Quarterly
Communication Research
Co mmunications
Human Communication
Human Communications Reseatch
Journalism Monographs
Journalism Quarterly
Journal of Applied Communication Research
The Journal of Communication
New Mexico Communication Journal
Ohio Speech Journal
Pennsylvania Speech Annual
Public Telecommunication Review
Quarterly Journal of Speech
Southern Speech Communication Journal
Speech Activities
Studies in Public Communication

■
Western Speech Communication

Basic Aspects of This research, for all its diversity, has a common framework: the
Science principles and methods of science. There are many kinds and
levels of good scientific work, but they share a few very impor¬
tant attributes. And although science, unlike the proverbial
crooked poker game, is not the only game in town, these quali¬
ties justify our concentration on the scientific approach to un¬
derstanding mass communication.
The critical feature of science is that it is a special way of
looking at the world. Whether the subject is biology, physics,
psychology, chemistry, economics, or the study of mass com¬
munication, the underlying nature of science is the same. The
fact that scientists in one field or another wear white coats, per¬
form experiments in laboratories, or use instruments that hum
and bleep matters little.
 Ongoing Concerns in Mass Communication Research 407 ■

Science rests on two important foundations: first, a set of

shared assumptions about what is being studied; and second,
creative thinking of the most demanding kind. In addition, sci¬
ence has unforgiving rules of procedure that dictate what kind
of evidence can be accepted as a valid, reliable basis for reaching
a conclusion. When examined in this framework, science is easy
to understand and makes sense. To show how this is the case,
let’s look more closely at each of these ideas.

■ The Assumptions of Science. Scientists approach the task

of research by making a set of basic assumptions that are some¬
times called the “postulates” of the scientific method. These as¬
sumptions are actually rather simple beliefs about the nature of
whatever subject is under study. Making these assumptions is
essential for conducting scientific research. In fact, there would
be little point of doing so unless scientists shared these beliefs.
Briefly, we can summarize these postulates of science as follows:
1. The assumption oj order. Scientists assume that there is
some order in whatever is under study, that it has discoverable
patterns. They assume that their subject matter is sufficiently
regular in its behavior that its underlying patterns of order can
be discovered, named, and described. An important goal of sci¬
entific research is to identify those regularities, show with con¬
vincing evidence that they actually exist, and provide them with
a name to make it easy to conceptualize their nature. Examples
from mass communication include activation (Chapter 8), the
two-step Jlow of communication (Chapter 8), the process oj
adoption (Chapter 9), gatekeeping (Chapter 9), and agenda set¬
ting (Chapter 9). Thus, science assumes order and sets out to
find it, demonstrate it with evidence, and give it a label. The
rules of research methodology dictate what evidence, gathered
under what circumstances, and evaluated by what criteria can
be accepted as valid evidence that such order exists.
2. The assumption of cause and effect. Scientists are skep¬
tical of the idea that events just happen in random ways. They
assume not only that what they are studying behaves in orderly
ways but that there are causal relationships underlying that or¬
der. Perhaps the most important goal of any science is explain¬
ing what causes what. It is for this reason that scientists are so
concerned with theories. Theories are summary descriptions of
what independent events, factors, situations, or conditions
bring about some particular outcome. In other words, theories
explain cause-effect relationships. Examples from mass com¬
munication research are modeling theory and meaning theory
(Chapter 10), which have been formulated to explain how behav¬
ior is shaped by exposure to media content.
3. The assumption of tentative truth. Infallibility is not one
of the characteristics of science: researchers and theory builders
 ■ 408 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

sometimes make mistakes. Thus, at least some of today’s scien¬

tific truths may become tomorrow’s obsolete explanations. Even
if a theory has been widely accepted and seems well supported
by convincing data, scientists remain just a bit skeptical. They
never believe that their theories provide final answers and ulti¬
mate truths. New data are constantly sought to test the merits
of theories. All sciences are littered with abandoned theories,
and the study of mass communication provides no exception.
The fate of the magic bullet theory (Chapter 8) provides a good
example.

■ The Advantages of Science. No alternative methods for gath¬

ering trustworthy knowledge have advantages over science.
Some alternatives are easier. Others are more fun. But science
is the only procedure we have for gathering valid and reliable
knowledge that systematically polices itself and tries hard to dis¬
prove its own claims by using both logic and controlled obser¬
vation. Moreover, science insists on accumulation—on following
up, testing, and retesting leads. It is characterized too by inno¬
vation—by the exploration of new ideas and possible explana¬
tions. Thus science is the cutting edge of understanding,
moving forward, correcting its own mistakes, but usually follow¬
ing directions guided by the past.
As a result of accumulated research, we clearly know a great
deal more about mass communication than we did a half-
century ago, when the scientific study of mass communication
had just begun. It is impossible in one chapter to summarize all
the noteworthy studies that have contributed to that accumula¬
tion. Therefore we restrict this discussion to examples from the
last decade that either are particularly significant or illustrate
important points. To organize this overview, we rely on the cat¬
egories Lasswell set out, beginning with questions about the
communicators themselves.

“Who”: Those who control and operate the media play the key role in de¬
Studying termining their content. In doing so they are constantly aware
Communicators that they are manufacturing a product designed to capture and
hold the attention of audiences. Thus, the “who” in Lasswell's
question is made up of those professional communicators who
lead the continuing struggle for readers, listeners, and viewers
from whom income can be obtained.
In their search for maximum attention, communicators op¬
erate within powerful constraints. These include the limits on
the economic resources of their company or corporation, the po¬
tential profit for a particular form of content, and the creative
talent that they can command, as well as boundaries set by pub-
 Ongoing Concerns in Mass Communication Research 409 ■

lie values and tastes, legal restrictions, journalistic or artistic

traditions, and the bureaucratic structures within which they
work. All these limitations have provided fertile ground for re¬
search and analysis for many years.2 One of the most important
recent studies of these constraints is David L. Altheide's detailed
analysis of the factors that affect the selection and dissemina¬
tion of news on television.3
Altheide's work builds on approaches of the great pioneer,
Walter Lippmann. Lippmann studied the news reports of World
War I and found that they were likely to produce very distorted
“pictures in our heads" of the realities of the war in the “world
outside."4 For three years Altheide studied the day-to-day selec¬
tion, editing, and presentation of the news. After lengthy studies
of the newsrooms of three local television stations that were net¬
work affiliates, he made more limited observations in other sta¬
tions. Later he also studied central managers in the news¬
making industry. He followed carefully the way in which several
major stories were handled, including a presidential campaign,
a war, and a major political scandal. He used in-depth discus¬
sions and interviews plus many hours of detailed daily
observation.
Altheide's research findings reveal in the day-to-day world of
TV news concepts and generalizations that we have set forth in
a more abstract way in previous chapters. His findings were
complex, but essentially they reveal the details of what he calls
the news perspective. The news perspective, according to Alt¬
heide, is a set of systematic constraints that distort the news.
Among the significant contributors to these distortions are (1)
commercialism. (2) ratings, (3) bureaucracy, (4) lack of real
news, (5) journalists' views of the audience as essentially stupid,
and (6) competition with other media.
Commercialism implies that television news, like any other
content in the media, must make a profit. Time for commercial
announcements during a news program is sold in the same way
as space in a newspaper. The price per minute depends on the
number of eyes and ears that the news can attract to the spon¬
sors' advertisements.
The ratings measure the number of eyes and ears and the
types of heads to which they are attached. If a news program is
not attracting enough potential buyers of a particular type—
such as women between eighteen and forty-nine for a manufac¬
turer of cosmetics—then the sponsor will look for other pro¬
grams on which to advertise. A drop in ratings is a signal to the
newspeople that the audience does not like their version of the
news: it threatens their jobs, the organization's profits, manage¬
ment’s success, and the owners' satisfaction. Thus the fate of
the communicator rests with the audience.
■ 410 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

All this implies that the audiences for television news do not
receive an accurate picture of what is happ'ening. Instead, they
receive entertaining accounts of what news personnel hope will
capture and hold their interest. Beating the competition in the
numbers game is the most important definition of doing a good
job. Thus “good news” is equivalent to “good numbers” from the
rating services. The numbers are what interest management;
the numbers define success or failure. This principle was
summed up shortly after the turn of the century by Will Irwin,
writing about the newspapers of the time: “We will give the pub¬
lic what it wants. ... If we find that people prefer murders, then
murders they shall have.”5
Other factors also introduce bias into the local news. For ex¬
ample, news reports reflect the bureaucratic nature of the organ¬
ization that produces them. Even the most interesting stories
must be produced in a limited time, according to a fixed sched¬
ule, and at the least cost. Thus news stories—like refrigerators,
blue jeans, and canned soup—have production cost limitations.
These constraints limit the activities of all newspeople, from
camera operators to on-the-scene-reporters to top management.
The result is a reduction in the fidelity of news accounts
through the process of gatekeeping.
Yet another distortion comes from the fact that on many days
nothing particularly interesting is going on. It is difficult to cap¬
ture and hold the attention of an audience when nothing of real
significance has happened. One skill that can make the differ¬
ence between competing newsrooms is the art of making some¬
thing out of nothing—producing pseudo-events. As Altheide
reported, “From this perspective, any event is newsworthy if it is
treated properly. During my research I have seen stories about
defecating dogs, fifteen cent robberies, treed cats, and pie-eating
contests.”6 Clever newspeople can provide an interesting treat¬
ment of almost anything.
Overall, Altheide’s central finding was that “events become
news when transformed by the news perspective, and not be¬
cause of their objective characteristics.”7 His work probes and
reveals the host of factors that shape this set of constraints.
Some of these constraints affect national as well as local news
programs, but there are differences. The competition is intense,
the talent is far greater, and the resources are far more abun¬
dant. Still, numerous biases creep in. Events are wrenched from
theii context in order to make an interesting story. Themes are
imposed in subtle ways that transform people and events by fo¬
cusing on only part of the situation.
Communication researcher Todd Gitlin adds to this analysis
in a new theoiy of news coverage. He argues that news making
is a form of social management, that the media are driven by
 Ongoing Concerns in Mass Communication Research 411 ■

commercial interests, and that they jockey for position, espe¬

cially during political crises. The result, he says, is high-level po¬
litical intervention in the news. Gitlin adds that even though the
media sometimes seem critical of American business, they must
“take care not to violate the most central premises of the busi¬
ness system as a whole: they must sanction the right of private
control over investment and production, just as they sanctify
their own right to control the space within which public com¬
munication takes place.”8 Gitlin's research points up the eco¬
nomic basis of much media decision making, not only with
regard to news, but for entertainment programming as well. In
essence, the old notion that “money talks" is alive and well in
the American media and guides decisions about what gets
covered.
Altheide’s and Gitlin’s research, like the pioneering insights
of Walter Lippmann more than fifty years ago, raises important
questions about whether we can rely on advertising-dependent
media in a democratic society. It presents a serious challenge to
those who maintain that we have a free press. When the news
must be shaped and presented for the purpose of focusing atten¬
tion on messages that sell deodorants and beer, it is difficult to
claim that citizens are receiving accurate and objective accounts
of events.

Says “What”: Contemporary efforts to analyze the content of the media have
looked at almost every conceivable topic and theme. Studies con¬
Assessing tinue to be conducted on how males and females are portrayed,
Content what images of minorities are presented, the relative emphasis
of political issues, the amount of violence, the use of drugs and
alcohol, the content of advertising directed at children, and doz¬
ens of other topics. All these efforts are valuable. Indeed, any
question concerning the media's influence on individuals, soci¬
ety, or culture must begin with studies of content. Today, when
people often express anxiety about the influence of the media s
portrayals of violence and sex, it is not surprising that many
studies have analyzed the presence of these themes in media
content.
Some observers say that these themes occur in media content
as a result of societal influence on the media—specifically pres¬
sure from their audiences. That is, to survive financially the me¬
dia must give the public what it wants. Others claim that the
influence goes the other way—that the media shove crime, sex.
and violence on the public, and this creates the public's tastes
for these themes. Thus, we have the old “chicken or egg" prob¬
lem. Which came first, media emphasis on such themes, or pub¬
lic taste for such content? It is one of the oldest problems raised
by media researchers.9
 ■ 412 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

Box 11

And Now,
a Word
From Our
Sponsor...

When we consider the content of a particular sors would cancel the broadcast; that kind of
television program, we may also consider who pressure, they said, was insignificant when
promotes that content and how that content compared with the social importance of the
has managed to reach us in the first place. We film.
can learn something about ourselves as indi¬ In the early days of television, a sponsor’s
viduals and as a society by studying how we opinion could make or break a show. Names
respond to what we watch on television; can such as Texaco Star Theater, Camel News
we also learn something about ourselves by Caravan, and Kraft Television Playhouse
knowing how a program may or may not reach only hint at the power that advertisers had
the air? over producers, networks, and stations. For
When ABC broadcast the TV film The Day example, Camel News Caravan—an early-
After on November 20, 1983, it won an esti¬ evening news show sponsored by Camel ciga¬
mated 100 million viewers—nearly half the rettes—was careful never to show any public
United States population. ABC barely made figure smoking a cigar (except for Winston
money on the project Why? Because The Day Churchill, who was considered too popular to
After, which showed in horrific detail the ef¬ come under this ruling), and filmed its stories
fects of nuclear war on a small town in Kan¬ without ever depicting a “No Smoking” sign.
sas, was a politically controversial movie, and Camel cigarettes also sponsored a detective
few major sponsors of prime-time TV shows show called Man Against Crime, in which only
wanted to back it Five weeks before the movie the good guys were allowed to smoke (and
aired, ABC had sold only half of its twenty-five they had to do it “gracefully”).
commercial spots, and by November 20 it had These might seem like minor intrusions,
dropped its asking price from $135,000 to but sponsors’ feelings were critical in the
$100,000 per spot But the network’s execu¬ days of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti¬
tives never suggested that the lack of spon¬ communist witchhunt The Ford Motor
 Ongoing Concerns in Mass Communication Research 413 ■

Company, which sponsored Ed Sullivan’s directors to the “security divisions” of adver¬

Talk of the Town variety show, backed Sulli¬ tising agencies, who then blacklisted those
van when he was pressured to let go a dancer they considered “inappropriate.”
for alleged Communist sympathies. But Ford We have seen that sponsors may pressure
was inundated with letters from angry viewers networks to present to the public a certain im¬
and was forced to ask Sullivan to check with a age of the public itself The networks may or
prominent blacklister before signing up acts. may not comply. How do you think content of
Continuing pressure caused the networks to television—and its control—affects us?
submit lists of proposed writers, actors, and (photo: Pictorial Parade.)

Under certain conditions careful studies of media content can

provide useful information regarding such complex questions.
For example, in the late 1970s, citizen groups such as the Par¬
ent and Teachers Association pressured the TV networks to re¬
duce the level of violence on television. The networks made an
effort to comply, and in some cases they did reduce the use of
themes of violence in their shows. Content analyses of televised
violence picked up this trend. Then critics began to suspect that
the networks had increased the sexual content of the shows in
order to hold the attention of viewers. This opened up a whole
new set of potential problems. What impact would the increased
sexual content have on young people and sexual norms? Con¬
tent analyses alone cannot answer this question, but several re¬
searchers conducted content analyses to assess whether the
networks were actually doing what they had been charged with.
A brief review of some of these studies illustrates not only the
use of content analysis to study the "what’ in Lasswell s frame¬
work but also the self-corrective features of science.

| Sex on Television The self-policing nature of science can be seen in a series of

studies on the sexual content of network TV that began in the
fall of 1975. To assess the quantity and quality of sex portrayed
on television, Susan Franzblau and her associates systematically
analyzed sixty-one programs from all three networks shown be¬
tween 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. during early October.10 They used care¬
ful and precise procedures to isolate, describe, and classify every
kind of sexual or intimate action on the program. Table 11.2
summarizes their findings.
Franzblau and her colleagues found a great deal of kissing,
embracing, and touching, but—not surprisingly—no overt por¬
trayals of sexual intercourse. Such controversial acts as rape
and homosexual conduct were only referred to, not shown. An¬
other finding was more surprising. The amount of nonaggres-
sive touching, innuendo, and physically intimate behavior was
 ■ 414 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

Table 11.2 Types of Sexual Behavior Portrayed on Prime¬

time Television

FREQUENCY INTENSITY
BEHAVIOR PER HOUR CASUAL INTENSE

Kissing 3.74 3.70 0.04

Embracing 2.68 2.64 0.04
Heterosexual
intercourse 0.04 0.04 0.00
Homosexual
behavior 0.00 0.00 0.00
Rape and other sex
crimes 0.28 0.25 0.03
Touching—
aggressive 5.48 1.64 3.84
Touching—
nonaggressive 68.11 67.62 0.49
Flirting and
seductiveness 1.38 1.38 0.00
Innuendo (with
canned laughter) 0.27 0.27 0.00
Innuendo(no
canned laughter) 0.41 0.41 0.00
Total innuendos 0.68 0.68 0.00
Atypical sex roles 0.76 0.76 0.00
Partner seeking 1.04 1.04 0.00

Source: Reprinted from Susan Franzblau, Joyce N. Sprafkin, and Eli

Rubinstein, “Sex on TV: A Content Analysis,” Journal of Communi¬
cation, Spring 1977, (Volume 27, Number 2), p. 166. © 1977. Re-
printed by permission.

greater during the two-hour family viewing time—from 8 to 10

p.m. than later in the evening. By Franzblau's measures, situa¬
tion comedies and variety shows were the sexiest programs. In
comparison, crime-adventure shows, which are usually shown
later in the evening, had little sexual content. Thus the times
when children are most likely to be watching and the kinds of
programs that are most popular among families had more sexual
content than programs later in the evening, which are viewed
more by adults.
 Ongoing Concerns in Mass Communication Research 415 ■

B The portrayal of sex on television during the 1950s and 1960s

was so low-key that almost everything had to be left to the viewer’s
imagination. Note the pyjamas and separate beds in the above por¬
trayal of a husband and wife in a popular family situation comedy.
While programs today do not show explicit sex scenes, there has
been a substantial increase in the portrayal of intimate activities
and bare skin. Much less is left to the imagination. Cable TV often
goes much further on some of its channels. (Courtesy of Calvada
Productions.)

The following year Carlos F. Fernandez-Collado and three as¬

sociates studied seventy-seven programs broadcast during the
1976—1977 season, including Saturday morning as well as
prime-time programs.11 In addition these researchers polled
fourth-, sixth-, and eighth-graders to see which programs they
viewed regularly. These researchers counted as “intimate sexual
behavior" any “explicit, insinuated or endorsed act of sexual in¬
tercourse."12 As a result, they came up with different findings.
Compared with the Franzblau study, they found a much greater
amount of sex portrayed on television. But like Franzblau they
found that sexual content was most frequent during family view-
 ■ 416 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

ing time. They also found that portrayals of the use of tobacco,
alcohol, and illegal drugs were most frequent during the early
evening. Saturday morning shows, in contrast, showed little
sex, alcohol, tobacco, or dope.
An excellent illustration of the self-policing feature of science
is the fact that the differences in the findings of the Franzblau
and the Fernandez-Collado studies prompted yet a third inves¬
tigation. A research team led by L. Theresa Silverman analyzed
a sample of sixty-four programs appearing between 8 p.m. and
11 p.m. during October 1977.13 These researchers had carefully
reviewed the previous two studies and noted that unlike the
Franzblau study, the Fernandez-Collado 1976 sample “con¬
tained at least 100 portrayals of or references to controversial
sexual topics, specifically ‘sexual intercourse, any type of illegal
sexual behavior, or homosexuality. . . .’ Unfortunately, [Fernan¬
dez-Collado] failed to differentiate physical, verbal, and contex¬
tually implied presentations, leaving in question the level of
explicitness of the references included in their tabulation.”14
Noting this deficiency, Silverman’s research team set out to
gain a more comprehensive picture of how physical intimacy
and sexuality were portrayed during one season. Their findings
did not parallel the Fernandez-Collado study. There was not as
much sex portrayed in the programs they analyzed, but flirta¬
tious behavior, sexual innuendo, and implied intercourse had
increased substantially since the Franzblau study. They con¬
cluded: 1 here is still no explicit sex shown on prime-time
[broadcast] TV. However, there does appear to be an increasing
tendency to ‘tease’ the audience behaviorally (through flirting),
verbally (through innuendo), and visually (through contextually
implied intercourse).”13 Thus in this study the researchers
probed more deeply and corrected what the researchers thought
to be an error in the second study.
These three studies illustrate very well the innovative, self¬
policing, and accumulative nature of science. But notice that in
themselves they do not answer our initial question; that is, they
do not tell us whether social pressures on communicators con¬
trolling the media led to an increase in sexual content. Neither
can these studies tell us what influence, if any, the content had
on individuals or society. An important limitation of many con¬
tent analyses is that their purposes and implications are not
clear. Do these studies assume that this content has influence
through modeling? Or do they assume that the content influ¬
ences meanings in the social construction of reality? By itself,
content analyses tells us nothing about the effects of that con¬
tent on audience members. Nevertheless, this series of studies
illustrates veiy well how researchers monitor and challenge one
another’s findings—ultimately leading to more reliable infor¬
mation.
 Ongoing Concerns in Mass Communication Research 417 ■

I Violence on
Television
Another focus of “what” is said concerns the portrayal of vio¬
lence. The presence of violence—in reality and in the media—
has long been a source of concern and controversy. Especially in
the 1960s, there was widespread anxiety about political assas¬
sinations, unrest among youth, destructive urban riots, and
sharply rising crime rates. In response President Lyndon John¬
son appointed the National Commission on the Causes and Pre¬
vention of Violence. It was a significant event in the history of
mass communication.
The influence of the mass media on violence was one concern
of the commission. Several researchers were asked to provide
analyses on the broad topic of violence and the media. Their re¬
port was over six hundred pages of findings on almost every as¬
pect of the topic.16 One chapter provided an important overview
of how much violence was shown on network television.
Using content analyses completed by George Gerbner and his
associates, this report focused on all prime-time television pro¬
grams plus Saturday morning cartoons shown during a typical
week in 1967 and a comparable week in 1968. Gerbner and his
investigators carefully defined what they meant by violence and
made detailed tallies of the frequencies with which many kinds
of acts were portrayed. They kept track of what kinds of people
were shown as violent and toward whom. They recorded numer¬
ous details concerning the victims, consequences, means,
times, places, and public responses to violence depicted on tele¬
vision. They concluded that the portrayal of violence on televi¬
sion was very pervasive and that the public believed it to be
excessive.
Out of this project grew an ongoing effort to monitor televi¬
sion’s portrayal of violence. Each year since 1969 the Violence
Profile has provided several measures of the prevalence, rate,
and role of violence in prime-time television dramas. From these
observations a quantitative violence index is prepared. For any
year comparisons can be made between different hours of view¬
ing, between different networks, between children s and adults
programs, and so on.17 The profile and the index provide data
that reveal how the networks are depicting violence. These con¬
tent analyses have been of considerable interest to those who

I
fear that television stimulates aggressive or violent behavior, es¬
pecially among children.

Whatever the content of a message, what is the effect of the me¬

Over What
dium itself in communicating it and influencing the audience?
“Channel”: Is one medium more effective than others in communicating
Studying the particular kinds of content or exerting certain influences? These
Medium questions are especially important to educators, propagandists,
and advertisers. For example, if we want to impart the greatest
possible amount of factual information, is it more effective to
 ■ 418 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

present the message through a lecture, print, film, or a tape? If

we wish to change attitudes, is it better to use television,
posters, radio, or some other medium? Is one medium more ef¬
fective than others for a certain type of audience?
Concern with these issues predates the emergence of some of
our mass media. During World War I, for example, various kinds
of filmstrips, graphics, and even silent films were studied as aids
for teaching recruits such things as how to avoid venereal dis¬
ease, how to care for a rifle, and what to do to ensure proper foot
hygiene.18 As new media became available, various kinds of pre¬
sentations with different media were explored in campaigns to
promote better nutrition, stop forest fires, encourage chest
x-rays, reduce prejudice, improve dental hygiene, and raise
funds. In developing countries, studies comparing the effective¬
ness of different media in persuading people to adopt new ways
have been popular. Advertisers have studied the effectiveness of
various media in promoting sales. In other words, many kinds
of people with numerous goals have tried many ways to deter¬
mine the effectiveness of different media.19

Effectiveness in One of the perennial questions that concerns educators is how

Teaching to capture the interest of children in topics that do not hold
much interest for them but that will be important to them in
later life. Most of us can remember some personal counterpart of
the proverbial violin lessons forced upon a child who would
rather be playing baseball. Today one pressing problem of edu¬
cators is to develop positive attitudes toward science among the
children of a society that will desperately need scientists in the
years ahead. One way would be to use television to help form
positive attitudes toward careers in science, but there are prob¬
lems in achieving this goal.
Typically, children develop a stereotype of the scientist that is
not particularly attractive. Communication researchers working
for the Children’s Television Workshop, of the Public Broadcast
ing System, studied over four thousand youngsters between
eight and twelve years old in a nationwide survey. They found
that at least for children in this age group, . . . scientists were
still being visualized as middle-aged white males in lab coats
pouring chemicals from one beaker into another in some lonely
setting. The vocation was seen as intellectually difficult, physi¬
cally dangerous, and requiring long years of training.”29 On the
other hand, the children respected scientists for their knowl¬
edge and expertise. They knew that scientists invented new
things and made life better for eveiyone with their discoveries.
Thus, the stereotype was not entirely negative—but being a sci¬
entist wasn’t seen as an attractive goal.
 Ongoing Concerns in Mass Communication Research 419 ■

■ Television has
been used for nu¬
merous prosocial
purposes, such as
creating an interest
in science as a pos¬
sible career for
youthful audiences.
“3-2-1 Contact the
Bloodhound Gang”
(here) uses logic and
observation, and
sometimes even a
pig, to bring wrong¬
doers to justice
while showing at¬
tractive aspects of
science. (© Chil¬
dren’s Television
Workshop. Used by per¬
mission of Children’s
Television Workshop.)

To make science and scientific careers seem more attractive,

the policy makers in public television decided that a new televi¬
sion series was needed that could improve the attitudes of chil¬
dren toward science and toward the role of scientists. To start
with, the researchers did a series of further studies on what
kinds of scientific topics would hold the interest of youngsters
as the subject matter of a series on public television. This was
really a tough problem, because the children would not be a cap¬
tive audience. Whatever television programs were shown would
have to compete with whatever was on television at the time.
Often this meant cartoons or “Charlie’s Angels’ and I he Hardy
Boys." The goal, then, was to use the research findings as a ba-
 ■ 420 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

sis for designing a popular and exciting series on science that

would compete vigorously with the alternatives as children select
their own TV content.
The research group conducted more than fifty studies involv¬
ing upwards of ten thousand children across the country. Most
of these studies were designed to test reactions to different types
of subject matter and production techniques so as to use the
medium to its maximum advantage.
The result was a television series called “3-2-1 Contact” that
was produced by the Children’s Television Workshop (creators of
“Sesame Street” and the “Electric Company”). The 105 shows
were aired daily over 250 public television stations. Since the
first season in 1981, the series has been repeated five times. It
proved to be very popular indeed with the target audience. Some
23 million viewers tuned in the first thirteen-week season. Total
tune-ins for all the series shown now exceed 91 million, the ma¬
jority in households with children.21
The researchers and producers achieved this remarkable re¬
sult by taking full advantage of television’s appealing features.
Each episode had exciting scenes of science and technology_for
example, the eruption of Mount St. Helens, an archeological dig
in Montana, a huge supertanker, and a solar-powered hogan
(house) on a Navajo reservation. Included in the program were
mini-mysteries that were solved by “The Bloodhound Gang,” a
group of attractive youngsters. Many of the scientists shown
were young and attractive. The lessons in science were included
in scenes that the children could understand. For example, aero¬
dynamics was studied in the context of flying lessons; gravity on
a roller coaster; sound waves via the signals dolphins use; and
gyro-stability in a frisbie. Although the 3-2-1 studies did little
to uncover basic concepts, principles, and theories, they are an
outstanding example of research aimed at solving a practical
problem.

I Ways of Learning Rather than asking how a medium can be made effective for
teaching or some other goal, researchers at Project Zero have
compared how and what children learn when different media are
used. In one study reported by psychologist Howard Gardner,
the Project Zero investigators prepared a story called The Three
Robbers. It was about three violent bandits who reformed after
getting to know a charming young orphan girl.22 Then the inves¬
tigators read the story in picture-book form to one group of chil¬
dren, who looked at the accompanying pictures. Another group
saw a television version of the story. Great care was taken to
make the two versions as similar as possible.
Several intriguing differences between the two groups were
found. The “book children” were able to recall more of the story
 Ongoing Concerns in Mass Communication Research 421 ■

■ Research compar¬
ing the effectiveness
of different media as
sources for learning,
comprehension, and
opinion or attitude
change remains im¬
portant Results in¬
dicate that the same
material presented
by television versus
print media may
have quite different
effects on children.
Final answers as to
which is best for a
particular situation
are not yet clear.
(© Michael Heron
1980/Woodfin Camp
& Associates.)

&/f

on their own and in response to cues. They were able to quote

many of the phrases from the story quite accurately. When they
were asked to draw inferences from the story, the book children
tended to draw on their own experiences. In contrast, the chil¬
dren who saw the story on television were more likely to para¬
phrase the story rather than quote it accurately. They were
less able to go beyond the content and relate it to their own
experiences.
Gardner related these results to basic differences between
books and television. Television provides the visual experience of
moving pictures, but watching and listening to television is a
passive experience compared with reading, which demands that
 ■ 422 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

the reader exercise his or her imagination. Although it is too

early to tell the significance of this line of research, it suggests
that television and books have quite different effects on chil¬
dren’s thinking. This does not mean that one or the other is
“better ”; they simply stimulate different experiences. Ultimately,
this type of basic research may reveal ways in which children
who watch a great deal of television but read few books develop
characteristic patterns of imagination and reasoning.23

To “Whom”: Research on the exposure of various categories of people to the

Studying media falls into two subtypes. The first merely analyzes audience
Audiences composition. Its goal is to determine what kind of people attend
to what medium to what extent. In other words, it assesses pat¬
terns of attention. This research can reveal trends, shifts from
one medium to another, the kinds of people who attend to a me¬
dium at different times, and the type of content most suitable
for a given television hour. To advertisers, and television pro¬
grammers, this research is an essential tool. The second type of
research on audiences is more complex and is called uses and
gratifications research. Here the goal is to discover the reasons
behind patterns of attention. Why do people turn to particular
media or particular kinds of content? In this type of study re¬
searchers use numerous theories to try to explain what satisfac¬
tions people obtain from their viewing. Both audience analysis
and gratification research are very popular today.

I Patterns of
Attention
Over the last quarter-century several major research projects
have examined trends in attention to television among different
age groups and other categories. George Comstock and his as¬
sociates made a major analysis in the late 1970s.24 Generally, be¬
fore 1955 only a handful of people in the United States could
afford television sets. As sets became cheaper and more
broadcasting hours were available, viewing increased sharply. It
has been remarkably stable over the last decade (see Table 11.3).
For many years adults viewed somewhere between two and three
hours a day, depending on their social category. Children reach
a daily viewing peak somewhere around age twelve and then
drop toward adult patterns (see Figure 11.1).
Robert Leibert and Neal Schwartzberg provided an excellent
summary of the composition of the medium’s audiences. Re¬
cently, adults appear to have increased their viewing somewhat
to just over three hours a day (up from two and a half hours
daily during the early 1960s). Research has not clarified the rea¬
sons for this increase, but the rapid spread of color, increased
attention to sports, the proliferation of evening soap operas
(“Dallas," “Dynasty,” and so on), the growth of cable TV, and the
increasing availability of portable sets have all played a part.
Ongoing Concerns in Mass Communication Research 423 ■
 ■ 424 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

railroads
Senate

■ Newspaper reading is far more frequent among adults than

among adolescents or children. It reaches its peak among mature
Res ^ h dIeCll)neS sharPly among the veiy old. (© Barbara Rios/Photo

Generally, television viewing is a deeply established habit

among American families, and it remains relatively stable from
one year to the next. People in their forties watch television the
least whereas those over sixty-five tend to be heavy viewers.
Children of families low in socioeconomic level view more than
those higher up. From these figures it is tempting to jump to the
conclusion that television appeals most to poor twelve-year-olds
and senior citizens with nothing more exciting to do. But this
generalization is not warranted because all age groups and so¬
cial categories are involved—some more heavily than others. We
must also be cautious in interpreting the averages because they
can be deceptive: About a third of children under six years old
watch television for four or more hours a day, even though the
average is two and a half. A quarter of the sixth- and tenth-grad¬
ers watch over five hours daily, even on school days. In fact.
 Ongoing Concerns in Mass Communication Research 425 ■

about one-fourth of sixth-graders are still watching at 11:30 on

school nights!
The use of print follows a rather predictable pattern. News¬
paper reading and attention to public affairs and political topics
in other print media are low among young people. Children read
less than adults: young adults read less than older adults. After
retirement, reading reaches a peak, but it falls off sharply
among the very old.
Generally, research reveals differences in attention to the me¬
dia between almost every kind of social group—between males
and females, blacks and whites, the old and the young, the rich
and the poor, the educated and the untutored. Differing pat¬
terns of attention are found even among those of different reli¬
gions, ethnic groups, and regions.
In spite of all these variations, however, one conclusion is ob¬
vious: Americans of all circumstances and backgrounds spend
many hours a week with their media, especially television. Sur¬
prisingly, even older Native American women in the pueblos of
the Rio Grande valley, whose command of English is often very
limited and who still follow their traditional culture patterns, av¬
idly watch television soap operas. Neighbors who are versed in
the ways of whites provide interpretations and explanations.
This observation indicates that social categories are not the only
influence on patterns of media attention. Social relationships
also affect these patterns. The tastes, social skills, preferences,
and habits of peers, parents, and associates all play a part in
determining an individual's patterns of attention to mass
communication.
But what does all this mean? The figures on media attention
are impressive. We can easily show that so many millions of peo¬
ple watch “Dallas” or something else. But massive attention does
not necessarily mean massive influence. Making this connection
is a common logical fallacy, and it continues to be made regu¬
larly—even by researchers.

Uses and What psychological rewards do people receive from reading,

Gratifications hearing, or viewing specific content? Investigations of this ques¬
tion began many years ago.25 Contemporary research indicates
that people seek various forms of media content for many
reasons.
One way to categorize audience gratifications is to contrast
people's need for fantasy-escape with their need for informa¬
tional-educational content. More complex classifications sort
out categories such as (1) the need to acquire desired informa¬
tion (for example, where is a given product on sale?): (2) catering
 ■ 426 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

to an established media habit (watching the news every night);

(3) using a medium for relaxation or excitement (watching a fa¬
vorite team battle a rival); (4) escaping boredom (going to a
movie to avoid a dull evening at home); and (5) companionship
(having a radio or television in the background when one is
alone).26 An excellent review of this research was given in a spe¬
cial issue of Communications Research that examined the evo¬
lution of uses and gratifications research, the theories at stake,
problems of measurement, and current controversies.27
In spite of the difficulties involved, uses and gratifications re¬
search continues to be pursued with vigor. It seeks to under¬
stand the psychological variables at work that shape what people
attend to and why. Usually, gratifications research tries to relate
patterns of attention to specific forms of mass communication
to some set of expressed needs, wants, wishes, or preferences in
content that provides some form of satisfaction.28
The idea has a great deal of intuitive appeal. It would be nice,
and very practical, to understand the underlying psychological
factors—needs, motivations, gratifications, and so on—that im¬
pel people actively to sort through available media content, reject
some, and attend closely to others in order to obtain subjective
satisfactions. What a boon this knowledge would be to at least
some people. Market researchers wanting to sell beer and balo¬
ney would love it. Political campaign managers wanting to sell
their candidates would, as the saying goes, trade their eye teeth
tor such information. Religious leaders would no doubt find it a
blessing. For all such users of the media, this knowledge would
provide the ‘magic keys” needed to manipulate those whose be¬
havior they want to change.
For many people, deliberate manipulation of an unsuspecting
public seems morally unacceptable. It is not difficult to imagine
a rather scary world, if proven and effective formulas were avail¬
able to anyone who wanted to use the media in this manner_to
capture and hold attention to persuasive messages that influ¬
ence people to buy, vote, donate, and think in ways the com¬
municators want. (Perhaps it is already too late; such a world
may be here already!)
Whether these concerns are real or overdrawn, the issue does
point to a feature of science that we have not reviewed. There is
a moral side to evaluating the achievements of science that
thoughtful people cannot ignore. Sometimes systematic inquiry
results in knowledge that at least some people may regret that
we have. Examples are legion; they range from nuclear energy
and nuclear weapons to pesticides, chemical additives to food,
and genetic engineering. Thus far, communication scientists
have not become entangled in such profound debates over the
uses of their findings, but the possibility is clearly there.
 Ongoing Concerns in Mass Communication Research 427 ■

With What The issue of the effects of mass communications is, as we noted
“Effect”: in Chapter 1, the bottom line for most people who ask questions
about the media. While researchers probe many aspects of the
Measuring “who says what” framework to try to understand mass commu¬
Influences on nication, the public wants to know if the media are creating any
People harm. This concern has led to a disproportionate amount of re¬
search attention to two topics over the last decades—the influ¬
ence of portrayals of sex and violence. In fact, public concern
over these two issues led the federal government to take steps to
do something about them.
In a society where media are protected by the First Amend¬
ment, the government cannot “do something” directly about me¬
dia presentations to which some people object. It has to act
indirectly, and this is exactly what it did. Two separate national
commissions were appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
One, the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, reviewed
available controversies and concerns over pornography: the
other, the Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Vio¬
lence, concerned itself with violence. In each case, the media
were a central focus of attention. Both commissions did their
major work during the late 1960s, publishing their reports as
the 1970s began.
A presidential commission is a group of distinguished citi¬
zens chosen to represent various points of view. The group is
given financial support and a staff to do the detailed work. The
commission brings an issue into focus, assembles available evi¬
dence, and prepares a report to the president (and the nation)
on its findings. The accumulated research of scholars and sci¬
entists makes up the most important source such commissions
have. Sometimes commissions provide funds for researchers
and scholars to conduct new studies. Thus, presidential com¬
missions not only summarize what is known about a topic but
also stimulate new research. They also raise the issue to a high
point in public consciousness and concern. This, in turn, leads
the research community to continue to study the topic long after
the original work of the commission has been concluded. In this
section we review the major findings of two presidentially ap¬
pointed commissions, and discuss recent follow-up studies on
the same topics to show the lasting influence of such efforts.

I Sexual Portrayals
and Behavioral
The Commission on Obscenity and Pornography focused on the
question as to whether the explicit portrayal of sexual acts in
Consequences print, film, or broadcasting leads to antisocial behavior by those
exposed to it. It reviewed all available research, conducted stud¬
ies, and heard the views of all segments of society on the issue.
Many people believed, then and now, that seeing erotic portray¬
als excites people sexually, and that such stimulation leads some
 ■ 428 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

people to socially disapproved, overt sexual^ activity. A first ques¬

tion, therefore, is whether watching erotic portrayals is indeed
sexually stimulating.
A study of undergraduate students showed that both males
and females were sexually aroused by pornographic films. Eighty
percent of the males who viewed the films reported partial or full
erections, and 85 percent of the females experienced genital sen¬
sations.29 But a satiation effect was also found. That is, college-
age males who repeatedly viewed pornographic material reported
that repeated exposure diminished their sexual excitement.30
Additional research showed that interpersonal sexual activity
often followed exposure to explicit portrayals (for example, the
probability of intercourse among married couples increased).
The frequency of masturbation (for both males and females) also
generally increased.31
The most significant finding in this commission’s extensive
report, however, was that pornographic portrayals play little part
in the generation of deviant or antisocial sexual behavior. Pedo¬
philes (people aroused by children) and homosexuals were less
likely than sexually conventional people to have seen porno¬
graphic materials as adolescents. Rapists in prisons reported
seeing pornographic depictions later in life than a comparison
group of nonoffenders. When restrictions on pornography were
lifted in Denmark, no increase in sexual offenses followed. The
report of the commission concluded:

If a case is to be made against “pornography” ... it will have to be

made on grounds other than demonstrated effects of a damaging
personal or social nature. Empirical research designed to clarify the
question has found no reliable evidence to date that exposure to ex¬
plicit sexual materials plays a significant role in the causation of de¬
linquent or criminal sexual behavior among youth or adults.32

President Richard Nixon, who came into office before the

commission released its report, refused to accept the conclu¬
sion. His conservative followers did not want to hear that por-
nography posed no harm. The issue flared into a political and
moral debate that went far beyond science. Meanwhile, research
scholars plow on, determined to explore every conceivable aspect
of the issue until the fullest possible understanding can be
achieved.
Of particular interest is the work of psychologists Neil Mala-
muth and Ed Donnerstein, who are conducting research on sex¬
ually violent films. They first summarized the main findings of
more than a hundred studies that have probed various aspects
of pornography.33 In particular, they were concerned with the ef¬
fects of sexual portrayals that combined aggression toward the
female as part of the portrayed situation. This combination of
 Ongoing Concerns in Mass Communication Research 429 ■

aggression and pornography appears to produce different effects

than nonaggressive sexual depictions. It is a difficult distinction
to define, but activist and writer Gloria Steinem put the matter
in the following terms:

Look at any photo or film of people making love; really making love.
The images may be diverse but there is usually a sensuality and
touch and warmth, an acceptance of bodies and nerve endings.
There is always a spontaneous sense of people who are there be¬
cause they want to be, out of shared pleasure.
Now look at any depiction of sex in which there is clear force, or
unequal power that spells coercion. It may be very blatant, with
weapons of torture, of bondage, wounds, or bruises, some clear hu¬
miliation, or an adult’s sexual power being used over a child. It may
be much more subtle. ... In either case there is no sense of equal
choice or equal power.34

Aggressive pornography, note Malamuth and Donnerstein, falls

into the second category. In particular, rape represents an ex¬
treme case in which coercion is often blatant. Depictions of for¬
cible rape, therefore, are a special category of pornographic
stimuli whose effects on males need exhaustive study because of
the social and legal significance of the act.
There is in the male subculture a kind of “rape myth.” It goes
something like this. A woman who is being forced to have sex
may initially react very negatively but at some point will become
sexually aroused and come to enjoy the experience. Malamuth
and Donnerstein assembled evidence on whether sexually vio¬
lent films showing such a process had the effect of arousing
viewers. They found that such was indeed the case. First, they
noted that rape portrayals in which the victim is depicted as
continually abhorring the experience had limited capacity to ex¬
cite viewers—much less than films showing mutually consenting
sex. Then they concluded:

A substantial body of data indicates that the reactions of the vic¬

tim in rape scenes significantly affects the sexual arousal exhibited
by both male and female members of the audience. If the victim is
portrayed as becoming involuntarily sexually aroused by the assault
. . . the subjects show levels of sexual arousal (both on self-reports
and on penile tumescence measures) that are at least as high and
often tend to be higher than those stimulated by mutually consent¬
ing depictions.35

■ Implications. Research on sexually violent films continues.

The question confronting researchers now is the cumulative in¬
fluence of repeated exposures to such stimuli. If repetitions over
the long term create new attitudes and meanings concerning the
responsiveness of women to violent sex, a potentially dangerous
 ■ 430 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

■ The impact of television viewing on children’s beliefs and behavior

remains a major concern in American society. Some parents do not
restrict or control what their children see on the screen. The way in
which exposure to many hours of television programs will eventu¬
ally influence children as adults has not been revealed by research.
Such long term and indirect influences are especially difficult to
study. (© 1980 Jan Lukas/Photo Researchers, Inc.J

situation may have been uncovered. We noted in Chapter 10

that meaning theory would predict just such indirect, subtle,
and long-term influences. Even modeling theory would be con¬
sistent with such a prediction, although it is less concerned
with long-term influences.
What this means is that the earlier findings of the Commis¬
sion on Obscenity and Pornography may need revision. Current
research appears to indicate that at least some forms of pornog¬
raphy may have just the kinds of influence that the public fears.
 Ongoing Concerns in Mass Communication Research 431 ■

The situation is very complicated, the research is difficult, and

the emerging generalizations are far from clear. Yet the potential
for serious harm is there if males come to believe that women do
enjoy violent sex.
Daniel Linz and his associates have reviewed the legal impli¬
cations of this new breed of pornography. Linz points out that
victims of sexual assaults may be able to claim injury by a third
party (the media), through product liability laws, if it can be
shown that injury was suffered because of the influence of ag¬
gressive pornography.36 This same issue was addressed much
more generally by Lowery and DeFleur in discussing the impli¬
cations of meaning theory. They note that the legal issues go far
beyond the case of pornography. The media may create other
kinds of harm:

If research solidly confirms the role of mass communication in

shaping people’s meanings, their interpretations of reality, and
therefore their subsequent actions in attempts to cope with that
reality, such confirmation will have truly profound implications. For
one thing, such a confirmed role of the media could have significant
legal consequences. Those who control the content of the media will
be seen to have a special responsibility that they do not now accept.
If people’s meanings are shaped in ways that create harm (in the
precise legal meaning of that term) to persons because of negligently
inaccurate portrayals of them or their situations, new kinds of liti¬
gation could follow. The situation is somewhat similar to the cur¬
rent situation of libel except that prosecutions for libel must show
“deliberate intent” to create harm. However, if scientific research
solidly establishes the meaning-creation functions of media portray¬
als, even the “negligent” use of such power could be a subject of legal
suits.37

In other words, males who watch aggressive pornography might

find it dangerous to their legal health if they buy the rape myth
that it implies. Those who control the media and provide such
material might find it dangerous to their economic health if vic¬
tims can back up their product liability and negligence suits
with solid scientific evidence that the media created dangerous
constructions of reality leading offenders to act out what they
thought was acceptable behavior. On the other hand, offenders
could sue the media for leading them to believe a false reality.
Clearly, there will be no serious unemployment for lawyers in the
years ahead.

Portrayals of Like the commission on pornography, the second presidential

Violence and commission appointed by Lyndon Johnson, the National Com¬
People’s Beliefs mission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, stimulated a
great deal of debate and a flood of continuing studies. In Chap¬
ter 8 we reviewed the content analyses of violence on television
 ■ 432 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

prepared by George Gerbner and included in the report of that

commission. Gerbner and his associates continued to keep
track of the amount of violence shown on the major TV networks
over the years.38 They then expanded their work into what they
called their “cultural indicators project.” They have continued to
analyze the content of television to try to see what inferences
about the real world might be drawn by viewers.

■ Cultivation Analysis. In particular, Gerbner and his associ¬

ates have been concerned with the beliefs television “cultivates”
about the world of crime and violence by the medium's contin-
uing preoccupation with violence. The researchers have called
this aspect of their work cultivation analysis. Its major propo¬
sition is that people who involve themselves deeply in television’s
fictional world (heavy viewers) should develop beliefs that corre¬
spond to what is depicted in that world.
Gerbner and his associates have looked most closely at such
questions as how people perceive the level' of violence in their
neighborhoods, how likely it is that they will be taken advantage
of, the effectiveness of law enforcement, and numerous issues
related to crime, criminals, risks, and potential victimization.
Presumably, those who see a mean and scary world on TV will
believe that they live in such a world. In this sense their hypoth¬
esis that television influences viewers’ beliefs parallels those of
the psychologists studying the influence of sexually violent films
on the degree to which subjects accept the rape myth. On the
other hand, cultivation analysis is little concerned with the overt
behavior that TV-cultivated belief may stimulate. Generally,
therefore, cultivation analysis is another way of studying a pro¬
cess that social scientists have been discussing and studying for
many decades—the social construction of reality through
communication.39
To understand the techniques and assumptions of cultiva¬
tion analysis more completely, it is necessary to review the con¬
cept of cultivation differential. (Gerbner and his associates
continuously invent an elaborate array of terms with which to
label their procedures and conclusions.) The basic idea is that
cultivation analysis produces cultivation differentials. Two spe¬
cific procedures are used to study cultivation differentials. These
can be illustrated with a relatively simple example from the work
of the Gerbner group.40
The first technique is a modernized version of an old method
of research into the media’s effects: they compare those who
have been heavily exposed to television with those who have
been lightly exposed. Without an additional precaution, how¬
ever, findings from this procedure would be untrustworthy; the
investigators must control for the influence of other factors that
 Ongoing Concerns in Mass Communication Research 433 ■

can lead to heavy or light exposure. For example, education, age,

sex, and other social characteristics are strong influences on
habits of using the media. But these researchers take this fact
into account. They compare heavy and light viewers within such
categories. Thus they contrast heavy and light viewers among
college respondents and among no-college respondents, among
regular and among occasional watchers of the news, among males
and among females, and so on.
Second, the investigators pose a series of questions to re¬
spondents concerning their interpretations and beliefs about
specific aspects of the social environment. For each question the
researchers also have a television answer. That is, from content
analyses of television programs they have formulated the answer
that television programs give to the question. For example,
many content analyses have shown that television depicts an
unrealistically large portion of its fictional labor force employed
in law enforcement. Respondents can be asked what portion of
the real labor force is employed in law enforcement. The televi¬
sion answer to this question exaggerates the actual percentage
substantially. The difference between the television answer and
reality is the cultivation differential.
Figure 11.2 shows results obtained on this question. Heavy
and light viewers within each category are compared. The re¬
sults seem striking. In all categories the heavy viewers gave an¬
swers more consistent with the television answer than with the
facts. Figure 11.2 also shows results obtained when respondents
were asked about their potential involvement in violent inci¬
dents. The researchers concluded that heavy viewers believed
themselves to be much more likely to be involved than light view¬
ers did—a result that is again consistent with the television an¬
swer. Thus, this research seems to show that television’s
content can have a strong influence on the audience’s beliefs.

■ Conflicting Findings. The finding that people who view a lot

of television are more likely than light viewers to fear their
neighborhood stirred much interest. Other researchers tried to
replicate the study (that is, reach the same conclusions by re¬
peating the study), but their findings were very different.
In Toronto, Canada, Anthony Doob and Glenn MacDonald
tested whether people who watch a lot of television are afraid of
being victimized in their neighborhoods.41 But they added con¬
ditions not present in Gerbner’s study: they looked at different
types oj neighborhoods, distinguishing high-crime from low-
crime areas. They suspected that people in high-crime neighbor¬
hoods would, quite reasonably, fear their environment whether
they watched a lot of television or not, and that those in low-
crime neighborhoods, however much they watched television.
 ■ 434 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

would not. In other words, they suspected that the actual

amount of crime in the neighborhood—and not patterns of tele¬
vision viewing—is the cause of fear.
The results obtained in the study support this hypothesis.
When Doob and MacDonald compared heavy viewers with light
viewers in low-crime neighborhoods, there was no difference be¬
tween them in their fear of being victimized. In the high-crime
neighborhoods most people tended to watch a lot of television,
and most feared crime in their area. But the overall results in¬
dicated that there is no relationship between viewing patterns
and fear of crime when the realities of the neighborhood are
taken into account. People in high-crime neighborhoods feared
that they would be victims; those in low-crime areas did not.
The amount of television viewing was not a critical factor.
No discussion of the work of Gerbner and his associates
would be complete without mentioning the criticisms brought to
the whole approach and its conclusions by Paul Hirsch. These
criticisms and the strong debate they provoked illustrate what
happens when scientists work on the frontier of their field. They
do so at considerable risk of heavy criticism if their colleagues
believe that they have made a mistake. It requires a certain
amount of courage to offer new ideas and data to support them
to the critical audience of one’s colleagues.
The scientific debate process is something like this. A scien¬
tist formulates a new way of analyzing a problem and presents
his or her observations and conclusions to other scholars via ar¬
ticles in professional journals. The colleagues who read those ar¬
ticles represent a tough audience because the first thing that
they do is to poke and pry into the conclusions as well as the
data on which they are based. They want to see if there are any
grounds for rejecting them. They want to make sure that the
rules of controlled scientific observation and logical inference
have been followed in reaching conclusions from the data. If
there are any grounds for suspicion that the original researcher
has erred in any way, they climb all over the poor soul! Further¬
more, they do it in print so that all other interested parties can
see their objections. The journals that print the debate allow
each side an opportunity for rebuttal and criticism. These de¬
bates are immensely useful to science because they serve as part
of the self-policing controls that force researchers to back up
their claims with very solid evidence.
Exactly this kind of debate broke out between professors
Gerbner and Hirsch when Hirsch reanalyzed some of the data
used by Gerbner to claim that he had demonstrated the relation¬
ship between heavy viewing of television violence and beliefs in
a mean and scary world.42 The Hirsch analysis claimed to have
exposed flaws in the statistical procedures used by the Gerbner
 Ongoing Concerns in Mass Communication Research 435 ■

group. By analyzing the data in a somewhat different way, he

showed that the relationships claimed by Gerbner and his asso¬
ciates did not hold up, or were even opposite to those claimed!
This was a very technical analysis and cannot be reviewed here.
However, the main point is that it was impressive enough to call
Gerbner’s whole theory of belief cultivation into question.
In rebuttal, the Gerbner group tried to show that Hirsch had
misinterpreted some parts of the original analysis, misunder¬
stood others, and generally gone wrong. Hirsch, of course, de¬
fended his position and attempted to show how the Gerbner
group had failed to discredit his charges. And so on it went. Oth¬
ers took up the issues and extended the debate.
What does it all mean? Do the findings from Toronto and the
charges leveled by Hirsch discredit Gerbner’s theories and re¬
search? We cannot conclude that at this point. Further evidence
is needed. All we can say with conviction is that all parties are
serious scientists working at the cutting edge, trying to under¬
stand what is really going on in the world of mass commu¬
nication and its influences. Only further research and new
conclusions placed before the critical eyes of communication sci¬
entists can clarify who is wrong and right. When this has been
accomplished, scientific understanding of mass communication
and its effects will inch ahead. In other words, it means that sci¬
ence is the best hope that we have of developing truly trustwor¬
thy knowledge. And, as Professor de Sola Pool said, in the
quotation with which this chapter began, “If knowledge of the
world is a good thing to have, there is no other way of acquiring
it except by observing carefully with well-designed controls.”

■ Summary The search for understanding more about mass communication

is being vigorously pursued through research. The basic frame¬
work that continues to guide these efforts was set forth by Las-
swell decades ago, when he identified the five basic topics for the
systematic study of communication. There is a vast outpouring
of analyses, commentaries, criticisms, and other writings about
mass communication that has little to do with research. These
go beyond Lasswell’s guidelines and many are important, but
his formulation continues to shape research on the media.
A good example of the “who” factor is Altheide’s analysis of
constraints on the television news industry at both the local and
national level. The “news perspective” is shaped only in part by
what is actually happening. Commercialism, the ratings, the
functioning of media bureaucracies, the lack of genuinely impor¬
tant events to report on, journalists’ belief that the audience is
not very bright, and competition with other media both distort
and limit news reports.
The “what” factor in contemporary research is illustrated by
 ■ 436 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

content analyses of television programs.. The conclusions of

three studies on the portrayal of sex on television showed in¬
creasing use of this content but in different patterns. These
studies also illustrate how science is innovative, self-policing,
and cumulative.
Research on “channels” remains an important topic in mass
communication studies. Recent applied research has shown
how to make television a competitive teacher about such sub¬
jects as science. Comparisons of children’s learning from picture
books and television showed that books stimulated the imagi¬
nation and led to different kinds of recall.
Studies of audience composition have many practical uses.
Different categories of people (male, female, old, young, rich,
poor) show varying patterns of attention to various media. A re¬
lated line of research probes the uses and gratifications that mo¬
tivate attention to different types of content and different media.
This difficult area of research seeks to understand not only what
people attend to but why they do so.
Studies of the media’s effects continue to dominate mass
communication research. In the late 1960s extensive research
indicated that the evidence did not support the belief that view¬
ing pornographic material leads to deviant sexual behavior.
More recent research calls that conclusion into question and
opens further paths of inquiry as to the effects of violent pornog¬
raphy. A good illustration of a contemporary direction in re¬
search on effects of the media is the Cultural Indicators Project,
which includes studies of violent television content and the in¬
fluence of that content on viewers’ beliefs about the world. This
project has some similarities to the meaning theory of media in¬
fluence. Comparisons of the beliefs of heavy and light viewers
have become controversial. Television may have important
measurable effects on the audience, but further research is
needed.
Notes and 1 Harold D. Lasswell, “The Structure and Functions of Communi¬
References cation in Society," in The Communication of Ideas, ed. Lyman
Bryson (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948), pp. 37-51.
2 Pioneering studies in this tradition are those of sociologist Robert
E. Park, The Immigrant Press and Its Control (New York: Harper,
1922), and "The Natural History of the Newspaper,” in Robert E.
Park and Ernest W. Burgess, The City (Chicago; University of Chi¬
cago Press, 1925), pp. 8-23. A classic study is Warren Breed, “So¬
cial Control in the News Room: A Functional Analysis, Social
Forces. 33 (1955). More recent efforts include J. C. Jarvie, Movies
and Society (New York: Basic Books, 1970): and R. J. Glessing,
Underground Press in America (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1970).
 Ongoing Concerns in Mass Communication Research 437 ■

3 David I. Altheide, Creating Reality: How TV News Distorts Events

(Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1976).
4 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1922).
5 Will Irwin, “The American Newspaper,” Colliers Weekly, January
21, 1911,p. 18.
6 Altheide, Creating Reality, p. 173.
7 Ibid.
8 Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching, Mass Media in the
Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1980), p. 282. Also see Gitlin, Prime Time
Television.
9 Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert R. Merton, “Mass Communication,
Popular Taste, and Organized Social Action," in The Communi¬
cation of Ideas, ed. Lyman Biyson (New York: Harper, 1948).
10 Susan Franzblau, Joyce N. Sprafkin, and Eli Rubenstein, “Sex on
TV: A Content Analysis,” Journal of Communication, 27 (Spring
1977) , 164-170.
11 Carlos F. Femandez-Collado and Bradley S. Greenberg, with Fi-
lipe Korzenny and Charles K. Atkin, “Sexual Intimacy and Drug
Use in TV Series,” Journal of Communication, 28 (Summer
1978) , 30-37.
12 Ibid., p. 32.
13 L. Theresa Silverman, Joyce N. Sprafkin, and Eli A. Rubinstein,
“Physical Contact and Sexual Behavior on Prime Time TV," Jour¬
nal of Communication, 29 (Winteer), 33-4:3.
14 Ibid., p. 34.
15 Ibid., pp. 41^12.
16 David L. Lange, Robert K. Baker, and Sandra J. Ball, “The Televi¬
sion World of Violence,” Mass Media and Violence (Washington,
D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969), pp. 311—339. This
is a report prepared from research evidence obtained by George
Gerbner and his associates.
17 George Gerbner and Larry Gross, “Living with Television: The Vio¬
lence Profile,” Journal of Communication, 26 (Spring 1976),
181-182.
18 Charles F. Hoban, Jr. and Edward van Ormer, Instructional Film
Research 1918-1950 (New York: Amo Press and the New York
Times, 1970).
19 Examples of such diverse efforts can be found in the following:
Goodwin C. Chu and Wilbur Schramm, Learning from Televi¬
sion; What the Research Says (Stanford University, Institute for
Communication Research, 1967): Raymond Winman and Wesley
C. Meyerhenry, eds., Educational Media (Columbus, Ohio:
Charles Merrill, 1973): L. C. Barrow and B. Westley, “Comparative
■ 438 Impact and Consequences of Mass Communication

Effectiveness of Radio and Television," AV. Communication Re¬

view. 7 (1959), 14—23; P. Deutschmann, L. Barrow, and A. Mac¬
millan, “The Efficiency of Different Modes of Communication,” AV
Communication Review, 9 (1961), 263—270.
20 Sam Iker, “Science, Children, and Television,” Mosaic (Publica¬
tion of the National Science Foundation), 14, No. 6 (November-
December 1983), 11.
21 Ibid., p. 10.
22 Howard Gardner, “Reprogramming the Media Researchers," Psy¬
chology Today, 13 (January 1980), 6—14.
23 Donald F. Roberts, Christene M. Bachen, Melinda Hornby, and
Pedro Hemandez-Ramos, “Reading and Television; Predictors of
Reading Achievement at Different Age Levels,” Communication
Research, 11, No. 1 (January 1984), 9-A9.
24 George Comstock et al., Television and Human Behavior (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1978).
25 Elihu Katz, Jay G. Blumler, and Michael Gurvitch, “Utilization of
Mass Communication by the Individual,” in The Uses of Mass
Communications, ed. Jay G. Blumler and Elihu Katz (Beverly
Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1974), p. 20.
26 See especially chapters 4, 8, and 12 in Blumler and Katz, Uses oj
Mass Communications.
27 Communications Research. 6 (January 1979).
28 Current examples of such research are: Mark R. Levy and Sven
Windahl, “Audience Activity and Gratifications: A Conceptual
Clarification and Exploration,” Communications Research, 11,
No. 1 (January 1984), 51—78; and Gina M. Garramone, “Audience
Motivation Effects: More Evidence,” Communication Research,
11, No. 1 (January 1984), 79—86.
29 D. L. Mosher, “Psychological Reactions to Pornographic Films,” as
reported in H. Abelson et al., Report oj the Committee on Obscen¬
ity and Pornography (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Print¬
ing Office, 1970), pp. 255-312.
30 The satiation effect has been well demonstrated by several similar
research studies. See: Report of the Commission on Obscenity
and Pornography (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1970), pp. 97-132.
31 Ibid., pp. 133-169, 170-254, 295-312.
32 Ibid.
33 Neil M. Malamuth and Ed Donnerstein, “The Effects of Aggres¬
sive-Pornographic Mass Media Stimuli,"Advances in Experimen¬
tal Social Psychology, 15(1982), 103—136.
34 Gloria Steinem, “Erotica and Pornography: A Clear and Present
Difference," in Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography, ed.
L. Lederer (New York: Morrow, 1980), p. 37.
 Ongoing Concerns in Mass Communication Research 439 ■

35 Malamuth and Donnerstein, “Mass Media Stimuli," p. 108.

36 Daniel Linz et al., “Basis of Liability for Injuries Produced by Me¬
dia Portrayals of Violent Pornography,” to appear in Neil Mala¬
muth and Ed Donnerstein, Pornography and Sexual Aggression
(New York: Academic Press, forthcoming).
37 Shearon A. Lowery and Melvin L. DeFleur, Milestones in Mass
Communication Research (New York: Longman, 1983), p. 385.
38 Gerbner and Gross, “Living with Television.”
39 George Gerbner et al., “The Mainstreaming of America: Violence
Profile No. 11,” Journal of Communication, 30, No. 3 (1980),
177-196.
40 Gerbner and Gross, “Living with Television,” p. 182.
41 Anthony N. Doob and Glenn E. MacDonald, “Television Viewing
and Fear of Victimization: Is the Relationship Causal? ” Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 37, No. 2(1979), 170—179.
42 The full text of the critique by Paul M. Hirsch and the reply by
George Gerbner and associates can be found in Communication
Research 8, No. 1 (1981), 3-37 and 30-72. Further related com¬
ments are in Communication Research 8, No. 3 (1981), 259—
280.
 mm

IONMEN
■ Media Support Systems
 All I know is what I read in the papers.
Will Rogers

■ The Media and the

News Industry

It happens every day in every city where there are news organi¬
zations. Reporters from newspapers and broadcast stations fan
out to gather the day’s news. They go on routine calls to police
stations and firehouses, and they are ready at a moment’s notice
to follow an unexpected lead. They talk on the telephone again
and again and sift through endless piles of paper. In all these
activities they are after the raw material that will be sorted and
sifted and processed in the newspaper or newscast. They are
carrying out what Lasswell called surveillance of the environ¬
ment, trying to inventory “what is happening.” The result, how¬
ever, is not a mirror of that environment but a creation molded
by many factors.
Several times in earlier chapters we have looked at how the
news provides surveillance, at the forces that shape it, and at its
effects. In this chapter we pull together those ideas and fill
them out to present a comprehensive, integrated discussion of
the news. Included here is a search for a definition of news, a
behind-the-scenes look at how it is shaped, and an examination
of recent trends in reporting. Finally, we will review the func¬
tions and effects of the news.

H What Is News? News is one of those things most people think they know about
until they are asked to define it. Henry David Thoreau offered a
striking, and scornful, view of the news:
 The Media and the News Industry 443 ■

I am sure that I have never read any memorable news in a newspa¬

per. If we read of one man robbed or murdered, or killed by accident,
or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown
up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog
killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter—we never need read
of another. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you
care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all
news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who read it or edit it are old
women over their tea.1

Idealistic journalists might reply to Thoreau that they’re looking

not for gossip but for truth. To get a clearer view of what the
news is—gossip or truth or something in between—we’ll look at
it from several perspectives, beginning with a rather philosoph¬
ical attempt to define it.

Gossip, Truth, and Columnist Walter Lippman once pointed out that news gather¬
the News ing and truth seeking are in fact quite different: “The function
of news is to signalize an event; the function of truth is to bring
to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation to each other,
and to make a picture of reality on which men can act.”2 News
gathering often stops at the facts, which “signalize the event”;
in Thoreau’s terms, it’s concerned not with the principle but
with the “myriad instances and applications,” with the who,
what, when, where, and how of a story. But as alternative jour¬
nalist Raymond Mungo said: “Facts are less important than
Truth and the two are far from equivalent, you see; for cold facts
are nearly always boring and may even distort the truth; but
Truth is the highest achievement of human expression.”3
The pursuit of truth is the work of a lifetime and more—it’s
the work of generations. In contrast, news is a view of reality
gathered quickly under difficult circumstances. A journalist
works under limitations quite different from those facing the
philosopher, scientist, or scholar. Journalists, said critic Ed¬
ward Jay Epstein, are in “a simple but inescapable bind: jour¬
nalists are rarely, if ever, in a position to establish the truth
about an issue for themselves, and they are therefore almost en¬
tirely dependent on self-interested ‘sources’ for the version of
reality that they report.”4 Moreover, all the news can give is a
very selective fragment of human activity "photographed" in
time, a fragment that suggests a larger view of human endeavor.
Contrast, for example, the journalist working on deadline to file
a story about the Supreme Court’s decision to allow new life
forms created in laboratories to be patented with the work of
generations of scientists that led to the creation of these new life
forms. Contrast the journalist’s report, too, with the work of
generations of philosophers, theologians, and scientists who
 ■ 444 Media Support Systems

have tried to find out what life is and how human beings relate,
or should relate, to the rest of the universe.*
But to say that news gathering is different from truth seeking
is not to say that journalists don’t ever seek the truth or that we
must agree with Thoreau that all news is no more than gossip.
As sociologist Robert Park observed, news is a form of knowl¬
edge.5 But we can distinguish at least two kinds of knowing:
“acquaintance with” and “knowledge about.”6 If you read an ar¬
ticle about the volcanic eruptions at Mount St. Helens, you
might say you “know” about volcanoes, but what you probably
mean is that you are now acquainted with the subject. Bernard
Roshco therefore reasoned that all news can be defined as a
timely acquaintance with. News, he said, is immediate knowl¬
edge of sufficient information that touches people’s personal ex¬
perience enough for them to share the meanings intended by
the communicator. News is usually surface information; it rarely
has deep significance.7 To Roshco, “timely acquaintance with” is
a superficial point of information that makes the bulb in peo¬
ple’s heads light up immediately. “Knowledge about,” on the
other hand, requires formal or systematic investigation.
Roshco’s view of the limited, superficial nature of the news is
consistent with Walter Lippmann’s eloquent commentary:

The news is not a mirror of social conditions, but the report of an

aspect that has obtruded itself. The news does not tell you how the
seed is germinating in the ground, but it may tell you when the first
sprout breaks through the surface. ... It may even tell you what
somebody says is happening to the seed underground. It may tell
you that the sprout did not come up at the time it was expected. The
more points, then, at which any happening can be fixed, objectified,
measured, named, the more points there are at which news can
occur.8

News, as Roshco pointed out, usually concentrates on overt in¬

cidents, not ongoing processes. And because it is “acquaintance
with,” it is usually descriptive, not analytic.9
These definitions of news are rather abstract. Although they
do help us distinguish news gathering from truth seeking, they
tell only part of the story in distinguishing what is news from
what isn’t. They point to the limited, superficial nature of news:
but after all, many overt incidents that we might be given
“timely acquaintance with” are never reported. A more practical
and empirical view, looking more closely at news items them¬
selves, can supplement these definitions.

I An Empirical View From a practical standpoint, you might be tempted just to say
that news is the stuff that fills news columns and newscasts.
That definition isn’t much help to working newspeople. Each
 The Media and the News Industry 445 ■

day thousands of journalists must decide just what is news and

what, therefore, belongs in their newspapers and newscasts.
News, some journalists say, is something that steps beyond
the commonplace, the usual. As John Bogart of the New York
Sun said in 1880, “When a dog bites a man, that’s not news be¬
cause it happens so often, but if a man bites a dog, that is
news.” Turner Catledge of the New York Times suggested that
“News is anything you didn’t know yesterday.” To David Brink-
ley of ABC News, “News is the unusual, the unexpected. Placidity
is not news. If an airplane departs on time, it isn’t news. If it
crashes, regrettably, it is.”10 There are also a variety of scholarly
perspectives on news, including social science studies (see, for
example, Chapter 11).
These comments tell us more about what news is not than
about what it is, and many news reports don't fit these defini¬
tions. Journalist Lou Cannon suggested that they “flunk an em¬
pirical test” because “they are not really definitions at all but
descriptions of what might be called ‘exceptional news.’ It is ob¬
vious . . . that insufficient ‘man-bites-dog’ items exist to fill the
ravenous news requirements of a modern metropolitan daily. 11
Some of the characteristics most frequently offered to de¬
scribe what makes something news are:

1 Conflict (tension-surprise)
2 Progress (triumph-achievement)
3 Disaster (defeat-destruction)
4 Consequence (effect upon community)
5 Eminence (prominence)
6 Novelty (the unusual and even the extremely unusual)
7 Human interest (emotional background)
8 Timeliness (freshness and newness)
9 Proximity (local appeal)12

Any one, several, or all these factors may be found in a news

story. Sociologist Tamotsu Shibutani explained the timeliness of
news further:

Since news has immediate relevance to action that is already under

way, it is perishable. This suggests that news is not merely some¬
thing new; it is information that is timely. Even if it is about events
long past, the information is necessary for current adjustment: it re¬
lieves tension in the immediate situation.13

But even with all these characteristics, we cannot distinguish all

those events that are reported as news from those that are not.
A definition of news must take into account something more
than the processes or events described.
 ■ 446 Media Support Systems

I A Definition News, said Mitchell V. Charnley, “is not an event or happening;

rather it is the report of such.”14 News isn’t* something that just
exists “out there” and is reflected in newspapers and newscasts.
To define and distinguish the news, we need to recognize, as
Bernard Roshco said, that “published news has a dual origin. As \
a social product, the press’s content reflects the society from
which it emerges; as an organizational product, press content is
a result of the workings of specialized organizations whose func¬
tion is to gather and dispense news.”15
Thus Roshco says that news is two things: (1) a selective as¬
sessment of the society, and (2) the product of a particular news
organization. Any evaluation of news by readers or viewers will
constitute a judgment of how well they think the news reflects
the world as they know it, how accurately it assesses the society.
Almost everyone can agree with the Commission on Freedom of
the Press, which proposed that the news media should present
a “representative picture” of the constituent groups of society
and thus the world. But how that should' be defined isn't so
clear, and the definition has changed as society itself changes.
Understanding the news, however, also means understanding
the organization in which the news is processed—the news¬
paper, news magazine, or broadcast news department. What
news is, is determined by how this organization works, the de¬
cisions it makes, and how its members view the world. Under¬
standing the news therefore means understanding how the
news is manufactured.
Thus news can be something that journalists know when
they see it, something that scholars ruminate about, something
that public officials try to influence. It usually monitors change
that is important to individuals or society and puts that change
in the context of what is common or characteristic. It is shaped
by a consensus about what will interest the audience and by
constraints from outside and inside the organization. It is the
result of a daily bargaining game within the news organization
that sorts out the observed human activities of a particular time
period to create a very perishable product. News is the imperfect
result of hurried decisions made under pressure. Essentially,
though, news must be defined as a report that presents a con¬
temporary view of reality with regard to a specific issue, event,

■
or process.

Manufacturing The news is a report designed to be consumed by readers and

the News viewers. It is shaped by many forces both outside and inside the
newsroom. Among the outside forces are:

The audience: Who are they, and what are their tastes and
interests?
 The Media and the News Industry 447 ■

Box 12

CBS versus
Fred Friendly:
Dollars and
Sense

On February 10, 1966, Fred Friendly had been CBS News increased the coverage as the hear¬
president of CBS News for nearly two years. A ings became more heated, despite calls from
veteran newsman who had launched his ca¬ the CBS sales department pointing out how
reer as Edward R. Murrow’s collaborator on much money the company was losing from
the radio show “Hear It Now” and who had pro¬ preempted programming. The following week,
duced such award-winning television series CBS News broadcast a controversial testi¬
as “See It Now” and “CBS Reports,” Friendly mony by Lt General James Gavin as well as a
was well respected for his commitment to report on a presidential statement about the
broadcast journalism in the Murrow tradition. war.
He was also a man who felt strongly that news On February 9, William S. Paley was asked
decisions should be made by experienced to give up his involvement in CBS broadcast¬
journalists rather than corporate executives. ing, though he was to continue as chairman of
As head of the news division, Friendly felt it the board. Stanton’s duties at CBS were al¬
was important to broadcast reports about the tered. Jack Schneider, head of the television
war in Vietnam that were considered contro¬ network, was put in charge of all decisions af¬
versial. Frank Stanton (president of CBS) and fecting CBS News. On February 10, Schneider
William S. Paley (chairman of the board) disa- declared that CBS would return to its sched¬
jlgreed. Though Friendly was able to broadcast uled programming: a fifth rerun of “I Love
an interview with Senator William Fulbright in Lucy.” (Schneider cited cost as the reason for
which Fulbright expressed his misgivings his decision: each day's broadcast allegedly
about governmental policies on the war, Stan¬ had lost the network $175,000.)
ton did not want Friendly to broadcast his pro¬ In explaining the details of his subsequent
posed coverage of UN discussions and Morley resignation in his book Due to Circum¬
Safer’s eyewitness reports from Vietnam. stances Beyond Our Control .... Friendly
Despite his doubts, Stanton allowed the pointed out that neither Paley nor Stanton
live coverage of the Senate Foreign Relations was at first willing to admit that Schneider’s
Committee hearings to begin on February 3. decision had been based on the question of
 ■ 448 Media Support Systems

corporate profits. “The truth was,” he wrote, quoted from a speech tgiven by Ed Murrow:
“that if we’d had a sponsor willing to pick up “Upon occasion, economics and editorial
the bill for the Vietnam hearings or if the soap judgment are in conflict.,. There is no sug¬
operas’ sponsors had agreed to stay with us, gestion here that networks or individual sta¬
there would have been no problem.” In his let¬ tions should operate as philanthropies. But I
ter of resignation he noted that “the decision can find nothing in the Bill of Rights or the
not to carry [the hearings] was a business, not Communications Act which says that they
a news, judgment” and that “the journalistic must increase their net profits every year, lest
judgment had been, by a single organizational the Republic collapse.”
act, transferred to a single executive.” He then (photo: UPI/Bettman.)

• The community and society itself: What are their traditions,

taboos, and patterns of life?
• Events: What, in fact, is happening?
• News sources: Who are they? Are they cooperative? To what
extent are they self-serving?
Interest groups: Who is trying to get their cause publicized or
who is objecting to the media’s coverage of events?
• Government: What information is the government letting out,
and what is it trying to keep secret? How are guarantees of
free speech and regulations about libel, equal time, and so on
being interpreted?
• Economic forces: Is the country’s economy dominating peo¬
ple’s attention, or increasing or decreasing the media’s audi¬
ence? Is the economy in such a state that the survival of news
organizations is in jeopardy? Are costs going up faster than
revenues?

Forces inside the newsroom also shape the product we call news,
including:

• Journalistic forms and styles: Reporters sent to cover a fire

are expected to return with a short, terse report that assem¬
bles the facts about the fire. They cannot return with a poem,
a reflective essay, or a lament—not if they want to keep their
jobs.
• Craft attitudes: What standards and views about how things
should be done do reporters and editors hold?
• The medium and technology: Is the report being prepared for
a newspaper, radio, or television?
• The organization: Are reporters encouraged to be innovative?
To take a particular point of view? How much influence are
economic considerations allowed to have on the news?
• Time, space, and economic constraints.

In the pages that follow we will look at a few of these elements in

more detail.
 The Media and the News Industry 449 ■

■ Ted Koppel con¬

ducts one of his live
broadcasts for ABC’s
“Nightline,” from
Harvard’s John F.
Kennedy School of
Government Koppel
and the “Nightline”
show pioneered late
night news program¬
ming, beginning dur¬
ing the Iranian crisis
in 1980. (© Martha
Stewart/The Picture
Cube.)

I The Medium and

the Message
News is, of course, a message carried by a medium, and that
medium—print, radio, or television—can affect both the form
and the content of the message. Take radio news, which is
known for its short, snappy delivery. The news comes in short
summaries, almost like headlines. It is crisp and to the point. If
you listen carefully, you realize that it is written for the ear. The
order of the words is different from their ordering in newspaper
stories. On radio, the action elements are given first, with con¬
siderable repetition, to catch the attention of the listener who
may not be paying close attention. In newspaper stories, the or¬
dering of words is much more complex than in radio broadcasts;
it requires the reader to do more thinking.
Television news is still different because images are inte¬
grated with the verbal account; it engages both eyes and ears.
Thus television news has more tools at its disposal and more
creative potential. Television, for example, sometimes uses mu¬
sic in the background plus a montage of images to give an im¬
pressionistic portrait of an event or series of events.
 ■ 450 Media Support Systems

The differences between television and newspapers are not

simply a matter of spoken versus written words or the addition
of images. Television not only can use images, but often relies
on images. “Talking heads”—a discussion between people—is
usually not considered “good television.” Television relies mostly
on vivid, visual events and has a difficult time covering concepts
or issues that don’t result in some event that can be shown.
Moreover, according to critic Paul Weaver, the differences be¬
tween the two media have led to radical differences in the way
they tend to present a news report. Newspapers, said Weaver,
have a detached or impersonal tone, whereas television takes on
the characteristics of storytelling. The sequence of a story in a
newspaper emphasizes the key item of the news story immedi¬
ately, then gives the background, and finally amplifies it. Televi¬
sion stories are more often chronological, piquing viewer
interest and then building to a climax. Unless a television news
story is just reported by the anchorperson in headline form, it is
usually given as a narrative. The event is plucked out of its nat¬
ural context to be reported as news, but then it is given a new
context—a beginning, middle, and end. As Weaver said:

Unlike the newspaper news story, which is designed not to be read

in its entirety, while still achieving intelligibility, the television news
story is a whole that is designed to be fully intelligible only when
viewed in its entirety. Its focus is therefore upon a theme which
runs throughout the story and which develops as the story moves
from its beginning to its middle and then to its end. Information,
narrative, sound, and pictures are selected and organized to illus¬
trate the theme and to provide the necessary development.16

Given these differences, it is not surprising that television and

newspapers select different items and present them differently.
Inherent differences between the media, however, do not by
themselves account for the differences in the way news is pre¬
sented. Generally, the news offered by each medium is the prod¬
uct of the complex relationship between the technical features of
the medium itself and the styles of communication required to
capture the attention of its audiences.

The Audience and From the consumer s point of view, said communication re¬
the News searcher Wilbur Schramm, the news is read or watched or
listened to because of the rewards it offers, which can be either
immediate or delayed. Immediate-reward news is usually fast¬
breaking spot news, such as crime, corruption, accidents, dis¬
asters, sports, social events, and human interest stories. News
of this kind pays its reward to the viewer or reader immediately,
said Schramm. “A reader [or viewer or listener] can enjoy a vi¬
carious experience without any of the dangers or stresses in-
 The Media and the News Industry 451 ■

volved.”17 Delayed-reward news usually involves public affairs,

economic matters, social problems, science, education, or
health. As the term suggests, delayed-reward news has deferred
gratification. “It sometimes requires the reader to endure un¬
pleasantness or annoyance—as, for example, when he reads of
the ominous foreign situation, the mounting national debt, ris¬
ing taxes, falling market, scarce housing, cancer.”18
Will the audience be interested in delayed-reward news?
Many news shows seem to assume that the audience will take
only so much of that diet. Local news shows fill many minutes
with reports of sports, crimes, and accidents and with happy
chatter, and even the network shows usually end with an up¬
beat, human interest, immediate-reward stoiy.
Expectations about what the audience wants or can assimi¬
late shape the news in many other ways. The news is, after all,
communication, and news people often try to take the role of
their audience. Interviewers often try to ask the questions that
they think their audience would want to ask. Is the audience the
elementary school readers of My Weekly Reader or the sophis¬
ticated readers of the Wall Street Journal, or is it the mass au¬
dience of “The CBS Evening News” or the highly educated
viewers of the “MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour”? Obviously the news
is likely to be presented differently to each of these audiences. In
a magazine such as Time or Newsweek, the news is put in a
form different from the form in a daily newspaper or newscast.
Because they reach a somewhat more educated audience than
television or radio news, magazines use a somewhat more so¬
phisticated vocabulary and syntax. The pace is more leisurely
and the articles are usually longer and more interpretive in mag¬
azines than in newspapers. Newspapers are designed for a busy
and hurried reader. Their stories are organized more compactly
than magazine stories and have frequent subheads.
Not only expectations about the audience but also feedback
from them shape the presentation of news. We have said many
times that most of the American media are businesses and that
newspapers, radio, and television are in the business of selling
the attention of their audiences to advertisers; the larger their
audience, the higher the advertising revenues are likely to be,
and, at least by one standard, the more successful the operation.
The audience provides indirect feedback through letters and
phone calls, which keep the news people in touch with the au¬
dience’s interests and sense of what is in good taste and what is
fair coverage. Cruder but perhaps more influential feedback
comes from circulation figures and ratings. News consultants
and market researchers, as we will see in Chapter 13, are some¬
times hired to interpret these figures and tell newspapers or sta¬
tions how to change their news to increase the audience. In the
 ■ 452 Media Support Systems

end, the influence of commercialism and of the audience de¬

pends on the news organization.

Inside the The news we read, watch, or hear is the result of several levels of
Newsroom decision making. As editor Ronald Buel put it, news is essen¬
tially data and data must be fashioned into a product. This fash¬
ioning is done through a series of decisions, which can be
summarized as follows:

1 Data assignment: What is worth covering and why?

2 Data collection: When has enough information been
gathered?
3 Data evaluation: What is important enough to be put into a
story?
4 Data writing: What words or images will be used?
5 Data editing: Which story should get a big headline and go on
the front page or begin a broadcast, which stories should be
buried, which should be changed, and which should be
cut?19

Who makes these decisions, what standards are they based

on, and what limitations influence them? The answers depend
on the people in the organization, its structure, and the tech¬
nology available.

The News and Individuals. At some point individuals must

make each of the decisions we listed. Their talents influence
those decisions and thus may shape the type of news that is cov¬
ered. For example, journalism educator Todd Hunt noted that if
we look at how the news is managed and organized in the news¬
room, we find two main types of news: event centered and pro¬
cess centered. Event-centered news is current: it provides
fragmented accounts of the events and issues of a particular
day. Process-centered news probes longer term patterns. These
two types of reports require different talents. Event-centered
news is collected by journalists “whose primary skills are maxi¬
mally efficient observation and minimally biased description.”20
Process-centered news requires a writer who can integrate and
interpret information within a context. Whether a particular
newsroom emphasizes event-centered or process-centered news
is likely to depend in part on which type of news best matches
the talents of the employees. If an editor doesn’t have any writers
who can put process-centered news into a worthwhile, under¬
standable report, then that newsroom is likely to emphasize
event-centered news.
By the mid 1980s, more and more news organizations were
relying on trend stories generated from census data and other
 The Media and the News Industry 453 ■

■ Priorities for news and decisions about what is news are made in
newsrooms like this one at the Washington Post. (Paul Conklin.)

“social statistics” covering not just the unusual story, but issues
and conditions that were common to many—if not most—Amer¬
icans. Thus, reports about marital successes or failures, sexism,
and loneliness became legitimate news stories. This would not
have happened under earlier definitions of news.
Individual ethics, standards, and attitudes also mold the de¬
cisions by which the news is manufactured. As Stanley Cohen
and Jock Young explained, the news media operate

with certain definitions of what is newsworthy. It is not that in¬

struction manuals exist telling newsmen that certain subjects
(drugs, sex, violence) will always appeal to the public or that certain
groups (youths, celebrities, immigrants) should be continually ex¬
posed to scrutiny. Rather, there are built-in factors, ranging from
the individual newsman's intuitive hunch about what constitutes a
“good story,” through precepts such as “give the public what it
wants” to structured ideological biases, which predispose the media
to make a certain event into news.21

The ethics of an individual journalist may lead him or her to de¬

lete from a story details that would discredit an individual. A
■ 454 Media Support Systems

news director or editor may support or resist efforts to mold the

content of a paper or newscast to the demands of the advertising
department or news consultants. A particular editor or news di¬
rector may have strong views on particular subjects or issues,
and his or her policies may reflect these biases. Reporters may
then deliberately or unwittingly slant their stories to fit those
policies. Failure to do so might slow promotion, limit raises, or
even put a journalist on the unemployment line. Even without
these penalties, subtler forces might encourage conformity.
Most people, after all, value friendships and like a smooth¬
running organization. Conflict over a particular news story
might not seem worth the unpleasantness. Of course, there are
also strong professional values that push journalists toward eth¬
ical decisions. Greater public concern about credibility of news
organizations was another reason for renewed interest in ethics.

■ The Organization. The extent to which-formal and informal

controls can influence the individual’s work varies with the
structure of the organization. How tightly is it controlled? How
much nonconformity or participation in decision making does it
allow?
Moreover, to some extent news people learn their attitudes
and standards on the job, in the organization. They learn what
is important and unimportant by interacting with their fellow
journalists. This interaction plus the more explicit rewards of¬
fered by the organization in the form of raises and prestige can
shape their attitudes, standards, and styles. For example, one
newsroom may place the highest value on objectivity; another
may be willing or even eager to use stories expressing a point of
view. Standards of completeness and fairness may be more or
less strictly enforced by management, editors, or colleagues.
More directly, the organization shapes the manufacture of
news by deciding who makes the decisions. Usually, reporters
descend on news sources first and ferret out information. They
then make decisions about how stories are to be crafted, some¬
times in consultation with editors, but always under their su¬
pervision. Editors make decisions about what to include in the
paper and what to discard; they also (sometimes in consultation
with others) decide on the emphasis and placement of stories.
Top management may make policies that shape and guide all
the other decisions.
But within this general framework there are myriad varia¬
tions in the balance of power. How free is a reporter to find his
or her own stories and follow them up, and how much is he or
she under the editor's control? How free are reporters and edi¬
tors to pursue stories that might offend advertisers or audience?
If a major story suddenly develops, how much advertising space
 The Media and the News Industry 455 ■

will be given up for it? Some years ago, Fred Friendly resigned
as president of CBS News because the network refused to con¬
tinue preempting regular (and profitable) programs to give live
coverage of congressional hearings on Vietnam. In his book Due
to Circumstances Beyond Our Control Friendly lambasted CBS
for putting business values ahead of news values.
Conflicts between news values and business values may test
the relative power of owners, editors, and news staff. Employees
may be forced to use a weapon of last resort: resignation. When
Australian press lord Rupert Murdoch bought the moderate and
highly regarded Chicago Sun-Times, members of the staff as
well as outside critics worried that he would try to lure readers
by turning the Sun-Times into a lurid, sensational paper, as he
had done with some other newspapers. Some employees didn't
wait to see what Murdoch would do: several reporters and edi¬
tors as well as popular columnist Mike Royko quickly left the pa¬
per. The paper did become more sensational, although it did not
follow the example of the highly charged Boston Herald and New
York Post.
Often the debate between news and business values hinges
on the belief that when news organizations worry too much
about profits, they court consensus in their communities and
avoid controversy, which is the essence of news. For example, in
1982 Charles W. Bailey, editor of the Minneapolis Tribune, re¬
signed when the paper’s owners ordered heavy staff cuts. Bailey
bristled at “the growing tendency to encourage, in fact, to re¬
quire, editors to become businessmen—to be part of a ‘manage¬
ment team,’ to concentrate on things that involve business
rather than journalism.”22 Newspaper owners, he said, were
encouraging their editors to avoid controversy by giving them
less chance to know, understand, and report on community
problems.
The organization also affects the news in more practical
ways. How much time does the reporter have to prepare the
story? Will it appear on the same day or in a magazine six
months from now? How long is it supposed to “last"—just until
tomorrow’s paper or newscast? Stories must be ready on time,
even if a delay would allow reporters to obtain more details or
viewpoints. Time and space are limited, and a story must be cut
to fit its allotment—or puffed up to fill it. How much money is
available? Is there enough for traveling to interview a source in
person, or even to make sufficient long-distance calls for infor¬
mation? All this will affect the final product, the news. Related
to the constraints of time and budget are the technological re¬
sources at hand.

■ Technology. In earlier times the telegraph, the steamboat,

and the railroad affected the manufacture of news. As we saw in
 ■ 456 Media Support Systems

Chapter 8, the telegraph changed not only the content of news

by expanding the sources and audiences but also the style. Be¬
cause news stories sent over the wire cost a certain amount per
word, the very descriptive language of the nineteenth-century
newspaper gave way to simpler, more direct (and cheaper)
language.
Technology continues to shape the news product. In recent
years the use of small, lightweight cameras with portable trans¬
mitters and of videotape instead of film (which takes longer to
process) ushered in an era of short live reports on television.
Some news staffs were so enamored with the equipment that
they let an emphasis on immediacy interfere with their news
judgment. Viewers were treated to live reports from the scene
even if the report came when nothing was happening. As the an-
chorperson said. Now we take you live to the scene of the fire
for an action mini-cam report,” an embarrassed reporter ap¬
peared on the screen and said, “This is the scene where the fire
was raging just minutes ago. Now it is over with and the firefight¬
ers and trucks have departed.” In time newscasters stopped
playing with the equipment and used it to provide more and bet¬
ter reports from the scenes of events.
On newspapers, electronic editing machines and computers
now allow reporters to retrieve material from various sources
more easily and edit their stories more efficiently. As computers
are brought into the newsroom, reporters will be able to conduct
detailed information searches from their desks and to retrieve
facts in a manner that would have been very costly and unlikely
in the past.
Thus the news media give us a picture of the world that is in
large measure something they have created and tempered by the
constraints imposed by their medium, their audience, their or¬
ganization, time, money, and technology. The definition and
presentation of the news change as all these factors and society
as a whole change.

News Reporting: In 1950 Alan Barth of the Washington Post wrote with pride,
Changing Styles “The tradition of objectivity is one of the principal glories of
and Standards American journalism.23 In fact, objectivity had been under fire
for generations, as an examination of the trade journals of the
1940s and 1950s quickly shows. But for a few years there was a
consensus among most journalists and consumers that objectiv¬
ity was a vast improvement over the sensational journalism that
characterized the American press of the 1920s and earlier, when
blatantly biased reporting was common. Nineteen years after
Barth’s statement, Herbert Brucker of the Hartford Courant
agreed with him and concluded, “We can do a good job ... as
long as we keep the flag of objectivity flying high. That will give
 The Media and the News Industry 457 ■

g With video display terminals alongside, a features editor at the

Detroit Free Press ponders a decision about a story. (© Ellis Herwig,
Stock, Boston.)

a more honest and more accurate view of this imperfect world

than trusting a . . . partisan on any side, to tell us what’s
what.”24 But meanwhile, in the 1960s the ideal of objectivity had
become an object of scorn and derision.
Why did objectivity come under such strong attack? Objectiv¬
ity, as we saw in Chapter 5, is a style characterized by:

• Separating fact from opinion

• Presenting an emotionally detached view of the news
• Striving for fairness and balance, giving both sides an oppor¬
tunity to reply in a way that provides full information to the
audience

By world standards American reporters are very objective. In

France, for example, the press is very partisan, mixing fact and
opinion throughout news reports. In contrast, American jour¬
nalists for decades tried hard to separate fact and opinion, keep-
 ■ 458 Media Support Systems

ing factual accounts in the news columns and opinion on the

editorial page. But, critics claimed, “Therfe’s no objectivity. No
human being is capable of complete objectivity. Everyone is sub¬
jective, and journalists are no different.” Anchorman Dan Rather
even said that objectivity is an impossible goal and urged report¬
ers to adopt fairness as their standard instead.
In part, critics had come to feel that American journalism was
lifeless, unemotional and incapable of dealing with great social
problems. There is much to be said for this view. The press had
virtually ignored the predicament of blacks, other minorities,
and the poor and the rising tide of their frustration in the
1960s. In addition, the press in the 1960s trumpeted its success
vigorously enough to help reopen old debates. Many American
journalists acted as if objectivity were an established character¬
istic, rather than a yet-to-be-achieved ideal. The typical response
to those who said coverage was unfair or inadequate was, “We’re
objective. We just report the news.” This rather arrogant refusal
to face complaints often enraged critics.
For a while, the press was criticized with a vigor it had not
encountered before. In this fate it had much company: during
the 1960s most American institutions were challenged by wide¬
spread distrust and a search for alternatives. As we saw in
Chapter 5, several alternatives emerged, and although they did
not revolutionize mainstream journalism, they did have some
influence. Here we examine a few of these alternatives more
closely: new journalism; adversarial, investigative, and advocacy
journalism: precision journalism; and the marketing approach.
These approaches are used in both the print and broadcasting
media, although because of government regulation most of them
are more difficult to implement in broadcasting.

The New The new journalism was never an issue of great concern to the
Journalism public, but it did alter the reigning definitions of news and writ¬
ing styles. The first stirrings of the new journalism came from
three sources: (1) journalists on newspapers and magazines who
felt restricted by the traditional journalistic styles such as the
inverted pyramid: (2) literary figures, especially novelists, who
wanted to say something in a direct way about the nation’s dis¬
contents; and (3) broadcast journalists eager to explore less con¬
ventional sources and language. The journalists looking for
change felt that traditional procedures were not effectively cap¬
turing the essence of the great social movements of the day or
the changes in lifestyle. They felt that both the traditional reli¬
ance on official sources (mainly public officials) and the conven¬
tional avoidance of rich description prevented them from
capturing the tone of the 1960s. As a result, they maintained, it
 The Media and the News Industry 459 ■

was impossible to give the public the full story of what was hap¬
pening. For example, the counterculture—which influenced mil¬
lions of young people—for a while was not presented fully in
newspapers and newscasts because it was not tied to “authori¬
tative” sources.
Of course, not everyone agreed with this assessment. In fact,
most journalists disagreed, and they continued to defend objec¬
tivity and traditional standards. But several young writers began
experimenting with new techniques, including:

• Scene setting: The new journalists used many descriptive ad¬

jectives to give the reader a sense of being on the scene.
• Extended dialogue: Instead of a few well-honed quotations,
the new journalists used long stretches of dialogue to capture
the essence of a person’s language.
• Point of view: Rather than trying to be detached and objec¬
tive, the new journalists sometimes allowed the attitudes or
values of their sources to dominate their stories.
• Interior monologue: The thoughts of the people who were the
news sources, as they reported them to the journalist, might
be included.
• Composite characters: Instead of quoting all sources by
name, the new journalists sometimes created a composite
character who brought together the characteristics of sev¬
eral persons and stood for, say, the average prostitute or
policeman.

Notice that these devices are old tools of writers of fiction. The
new journalists claimed that these methods allowed them to of¬
fer a richer and truer, more objective, portrait than the tradi¬
tional news style permitted. Most of these new journalists were
not political activists; they wanted to observe and report on
America’s manners and morals in an exciting way instead of
merely quoting official sources. The methods of fiction writers
helped them do this.
For their subjects, the new journalists turned mainly to
“(1) celebrities and personalities; (2) the youth subculture and
the still evolving ‘new’ cultural patterns; (3) the ‘big’ event, often
violent ones such as criminal cases and antiwar protests; and
(4) general social and political reporting.”25 Their stories ap¬
peared first in Esquire, New York, and Playboy and then spread
to Harper's and many other magazines. (Some critics said that
magazines with a strong literary tradition like the New Yorker
had been using the new journalists’ techniques for years. In fact,
the New Yorker's Alastair Reid was embroiled in controversy in
1984 when he was accused of rearranging events and using
composite scenes in his articles for that magazine. This was re-
■ 460 Media Support Systems

futed by the magazine’s editors in a public statement. Rolling

Stone became well known for its receptivity to the style. Before
long, the new journalism swept into the mainstream of the mag¬
azine world, until it became the dominant style in the mid
1970s. By then conventions in newspapers had loosened, and
the new journalism appeared there, too, especially in feature sto¬
ries and background pieces. Novelists began to apply their skills
to actual rather than fictional events.
The new journalism also touched broadcasting. National Pub¬
lic Radio’s “All Things Considered” uses creative news-gathering
techniques and a literary flair; sometimes the testimony of news
sources is re-created, and sometimes their roles are acted out.
Television documentaries, too, sometimes use new journalism
techniques. Even before the new journalism appeared in maga¬
zines, the style was evident in Charles Kuralt’s poetic or whim¬
sical interviews with little-known people in out-of-the-way
places.
The best of the new journalism reads with the grace and color
of short stories and novels. Among its masterpieces or mile¬
stones are Gay Talese’s portrait of fighter Joe Louis at fifty; Tom
Wolfe’s Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, de¬
picting a party that composer Leonard Bernstein held for the
Black Panthers; Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, an account of
a gruesome murder; and Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night, a
portrait of the 1967 march on the Pentagon, and The Execu¬
tioner’s Song, a gripping account of murderer Gary Gilmore’s
last days. More radical and less literary are Hunter S. Thomp¬
son’s books, written in a style he called “gonzo journalism.”
Thompson, who is still writing, continues to be a popular cam¬
pus speaker where he promotes his particular view of reality.
Once those calling for use of new techniques were regarded
as journalistic renegades, radicals opposed to the conventional
values of journalism. But by the mid 1980s, such thoughtful
commentators as James W. Carey, dean of the College of Com¬
munication at the University of Illinois, suggested that reporters
stop thinking of themselves as seekers and transmitters of truth
and urged more ferment in news writing. As he put it: “I think
if there was a more playful, a more controversial approach, it
might lead to far more experimentation and different ways of re¬
porting what happened in a given day. It would lead perhaps to
the return of different styles of writing, beyond the factual, the
flatfooted, and the reportorial.”26
It is hard to draw a balance sheet of the quality or impact of
the new journalism. Abuses by some writers who were not much
concerned with accuracy led to justified criticism. A good deal of
the criticism, however, came from people threatened by the new
style—from newspeople who practiced the traditional style and
 The Media and the News Industry 461 ■

from literary people who felt the nonfiction novels (as Capote’s
and Mailer’s books were called) poached on their territory. De¬
spite the criticism, the new style had some influence on the con¬
ventions of journalism. By the 1980s the new journalism’s
techniques were commonplace in magazines; nonfiction novels
were popular; and news writing—for newspapers and broadcast¬
ing—was less rigid. For the most part, however, the influence of
the new journalism was not overwhelming or revolutionary but
subtle and indirect.

Changes in Whereas the new journalism is concerned mostly with style, ad¬
Substance versarial, investigative, and advocacy journalism represent dif¬
ferent approaches to the substance of the news. The new
journalism was somewhat obscured from the public; after all,
most Americans don’t sit around and talk about the usefulness
of literary devices. But other innovations were more visible. Most
dramatic was the spectacular success of the investigative jour¬
nalism of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington
Post, whose reporting helped uncover what became known as
the Watergate scandal. By the time their book. All the Presi¬
dent's Men, was dramatized in a film, investigative reporters
had become folk heroes.

■ Investigative and Adversarial Journalism. Investigative re¬

porting focuses on news-gathering techniques, on strategies for
obtaining information, not on style. Basically, an investigative
journalist investigates a story deeply. At its best, investigative
reporting is an exhaustive process involving numerous sources,
including personal interviews, documents, records, and long pe¬
riods of painstaking observation. Some say that this should be
standard operating procedure in all reporting, that all journal¬
ism should be investigative. True enough, but those who call
themselves investigative reporters often work with an intensity
and give investigation an emphasis that is lacking in more rou¬
tine, general reporting.
Presumably, an investigative reporter could do a probe that
would provide a clean bill of health for an individual or agency
under fire. More often an investigative reporter exposes some¬
thing illegal or immoral. In fact, a “whistle-blowing” government
aide who makes charges against an agency or individual often
starts the reporter on the trail of an investigation. (There is
much less investigative reporting of the private sector than of
government, probably because reporters have less access to rec¬
ords and other information in business and industry.) Unlike
traditional news reports, investigative journalism does not pre¬
tend to be disinterested. Instead, it aims at a target, attempting
to expose corruption or other abuses through evidence. Persons
 ■ 462 Media Support Systems

■ Standup reports
by broadcast news
reporters against the
backdrop of a place
where news is hap¬
pening (in this in¬
stance, the nation’s
capitol) is a common
format in television.
(Paul Conklin.)

whom the journalist portrays as guilty of questionable practices

are given a chance to reply in the stories, although the material
may be heavily weighted against them. In fact, investigative
journalism is an outgrowth of the long-standing belief that the
press should be an adversary of government. Central to this be¬
lief is the idea that the press can and should act as a fourth
branch of government, checking and balancing the other three.
Nowhere does the power of investigative reporting glow
brighter than on CBS News’s television program “Sixty Min¬
utes.” The show takes on targets from faith healers to public
 The Media and the News Industry 463 ■

officials, coming down hard on consumer fraud and corruptior

and vividly presenting the conflicting statements of sources. It
has frequently been number one in the ratings of network tele¬
vision. Even on local television there is investigative reporting,
although it is still somewhat infrequent.
Some critics woriy that investigative reporting puts too much
emphasis on what is bad and too little on solid analysis and on
building public understanding of issues. Furthermore, investi¬
gative journalists often rely on confidential sources. As a result,
those accused find it difficult to defend themselves, and the pub¬
lic has little objective basis for judging who is telling the truth.
Indeed, investigative journalism lost some of its glow as early as
1976. A team of reporters calling themselves Investigative Re¬
porters and Editors (IRE) went to Arizona to investigate the kill¬
ing of reporter Don Bolles while he was on assignment—perhaps
the first use of a team approach to investigative journalism. The
result was a series that ran in newspapers in several cities. It
was sharply criticized for its lack of documentation and faulty
conclusion, although the IRE stoutly defended its work.
In 1980 another product of investigative journalism was the
object of both intense interest and scathing criticism. Washing¬
ton Post reporters Bob Woodward (of Watergate fame) and Scott
Armstrong wrote The Brethren, which claimed to be the inside
stoiy of the U.S. Supreme Court. It was based on hundreds of
unnamed sources, many of whom were not witnesses to the
events they were discussing. The same criticism could be made
of Woodward’s 1984 book, Wired, which tells the stoiy of John
Belushi.
Because investigative reporting requires exhaustive back¬
ground work that can take months, if not years, it is not sur¬
prising that much of this type of journalism is found in
magazines and books. For example, William Greider, author of
The Education of David Stockman, a revealing report about
President Reagan’s economic policy making, left the Washington
Post for Rolling Stone, where he could do longer, better re¬
searched reports. Seymour Hersh, who revealed the massacre
carried out by American soldiers at My Lai on an alternative
news service during the Vietnam war, later joined the New York
Times, but soon left to write books and longer articles. His 1983
book. The Price oj Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House,
could have been produced only through years of investigation
and, like Greider’s portrait of Stockman, was first published in
the Atlantic.
Investigative reporting is promoted by the IRE group which is
more interested in journalistic techniques such as systematic
use of public records and documents than in the passionate cru¬
sades common a decade ago. IRE publishes a regular newsletter
 ■ 464 Media Support Systems

and occasional books. It also maintains an office at the Univer¬

sity of Missouri School of Journalism.

■ Advocacy Journalism. Another alternative reporting style is

advocacy journalism, in which the reporter takes a point of view
and identifies with a cause or position. Unlike editorial writing,
advocacy journalism appears in news columns and is not a sim¬
ple statement of opinion. In a sense, it is a kind of hybrid news
story with a point of view. Thus it departs from traditional jour¬
nalism and from investigative reporting.
Advocacy journalism appears mostly in magazines, although
a few well-known broadcast journalists, such as Geraldo Rivera
of ABC, are unabashed advocates, making no pretense of bal¬
ance or fairness in their stories. Rivera is famous for his exposes
of mental hospital conditions, inner-city problems, and issues
affecting the poor and minorities. Advocacy journalists see
themselves as torchbearers for a viewpoint and pursue their
mission knowing that there are plenty of people promoting an
opposite point of view. Advocacy reporting is not widely prac¬
ticed, and most studies of journalists show that it is not partic¬
ularly admired.

Precision Probably the least known of the new methods of news gathering
Journalism and reporting is precision journalism. Essentially, precision
journalism is the use of social science methods and information
by journalists, and it takes two forms. In active precision jour¬
nalism reporters conduct surveys or other research. In reactive
precision journalism they use reports already assembled by gov¬
ernment agencies, universities, and private firms.
Precision journalists attempt to make journalism more sci¬
entific. They assess the views of citizens through systematic
sampling rather than through random interviews. Unlike the
standard use of polls, precision journalism presents statistical
information within the context of traditional news stories. Ta¬
bles, graphs, and statistics are used along with interviews that
serve as examples. Thus precision journalism can provide a 1
fuller and more exact view of the community. To use this tech¬
nique, reporters must be trained in social science methods such
as survey research, experimental design, and content analysis.
They need to understand how to apply statistical tests and how
to use a computer or direct someone else to use one.
Since the 1960s, when precision journalism was introduced
and then championed by Philip Meyer of Knight-Ridder News¬
papers, precision journalists have examined such diverse sub¬
jects as race relations in Detroit and Miami, criminal justice in
Philadelphia, parking problems in Dubuque, and politics and
elections almost everywhere. Meyer has said that if precision
 The Media and the News Industry 465 ■

■ News from the field, especially in foreign correspondence, is a

staple of our news diet and is provided by reporters like this one who
is conducting an interview with a woman in El Salvador. (© Susan
Meiselas/Magnum Photos, Inc.)

journalism catches on, journalism may someday be known as

“social science in a hurry.” The approach is being promoted by
a national organization with a small but dedicated membership,
a newsletter, occasional summer seminars, and several books
and articles. The number of precision journalists is small but
growing. The approach is found mainly in newspapers, but news
magazines, network television, and, to a lesser degree, local sta¬
tions also use precision journalism. USA Today, with its heavy
reliance on poll data in reporting, may be one of the premier ex¬
amples of precision journalism that both generates its own data
and analyzes existing polls and census information. As one
writer put it:

This radical new direction in American journalism has produced an

avalanche of research of a type that was once the exclusive province
of the social scientist. Since the . . . late 1960s, precision journalists
have turned out literally hundreds of political preference polls and
 ■ 466 Media Support Systems

dozens of more substantia] studies. These have ranged from sophis¬

ticated content analyses of court records to criminal victimization
studies, to descriptive surveys of special population groups. In many
of these studies, reporters have worked hand-in-hand with social
scientists, who provide the refined judgment and technical knowl¬
edge that minimally-trained journalists do not yet possess. There is
every indication that this pairing of academic and practitioner will
become more common.27

Precision journalism pushes the whole field of reporting toward

science while the new journalism pushes it toward literature.
Both are helping to refine the definition of news.

The Marketing Yet another alternative to traditional journalism begins with sta¬
Approach tistical data—data on the audience. These data are used as one
factor determining what material will be offered in what man¬
ner. In this marketing approach to journalism, the content of
the news is matched to the interests and potential interests of
the audience. Regular reviews of research on the audience deter¬
mine what stays in and what goes out.
Of course, newspaper editors and publishers for decades have
been concerned with what will and won’t sell papers. The mar¬
keting approach, however, takes this concern a giant step fur¬
ther. Now news organizations invest time and money to answer
that question systematically and to apply the answers methodi¬
cally to shape their products. The marketing approach institu¬
tionalizes concern with the audience and revenues and gives
this concern new stature in the process of manufacturing the
news.
Newspapers were actually slow to adopt methods that broad¬
cast stations had used for years to calibrate their “product” with
their audience. For years the marketing approach has been ap¬
plied to television news. Changes in format and style were made
in order to attract a larger audience—a practice that print jour¬
nalists often treated with contempt. But soon print journalists
had their own “news doctors.” In the early 1970s managers and
owners of metropolitan daily newspapers were appalled by their
declining circulations (although total nationwide circulation
continued to mount). Television, the growth of the suburbs, new
lifestyles, and a lack of relevance in the papers were all blamed.
The newspapers responded with market research designed to di¬
agnose the ills causing the decline. Usually they asked the audi¬
ence, both present and potential, what it wanted. This led to the
rise of the so-called use paper.
To end declines in newspaper circulation, the market re¬
searchers often prescribed new sections on topics such as life¬
styles, entertainment, gardening, and housing—sections that
help readers use their communities, their environment. These
 The Media and the News Industry 467 ■

new sections were edited and written for audience approval. In

part they represented just extended and repackaged coverage.
For example, many newspapers had covered real estate for years,
but, as a result of the marketing approach, some renamed the
section Shelter and began to treat the topic from the consumer’s
point of view—adding, for example, very personal stories about
how to find an apartment or remodel a home. Similarly, in their
lifestyle sections the newspapers print advice from “experts" to
tell people how to solve their everyday problems—from how to
get rid of stubborn stains to how to deal with a sulky child or
your spouse’s affair.
For the most part the new material, sometimes called the
new news, supplements standard news coverage. It has not re¬
placed the traditional content of the press, but it is taking a
larger and larger share of the space or time available for news. In
a sense it reflects the goals of the new journalism, which tried to
make reporting more appealing through literary devices, and is
related to precision journalism, since both emphasize the use of
statistical data.
Some critics complain that the marketing approach leads to
trivialization of the news. The consultants sometimes seem
more concerned with the hairstyles of anchorpeople than with
the substance of the news. Kansas City anchorwoman Christine
Craft charged that she was fired because market research
showed that viewers thought she was unattractive.
Critics also ask whether newspapers and broadcasters, by re¬
lying on the advice of news consultants to shape their product,
have become followers rather than leaders of taste. As Dennis
and Ismach have pointed out, the marketing approach revives

the old debate of giving readers what they want vs. providing edito¬
rial leadership and giving citizens what they need. We believe that
the two goals are not incompatible, that newspapers need not go the
way of the National Enquirer pandering to morbid curiosity, but can
and do provide a mix of public affairs news and guides to leisure
time and culture.28

Does the marketing approach serve readers better or does it

pander to the lowest tastes? Philip Meyer, a leader in the preci¬
sion journalism movement, suggested that it helps newspapers
obtain and respond to feedback from their audiences and thus
communicate with them more effectively.29 On the other hand,
perhaps it is too early to predict much about the marketing ap¬
proach, which is a product of the late 1970s. If it becomes com¬
monplace, however, the definition of news is likely to shift
further away from an emphasis on public affairs and specific
events.
 ■ 468 Media Support Systems

■ New technology somtimes changes the definition of news. USA

Today, the nation’s first national daily of general interest, empha¬
sizes a marketing approach to news. (© Alan Carey/The Image Works,
Inc.)

Surveillance All the journalistic trends we’ve mentioned—the new journalism,

and Its adversarial and investigative journalism, advocacy journalism,
precision journalism, and the marketing approach—have some¬
Implications
thing to offer. Today's news forms are actually a blend of all the
various styles and standards we’ve discussed here. The new
journalism piques reader interest; investigative journalism helps
keep people honest; advocacy journalism points to potential
problems; precision journalism helps us understand what the
whole community—or a segment of it—is thinking; the market¬
ing approach helps to tune the news to the interests, demands,
and expectations of consumers.
These techniques sometimes seem to take journalists away
from the most basic function of the news: surveillance of the en¬
vironment. But to “work” and “succeed" news must provide in¬
formation that people will bother to read or listen to in large
enough numbers to make it worthwhile for publishers or broad-
 The Media and the News Industry 469 ■

cast organizations to produce it. Thus the new techniques may

help journalism perform its functions better.
Sociologist Charles Wright has said that the news, and spe¬
cifically its surveillance of the environment, has several implica¬
tions for society and for individuals. It provides warnings about
imminent dangers such as an impending hurricane or military
attack, and it provides a flow of information about everyday life
such as the state of the stock market or traffic. The news can
help individuals cope with daily life, bestow prestige on individ¬
uals by making them better informed than their neighbors, and
build up the prestige of the person who is the subject of a news
report.30 The news can reduce uncertainty and help hold a soci¬
ety together. It can also have negative effects: it can stir things
up, threaten stability, foster panic, cause anxiety or apathy, or
ruin someone’s reputation as rapidly as it can build it.
But assessing the extent to which the news has these and
other effects is difficult. As we saw in Chapters 8—11, research
on the influence of the media in general has not supported the
belief that the media have powerful, direct effects on individuals
or society. The effect of the news is likely to depend on individ¬
ual differences and social categories and to be long term and
indirect. Its effect is likely to depend, too, on the personal
channels of communication that spread and interpret informa¬
tion presented in the news. If earlier commentators thought of
the audience for news as passive and wholly dependent on news
organizations for its interpretation of the world, scholars con¬
cerned with media fantasies and mediated realities put that no¬
tion to rest. Because we have little direct experience with the
people, places, issues, and events that make up the news, we
must use imagination and thought to create reality from the
news.
One news report is unlikely to change opinions and behavior,
but it is most likely that the news, like other content presented
by the media, affects the social construction of reality. Social sci¬
entists David Altheide and Robert Snow argue that “social real¬
ity is constituted, recognized, and celebrated with media.”31 For
example, according to political scientists Dan Nimmo and James
Combs, our image of politics and politicians is “mediated real¬
ity.” “The pictures we have of politics,” they wrote, “are not the
products of direct involvement but are perceptions focused,
filtered, and fantasized by a host of mediators—the press, enter¬
tainment, programming on television, movies, popular maga¬
zines, songs, and group efforts in election campaigns, political
movements, religious movements, and government policy¬
making.”32 They argue that “reality is created or constructed
through communication, not expressed by it.”
More specifically, as we saw in Chapter 9, the news media can
 ■ 470 Media Support Systems

be agents of change by spreading information about innovation.

The news probably has its most direct effect in “creating” social
problems by raising public awareness of troublesome condi¬
tions. Less directly, the agenda of issues set by the media prob¬
ably influences the public’s agenda—the issues that the public
thinks about, talks about, and considers important.
Some people argue that the press more often follows public
opinion than leads it, and the press itself often claims that it
merely reflects “what’s happening.” These claims, as well as our
examination of how the news is made and how recent trends
have modified the definition and presentation of news, point to
an important if not very satisfying conclusion. It is usually a
mistake to try to see the press as just a cause or just an effect;
it is often both, affecting and being affected by society. To un¬
derstand the world we can turn to the news media for much
helpful information. But we will understand the news and our
environment much better if we understand that the media in
part create the news and that the news does not have a magical,
controlling influence on us—or our neighbors.

Summary News gathering is not the same as truth seeking. Journalists op¬
erate under many limitations, and what they give us is usually
not “truth” but something more limited and more superficial: a
timely acquaintance with selected facts. They survey the envi¬
ronment to give us the news, but the news is not just a re¬
flection of what is happening. It is a manufactured report of
selected events or processes. That report reflects both an
assessment of society and the organization within which it is
produced. Among the most important forces shaping the news
report are the medium, the audience, and the news organiza¬
tion. The organization determines who makes the decisions that
produce the news, and it influences the psychological and phil¬
osophical constraints as well as the practical ones (such as time
and money) that mold the report.
Several trends in the last ten or fifteen years have modified
the definition of news and the way it is presented, including the
new journalism, investigative and adversarial journalism, advo¬
cacy journalism, precision journalism, and the marketing ap¬
proach. These innovations illustrate that news is the result of
both social currents and the internal dynamics of an organiza¬
tion. News is always served up to meet the interests, needs, and
demands of a particular audience. When it fails to do so, the ve¬
hicle that carries it usually dies.

Notes and 1 Hemy David Thoreau, Walden, Or, Life in the Woods (Boston:
References Houghton Mifflin, 1854), II, 148—149.
2 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Free Press, 1967),
p. 226, originally published in 1922.
 The Media and the News Industry 471 ■

3 Raymond Mungo, Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times

with Liberation News Service (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970).
4 See Edward Jay Epstein, Between Fact and Fiction: The Problem
of Journalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), p. 3.
5 Robert E. Park, “News as a Form of Knowledge,” American Jour¬
nal of Sociology, March 1940, pp. 669—686.
6 Ibid., p. 669.
7 Bernard Roshco, Newsmaking (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1975), p. 5.
8 Lippmann, Public Opinion, p. 25.
9 Roshco, Newsmaking, p. 14.
10 Quoted in Ivan and Carol Doig, News: A Consumer's Guide (En¬
glewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), p. 8.
11 Lou Cannon, Reporting: An Inside View (Sacramento: California
Journal Press, 1977), p. 23.
12 Taken from Julian Hariss and Stanley Johnson, The Complete
Reporter (New York: Macmillan, 1965), pp. 32—33.
13 Tamotsu Shibutani, Improvised News: A Sociological Study of
Rumor (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), p. 41.
14 Mitchell V. Chamley, Reporting, 2nd ed. (New York: Holt, Rine¬
hart & Winston, 1975), p. 44.
15 Roshco, Newsmaking, p. 5.
16 Paul Weaver, “Newspaper News and Television News,” in Televi¬
sion as a Social Force, ed. Douglass Cater (New York: Praeger,
1975), p. 86.
17 Wilbur Schramm, “The Nature of News,” Journalism Quarterly,
September 1949, p. 260.
18 Ibid.
19 Ronald A. Buel, Dead End: The Automobile in Mass Transporta¬
tion (Baltimore: Penguin, 1973), p. 220.
20 Todd Hunt, “Beyond the Journalistic Event: The Changing Con¬
cept of News, "Mass Communication Review, April 1974, p. 26.
21 Stanley Cohen and Jock Young, eds., The Manufacture of News,
A Reader (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1973), p. 7.
22 Charles W. Bailey, “Exit Lines from a Minnesota Editor,” Wash¬
ington Journalism Review, January-February 1983, pp. 14—15.
23 Quoted in Herbert Brucker, “What’s Wrong with Objectivity,” Sat¬
urday Review, October 11, 1969, p. 77.
24 Ibid.
25 John Hollowell, Fact & Fiction, The New Journalism and the
Nonfiction Novel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1977), p. 40.
26 James Carey, quoted in Making Sense of the News (St. Peters¬
burg, FI.: Modem Media Institute, 1983), pp. 23—26.
■ 472 Media Support Systems

27 Arnold H. Ismach, “Precision Journalism: Implications for Soci¬

ologists,” paper read at Pacific Sociological Association, Sacra¬
mento, Calif., April 20—23, 1977, pp. 2—3.
28 Everette E. Dennis and Arnold H. Ismach, “The ‘New’ News: Hype
or Real Hope?” Saturday (weekend magazine of the Minneapolis
Star and Tribune), April 15, 1978, p. 4.
29 Philip Meyer, “In Defense of the Marketing Approach,” Columbia
Journalism Review, January—February 1978, pp. 60—62.
30 The concept of status conferral was first introduced in Paul F. La-
zarsfeld and Robert K. Merton, “Mass Communication, Popular
Taste and Organized Social Action,” Mass Communication, ed.
Wilbur Schramm, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1960), p. 497.
31 David L. Altheide and Robert P. Snow, Media Logic (Beverly Hills,
Calif.: Sage Publications, 1979), p. 12.
32 Dan Nimmo and James E. Combs, Mediated Political Realities
(New York: Longman, 1983), p. 2.
 There is no more important question to be considered by the Ameri¬
can people than the question, "Is the Associated Press fair? Does it
transmit the news?"
Upton Sinclair, in The Brass Check
(1919)

■ The Auxiliaries

Both print and electronic media have important help from out¬
side their organizations, from groups we call the auxiliaries: the
wire services, feature syndicates, ratings services, and various
research organizations. If you doubt the importance of auxili¬
aries, take a newspaper, clip all the stories that come from wire
services and feature syndicates, and put the clippings aside.
You’ll probably be left with a few local stories, advertisements,
and little more.
The auxiliaries are flourishing today, partly for economic rea¬
sons. But they also serve an important function as the media’s
windows on the world, links between media organizations and
outside events. In this chapter we examine the nature and scope
of each type of auxiliary service, their origins, and their present
status.

The Role of the Except for the national broadcasting networks, the American
news media are fiercely local. But they depend on national organ¬
Auxiliaries izations for much of their content and for other services. Wire
services (or press associations as they are sometimes called)
such as the Associated Press (AP) and United Press International
(UPI) bring national and international news to local papers and
broadcasting stations; feature syndicates bring cartoons and
comic strips, columns, and crossword puzzles; rating services
monitor radio and television audiences; pollsters and market re¬
searchers provide data that help media executives make deci-
■ 474 Media Support Systems

sions. These are some of the auxiliary, or .supportive, services

that link the local media with the outside world and influence
their content and direction.
The advantages of these services are many. One is lower cost.
For example, hiring a cartoonist or comic artist would be well
beyond the means of most small newspapers—and even some
large ones. But a syndicate allows the papers to share the cost:
because the syndicate sells the strip to papers across the coun¬
try, the cost for each newspaper is reduced enormously. A pop¬
ular national comic strip can cost a local paper as little as a few
dollars a week. Thus rich resources that would otherwise be very
expensive are put within the reach of many organizations. Aux¬
iliary services allow even the smallest newspaper or broadcast
station to be linked with a worldwide network of news reporters,
to enjoy the keen insights of a brilliant commentator or the bit¬
ing wit of a great cartoonist, to provide the latest reading of the
public pulse through major polls, and to find out what its audi¬
ence is reading or watching through the services of a marketing
research firm. As a result, the auxiliaries probably help many
newspapers and broadcasting stations to survive.
More important perhaps, these auxiliaries foster what Harold
Lasswell called a “transmission of the social heritage.” That is,
because these services are used all across the nation, they pro¬
vide Americans with a wide range of shared information. This
unifying effect is increased by the fact that print and broadcast
media use some of the same auxiliaries, such as the wire ser¬
vices. Furthermore, what appears on the front pages of news¬
papers or the openings of newscasts throughout the country is
largely determined by the recommendations of the wire services.
In other words, the auxiliaries help set the media’s agenda.
If the auxiliaries foster unity, they can also bring uniformity.
Because the wire services blanket papers and broadcast stations
across the country, news reports have little regional diversity.
From Maine to southern California, publications and newscasts
are similar. The fate of editorial cartoons provides another ex¬
ample of this standardization of communication. In the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries most daily newspapers
had their own cartoonists. But with the coming of the feature
syndicates, papers began to rely on a few syndicated cartoonists.
The local cartoonist drifted out of sight on almost all but the
larger papers.
To their critics the auxiliaries endanger freedom of expres¬
sion by reducing diversity in mass communication. But their
supporters argue that as long as there is competition among
various wire services, syndicates, and other auxiliaries, there
will be plenty of diversity. Moreover, newspapers and broadcast
stations are not just passive recipients of the auxiliaries’ ser-
 The Auxiliaries 475 ■

vices. People within these organizations act as gatekeepers; in

other words, they decide what to use from the auxiliaries and
how to use it.
These and other arguments about the auxiliaries have made
for continued controversy almost since they first appeared on
the American scene in the nineteenth century. The wire services
were the first to appear.

The Wire If anyone ever wondered how the country’s news organizations
would fare if the wire services shut down, they came close to
Services finding out in the summer of 1977. On a Wednesday evening in
July of that year. New York City suffered a massive power out¬
age. Not only did the lights go out, but so did the computer sys¬
tems that link the wire services to the nation’s news media.
Imagine the surprise of copy editor Bob Kraft at the Cincinnati
Post. Kraft sat down at a video display terminal and requested
transmission of a story from United Press International that was
stored in UPI's New York computer. Instead of the story, Kraft
got “a series of flickering green checks, dots and other
symbols.”1 As Richard L. Gordon wrote in Editor and Publisher:
“It was 9:34 p.m. Wednesday, July 13. He lifted the emergency
phone and called UPI in New York. He listened briefly to a dis¬
traught voice and, turning to Assistant Managing Editor Laura
Pulfer, he said, “Jesus Christ—there’s a blackout in New York!”2
Although regional systems continued to send copy around
the country, no news was sent from the nation’s communica¬
tions center for several hours. While technicians worked on an
emergency backup system, UPI staffers telephoned stories to
Washington, and the nation's capital became a makeshift na¬
tional headquarters. Twenty hours passed before all service from
New York was restored.
The Associated Press, the largest and most powerful of the
press associations, also had problems and shifted some of its op¬
erations to Washington. But AP had better backup systems, and
it was able to get its New York wires running again three hours
after the breakdown. The blackout was an inconvenience for the
wire services, but it demonstrated their widespread and decen¬
tralized nature.

Organization of the Although the wire services rely on New York as a transmission
Wire Services point for national and international news, they also have major
offices in Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other impor¬
tant cities, as well as foreign capitals. Virtually every state has
wire service bureaus in its major cities and state capital, offices
where reporters and editors produce copy and receive stories
from correspondents. And these bureaus are two-way commu¬
nication centers linked to thousands of newspapers and broad-
 ■ 476 Media Support Systems

casting stations that subscribe and contribute to the around-

the-clock coverage of the wire services. Computers tie the whole
system together.
Thus the wire services, as well as supplementary services run
by major newspapers, are a kind of central nervous system for
the American news media. Their circuits send and receive news,
reprocess it, and channel it to appropriate outlets. The New York
blackout was like a minor heart attack. It short-circuited the
system and slowed it for a time, but the system soon recovered.
The role of the wire services is basically twofold: to gather and
to distribute the news and interpretive material. In gathering
the news, wire service reporters work much like other reporters,
although the news they assemble transcends the interests of a
local area; naturally, reporters are always looking for stories that
have national or international significance. The wire service re¬
porters give their copy to editors, who send it along to regional
centers. For example, in the Far West news from small California
cities flows to Los Angeles, the regional center, where editors de¬
cide whether to edit and redistribute the story to the region only
or to pass it on to the national offices in New York. Thus news
moves up the chain toward New York. Items of regional or nar¬
row interest are picked off along the way.
Once the news gets to New York (or to a major regional cen¬
ter, such as Los Angeles, Denver, Seattle, Chicago, Kansas City,
Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, New Orleans, Boston, Philadelphia, or
Washington), distribution begins. The news is sorted out and re¬
channeled across the countiy either to all wire outlets or to se¬
lected ones, depending on the story. Once, trusty Morse Code
operators distributed the stories by sending dot-and-dash mes¬
sages over telegraph lines. Later they were replaced by electronic
teletypesetters, which have now been connected to sophisticated
computer systems. By the 1980s the wire services routinely
transmitted the news via satellite.

Origins of the Wire The complex, computerized news-gathering and distribution

Services systems of the contemporary wire services stand in dramatic
contrast to their simple beginnings in the mid-nineteenth cen¬
tury. It all began in the 1840s when several rival newspapers
pooled their resources in order to provide faster, cheaper, and
more comprehensive coverage of the Mexican War. This tempo¬
rary but innovative link-up of newspapers in New York, Balti¬
more, and Philadelphia set a precedent. In 1848 six New York
newspapers signed an agreement to share the costs of telegraph¬
ing foreign news from Boston, where ships first arrived from Eu¬
rope. This agreement was the forerunner of the modern AP. The
papers were members of a cooperative association, and they
elected their own board of directors.
 The Auxiliaries 477 ■

■ The wire services, now full information and feature suppliers,

also provide their subscribers with such visual material as photo¬
graphs and line drawings. (© Ellis Herwig/Stock, Boston.)

At first AP was mainly an organization linking Eastern news¬

papers. But as Americans moved westward and railroads grew,
AP began to cover the nation rather than just the East. During
the Civil War, AP newspapers covered the great battles and troop
movements with considerable detail.
Increasing dependency on the “wires” led to changes in the
writing style of newspapers. The telegraph seemed to demand
clarity and precision. The correspondent in the field had less
time for the flowery language and elongated sentences common
to nineteenth-century newspapers. Before long, reporters and
editors began to distinguish between “telegraph” and “news¬
paper” stories. Telegraph stories were rather like bulletins. This
style eventually evolved into AP's famous lead of “who, what,
where, why, and how”; stories were organized into an inverted
pyramid style, in which the most important elements were first,
the next important second, and so on. To appeal to newspapers
in various regions and with various political persuasions, AP
avoided opinionated and controversial interpretations of the
news. In fact, AP pioneered what would later be called the objec¬
tive report. Thus, almost from the beginning the wire services
broadened the content of news (allowing more newspapers to
have a wide range of coverage from distant points) and narrowed
its style.
 ■ 478 Media Support Systems

After the Civil War various cooperating and competing AP

groups sprang up around the country. Some* groups died, others
consolidated in a reorganization of the Associated Press in 1900.
But the competitive undercurrent pointed up a problem: mem¬
bership in AP was very controlled and closed. In some cities rival
newspapers had difficulty holding readers unless they had the
advantages of AP membership and news coverage.
Not everyone was happy with the content that AP provided.
Edward Wyllis Scripps, the owner of the Scripps chain of news¬
papers, complained that “at least 90 percent of my fellows in
American journalism were capitalistic and conservative.”3
Scripp’s answer was to found the United Press Association (UP):
“I knew that, at that time at least, unless I came into the field
with a new service, it would be impossible for the people of the
United States to get correct news through the medium of the As¬
sociated Press.”4 On July 15, 1907, the first “By United Press”
byline appeared over a dispatch from New York that began: “The
completion of an important press association consolidation was
announced this morning.”
Two years later, another press lord, William Randolph Hearst,
formed his own press association, the International News Ser¬
vice (INS). From that time until 1958 the United States was
served by the three rival services, although AP always outdis¬
tanced the other two. In 1958 UP and INS merged into UPI,
which led to more vigorous competition with AP. In addition,
since the early 1960s several supplemental wire services have
been organized. The New York Times Service, the Washington
Post/Los Angeles Times Service, the Copley News Service, the
Knight-Ridder News Service, and others provide a variety of
news and feature material.
Tradition may be the only reason that any of these organiza¬
tions are still called wire services, a term that clearly derives
from their earlier use of telegraph lines. Both AP and UPI have
joined the communication revolution (see Figure 13.1). They use
satellites and transmit their information services to thousands
of earth stations. They have digital darkrooms and computer¬
ized newspictures as well as color photography, audio networks,
and alphanumeric cable news reports. In addition, they sell data
bases both to institutions and to individuals. As former UPI vice
president and editor H. L. Stevenson observed, “We think of our¬
selves as an information service, not just a news agency.”

AP and UPI: At a glance, AP and UPI seem much the same. Both provide a
Similarities and steady flow of a wide range of news, national and international
Differences as well as state and local. Both also provide interpretive and
background articles. Both have special sports and business
wires and a photographic service. Despite these similarities,
there are still differences between these two major wire services.
The Auxiliaries 479 ■
 ■ 480 Media Support Systems

■ Size and Economics. Originally, both UP and INS had news¬

papers owned by Scripps and Hearst as their chief clients, but
they later expanded to include other papers. Where AP had
“members” and only members received AP stories, UP and INS
sold their reports to “clients.” Even today AP has “member” pa¬
pers and stations, and UPI has “users” or “clients.” But this dis¬
tinction is now rather academic because both AP and UPI are
responsible to boards of directors linked to members and
clients, and the papers and stations using either wire pay a fee.
Both services set rates on a sliding scale, from as little as un¬
der $100 per week for small papers and broadcast stations to as
much as $7,000 per week for larger organizations. The rates
they charge are somewhat different: UPI’s rates for big papers
are lower than AP’s, but in broadcasting the situation is
reversed.
By 1984 about 1,500 newspapers and 5,700 broadcast sta¬
tions were getting AP news and picture services, whereas UPI re¬
ported about 6,000 subscribers worldwide.' AP had 135 news
bureaus and 45 photobureaus in the United States and 83 bur¬
eaus in 65 countries abroad, whereas UPI claimed 260 news and
picture bureaus in the United States and 130 news and picture
bureaus overseas. About 76 percent of America’s daily news¬
papers get AP; 47 percent get UPI; and 25 percent get both. AP
has well over 2,850 full- and part-time employees in the United
States and 480 abroad, whereas UPI has about 2,000 overall.
The essential financial difference between AP and UPI was
that AP was a moneymaker for most of the 1970s, while UPI was
losing money. In 1982 UPI got new owners. Four men who
owned other media companies combined resources under the
name Media News Corporation and purchased UPI. Almost im¬
mediately there was a controversy about two of the owners; both
had been publicists for the Baha’i faith, an international religion
that emphasizes spiritual unity. Questions were raised about
whether the new owners would impose their religious views on
UPI reports. They pledged that they would not do so. To reassure
UPI’s clients, the new owners hired as president William J.
Small—a former president of NBC News and of the Society of
Professional Journalists and one of the nation’s most respected
news executives. However, UPI continued to have fiscal prob¬
lems, and Small was fired in 1984.

■ Style, Content, and Reputation. Although UPI began as a

midwestern wire and was the first wire to serve the broadcasting
industry, differences between the wire services had blurred by
the mid-twentieth century. Still, their images differed. AP has
been seen as a somewhat conservative but reliable service; UPI
 The Auxiliaries 481 ■

has a reputation for less attention to accuracy and for more col¬
orful writing.
UPI’s reputation for inaccuracy may stem from a massive er¬
ror in 1918, when UP reported the Armistice four days early. As
late as the 1970s a former UPI president complained, “We’re still
living down the premature Armistice.”5 Evidence refutes the im¬
age of inaccuracy. J. Richard Cote looked for errors of fact and
errors in interpretation by AP and UPI. His findings: “On the ba¬
sis of the sample drawn ... the difference between the number
of errors overall ... is not significant. Similarly, neither is the
difference between the number of stories indicated by the
sources as totally accurate significant."6
Accurate or not, the perceptions of those who use the wire
services are veiy important because they determine which ser¬
vice will enjoy greater financial security. Clearly AP is the most
popular service among U.S. newspapers.
Journalism professor Richard A. Schwarzlose tried to find
out why. Three factors seemed to account for AP’s popularity:
(1) the reputation—true or not—for reliable and accurate cover¬
age; (2) AP’s organizational structure, which gives the im¬
pression that newspapers are part owners of AP and that the
wire is an extension of the dailies' own news gathering: and
(3) AP’s image as a newspaper wire because of UP’s early entry
into broadcasting, a decision that angered many publishers.
But, wrote Schwarzlose, “UPI’s brighter writing style and its
somewhat faster handling of news stories make it a desir¬
able resource for competitors, particularly those subordinate
competitors seeking to increase circulation rapidly.7
B. H. Liebes found another indication of the perceived differ¬
ences between the two services. When he asked newspapers tele¬
graph editors to rate the AP and UPI in five broad categories, he
found that “although the consensus favored AP in Washington
and international reporting, UPI rated outstandingly high in re¬
porting news from the White House and the Soviet Union. . . .
UPI also scored high in reporting Latin American and Caribbean
news.’’8
The ratings of the wire services at any given time probably
depend largely on the reporters, the quality of the personnel, the
consistency and reliability of reports, and the speed with which
the news is delivered.
The reputations of the two wires are really undeserved, said
editor Gordon Pates. “Both have tried to correct their weak¬
nesses,” he noted.9 The most significant difference between the
two services, some observers believe, is that they provide two
points of view, two perspectives on the news, and this, of course,
gives editors a choice. This choice. Judge Learned Hand be¬
lieved, is healthy for the American public. In a federal court
 ■ 482 Media Support Systems

opinion, Judge Hand overturned two bylaws of the AP that he

said created a monopoly in the news: one prohibited AP mem¬
bers from selling news to nonmembers; the other gave each AP
member almost a veto over the application of nonmembers to
join AP. In his opinion on the case. Hand wrote:

In the production of news every step involves the conscious interven¬

tion of some news gatherer, and two accounts of the same event will
never be the same. . . . For [this] reason it is impossible to treat two
news services as interchangeable, and to deprive a paper of the ben¬
efit of any service of the first rating is to deprive the reading public
of means of information which it should have.10

This now-famous opinion was later upheld by the Supreme

Court.

The Wire Services The importance of the wire services, both in this country and
in Perspective worldwide, greatly exceeds their monetary wprth and other sta¬
tistical measures. But the statistics do give some clues. About
95 percent of the nation’s daily newspapers subscribe to either
AP or UPI or both. The wires supply about 75 percent of the
state, national, and international news in American newspapers
and on radio and television. Without doubt, the wire services
blanket the American news media. Even when large newspapers
and broadcasting stations send their own reporters to the scene,
the wires still set the tone and provide a backstop. As columnist
Russell Baker has described Washington coverage:

After the wire men [and women] comes a profusion of reporters

working for individual papers, networks, news syndicates, and trade
journals. These men concentrate on specific “beats," thus duplicat¬
ing much of the work of the “wires,” but looking for special “angles”
to suit their peculiar audiences.11

The American wire services have an importance that

stretches far beyond this country’s national boundaries. They
are worldwide organizations with operations in many national
capitals and the ability to dispatch personnel to almost any spot
in the world. By the same token, the American wire services are
used not only by newspapers and broadcasting stations in the
United States but also by those abroad. Of course, abroad the
American wires run into pretty stiff competition from the Brit¬
ish service, Reuters, and from the French wire, Agence France
Pi esse. Many ol the major nations of the world have their own
press associations—Tass in the Soviet Union and the New China
News Service in China, for example. Wire services are found
mainly in rich, industrial nations, but the developing nations
are moving to set up their own press associations. In Latin
 The Auxiliaries 483 ■

America, for example, major daily newspapers have organized a

press association, Latin. African journalists and government
leaders have also formed their own press associations.
Because wire services cover the globe and monitor the world's
news systematically, they have tremendous influence on the con¬
tent of the world's press. Each day they give updated reports on
the important stories of the day, providing a kind of running
priority list called budgets. The budgets set the agenda for the
press; that is, the wire services’ priorities influence the amount
of attention that newspapers and broadcast stations give to
stories.
If anything, the influence of the wire services has increased
since the end of World War II as fewer newspapers and broadcast
stations today use more than one wire. The trend has been away
from diversity and toward reliance on just one wire service. Wire
service personnel argue, however, that their reports are neither
rigidly standardized nor prepared by people with a single point
of view. Indeed, the wire services get their content not just from
wire service reporters but also from newspapers. AP, for exam¬
ple, has the option of using news reports from any of its member
newspapers. “In theory,” wrote A. Kent MacDougall of the Wall
Street Journal, “the AP gets exclusive use of these stories, even
if the paper is also a UPI client. But in practice, UPI staffers in
many cities freely lift local stories from papers that have AP ties
as well as from other papers and from broadcasters."12
AP and UPI have also begun to provide special services for ca¬
ble television as well as marketing their news reports to various
data bases available to consumers on their personal computers.

The Supplemental As the competition between AP and UPI increased in the 1980s,
Services the leaders of the two giants looked worriedly at the extraordi¬
nary success of the relatively new supplemental services. The
supplemental services make no effort to match the exhaustive
coverage provided by AP and UPI. Instead they present special
reports, features, and other material that supplements the work
of newspapers, AP, and UPI.
For years various specialized news services have offered re¬
ports of a particular kind such as science, religion, and financial
news. For example, the Dow Jones wire offers superb financial
coverage, and the Women’s News Service provides coverage of
women's news and problems. But another type of service became
important in the 1970s and 1980s—supplemental services offer¬
ing a wider range of reports. Several of these started by serving
members of a particular newspaper chain but expanded to sell
their services to other newspapers and broadcast outlets. Espe¬
cially noteworthy was the growing use of the New York I imes
Service, which allows subscribers to use a selection of stories
 ■ 484 Media Support Systems

from the Times. These stories are transmitted electronically at

the same time they appear in the Times, finking a number of
newspapers, large and small, with its impressive worldwide
sources.
What do the supplemental services offer? An advertisement
for the Los Angeles TimesAVashington Post Service answered
succinctly: “For less than the cost of one good reporter the Los
Angeles TimesAVashington Post News Service offers exclusive
world-wide live wire coverage of the best journalists in all news
centers of the globe.”13 The service claims to bring together the
resources of the two papers based in “two epicenters of move¬
ments that shake people.” It carries contributions from News-
day, the Long Island newspaper; the Dallas Times-Herald in
Texas: Los Angeles Times bureaus in Chicago, Atlanta, Hous¬
ton, New York, Sacramento, and San Francisco: Washington
Post bureaus in Los Angeles and New York; plus a traveling
corps of specialists. To this they add material from thirty foreign
bureaus of the Post and the Times, forty correspondents of the
Manchester Guardian, and more than a hundred bureaus of the
Agence France Presse. The Los Angeles TimesAVashington Post
News Service boasts of its Washington coverage. Other journal¬
ists cover economics, fashion, science, and technology, as well
as cultural affairs and books, gardening, and sports.
Between 1960 and 1973 the New York Times Service in¬
creased its clients from 36 to 150: the Los Angeles TimesAVash¬
ington Post Service grew from 77 subscribers in 1970 to 105 by
1973.14 By 1973 the New York Times and Los Angeles Times/
Washington Post services “accounted for 62 percent of all re¬
ported supplemental news service subscribers.”15 This pace con¬
tinued in the 1980s. Somewhat similar supplemental services
include the Gannett and Newhouse News Services, the North
American Newspaper Alliance, and the Newspaper Enterprise
Association.
No one is yet claiming that the supplemental wires can re¬
place AP or UPI for immediate coverage of fast-breaking news or
for the vast range of news that they carry. For all their richness
of content, the supplemental are just that—supplemental
sources of interpretation, analysis, interviews, and other infor¬
mation. But their growth may eventually change the role of the
major wires, which have tried to expand their interpretive cov¬
erage in recent years. Clearly, the supplemental expand the di¬
versity of content available to American readers, listeners, and
viewers.

B The Syndicates The feature syndicates, like the wire services, trace their origins
to the mid- and late nineteenth century. Enterprising editor-
publishers recognized the importance of entertaining their read-
 The Auxiliaries 485 ■

■ Feature syndicates have been a major source of visual material in

the press since the 19th century and owe a debt to such pioneering
sources of graphic art as Harper's Weekly, which is represented
here in this cartoon showing reporters rushing to file their news re¬
ports with a telegraph operator. (Library of Congress/Photo by National
Photo Company.)

ers. They surmised rightly that a profit could be made by offer¬

ing newspapers a package of ready-to-print features including
opinion columns, poetry, cartoons, short stories, and other en¬
tertainment. They formed companies to provide such material.
The earliest syndicate was organized by two Wisconsin news¬
papermen just after the Civil War. Others quickly followed suit,
and by the late nineteenth century Irving Batchelor, S. S. Mc¬
Clure (who later became famous as magazine publishers), and
others organized feature syndicates. By the early 1900s syndi¬
cates were offering opinion pieces, political cartoons, and comic
 ■ 486 Media Support Systems

strips as well as columns on fashion, personal problems, poli¬

tics, and other topics. There was considerable competition
among the syndicates. William Randolph Hearst organized his
King Features Syndicate in 1914. Almost from the beginning,
the syndicates played an important role in making the work of
particular writers and artists popular among millions of readers.
At first the syndicates directed their appeals to small papers
that could not afford to produce their own material, but even¬
tually they sold to larger papers, too. Some syndicates were tied
to a particular group of newspapers; others sought clients
throughout the country. At first they provided printed pages
that had feature material on one side and blank pages on the
other so that local papers could fill in local advertising and news.
Later, syndicates circulated copy that could be photographed
and used by offset presses. Today syndicates number more than
three hundred, and they range from those with billings of more
than $100 million per year to small firms that represent one or
two writers.
Unlike the wire services, which distribute their wares to both
print and broadcast media, the syndicates aim almost exclu¬
sively at the print media. But material from the major broadcast
networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS) as well as some independ¬
ent companies is to local television and radio stations what syn¬
dicated material is to newspapers and magazines. Local radio
and television news and the evening magazine programs often
include material that comes from the networks, a kind of syn¬
dicate of the air.

What the The syndicates mostly provide entertainment and opinion ma¬
Syndicates Provide terial for newspapers, including serializations of popular books,
columns by noted political commentators, comic strips, and ed¬
itorial cartoons. In addition, some syndicates sell design ser¬
vices, graphics, and even newsstand racks. They promise that
their material will being circulation gains, something every
newspaper covets, and readership studies indicate that the syn¬
dicates are sometimes right. For example, “Dear Abby” and "Ann
Landers” often head the list of the most-read items in a news¬
paper, and the comics also have strong appeal. Newspapers have
occasionally fought vicious court battles to retain a particular
columnist or cartoonist.
Because relatively little is written about syndicates and all are
privately held companies, even their size and scope is something
of a mystery. One way to measure the reach of a syndicate is by
the number of newspapers or magazines it serves. “Blondie” is
said to appear in 1,700 to 2,000 papers worldwide. In terms of
gross revenues, the largest syndicate is United Features, fol¬
lowed by King, Tribune, Universal Press, the Washington Post
Writers Group, the Los Angeles Times, and McNaught.
 The Auxiliaries 487 ■

King Features Syndicate claims to have the greatest array of

comic strips for the Sunday papers. This syndicate also has fea¬
ture columnists who cover astrology, automobiles, books,
bridge, politics, gossip, consumer advice, human relations, mu¬
sic, religion, television, and other topics. The syndicate has
many old favorites that go back a couple of generations, but it
also carries material from the rock magazine Rolling Stone. In
addition, subscribers have access to puzzles and game columns.
The Tribune Syndicate (formerly the New York Daily News-
Chicago Tribune Syndicate) offers “Dear Abby,” the nation’s
most widely read advice column, along with a variety of other
columnists and comics. Along with crossword puzzles and other
amusements, the syndicate carries editorial cartoonists Jeff
MacNelly and Wayne Stayskal. as well as “Youthpoll,” which
keeps watch on the pulse of young people. The Tribune Syndi¬
cate gets about 60 percent of its revenues from its comics; the
rest comes from the text features, puzzles, and a graphics
service.
Washington Post Writer’s Group claims to offer “bylines that
build readership.” Among its services are political commentary
by George F. Will and David S. Broder, economic analysis by
Hobart Rowen and Jane Bryant Quinn, and media criticism
from Sander Vanocur and Charles Seib. It also provides columns
by Ellen Goodman, illustrations by Geoffrey Moss, editorial car¬
toons by Tony Auth, and the Book World Service.

How the Syndicates A former syndicate editor, W. H. Thomas, wrote, "Of all the out¬
Work lets available as a market for creative talent, none is so little
understood or so ill defined as the newspaper syndicate, that in¬
sular and elusive shadow-organization which exercises so much
power within the various communications media."16 True, little
is written about syndicate organizations, although even the larg¬
est of them are modest in size and complexity. But in spite of
this lack of publicity and the variations among the syndicates,
we can make some generalizations about how they work.
Syndicates coordinate many people and tasks, including con¬
tracts between the creators of syndicated material and the
syndicate itself and contracts between the syndicate and
subscribing newspapers. They also handle the flow of money
from the newspaper to the syndicate and the payment of royal¬
ties to the writers and artists. A production staff prepares ma¬
terial for distribution to various media outlets. Additionally,
syndicates promote and market their products through personal
contact, advertising, and other means.
First the syndicates must acquire material. To do so they
maintain regular contacts with writers, artists, designers, and
others. Acquisition can be complicated and secretive, as in the
negotiations for a president’s memoirs. Or it may result from
 ■ 488 Media Support Systems

■ “Buck Rogers”
was one of a number
of important comic
strips that have at¬
tracted the sus¬
tained attention of
newspaper readers.
The comics are im¬
portant circulation-
builders for news¬
papers and are
distributed by fea¬
ture syndicates.
(Courtesy of R. F. Dille.)

opening the morning mail. Free-lance writers and artists fre¬

quently send material to syndicates. The syndicates often serve
as representatives for their writers and artists, much as literary
agents represent authors. Contracts must be negotiated; the
new “property’ (strip or column, for example) must be prepared
for marketing; then the material is sold to clients.
The syndicate usually offers a newspaper a contract for a va¬
riety of materials for a specified time at a specified cost. Like the
wire services, the syndicates have a sliding scale of fees; papers
with small circulations pay less. Some syndicates make it finan¬
cially attractive for a newspaper to take several of their offerings,
but most often newspapers buy material from several syndi¬
cates. Sometimes there is vigorous competition for a feature.
Syndicates must manage and market their wares like any
business that produces a product. New items are added and
 The Auxiliaries 489 ■

marketed; unsuccessful columns and cartoons are dropped. Bob

Reed, president of the Tribune Syndicate, said in a 1983 inter¬
view that syndicates are always on the lookout for new talent but
are cautious in signing new artists and writers. A property suc¬
ceeds or fails on the basis of the numbers of papers signed.
Sometimes unique circumstances intervene. For example, in the
late 1970s Reed “discovered” editorial cartoonist Jack Ohman,
then a sophomore at the University of Minnesota, where he drew
cartoons for the Minnesota Daily. Ohman, at the age of twenty,
moved on to the Columbus Dispatch, where his work was syn¬
dicated to other papers. In 1981 the syndicate’s star cartoonist,
Jeff MacNelly, took a year's vacation, and young Ohman was
picked to take his place. Instantly, Ohman’s work began appear¬
ing in nearly three hundred newspapers. MacNelly later returned
to cartooning, but Ohman continued to draw successfully for the
syndicate from his new base, the Portland Oregonian.
Sometimes syndicate personnel must coordinate many tal¬
ents. For example, in 1917 John F. Dille was a creative busi¬
nessman with experience in advertising when he founded the
National Newspaper Syndicate. Although Dille was neither an
artist nor a writer, he is credited with originating adventure
comic strips. The most notable accomplishment of his syndicate
was the science fiction strip “Buck Rogers.” Dille got the idea for
“Buck Rogers” from a science fiction article in a magazine. He
talked the author into writing for a strip based loosely on the
story. Then he hired an artist to work with the writer, and
“Buck Rogers” was born. Dille’s involvement with the strip
didn’t end there. He knew scientists at the University of Chicago
and often talked with them and reported their ideas about the
future to his artist and writer. Perhaps more important, Dille
convinced newspapers to buy the new strip. It prospered, ap¬
pearing in some 287 newspapers at the height of its popularity.
Thus syndicates are multifaceted organizations that link a
wide variety of creative energies to potential outlets. Syndication
can be carried out by large organizations or by the self-syndica¬
tion efforts of a writer or artist. Syndicates are brokers, but they
can also be quite creative, as John Dille was.
Some syndicates are responding to the communication revo¬
lution and making substantial changes. The Tribune Syndicate
became an information service with a broader mandate than it
had previously had, and ceased calling itself a syndicate in 1984.

Measuring Although there is increasing consolidation of media outlets in

America, competition between and among different media can
Services be intense. They are competing for audiences and for advertis¬
ing. One important tool in this competition is information about
the audience. With the right kind of information, media man-
 ■ 490 Media Support Systems

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H The comics are “artifacts” of American popular culture which

send “signals” around the world about our values and attitudes.
Here “Dennis the Menace” appears in a Hong Kong newspaper.
(Michael Weisbrot and Family/Stock, Boston.)

agers gain feedback that tells them if they're communicating ef¬

fectively. Research on their audience can tell them how to reach
more people. Or they can use data on their audience to convince
advertisers of their effectiveness. Newspapers, magazines, and
radio trumpet the advantages of their medium for reaching par¬
ticular audiences.
For most of this information on audiences, the media turn to
ratings services and companies that specialize in market re¬
search. Professional rating services measure the size, character¬
istics, and behavior of audiences. They may use data from
government agencies such as the Department of Commerce on
the characteristics of market areas (for example, the number of
households or the average age, education, and income of people
in the area). Market researchers provide information about the
effectiveness of advertising. Some trade organizations and me¬
dia organizations conduct research themselves and offer data
 The Auxiliaries 491 ■

about the advantages of a particular medium or a particular out¬

let. Some of this research is conducted by neutral organizations
that report their findings objectively, much as academic re¬
searchers do. But most of the data come from self-serving
groups that use research as a weapon to point up the advan¬
tages of a particular medium. This does not mean that the re¬
search is never conducted rigorously; sometimes it is. But in
many cases the questions in interviews are phrased or arranged
to emphasize the advantages of one medium over another.
Ratings, polls, and market research data have an important
influence on the health of media outlets. They may chart the rise
and fall of a publication or program or spark changes in content.
Within a single market area radio and television stations fight
ratings wars to show advertisers who has the greatest share of
the market and degree of audience attention at particular times
of the day. Losers may find themselves financially strapped.
Sometimes ratings indicate impending death, as they predicted
the fall of slick mass-circulation magazines in the 1960s. Life
and Look faltered when the rating services revealed that they
could not compete with television for large, diversified audi¬
ences, and their advertising revenues declined. Program ratings
often bring rapid changes to the television networks. A new se¬
ries may disappear from the air in midseason, or a network may
announce major changes in its management, all as a result of
ratings. The ratings game and market research form a bizarre
battlefield that merits close scrutiny.

Measuring The basic rating for a newspaper is its circulation. There was a
Circulations time when newspapers and magazines made exaggerated claims
about their audience. Some would increase the figures to im¬
press the advertisers. To end this practice and promote reliable,
impartial reports, a group of advertisers, advertising agencies,
and publishers formed the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) in
1914. ABC checks and verifies circulation figures and other mar¬
keting data on periodicals and newspapers. It sets standards for
circulation (such as solicitation methods and subscriptions) and
requires a publisher’s statement of circulation and other data
every six months. The statements are checked, processed,
printed, and distributed by ABC. Once a year an ABC auditor
goes to the offices of the newspaper or magazine and examines
all records and materials necessary to verify the claims of the
publisher’s statement of circulation. Information provided by
ABC in its semiannual reports includes audited, paid circulation
figures for the six-month period, with breakdowns for such
things as subscriptions versus newsstand sales and data on re¬
gional, metropolitan, and special edition circulation. The report
also includes an analysis of a single issue of the publication in
terms of the market area it reaches and much more.
 ■ 492 Media Support Systems

The importance of the ABC audit was seen dramatically in

the 1980s when USA Today started publication. A paper must
be published at least a year before ABC will run an audit, and
advertisers took a “wait and see” attitude toward the new paper
until the ABC audit was completed in 1984.
Today most daily newspapers and magazines in the United
States and Canada are ABC members. Severed other organiza¬
tions and groups provide basic circulation data for the print me¬
dia and audience figures for broadcast stations. Among them are
Standard Rate and Data Service, which reports audited audi¬
ence/circulation figures and lists advertising rates, policies, and
practices. Still more audience data are available from the Asso¬
ciation of National Advertisers, the American Newspaper Pub¬
lishers Association, the Magazine Publishers Association, and
others.

I Measuring the
Broadcast Audience
The paid circulation of a magazine or newspaper can be audited
rather easily. A physical object—a newspaper or magazine—
arrives at a household and is read by a given number of people.
But getting reliable information about the audience for a broad¬
casting station or a network is more difficult. Broadcast mes¬
sages can occupy long periods of time and reach their audiences
in different ways and with varying levels of intensity. Conse¬
quently, wrote broadcast historian Sydney Head, “no single uni¬
versally accepted way of measuring broadcast consumption has
evolved. Instead, several research companies using rival meth¬
ods compete in the audience measurement field.”17 They use dif¬
ferent procedures to chart audience size, characteristics, and
behavior. Over the last twenty or thirty years they have fre¬
quently changed these methods in order to keep pace with new
techniques for using surveys and statistics.

■ Types of Ratings. One way to measure the audience in an

area is to relate the number of receivers in working order to the
total number of households; the result is the relative saturation
or penetration of the broadcast medium in a particular area.18
Obviously this figure is not a precise measure of the audience
because it says nothing about the viewing habits of people, who
may or may not be using their television sets regularly. Penetra¬
tion or saturation measures the potential audience.
The search for more precision in calculating the broadcast
audience led to systems in which the relative audience size for a
particular time slot or program is calculated. Various measures
are used in this approach: Instantaneous rating reports indicate
the audience size at a particular moment; cumulative reports
give figures for a period of time, say thirty minutes.
 The Auxiliaries 493 ■

Three measures frequently provided by the rating services are

rating, share, and homes using television (HUT). The differences
between these forms are subtle. They can be expressed as
follows:

Rating = homes tuned to station 4- total TV homes ( x 100)

Thus, the rating is the percentage of people who are watching or

listening to a particular station.

Share = homes tuned to station -r homes using TV ( x 100)

A share is the percentage of households watching a particular

program in relation to all programs available at that time.

HUT = sets turned on 4- total TV homes ( x 100)

HUT is thus the percentage of homes that have television sets

tuned to any station. Each of these measures tells us something
different, and they are helpful to the station in sorting out its
exact audience at any given time.

■ Obtaining Ratings. More than fifty companies conduct re¬

search that leads to ratings of some kind. Their first step is to
define the people or the area of interest. A firm called Arbitron
developed one method for defining the areas of interest in the
television industiy. Arbitron divides the United States into
about 210 market areas called areas of dominant influence, or
ADIs. Each of the nation’s 3,141 counties is assigned to one of
the areas, and the markets are ranked according to the number
of television households. The ADIs range from New York, with
more than 6 million television households, to Pembina, North
Dakota, with just over 6,500. The information is used by media
buyers to try to capture specified audiences.
In all audience research some more or less representative set
of people—a sample—must be contacted and data recorded.
Various techniques may be used: telephone interviews, in-per¬
son interviews, listener/viewer diaries, or receiver meters. The
two major broadcast rating services are Arbitron and Nielsen,
which provide national and local ratings.
Arbitron, which conducts research for both radio and televi¬
sion, asks a sample of listeners or viewers to keep a weekly diary
of their viewing/listening behavior. Radio listeners, for example,
are asked to indicate the amount of time they listen and the sta¬
tions they are listening to, including the specific program and
the place they are listening (for example, at home or away from
■ 494 Media Support Systems

home, including in a car). Samples are drawn from each market

area and are weighted to provide a representative picture of the
viewing or listening habits of the people who are asked to keep
diaries.
The famous Nielsen ratings, from which the television net¬
work programs are ranked, are based on data accumulated from
meters attached to television sets in a sample of about 1,200
American homes. A meter known as an Audimeter records how
long the set is on and to what channel it is tuned. The device
then delivers the information to a central computer through a
telephone wire network. This allows rapid daily processing of
data, which are analyzed for the national prime-time ratings.
For ratings of local programs, Nielsen uses diaries.

■ Criticisms and Competitors. All rating services have prob¬

lems gaining acceptance in homes. Some people simply refuse to
cooperate; others do so halfheartedly. These responses distort
the ratings somewhat, although the rating services say they try
to correct for these distortions. No one outside these very secre¬
tive and competitive organizations really knows for sure how se¬
vere these problems are because they do not readily share
information about their methods and procedures. An exception
is Arbitron, which publishes a book explaining its methodology.
But the ratings are generally regarded as sufficiently reliable,
and the industry pays close attention to them. Indeed, these rat¬
ings sometimes cause major shifts in programming.
Although Nielsen and Arbitron dominate the field of broad¬
cast rating services, various competitors occasionally emerge to
challenge their dominance. As a result of the upsurge of interest
in radio in the late 1970s and early 1980s, research on the radio
audience has prospered. With both stations and advertising
agencies eager for more data, seven new firms have entered the
field of radio research and provided a serious challenge to Arbi¬
tron, which once held a near-monopoly. In 1983 Television Au¬
dience Assessment, Inc. (TAA), of Cambridge, Massachusetts,
developed a system that could change the way advertisers adver¬
tise and networks produce television programming. Whereas
Nielsen and Arbitron ratings merely show how many viewers
watch a particular program, the TAA system attempts to show
how people watch TV; that is, the degree of their intellectual and
emotional involvement.
TAA's new approach and others through the years have at¬
tempted to develop a more refined way to look at the audience. It
is important to advertisers to know whether people are really
paying attention to particular programs or whether they are si¬
multaneously working, talking with friends, or reading. No
doubt this kind of refined audience research will play a role with
new electronic media in the future.
 The Auxiliaries 495 ■

In fact, in the early 1980s, it was lack of good audience data

that plagued the cable television industry. Executives of adver¬
tising agencies were growing impatient with the lack of data
measuring audiences for cable. David C. Lehmkuh, vice presi¬
dent of N.W. Ayer, complained: “We owe it to our clients to tell
them, ’Somebody saw your ads.’ Right now we’ll settle for good
household numbers. Later on, we can get age and income
breaks. But first we have to know: is it turned on?” According to
Frank J. Gromer, senior vice president, Foote, Cone & Belding,
“We hardly have any information on the audience delivered: we
don’t know what we’re getting. Decisions on whether to pur¬
chase are based on judgments.”19

■ Ratings and the News. News programs have not been im¬
mune to the probes of researchers and rating services. In fact,
broadcast news consultants not only report audience ratings
and perceptions of news programs but also offer advice designed
to boost ratings. These consultants, firms like Frank N. Magid
Associates and McHugh and Hoffman, are really marketing con¬
sultants concerned mainly with packaging the news to achieve
the greatest possible audience. Their recommendations often
have little to do with journalism. As two educators have written:

Few [of the consultants’ suggestions] deal with the complexities of

news writing, best uses of resources, lines of communication, con¬
troversial reporting, or other journalistic topics. They have tradi¬
tionally convinced station managers that the anchorwoman needs to
convey more warmth on the air, the sportscaster needs to have silver
teeth fillings replaced with more telegenic porcelain fillings, the
weathercaster needs to practice getting rid of his lisp.20

Outrageous and superficial as these examples seem, they do

reflect the kinds of recommendations that the consultants
make. They urge the station to build new and better sets, sug¬
gest more elaborate weather-forecasting equipment, and tell the
anchorman to get a new hairpiece. The most visible sign of the
news consultants’ work has been “happy talk” news in which an-
chorpeople deliver the news in chatty fashion with frequent
friendly asides. Other evidence of the consultants' advice is the
“action news” format, which includes more stories of shorter
length. This format is the result of the consultants’ conviction
that viewers do not pay attention for long.
Station managers take these recommendations seriously, al¬
though many news directors have resisted them. In some places
the consultant’s recommendations have virtually dictated major
changes: in others the information is used advisedly in reshap¬
ing the format of a program. Consultants do have an instinct for
boosting ratings. In any event, the use of these consultants
shows clearly that news programming on radio and television.
 ■ 496 Media Support Systems

like entertainment programming, competes yigorously for an au¬

dience. Better ratings means a bigger share of the market and
thus greater profits.

Probing Consumer In recent years the ratings services have tried to break down the
Behavior broadcast audience in terms of such categories as age, occupa¬
tion, income, ethnic background, and geographic location. Pre¬
cise knowledge of such characteristics of the audience has
become increasingly important as broadcasters try to attract
specific kinds of audiences. For example, it must have been de¬
termined that people likely to buy records are also likely to watch
television late at night, since the airwaves are full of such adver¬
tising late at night and veiy early in the morning. Various kinds
of nonrating research probe the size and stability of the audi¬
ence, seasonal variations, the hours spent viewing, and other
factors. A number of market research firms look at audiences as
potential consumers. The Axiom Market Research Bureau, for
example, uses a large national sample (25,000) and collects in¬
formation to learn how people use products and the media and
how they make their buying decisions. It offers its subscribers
information about some 450 products and services, 120 maga¬
zines, 6 newspaper supplements, the nation’s major newspapers,
network television, and television usage as well as radio usage
by type of program. The resulting data can help an advertiser
decide which medium to use to sell laxatives, perfume, beer, or
some other product.
Readership or viewership and product data are also corre¬
lated by W. R. Simmons & Associates Research, which studies
the audiences of magazines, newspaper supplements, national
newspapers, and network television programs in terms of selec¬
tive markets. Other firms, like Opinion Research Corporation,
provide selective market information about the reading patterns
of groups such as executives and teen-agers. Still another firm,
Lee Slurzberg Research, focuses on the black consumer and
black media.
Other market research firms collect and disseminate infor¬
mation about advertising rates and mechanical specifications,
advertising volume, and advertising effectiveness. One such
firm, Daniel Starch & Staff, Inc., studies readers of consumer
magazines, general business and trade periodicals, daily news¬
papers, and other publications. They also note reading intensi¬
ties or the reactions of readers to particular typographical
devices and approaches.
Individual newspapers or broadcasters sometimes hire firms
to probe their audience in more detail. The circulation losses of
American newspapers led to a good many of these studies in the
1970s. One study, commissioned by a large metropolitan news-
 The Auxiliaries 497 ■

paper, examined what was in the paper and what people read.
As the confidential report described the study’s recommen¬
dations:

The prescription outlined here is surgery: It points out what kinds

of things might be cut out of the paper to improve readership, and
also what kinds of things readers seem to want more of. It points
out how differences in readership are related to such things as the
subject of a story, its orientation, where it takes place, where it ap¬
pears in the paper, the writing approach used in the story, the
length of the story, the size and quality of its headline, the size of
the newshole and the number of items on the page where the story
appears, and the size of any photographs used to illustrate the
story.21

Clearly, recommendations were offered that would alter the

newspaper, in the hope of gaining a larger and more dedicated
audience. Thus the various rating services and market research¬
ers do not provide static indicators of audience preferences but
information that can be used to change the content or format of
a program or publication.
Most of the information we have been discussing is some¬
what secret. It is gathered mainly for internal use by advertisers
and media organizations. Sometimes, as in the case of the Niel¬
sen ratings, the information is published widely in the press,
but still its main use is internal. The public sometimes sees the
consequences of the ratings but rarely knows much about how
the ratings were determined or why decisions were made. On
rare occasions a disgruntled Nielsen employee has revealed anec¬
dotes about the internal operations of the firm. Beyond this kind
of insider's view, however, little is known about these groups,
which have so much influence on the media.

Measuring Public In contrast to ratings and market research on the media, public
Opinion opinion polls are designed for public display and public con¬
sumption. The various media are interested in them for two rea¬
sons. First, the media are thought to influence public opinion.
Second, and more important, public opinion on current topics
can be important news.
Some polling groups—such as George Gallup's American In¬
stitute of Public Opinion, the Louis Harris polls, and various
state and regional polls (Field in California, the Iowa and Min¬
nesota polls in the Midwest)—produce regular reports on the
public pulse. These polls have been conducted with ever more
precise methods through the years. They measure popularity of
the president, public views of political and social issues, and re¬
actions to a particular policy. The responses of Americans to
such questions is news and is treated as such.
■ 498 Media Support Systems

As polls became more common and proved more aspects of

American life, they also became controversial. They are often
criticized for interfering in the electoral process. (We discuss the
influence of mass communications generally on elections in
Chapter 8.) Congressional committees have probed the ques¬
tion: do polls have an undue influence on American politics?
The pollsters say no, they are merely “photographing” public
opinion at a given moment in time. But politicians persist in
claiming that the polls influence voting behavior. There is little
data to support this claim.
From time to time interest in the pollsters’ methods rises.
How accurate are the polls? Can they call a close election? What
if they are wrong? These questions and others have occupied
commentators for years. Much of the concern goes back to hazy
memories of the famous Literary Digest poll of 1936. The Liter¬
ary Digest, then a popular weekly magazine, mailed 10 million
ballots to American citizens. They got 2 million back, and pre¬
dicted that Alfred Landon would defeat Franklin D. Roosevelt in
the presidential election by a substantial margin. Landon suf¬
fered an overwhelming defeat, and the magazine was mortified.
Later (for this and other reasons), it went out of business.
Why had the Digest, which had been accurately forecasting
elections since 1916, made such a colossal error? It happened
because they had mailed their ballots to those people who were
on auto registration and telephone lists. In the middle of the
Great Depression of the 1930s, these lists excluded many voters
with low income, people who were likely to vote against Landon
and for Democrat Roosevelt. In the jargon of polling, the sample
was biased.
The Literary Digest poll taught the pollsters a lesson and led
to more refined and sophisticated methods of both drawing a
sample and interpreting the results. Pollsters have continued to
alter their methods since then for more accurate prediction.
The major pollsters work in somewhat different ways, but
generally they use a national sample of, say, 2,500 people. This
sample is sorted and weighted to take geographical differences
and differences in neighborhood (and thus social class) into ac¬
count. The pollsters try to measure the degree of accuracy to pre¬
dict variation from their results, and they try to control for
errors. For the most part they have been successful in doing this
and in building confidence in their results.
If a poll says that only 30 percent of the public favor national
health insurance or that 60 percent of the public approve of the
president’s handling of his job, what does that mean? It is im¬
portant first to know who paid for the poll and to know the exact
wording of the questions used. Information about the sample
size and possible percentage of error provides useful insights
 The Auxiliaries 499 ■

Box 13

How Accurate
Are Public
Opinion Polls?

In the mid 1980s, public opinion polling is a eral questions about people’s interest in var¬
$1.5 billion per year business. Politicians and ious issues such as energy, the environment,
corporations rely on it to plan their strategies; and equal rights for women were influenced
sociologists and advertising firms use it to by more specific questions; 42 percent of re¬
spot trends in the way we behave and the spondents claimed they were “very inter¬
things we believe. But no one is really sure ested” in some of these issues after they had
that the polls’ results are accurate. Although answered a number of questions, whereas
most responsible pollsters try to avoid ob¬ only 28 percent said they were “very inter¬
vious sources of bias—polling a homogene¬ ested" when they were asked the general
ous group of people, or asking leading question first
questions—there are dozens of pitfalls in the A related criticism of polling is that the way
process itself. in which questions are worded biases re¬
For example, many critics of polling claim spondents toward one or another answer. Ac¬
that the order in which questions are asked in¬ cording to a report in the spring 1982 issue of
fluences the way in which people respond. Us¬ Public Opinion Quarterly, a journal devoted
ing a question that the Gallup Poll has asked exclusively to such questions, people are
for more than forty years—“Do you approve of more apt to agree with the idea presented in a
the way that_is handling his job as question if they are given no alternative infor¬
President?”—one group of researchers tried mation. Researchers asked questions in two
to determine whether this was true. They forms:
found that respondents' answers did not vary
significantly whether the question came first l.“Some people feel that the government in
or thirty-third in an interview, but that people Washington should see to it that every per¬
were more willing to express an opinion after son has a job and a good standard of living.
they had answered more specific questions Do you agree or disagree with the idea?”
about the President’s actions. Similarly, gen¬ and
 ■ 500 Media Support Systems

2. “Some people feel that the government in college graduates seemed to respond almost
Washington should see to it that every per¬ equally, less educated people differed in their
son has a job and a good standard of living. responses by as much as fifteen percentage
Others think the government should just points.
let each person get ahead on his own. Do What does all this mean for the future of
you think that the government should see public opinion polls? It may be that as people
to it that every person has a job... or become more aware of such problems, they
should it let each person get ahead on his will become less willing to take part in polls.
own?” Then again, polls may become so popular that
we rely on them to tell us things about our¬
Forty-four percent of those who were asked selves that we might have been able to learn in
Question 1 agreed with it, whereas only 30.3 other ways. As Larry Sabato, a political scien¬
percent of those who were asked Question 2 tist, has said, “There is something disquieting
chose the first alternative. These findings about a society that needs to have its temper¬
were even more dramatic among respondents ature taken so frequently.”
with a high school education or less; whereas (photo:© Ellis Herwig/The Picture Cube.)

into the meaning of the findings. How the interview was con¬
ducted might also influence the results. Was it conducted in per¬
son or on the phone? Did it include anyone registered to vote or
only those likely to vote? Finally, timing might be crucial. If, for
example, a poll commenting on the president’s popularity was
taken just before an unpopular presidential decision, it may not
reflect current opinion. During the presidential election of 1980,
the importance of timing was strikingly evident in polls regard¬
ing the race between President Carter and Senator Edward Ken¬
nedy for the Democratic nomination. At first, Kennedy ran far
ahead of Carter in the polls. Then American citizens were taken
hostage in Iran. The country rallied behind the president, his
ratings in the polls rose dramatically, and Kennedy’s fell.
To help the public interpret polls intelligently, the National
Committee on Published Polls has set minimal standards of in¬
formation that should accompany any published poll. The fol¬
lowing information should be provided in all news stories about
public polls:

1 The identity of the sponsor of the survey

2 The exact wording of the questions asked
3 A definition of the population sampled
4 The sample size and, where the survey design makes it rele¬
vant, the response rate
5 Some indication of the allowance that should be made for
sampling error
6 Which results are based on part of the sample, for example,
probable voters, those who have heard of the candidate, or
other subdivisions
 The Auxiliaries 501 ■

7 How the interviews were collected: in person in homes, by

phone, by mail, on street corners, or wherever
8 When the interviews were collected22

These standards are important because they give the public

enough information to evaluate a poll. The major national polls
usually provide most of this information, although some editors
delete parts of it, thinking that their readers won’t be interested.
Not all public polls are released by respectable and reliable firms
like the Gallup organization. Politicians and various special-
interest groups often trumpet polls that make them look good.
Sometimes these polls are worth examining; sometimes they are
not. Information on how the poll was obtained can help readers
make that decision. Well-conducted polls have the advantage of
taking readers beyond their own experience and that of society’s
authorities (public figures and others) to the grassroots, to the
people.
Another intriguing measure of public opinion has been pro¬
moted by John Naisbitt in his book, Megatrends: Ten New Di¬
rections Transforming Oar Lives. Naisbitt and other social
forecasters analyze the content of newspapers to see what edi¬
tors play up or ignore. Acting on the belief that papers cover
things that people are concerned about, these forecasters use
their analysis of newspapers to predict trends in social priori¬
ties. A number of companies buy these services and use the in¬
formation in their public relations program.23

■ Summary In this chapter we have examined the auxiliary organizations

that serve, support, or supplement the mass media of commu¬
nication. The wire services, feature syndicates, and public polls
provide content and in the process bring some standardization
of media fare. Other auxiliaries monitor and measure audience
reaction to the mass media. Although these auxiliaries—rating
services, market research, and others—do not provide content
for the media directly, they help shape that content.
AP and UPI are the dominant wire services, providing exhaus¬
tive coverage of national and international news. They gather
and distribute the news, and both what they cover and how they
cover it have a major effect on the content of papers and news¬
casts all across the nation. About 95 percent of America’s daily
newspapers subscribe to AP or UPI or both. In addition, many
now subscribe to one of the supplemental services.
The wires serve both the print and the broadcasting media;
the syndicates serve just the print media, although the networks
act rather like “syndicates of the air.” Much of the interpretation
and entertainment in newspapers comes from the syndicates.
 ■ 502 Media Support Systems

From editorial cartoons to political columns, comic strips, and

advice to the lovelorn, the syndicates have touch to offer news¬
papers. They most often act as brokers between the writers and
artists and the print media.
Ratings, market research, and polls help the media to keep in
touch with their audiences and to sell themselves to advertisers.
Although these evaluative tools frequently influence the content
and format of programs and publications, the methods used and
the results are often secret.

Notes and 1 Richard L. Gordon, “Cincinnati Post Copes with New York Black¬
References out, "Editor & Publisher, July 30, 1977, p. 29.
2 Ibid. See also, “News Computers Go Dead During NY Power Out¬
age, "Editor & Publisher, July 23, 1977, p. 7.
3 Victor Rosewater, History of Co-operative News-Gathering in the
UnitedStates (NewYork: Appleton-Centuiy-Crofts, 1930), p. 354.
4 Ibid.
5 A. Kent MacDougall, “Wire Services: AP and UPI,” in The Press; A
Critical Look from the Inside, ed. MacDougall (Princeton, N.J.:
Dow Jones Books, 1972), pp. 109-110.
6 J. Richard Cote, “AStudy of Accuracy ofTwo Wire Services,” Jour¬
nalism Quarterly, Winter 1970, p. 666.
7 Richard A. Schwarzlose, “Trends in U.S. Newspapers’ Wire Ser¬
vice Resources, 1934—66,” Journalism Quarterly, Winter 1966,
p. 637.
8 B. H. Liebes, “Decision-Making by Telegraph Editors—AP or
UPI?" Journalism Quarterly, Autumn 1966, pp. 441^442.
9 MacDougall, “Wire Services,” p. 110.
10 United States v. Associated Press et al, 52 F. Supp. 372 (1943).
11 Russell Baker, An American in Washington (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1961), p. 197.
12 MacDougall, “Wire Services,” p. 118.
13 Michael W. Singletary, “Newspaper Use of Supplemental Services,
1960-1973," Journalism Quarterly, Winter 1975, pp. 750-751.
14 Ibid.
15 See advertisement, pp. 28-29A, Editor & Publisher, July 31,
1976.
16 W. H. Thomas, ed., The Road to Syndication (New York: Fleet
Press, 1967) p. 12.
17 Sydney Head, Broadcasting in America, 3rd ed. (Boston: Hough¬
ton Mifflin, 1976) p. 227.
18 Ibid., p. 228. See, generally. Head’s excellent discussion of audi¬
ence measurement, pp. 226—255.
 The Auxiliaries 503 ■

19 Television/Radio Age, May 17, 1982, pp. 46-47.

20 Julius K. Hunter and Lynn S. Gross, Broadcast News: The Inside
Out (St. Louis, Mo.: C. W. Mosby, 1980), p. 280.
21 From a confidential report prepared by a market research firm for
a large metropolitan daily newspaper.
22 For an excellent discussion of criteria for public polls, see Phillip
Meyer, Precision Journalism, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana Uni¬
versity Press, 1978).
23 Bill Adams, “John Naisbitt Makes a Handsome Living Reading
Newspapers for Big Corporations,” Wall Street Journal, Septem¬
ber 30. 1982, p. 52.
Sweeping across the country with the speed of a transient fashion
. .. comes now the mechanical device to sing Jot us or play the
piano ... in substitute for human skill, intelligence and soul
there will be a marked deterioration in American music and musical
taste with the multiplication of various music-producing machines.
John Philip Sousa,
Appleton's Magazine, 1906

■ Popular Music and the

Recording Industry

Popular music is so much a part of our society that it seems as

common as the air we breathe. We are saturated with music if
for no other reason than the overwhelming presence of media to
transmit it to us. Some 97 percent of American households have
at least one TV and viewing time exceeds seven hours per day.
Radios are everywhere. It would be difficult to find an American
household without one. About 95 percent of all automobiles on
the road have receivers. Add to these music-delivering media
some 75 million record players, an unknown number of devices
to play audio or video tapes, the gadgets that deliver wired music
such as one hears in elevators, and the musical soundtracks of
movies. Few can escape the daily tidal wave of popular music
that the media industries transmit.
Popular music has a rich history with complex beginnings.
These origins have left an indelible imprint on contemporary en¬
tertainment. As we shall see in our brief review of the music it¬
self, many of the rhythmic forms that delighted, startled, or even
frightened our grandparents in the early days of popular music
are still part of what we hear today. We will also see that many of
the social forms developed in past generations to produce and
market popular music are still very much a part of the contem¬
porary industry.
Thus, in this chapter we look back to review the origins of
popular music, its principal forms, and its enthusiastic adop¬
tion by the majority of Americans. We also trace the emergence
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 505 ■

■ Popular music is an ever-present feature of the daily lives of

most Americans. Radios, television sets, record and tape players,
plus many other devices place it literally at our finger tips twenty-
four hours a day. It is a central part of our media content The in¬
dustry that produces popular music is an important adjunct to our
system of mass communication. (© Paul Light/Lightwave.)

of the technologies and social innovations that made it possible

for our nation to enter the Jazz Age. We will show that from its
beginnings the popular music industry has been dependent on
mass media. At the turn of the century the printing press was
the medium in use. Popular tunes in the form of sheet music
were marketed for the home piano. By the time of World War I,
the technology of sound recording had been improved to a point
where the phonograph became the major medium for the explo¬
sive new jazz of the time. In the 1920s the rapidly developing ra¬
dio industry filled its broadcasting hours by playing popular
songs over the airwaves. The movies finally discovered popular
music during the 1930s. Today, television, especially cable TV,
 ■ 506 Media Support Systems

presents the latest singers, bands, dance crazes, and musical in¬
novations in multicolored, flashing splendoi*. In the decades to
come new technologies will delight, startle, or frighten us. The
Jazz Age will continue because of this intensely creative media-
related industry. Yet there is little doubt that the musical styles
and hits of today will at some point seem as quaint and dated as
the popular music of years gone by.

The Beginnings Religion was a powerful influence on the early settlers of New
Of Popular Music England- They brought with them books of psalms and hymns
for religious singing. The melodies of these songs were preserved
mainly by the oral tradition in a largely illiterate society.1 As
these religious songs were spread from one place to another and
passed on through generations, they often became distorted.
This disturbed religious authorities. To preserve the original
hymns the clergy encouraged “singing masters” to go from town
to town providing instruction. These enterprising individuals of¬
fered a simple course of a few weeks in which for a fee villagers
could learn the rudiments of music and engage in group sing¬
ing. The sessions were held in local churches, or if there was no
church, in a school, meeting house, or even a tavern.
These singing meetings had a particular appeal for the young
because they provided socially approved opportunities to meet
and be with members of the opposite sex. This was exciting in
the strait-laced farming towns of early America, where there
were few distractions from a life of grinding toil. As one young
man explained in a letter to his friend in 1782:

I have no inclination for anything for I am sick of the World and if it

were not for the hopes of going to singing meeting tonight and en¬
gaging in some of the Carnal Delights of the Flesh, such as kissing
and squeezing ... I should willingly leave it now.2

Apparently, the music that provided popular entertainment for

people in the eighteenth century had two features that it retains
today: a strong appeal to the young and an association with ac¬
tivities not entirely approved of by the older generation.
As the nation moved into the nineteenth century, the music
of ordinary people reflected their daily experiences as they toiled,
went to war, and suffered the hardships of a demanding life.
Simple and honest songs were created that needed no musical
instruments. The ones that eased the burden of heavy work
played an especially important role. For example, from the sea
came the “chantey” that was sung by sailors as they pulled the
heavy lines. Even in the following brief segment we can see that
the chorus helped them put their backs into the task in unison:
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 507 ■

Cape Cod girls they have no combs

Heave Away! Heave Away!
They comb their hair with codfish bones
Heave Away! Heave Away.13

Similarly, the slaves on the plantations developed their own

songs, rhythmic “field hollers,” and melodic “shouts” that not
only helped them do the heavy work but also expressed their
emotions. The often brutal treatment of the blacks brought from
Africa had left them with a deep, culturally shared sorrow. Their
suffering was intense on the slave ships as they got their first
taste of life under their new white masters:

At the savage captain’s beck

Now like brutes they make us prance;
Smack the cat about the deck.
And in scorn they bid us dance.
from "The Sorrows oJYamba,”
an anonymous eighteenth-century poem

The deep feelings embedded in black culture by such experi¬

ences would later find expression in the blues that became a
part of popular music early in this century.
While black people suffered dreadfully, life was difficult at
best for all the common people in the nineteenth century. It was
a life of bone-wearying labor. Work gang songs helped focus the
energy of men’s muscles as they struggled to build canals, rail¬
roads, mines, and farms. Ballad songs were much in vogue.
They were sung to entertain people, often accompanied by a
banjo, fiddle, or dulcimer. What we call country and western mu¬
sic today had its origins in the simple songs of those who settled
in the isolated Ozark and Appalachian Mountains. Based on the
English ballads they brought with them, their native songs ex¬
pressed themes of love, fear, death, and the experiences of their
way of life. A somewhat similar type of folk song gave rise to to¬
day’s bluegrass and cowboy songs. This was the music of the up¬
per South, the Southwest, and the Great Plains. The themes
were of cattle, outlaws, the limitless outdoors, and personal feel¬
ings. In addition, there were dozens, even hundreds, of musical
forms that were brought to the New World by the millions of im¬
migrants. They sang, danced, and played their instruments long
before anyone had ever heard of popular music in the modern
sense.
The turn away from folk music to written popular music pre¬
pared for a market occurred gradually. Even during the mid¬
nineteenth century, a few composers were preparing tunes for a
 ■ 508 Media Support Systems

small and scattered sheet music market. Stephen Foster wrote a

number of songs that have become a part of our national heri¬
tage. Although they sound like southern folk melodies, they were
his own creations as he worked in the North. For example, he
wrote “Way Down upon the Swanee River” in Philadelphia. He
never saw the rather muddy Suwannee River that runs through
southern Georgia and northern Florida; while writing the music
he didn’t even know it existed. His original version used the Pe-
dee River, but he decided that he didn’t like the sound. He con¬
sulted his brother, who seriously suggested the Yazoo River
(“Way Down upon the Yazoo River”?). Finally, he found the Su¬
wannee in an atlas and shortened the name to Swanee.4
Another part of America’s musical heritage that helped form
contemporaiy popular music was the venerable minstrel show.
This type of show and its music was originated by a group of
whites in the 1840s. Performers in Lew Johnson’s Plantation
Minstrel Company put burnt cork on their faces to mimic and
burlesque the slaves. They played the banjo, beat the drum,
shook the tambourine, and rattled the bones. They entertained
the slave owners and their guests with gross stereotypes of
blacks and crude humor. After Emancipation, blacks themselves
continued the tradition, even using burnt cork. Making a living
wasn’t easy in a white-dominated world. The significance of the
minstrel shows was that their musicians and singers were pre¬
cursors of the popular bands that came decades later.

The old minstrel show, truth to tell, for all of the sentimental
memories that are linked to it, must have been a pretty dull affair.
Its jokes were old when Cleopatra was a child. Its tunes were undis¬
tinguished, for the greater part, although they had the country by
the ears. The words and ditties served mainly tb fill space. And yet it
is from the minstrel show that we get (many popular songs].5

In addition to the nation’s rich musical heritage, several

other factors eventually led to the development of a national
marketing system to sell popular music. Once such a system of
distribution had been established, it made possible the retail
sale of songs and tunes specifically prepared for popular con¬
sumption. At first, since there were no other media to be used,
this was sheet music for the home piano. What was needed was
social machinery for production and distribution, and above all,
an imaginative new kind of music that would capture the pub¬
lic’s imagination. At the end of the century, the music came in
a form and from sources that no one would have expected.

The Emergence of During the last part of the nineteenth century, several cities
Ragtime along the Mississippi had become centers of commerce, thanks
to their location and the existence of the great river itself. The
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 509 ■

farms of mid-America had begun to produce far more food and

fiber than the population needed. Steamboats brought agricul¬
tural products southward from the Midwest to the port of New
Orleans for shipment to distant markets. They also brought cot¬
ton from the southern states. In turn, imports from many parts
of the world were carried back up the river by the boats into the
nation’s heartland. This flow of commerce brought great profits
to some and high wages to many. With gold jingling in a large
number of pockets, it was inevitable that gambling halls, sa¬
loons, and bawdy houses would prosper in St. Louis, New
Orleans, and other major ports along the river.

■ The Entertainer. The districts of bright lights and seamy

pleasures of the river ports inevitably attracted clever musicians
to entertain the customers. There were no juke boxes or record
players—only the house piano. The “sporting houses,” as they
were called, used the most able of the available talent, musically
and otherwise. The majority of the musicians were black. One
reason was that they had extraordinary skill, even though very
few could read music. Also, it was one of the few jobs that were
open to them as musicians. It was a tough job in a tough envi¬
ronment. They had to be good to survive. There were always new
candidates waiting in the wings to take their jobs. And, if they
didn’t please the customers, they soon became unemployed.
The fact that few of these entertainers could read music may
have been a blessing rather than a handicap. They could play
almost any customer’s request from memory. Once they heard a
song, many could reproduce it flawlessly, even long afterward.
They were also very clever at inventing catchy tunes with lively
rhythms to set a mood of fun. Their pay depended directly on
their innovative talents. The more they pleased the customers,
the greater their earnings. From the perspective of a black man
from an impoverished background, there was a fortune to be
made. A skilled entertainer could earn as much as $25 a night
in tips, sometimes even more. It was high pay indeed. A good
meal cost only a quarter, and a finely tailored suit about $20.
Thus, it was in the bawdy houses and saloons that the in¬
tensely creative black musician found a sympathetic home. The
madam was his patroness of the arts, and the customer both au¬
dience and critic. It was a fiercely competitive situation that de¬
manded the highest level of skill and innovation in playing the
instrument. The entertainers took great pride in their work and
held immensely popular contests to see who could outplay the
other.
The most famous (or infamous) of the sporting houses were
to be found in “Storyville” in New Orleans. The Crescent City
was the busiest river port of them all, and it was in its red-light
■ 510 Media Support Systems

district that the most talented and innovative of the entertainers

performed in the fanciest establishments. *It is little wonder,
then, that New Orleans is often thought of as the city that con¬
tributed most to the early development of popular music in
America.
As a basis for their musical innovations, the entertainers
made extensive use of the rhythms and folk music they knew
from the black society in which they had been raised. From
those sources they created new piano compositions that incor¬
porated the “rag” dances of the poor blacks who lived and
worked along the levee. They also used elements of the “cake¬
walk” music that had been a part of black life on the planta¬
tions. (The cakewalk was a competition of fancy and high-
stepping dancing. The owner usually gave a cake to the winning
couple.) The pianists added the polyrhythms that had survived
from the music of the generations who had been brought from
Africa. From these sources the black entertainers of the red-light
districts created an unusual and very lively form of piano music
that came to be called “ragtime.” They were playing it in the
sporting houses along the great river during the 1880s and the
early 1890s. It remained only for this charming and unusual
music to move out of this disreputable environment to capture
the imagination and enthusiasm of the larger society. Ragtime
was destined to become the first form of truly popular music in
the modern sense of that term.

■ Scott Joplin. One entertainer among the hundreds who

played the new lively music was to become the celebrated inno¬
vator who brought ragtime out of the sporting house and made
it the respectable darling of the middle class. His name was
Scott Joplin, and he was uniquely qualified to bridge the two
worlds. He was born in 1868 in a small town in Texas. His father
had been a slave and had played the violin for plantation parties.
His mother had been free-born. She had a beautiful singing
voice and played the banjo. All the children were taught to play
some kind of instrument. Scott was only seven when he discov¬
ered a neighbor’s piano. Since he showed clear signs of talent,
the impoverished family scraped together enough resources to
buy him an old and rather decrepit instrument. The boy spent
every possible hour exploring his piano, and by the time he was
eleven he could improvise smoothly with a keen sense of rhythm
and harmonics. Still, he couldn’t read a note!
His remarkable self-taught ability came to the attention of an
old German music teacher who lived in the town. As a result,
Scott received free lessons in technique and some sight-reading
as well as an initial grounding in harmony and musical theory.
The old professor also introduced his young friend to the mas¬
ters of classical music.
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 511 ■

With few other outlets for his skills, Scott Joplin became a
roving pianist, working in the sporting houses and saloons up
and down the Mississippi Valley. As a young adult with several
years behind him working as an entertainer, he took a job play¬
ing the piano in a saloon called the Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia,
Missouri.
Meanwhile, Joplin had put his formal musical training to
work. He had begun to write down the lyrics of ragtime pieces
that he had composed. He was not the first to do this. A number
of obscure ragtime pieces were scored a few years earlier. But it
was Joplin’s work that was to capture the imagination of the
public. One reason was that while in Sedalia he had substan¬
tially added to his formal training by studying music at nearby
George R. Smith College. This enabled him to produce techni¬
cally sophisticated music. He named one of his compositions
“The Maple Leaf Rag” after the saloon. It was here that he en¬
countered John S. Stark, who owned a music store in Sedalia.
In 1899 Stark bought the rights to the “Maple Leaf Rag” for $50
and had it printed as sheet music. He included in the agreement
a royalty for the composer in case the piece made any money
after publication. It was a gamble because few outside the saloon
world had ever heard of ragtime music. As it turned out, it was
the best investment Stark ever made. He distributed the sheet
music around the region, and it caught on rapidly. “The Maple
Leaf Rag” was soon selling briskly even though it was an entirely
new musical form unfamiliar to those who bought it. By 1906 it
had sold over half a million copies.6 Other composers quickly
produced additional pieces, and ragtime began to attract an en¬
thusiastic national following.
Joplin’s personal life ended in tragedy. He died of complica¬
tions arising from syphilis, contracted during the time he played
piano in the sporting houses.
Joplin produced a number of famous ragtime compositions.
He even wrote an opera, but it never caught on. In 1974, de¬
cades after his death, a motion picture, The Sting, featured his
compositions as its theme music. Joplin s The Entertainer
made the top of the charts in the same year.
It is difficult to say why ragtime swept the country at the be¬
ginning of the new century. Perhaps the public had grown tired
of the sentimental ballads, waltzes, and European-type music of
the late nineteenth century. Ragtime was very different. Tech¬
nically speaking, it used musical forms that were not well known
to the established world of music at the time. Certainly, the Eu¬
ropean masters had never tried to use them. Ragtime is based
on a rhythm called syncopation. In playing the melody with the
right hand, the pianist accents the weak or normally unaccented
third beat of a measure while playing a precise and regularly ac¬
cented bass with the left hand. Complex polyrhythms result—
■ 512 Media Support Systems

■ Tin Pan Alley continued to churn out sentimental ballads even

after ragtime took over as America’s most popular music during the
decade and a half before World War I. Some critics maintain that
even though ragtime music was complex and difficult to play it be¬
came popular in part because the sentimental ballads were such a
ghastly bore. (Library of Congress/Photo by National Photo Company.)

common enough in African drum-dominated music, but a bit

startling in the Western world at the turn of the century. In fact,
ragtime was far more complex and difficult to play than the bal¬
lads and waltzes that were then being published for the home
piano.

■ Tin Pan Alley. One clear reason ragtime enjoyed wide popu-
larity was its vigorous promotion by a group of music publishing
houses that came to be called “Tin Pan Alley.” In 1883 a young
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 513 ■

man named Charles K. Harris hit upon the idea of writing songs
specifically for new musical shows. Up to that time shows had
been developed around existing songs that people already knew.
The results were often less than satisfactory. Sometimes the mu¬
sic fit the themes of the production and sometimes not. Harris
understood the world of vaudeville, musical shows, and the
theater very well, and he came up with a clever solution for the
problem. He opened a small office with a sign outside that said:

Charles K. Harris
Banjoist and Song Writer
Songs Written to Order

In those last four words—“Songs Written to Order”—was the es¬

sence of what was to become Tin Pan Alley. Here was a com¬
pletely new approach to the production of music. The songs that
Harris produced were not folk music, although in some cases
they sounded like it. Neither were they products of artists moti¬
vated solely by the creative muse. They were developed for com¬
mercial purposes, Jor specific markets. In other words, they
were produced to be sold for profit, in much the same way as one
produces beer, soap, a patent medicine, or any other product.
This concept remains one of the most important features of pop¬
ular music.
Soon, Harris had a number of competitors. There was a big
demand for such music, not only from those producing shows,
but also from the public who wanted sheet music for their pi¬
anos. Tin Pan Alley did not receive its name until after the turn
of the century (from critics who claimed that their products had
all the musical qualities of tin pans beaten by idiots). It was a
group of loosely organized publishing companies that under¬
stood how to copyright songs, how to get the scores printed in
the form of sheet music, and how to sell their wares to national
distributors who supplied local retailers. Some of their compos¬
ers were free-lancers who brought their tunes to the publishers
and sold them for a fee plus a share of the royalties. Others
worked directly for the companies. It was an intensely competi¬
tive business in which fortunes could be made, even on a single
song. As the national market developed for sheet music, songs
were “plugged” competitively by promotional techniques that are
marveled at even today by advertisers and public relations
experts.
Before the ragtime craze got started, the early Tin Pan Alley
houses were producing and selling sentimental ballads. Many a
tear was shed over gushy musical laments about mothers, dearly
departed lovers, innocent young women who were wronged, pa¬
thetic little children, and unrequited romances. The ballads
■ 514 Media Support Systems

were slow pieces that were easy to play on the piano. They had
simple words for the family to learn and sing. In the opinion of
many, they were a ghastly bore. In any case, they sold by the
hundreds of thousands and fortunes were made.
Thus, as the century began, the social machinery of Tin Pan
Alley was in place. It had hustling entrepreneurs eager to make
money on any new song. Publishing sheet music had become a
well-developed industry supplying a product to a national mar¬
ket of amateur piano players. It was into this environment that
written ragtime music emerged from its colorful origins. For the
hucksters of Tin Pan Alley its immediate popularity represented
a golden opportunity. They went to work with great enthusiasm
to produce and sell a tidal wave of ragtime songs and sheet mu¬
sic to anyone and everyone who had the money to buy.
The ragtime craze lasted from about the turn of the century
to the beginning of World War I. Tin Pan Alley produced literally
thousands of titles, and the snappy new rhythm spread to all
parts of the Western world where pianos were in use. Meanwhile,
two additional forms of technology began to play a part in the
spread of popular music. These were the piano roll and the new
talking machine.
Piano rolls were widely used early in the century, although
they did not reach their peak of popularity until the 1920s. They
were not actual recordings of musicians playing the instrument.
They were made by arrangers and technicians on special ma¬
chines. At first, they were simply duplications of the tunes pub¬
lished as sheet music. Later, as ragtime became increasingly
popular, the technicians discovered that they could put in many
extra notes to make the piano work hard and really produce a lot
of music. For this reason, even an accomplished musician can¬
not actually play the compositions produced by some piano rolls.
The rolls cannot produce subtle nuances of style; each note is
struck mechanically and in full. Nevertheless, they were a lot of
fun and they sold by the millions. Some today are quite valuable.
Scott Joplin himself supervised the preparation of a roll for “Ma¬
ple Leaf Rag," and this is our only surviving record of how he
meant it to be played.
The phonograph had been developing rapidly during the
same general period. After the turn of the century, many per¬
formers of opera and classical music were recorded by the early
studios, even though the quality of reproduction was dismal by
today’s standards. However, the record companies did not think
that the new popular music was worthy of their serious atten¬
tion. A few folk songs and ballads were being produced, but the
first ragtime piano recording we know of was not made until
1912, when Mike Bernard played “Everybody’s Two Step” for Co-
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 515 ■

lumbia Records. Even though the world took little note, the
event represented a kind of turning point. Soon, the new ma¬
chines would play an important part in the death of ragtime as
America’s most popular music.
As Tin Pan Alley became well established, it was not uncom¬
mon to sell a million copies of the piano music for a popular
tune. In 1910 more than 2 billion songs were sold in sheet mu¬
sic form. However, as the phonograph spread, the sale of piano
music began to decline. It was a lot easier to crank up the ma¬
chine and put on a record than to play the tune on a piano. As
the recording companies began to realize the market potential of
popular music, Tin Pan Alley redoubled its efforts to grind out
new songs. Soon hundreds of ragtime pieces were being written
every month, and millions of records were manufactured every
year to meet the demand. By the time World War I arrived, the
country had been virtually saturated with ragtime, and it was
rapidly wearing out its welcome.

I The Bad Bad Blues During the same period when the entertainers were playing rag¬
time to the customers of the red-light districts, poor black peo¬
ple were singing a different type of song to one another. They
were original folk songs that became known as the “blues." This
music was also to become a heritage from which popular music
drew its inspiration. It was music that expressed feelings gen¬
erated by difficult experiences in everyday life. These were earthy
songs that incorporated basic human relationships and the
hard times that are found at the bottom of the socioeconomic
ladder.
Many of the blues songs were poignantly beautiful in their
expression of human emotion. On the other hand, in some
cases, the words and themes were sexually explicit, posing in
very blunt terms the desires and activities of both their singers
and the audiences. Four-letter words were not uncommon in the
lyrics. Others posed their earthy themes in metaphors, whose
meanings were easily understood. For example, the title of a
blues song first written down in 1896 asked the question: "If
You Don’t Like My Potatoes, How Come You Dig So Deep?"
In spite of the humorous and colorful nature of much of this
music, the publishing and recording companies avoided it like
the plague. The four-letter words were absolutely taboo. Even
the metaphorical references would not find acceptance in pro¬
ductions until the 1920s or later. Eventually, a few record com¬
panies began to overcome their fear of public censure and made
records of some of the songs. For example, two of the pioneering
record companies (Okeh and Bluebird) produced the following
interesting song titles on records during the early 1920s:
■ 516 Media Support Systems

“Please Warm My Wiener”

“Your Biscuits Are Big Enough for Me”
“Banana in Your Fruit Basket”
“My Pencil Won’t Write No More”

Clearly, the original folk blues came from the least sophisticated
level of black society. Such songs were not appreciated at all by
the black middle class:

To respectable, middle class, church-going Negroes, blues is often

considered evil music; the devil’s music that beguiles the listener
and leads him to damnation.7

As time went on, the blues were to be discovered by white so¬

ciety. Ultimately they would even be elevated to the status of
“classics.” Like ragtime, they would reach the general public
when a talented black musician captured their musical form
and poignant spirit in written form and' began using their
themes in his own compositions. Also like ragtime, their dis¬
reputable aspects would be dropped. What would remain would
be timeless expressions of people leading a hard life and singing
about their sorrows.

■ William C. Handy. The person who did the most to make the
blues an acceptable form of popular music to the general public
was a black musician who was born in Florence, Alabama, in
1873. William C. Handy came from a family of preachers, all of
whom were dead set against his pursuing a career in music.
Young William had a good tenor voice and was fascinated by the
soulful folk songs of his people. He was determined to learn all
he could about music. When he was about ten, he bought a used
rotaiy valve cornet. He had no money for lessons, but he figured
out that he could peek through the open door where other chil¬
dren were receiving musical instruction. He memorized the
notes on the blackboard and taught himself to play the music on
his cornet. Later, when he could afford it, he took more formal
training.
As a young adult, Handy found that jobs for musicians were
scarce. He had to roam around, working as an itinerant musi¬
cian wherever and whenever he could. In lean times he did what¬
ever jobs were available. Meanwhile, he continued to study
music and to learn all he could about the songs, both sacred and
profane, of the black people of the South. By 1909 he had writ¬
ten a piece based on black folk music. It was published in 1912
as “The Memphis Blues.” Although it never made him any
money, it added to his growing reputation as a musician. He
had established his own small band and times got a little better.
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 517 ■

He continued to write and ultimately produced songs that

achieved considerable popularity, especially in the period just
before World War I. His “Beale Street Blues,” and especially his
“St. Louis Blues,” became part of the American heritage of pop¬
ular music. Handy put his money into a phonograph company
for the purpose of producing and recording records for blacks. It
was wiped out in the postwar depression. Today, we remember
W. C. Handy as the “father of the blues.” He didn’t invent the
music, but he made it accessible to the entire musical
community.

■ The Classic Blues. During the 1920s the record companies

began recording and selling blues music. The first “classic
blues” recording was “Crazy Blues” (written by Perry Bradford).
It broke all sales records of the time, selling 7,500 records in one
week. The sales were mainly to the black community. Soon the
record companies had talent scouts looking for promising black
musical groups and singers. In the black tradition the blues
were sung mostly by women. (Presumably this was because the
men were working mainly at migratory jobs and the women
stayed behind and missed them greatly.) Still, a number of out¬
standing male musicians specialized in the blues. Several black
performers became famous during the 1920s. "Ma Rainey, Bes¬
sie Smith, Blind “Lemon” Jefferson, “Leadbelly" Ledbetter, and
Louis Armstrong eventually received world recognition. Today,
these musicians are honored for their role in the development of
American music.
In the late 1920s the blues were incorporated into more “se¬
rious” music by composers such as George Gershwin. In 1924
he brought a number of black folk musical elements together in
his “Rhapsody in Blue.” His composition was first played before
some of the most distinguished musicians in the world in a spe¬
cial performance at the Aeolian Hall in New York. They liked it,
and the era of “symphonic jazz” had begun. In one form or an¬
other, the blues have survived to the present. Traditional blues-
type songs still become popular from time to time, performers
who use the style can still find enthusiastic followers, and many
of their elements can be identified in contemporary popular
music.

Gospel and An outgrowth of the blues during the early part of the century
Country was the black gospel song. The first gospel songs were products
of the difficult times of the Great Depression. Times were hard
for everyone, even the white middle class, but for black people
they were terrible. There were few jobs, and unlike today, there
were no federal programs to aid the poor and the unemployed.
People often went hungry. Many wandered around seeking even
 ■ 518 Media Support Systems

■ Many black
Americans received
world-wide recogni¬
tion for their music.
Louis Armstrong
and Billie Holliday
both played a part in
bringing blues and
jazz to international
acceptance in the
years before World
War II. (The Bettman
Archive, Inc.)

the most temporary kind of work—anything to survive. It was a

time of loneliness, heartache, and despair. These conditions cre¬
ated a need for religious expression and belief. As people sought
solace in religion, gospel songs helped stimulate hope.
The basic theme of the gospel song is an emotional testi¬
mony, a petition to God for help and approval. In other words,
the gospel song

tells the congregation or audience of the singers’ particular prob¬

lems, needs, or desires or of their experiences and knowledge of
God. It invokes all those within hearing distance who share or have
faced the same problems to join the singers and to sanction or tes¬
tify along with them. All are directly singing to each other yet indi¬
rectly speaking to God, petitioning God or marvelling at the powers
of God.8
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 519 ■

Sung with great feeling and emotion, gospel songs relieved the
frustrations of the congregation and aided them in facing their
difficult life.
Gospel songs were not folk music in the true sense. They
were deliberately composed with written scores. But in their
original form the score was only a rough guide to how the music
was to be played or sung. Singers made their own emotional
interpretations. While the basic themes and messages of gospel
songs remain the same, they use whatever musical style is pop¬
ular. There have been gospel songs written not only in the tra¬
ditional form but also as blues, jazz, folk, soul, and rock. Gospel
music long ago appealed to white as well as black people, and it
remains popular today.
Country, or country-western as it is often called, is a mixture
of styles that originated in the pioneer folk music of various sec¬
tions of the country. One form survives from the isolated life of
the early settlers of the Appalachian highlands. These songs
were based on English ballads that the pioneers brought with
them. They were passed on in the oral tradition, and predictably
underwent many changes. As time went on, the settlers created
their own ballads, and some became widely known. Most of this
folk music had a rather simple musical structure so that it could
be played easily on the instruments that were available, such as
the fiddle, the banjo, and the dulcimer. The melodies were un¬
complicated, and the words usually provided a story. These nar¬
ratives were drawn from the everyday experiences of the people
and the time. Like their counterparts today, the songs expressed
themes that everyone understood. They told of work, play, inter¬
esting people or events, and significant human emotions.
Cowboy songs and bluegrass music are still another form.
They, too, grew out of the everyday life of pioneers. The original
folk songs were usually sung solo and accompanied by a guitar
(adopted from Mexico). Some were ballads that told of dramatic
events or famous people. Others were used to soothe nervous
cattle. In some cases several instruments were used and the mu¬
sic became more complex, incorporating dance forms such as
reels and square dances. In more modern times the film indus¬
try gave the cowboy song an immense boost in popularity. Some
cowboy stars of the 1930s not only rode horses, shot the bad
guys, and generally overcame evil but also played the guitar and
sang versions of the old range songs. Roy Rogers and Gene Autry
made this type of music a household item in the decade before
World War II.
Today, all these styles remain alive in the broad category of
gospel and country-western music. Like all popular music, the
contemporary versions are produced for profit by a music indus¬
try that operates in much the same way as did Tin Pan Alley.
 ■ 520 Media Support Systems

The home base of the gospel and country-western industry is

Nashville, Tennessee, and its most conspicuous center for live
performances is the Grand Old Opry, a venerable institution
that has remained popular on radio and television for decades.

I America Enters
the Jazz Age
The term jazz was not applied to popular music until the year
the United States entered World War I. It had its origins in a new
kind of music that seemed to come out of nowhere to displace
the ragtime that had been popular for almost two decades. Some
claim that Tin Pan Alley killed ragtime by sheer overproduction.
Supposedly, people were so satiated by the continuing torrent of
trivial tunes, each one sounding suspiciously like the last, that
they were eager for something new. Whatever the explanation, it
was from New Orleans that a musical revolution came to capture
the imagination of the public.

I The Original
Dixieland Jazz
At the turn of the century New Orleans was full of amateur
bands. Putting together a marching group and playing on the
Band streets was a popular sport among both blacks and whites. Al¬
most all events in the city—prize fights, dances, auctions, bar¬
becues, speeches, funerals, weddings, and fish fries—were made
more colorful by the presence of live music. The instruments
were usually brass, woodwinds, and drums, the basic elements
of a marching band. Some groups were large and impressive,
with uniforms and whole sections of particular instruments.
Others were small enough to fit comfortably on a horse-drawn
wagon as long as the trombonist sat on the tailgate and aimed
his slide toward the back.
It was in this environment that the son of an Italian shoe¬
maker grew up to become a leader in changing America’s tastes
in popular music. Dominick (“Nick”) LaRocca was born in 1889
and had decided by the age of ten that he wanted to be a musi¬
cian. His father was outraged, especially when he discovered
that his son had saved up enough to buy an old cornet and was
secretly learning to play it. His father smashed the instrument
and Nick’s budding musical career suffered a setback. However,
within a year or so his father died suddenly. Nick promptly quit
school, got a job, bought a fancy new silver-plated cornet, and
began to play in earnest. Like many amateur musicians in the
city, he never learned to read music. Consequently, he had no
preconceptions of the limits of his instrument. Unburdened by
such restrictions, he systematically began to command every
kind of musical composition, rhythm, and sequence that it
could produce.
Nick readily found other young men who loved to play and
formed a small band. For several years the group of five eked out
a miserable existence playing in saloons, dance halls, and sport-
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 521 ■

ing events. Often they had to work at other jobs to make ends
meet. Meanwhile, they began to experiment with new styles of
music. They were not alone in their attempts at at innovation.
Many groups in New Orleans were constantly experimenting
with new musical expressions. But LaRocca’s group worked out
a very distinctive style of playing. LaRocca began to compose
new songs in the innovative technique. These were not written
scores; the group learned and practiced them until they could
play them perfectly by memoiy.
In some ways the new style sounded like musical chaos. In¬
stead of everyone playing together in the traditional manner, fol¬
lowing a set melody, each musician went his own way in an
improvisational style while rigidly maintaining both the beat
and the basic harmony. Those who heard the music for the first
time were puzzled, angered, or frightened. It didn’t sound like
anything they had ever heard before. Each instrument seemed
to be playing a different tune in a completely impromptu man¬
ner. Yet, somehow, it all fit together like a musical jigsaw puzzle
into a recognizable pattern. Once the initial shock was over, it
was very catchy. It not only held people’s attention but set their
feet to tapping as well.
One December day in 1915 Nick and his friends were playing
enthusiastically at a local prize fight. A man from Chicago who
owned a prosperous nightclub was at the fight and heard the
band.

LaRocca, pointing his cornet skyward and blowing it to the point of

apoplexy, ripped off the polyphonic phrases of his own original mel¬
odies, as trombonist Leonce Mello, seated on the tailgate of the
horse-drawn wagon, answered in powerful blatting tones that rat¬
tled the plate glass windows across the street. Over this pair rode
the screaming clarinet of Alcide Nunez, and behind it the booming
of Jack Laine’s big parade drum.9

The man from Chicago could scarcely believe it; it was loud, rau¬
cous, and wild. He couldn’t get it out of his mind. After return¬
ing home, a crazy idea kept nagging him. Why not bring that
strange little band to Chicago and let it play in his nightclub. At
first it seemed absurd—a brass band from the honky-tonks of
New Orleans in a modern northern nightclub? Those corn pones
from Dixie would be laughed right out of town! Yet, reckless and
fast-moving Chicago might just love it. Ragtime had about run
its course and it was time to experiment with something new. In
the end he sent the band a wire and offered them train fare and
a meager weekly salary.
The five young musicians were scared. They had never been
north of Biloxi, Mississippi, but they decided to try it. They ar-
■ 522 Media Support Systems

rived on a raw March day and opened in Schiller’s Cafe, a popu¬

lar night spot. At first, on opening night, there were only a few
people in the club. Then the band started to blast away. By
eleven o’clock the place was filled to capacity and people were
milling around outside wanting to get in and hear the wild mu¬
sic. Within days the word spread and firemen had to be dis¬
patched nightly to control the large crowds. In short, they were
a sensation.
One night while the band was playing enthusiastically and
the audience was roaring its approval, a tipsy character from
Chicago’s underworld jumped up and shouted a word that in the
local slang referred to an obscene act. He meant to encourage
the band and he shouted “Jass it up boys!” The crowd took up
the cry. The next day, the band billed itself as the Dixie Jass
Band in big red letters outside the club. As it turned out, Chi¬
cagoans loved to dance to the new music. The group speeded up
its tempo and played in a more frenzied manner. The crowds
liked it even better!
The new music had created such interest in Chicago that
other clubs had to bring in musicians from New Orleans to tiy
to play in the same style. This led LaRocca and his group to call
themselves the Original Dixieland Jass Band. Soon, their fame
spread to New York. A1 Jolson, a well-known show business per¬
sonality, had heard them play and arranged for a friend to bring
them to New York for a two-week tryout at Reisenweber’s Res¬
taurant, a fancy nightclub. If they succeeded, they were prom¬
ised an extended contract for a dizzying $700 per week. The
band was incredulous.
Their tiyout was almost a disaster. They were sandwiched in
for a couple of numbers during the regular band’s intermission.
When they blasted out, the blase New Yorkers simply shrugged
their shoulders in disbelief and left the dance floor. They didn’t
understand the music and thought that it was some kind of joke
or stunt. However, an understanding management moved them
to another part of the nightclub and gave them a better trial. On
their first full night the audience gathered in the plush 400
Room to eat, drink, and dance, expecting to hear a string group
playing soft Hawaiian music. They were stunned when Nick
LaRocca stomped his foot a few times and the little band opened
with a steaming version of the “Tiger Rag,” one of his own com¬
positions. It was as if a bomb had exploded in the room.
Within a few days the verdict was in. New York decided it
liked the new Dixieland music. A few newspapers denounced it,
but most praised it lavishly. Nearly all misspelled jass in every
conceivable way. LaRocca finally settled on jazz because mis¬
chievous boys were defacing the band’s posters by crossing out
the first letter. Within a few weeks, the Original Dixieland Jazz
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 523 ■

Band became the talk of New York. Suddenly they were famous
and the whole country began to be jazz conscious. Like it or not,
America had entered the Jazz Age. Hundreds of other groups
took up the style, and the older ragtime music just faded away.
Although the term jazz clearly had its origins in LaRocca’s mu¬
sic, it quickly became part of the common vocabulary. Its mean¬
ing expanded to imply almost all forms of modern popular
music. In more recent times, the term Dixieland or Dixieland
jazz has generally been used to set off the music that originated
in New Orleans.
Not everyone in New Orleans was happy that their city was
becoming known as the birthplace of jazz. In fact, on June 20,
1918, the city’s major newspaper denounced the idea, carrying
the following comments entitled “Jass and Jassism”:

[Jass music, dime novels and greasy doughnuts] are all manifesta¬
tions of a low streak in man’s tastes that has not yet come out in
civilization’s wash. Indeed, one might go further and say that jass is
the indecent story syncopated and counterpointed. ... it has been
widely suggested that this particular form of musical vice had its
birth in this city, and that it came, in fact, from doubtful surround¬
ings in our slums. We do not recognize the honor of parenthood, but
with such a story in circulation, it behooves us to be the last to ac¬
cept the atrocity in polite society, and where it has crept in we
should make it a point of civic honor to suppress it.10

But whether or not New Orleans was happy, the world was
swept up in the jazz craze. Once the war was over, the country
entered the roaring twenties. Moral codes changed: people drank
bootleg “hooch”: the new phonograph and the budding radio in¬
dustry helped spread the new music. The Original Dixieland
Jazz Band had thousands of imitators, but they became the
most highly paid and sought-after musical group in history, at
least up to that time.

Dancing to All That Along with the increasing production of popular music came a
Jazz tremendous enthusiasm for dancing. A host of new steps and
styles were created to go with the new music. It became a hall¬
mark of being a member of the modern age to be able to perform
the latest dance craze. The younger generation regarded people
without such skills as barely human. Earlier, the old stodgy
waltz had become as obsolete as the minuet when ragtime
brought the bunny hug and the turkey trot. With the faster tem¬
pos of jazz, new and more vigorous dance rhythms swept the
country. Many came and went in a series of fads that were as
fleeting as snowflakes. Who today can do the Chinese toddle, the
ramble, the inner circle tango, or walking the dog? More endur¬
ing were the fox trot and its variations, such as the one-step and
■ 524 Media Support Systems

■ The 1920s will always be remembered for the Charleston. It was a

time of new music, new dances, new styles of dress, and new moral
codes. The changes were deplored by the older generation but thor¬
oughly enjoyed by the young. Such a generation gap has existed
many times during the twentieth century as social change has con¬
tinued. (Brown Brothers.)

two-step. But none was as controversial as the shimmy, per¬

formed solo on the dance floor, mainly by rather athletic young
women. It was clearly inspired by the scandalous “hootchy-
kootchy” performances that had shocked visitors to the Chicago
World’s Fair a generation earlier. Many parents were convinced,
however, that it was inspired by Satan himself.
But the big one was the Charleston. No one can talk about
the jazz of the 1920s without including the Charleston. Women
dressed in short flapper dresses with make-up on their faces
were paired off with men wearing bell-bottom trousers and their
hair greased back. They hopped about vigorously, kicking up
their feet, stooping in knee bends, and flapping their arms like
big birds. They were the flaming youth of the twenties—the first
generation to escape fully the rigid confines of prewar Victorian
morality.
The whole world was changing. The Great War had shaken
the very foundations of Western society. The conservative and
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 525 ■

heavily rural United States was taking on new folkways and

mores. There was no way, as a popular song of the time noted,
“to keep ’em down on the farm after they’d seen Paree.” Shimmy
dancing, bootleggers, women smoking, and premarital sex
seemed to conservative Americans to be destroying the rules of
decent life. They were scared. Where would it all end?
In retrospect, the enthusiastic acceptance of jazz music was
a symptom rather than a cause. It was a time of rapid social
change brought about by increasing industrialization, urbani¬
zation, and modernization. These brought new values, new
priorities, and new standards. These great social changes would
have come whether or not people turned to a particular new
form of popular music.

The Anti-Jazz As the twenties roared on, conservatives became increasingly

Movement convinced of two things. First, morality was going to hell in a
hurry. Second, it was all being caused by jazz. From these two
simple propositions came a welling up of anger, resentment, and
determination to drive the offending demon out. Jazz was the
visible enemy around which forces for the preservation of good
against evil could be mustered. And the problem seemed to be
growing. The phonograph was bringing the music into every
home, and the movies were showing seductive visions of immo¬
ral life to an impressionable generation. In urban areas dance
halls were becoming increasingly popular as places where the
young could come together in an exciting atmosphere of flirta¬
tion, illegal drinking, smoking, and dancing.
Public leaders began vocally to denounce the growing menace
of jazz. Groups such as the National Education Association, the
Federation of Women’s Clubs, and many religious organizations
jumped on the anti-jazz bandwagon. The media spoke out
strongly. For example, in 1922 the New York American pub¬
lished this disturbing item:

Jazz Ruining Girls, Declares Reformer

Chicago, Jan. 21.—Moral disaster is coming to hundreds of Ameri¬
can girls through the pathological, nerve irritating, sex-exciting mu¬
sic of jazz orchestras, according to the Illinois Vigilance Association.
In Chicago alone the association’s representatives have traced
the fall of 1,000 girls in the last two years to jazz music.
Girls in small towns, as well as the big cities, in poor homes and
rich homes, are victims of the weird, insidious, neurotic music that
accompanies modem dancing.
The degrading music is common not only to disorderly places,
but often to high school affairs, to expensive hotels and so-called so¬
ciety circles, declares Rev. Richard Yarrow, superintendent of the
Vigilance Association.
The report says that the vigilance society has no desire to abolish
■ 526 Media Support Systems

dancing, but seeks to awaken the public conscience to the present

danger and future consequences of jazz music!

By the mid-1920s jazz was being denounced vigorously on all

sides. Church leaders, health authorities, educators, and con¬
cerned citizens all joined the assault. In New York City the com¬
missioner of licenses outlawed all jazz and dancing on Broadway
after midnight. Even the phonograph companies joined the cru¬
sade. The first jazz record had not even been made until 1917
(by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a piece called “Livery Sta¬
ble Blues”). By 1923 the Victor Talking Machine Company,
which had been a leader in issuing jazz records, banished the
word from its labels and refused to record any more jazz music.
Jazz, said the experts, was dead.
But what all the self-appointed reformers and tight-lipped
moralists could not do was accomplished by a number of men
dressed in tuxedos in February of 1923. Paul Whiteman, a mu¬
sician with a background in classical music, had conceived of
dressing up jazz into concert form. He had put together a full
symphony orchestra for that purpose, and he gave an historic
“Jazz Concert” in the prestigious Aeolian Hall in New York City.
It had been advertised as an experiment in modern music, and
it certainly was. Paul Whiteman was a huge man, weighing over
300 pounds. Elegantly attired in evening clothes, he raised his
baton and the orchestra played their interpretation of Nick
LaRocca’s “Lively Stable Blues.” They went on with symphonic
renditions of such familiar pieces as “Yes, We Have No Bananas”
and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” The concert finished with
George Gershwin himself playing his new concerto “Rhapsody in
Blue.” The idea was to show that the popular music of America
could be taken seriously. In the audience were a number of the
world’s most distinguished musicians and music critics. They
loved it.
From that time on, the older, cruder form of Dixieland went
into decline. Popular music became softer and sweeter. It was
played by larger orchestras from carefully arranged music. Dix¬
ieland just faded into the background along with ragtime, except
for minor revivals and a hard core of loyal fans. By the beginning
of the 1930s the era of the big bands was ushered in. A still
newer form of music called “swing” would delight another gen¬
eration, and a rapidly growing radio industry would push it to
undreamed of popularity. The national enthusiasm for swing,
boogie woogie, and the big bands will be reviewed briefly. First,
however, we need to discuss the rapid development and improv¬
ing technology of the phonograph industry. This new medium
had begun to play an increasingly important role in the spread
of popular music as Americans began to buy records by the
millions.
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 527 ■

I The Phonograph
and the Record
The early development of popular music in the United States did
not depend greatly on the phonograph. The essential medium
for ragtime was sheet music. Piano rolls and records played a
Industry
part, but the home piano was the main producer of the music.
The popularity of Dixieland was in many respects due to its ex¬
citing role as dance music, played live. Records would play an in¬
creasing role in the consumption of popular music as the
phonograph was developed from a novelty to a practical device
for home entertainment. It would undergo continuing improve¬
ment, right up to the present. After about 1925 home radio and
the record industry together provided a combination of content
and medium that brought an ever-changing flow of popular mu¬
sic to millions of fans. For that reason, it is essential to review
briefly the development of the phonograph and the record indus¬
try as they developed together over more than a century.

I Edison’s Thlking
Machine
Thomas Alva Edison created so many inventions that we can
easily forget that he was the originator of the phonograph. He
was trying to improve the efficiency of the telegraph and tele¬
phone when it occurred to him that the human voice might be
captured on some sort of recording device. On July 18, 1877, he
wrote:

Just tried an experiment with diaphragm having an embossing

point and held against paraffin paper moving rapidly. The speaking
vibrations are indented nicely, and there is no doubt that I shall be
able to store up and reproduce automatically at any future time the
human voice perfectly.11

What Edison was describing were the essential components

of the phonograph. A diaphragm vibrates in sympathy with
sound waves produced by a voice or some other noise. The dia¬
phragm is attached to and moves a pointed object that tracks in
grooves on a moving surface, such as the outside of a cylinder or
the top of a rotating disc. When fixed just right, the pointed ob¬
ject indents or scratches patterns in the grooves. These patterns
correspond to the original sound waves. From this record the
sound can later be reproduced by moving a needle along the
same grooves. The needle now vibrates a diaphragm, which in
turn vibrates air to make sound waves that reach our ear. When
so described it doesn't sound all that complicated, and in retro¬
spect, it wasn’t. But before Edison no one had ever thought of
making such a device.
By the fall of 1877 Edison had actually developed a machine
that could reproduce the human voice. It was a cylinder with a
needle. One turned a crank and shouted into the diaphragm,
and a needle embossed a hill-and-valley pattern as it made a
groove on a tinfoil sheet wrapped around the cylinder. By re-
■ 528 Media Support Systems

tracking the needle through the same groove that it made when
recording, the thing would talk back. The first words Edison re¬
corded were “Mary had a little lamb.” When the machine re¬
peated the phrase, Edison was astonished but delighted. He
wasted no time in demonstrating his talking machine to fasci¬
nated audiences. He took the device to the New York offices of
the Scientific American and demonstrated it to an enthusiastic
group. Later, the account was written up in the magazine:

Mr. Thomas A. Edison recently came to this office, placed a little

machine on our desk, turned a crank, and the machine inquired as
to our health, asked how we liked the phonograph, informed us that
it was very well, and bid us a cordial good night. These remarks were
not only perfectly audible to ourselves, but to a dozen or more per¬
sons who were gathered around.12

The Edison Speaking Phonograph Company was quickly

formed to exploit the invention commercially. It was seen mainly
as a curiosity. In fact, it was modestly successful in this form.
Showmen could record various sounds on tinfoil-covered cylin¬
ders and astonish audiences by playing them back on a machine
billed as a Parlor Speaking Phonograph. One could hear voices
in Dutch, German, Hebrew, Spanish, and other languages. The
barking of dogs was recorded, even a cock crowing. People sang
“Yankee Doodle” or whistled. It was all very entertaining.
Once the novelty began to wear off, more serious uses of the
machine were sought. Edison himself suggested using it for
business dictation, phonographic books for the blind, pre¬
recorded lessons, the reproduction of music, and the recording
of family members’ voices for posterity. He went on to suggest
talking clocks, preservation of the correct pronunciation of lan¬
guages, and permanent records of important telephone calls. If
he had added dancing and the hit parade, he would have antic¬
ipated most of its subsequent uses.
But soon the novelty did indeed wear off, and the phonograph
fell into disuse. Other inventors advanced claims that they,
rather than Edison, had produced the first practical machine.
The tinfoil-covered cylinder was abandoned in favor of hard wax
cylinders. Another innovator brought out a practical disc for re¬
cording made of hardened shellac. A few adventurous musicians
from opera and classical music actually recorded their perform¬
ances. In the 1890s there was neither a substantial market for
the machines nor enough records to play on them. One problem
was the poor quality of musical reproduction. Another was the
brief duration of the recordings (two minutes). Still another was
that no practical means had been invented for copying a master
recording to produce records in quantity. To get multiple copies,
the performance had to be repeated over and over, making one
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 529 ■

■ Thomas Edison
first reproduced the
human voice on a
crude device in
1877. He then re¬
fined his original
talking machine and
produced a hand
cranked version that
could produce music
and many other
sounds. The quality
of the sound was aw¬
ful by today’s stan¬
dards, but provided
the basis from which
today’s stereo sets
have evolved. (Library
of Congress/Photo by
L. C. Handy.)

record at a time. It was very hard on such groups as the U.S.

Marine band, which played “Semper Fidelis” up to fifty times
during one session. Opera stars and other famous musicians
had the same difficulty.
Yet in spite of the problems, the technology of recording con¬
tinued to advance. Various materials were tried for the records
themselves, such as metal and hard rubber. Hardened shellac
proved to be the best, and it came into wide use rather early. In
fact, it remained the basic material for the manufacture of rec¬
ords well into the 1930s. More and more was recorded: Shake¬
speare’s plays, marches by John Philip Sousa, Negro folk music.
■ 530 Media Support Systems

poems, comedy monologues, and always the venerable opera

stars. By the beginning of the new century, American and Eu¬
ropean firms were marketing literally thousands of different rec¬
ords for various types of machines. Even so, the phonograph
was still something of a rich man’s plaything. It was rather ex¬
pensive and was certainly not in the hands and homes of the
masses.
As the new century began, techniques had been developed for
molding records from a master; the problem of multiple repro¬
duction had been solved. Also, the disc was rapidly replacing the
cylinder, much to Edison’s chagrin. More important, a reliable
spring motor had been invented to drive the discs at a constant
(78 rpm) speed, which became the standard of the industry. New
sound boxes were coupled to the spring motor, horn, and turn¬
table, and relatively inexpensive models were mass produced.
Twenty-five dollars would buy an Improved Gramophone, a
model that achieved immortality when advertised with an engag¬
ing black and white fox terrier listening to “his master’s voice.”
(There actually was such a dog. His name was Nipper and he was
painted by his owner, Francis Berraud.)
In 1902, in the deal of a century, the Gramophone Company
in England prevailed on Enrico Caruso (the great opera singer)
to cut ten records. By the time Caruso died in 1921 he had
earned over $2 million from gramophone records. The industry
began to awaken to the fact that there was a market out there
and that great profits could be made for those with imagination.
Soon every company in the business was recording Italian opera
stars, symphony orchestras, and great pianists. They sold like
the proverbial hotcakes.
Back in the United States the Victor Talking Machine Com¬
pany and the Columbia Disc Gramophone Company both began
making phonograph machines. They were cheap and reasonably
reliable, and there was an increasing repertoire of recordings
that one could purchase and play (although little in the way of
popular music). Even so, the new machine had its critics. John
Philip Sousa, who had been recorded a number of times, de¬
cided that the device was a menace and blasted the new craze.13
Notwithstanding heavy criticism, by the end of the first de¬
cade American and European record companies were producing
thousands of titles and selling records in the millions. Victor
had introduced its popular Victrolas, which looked like a nice
piece of furniture, and other companies had brought out similar
models. By the time of World War I the 78 rpm record and the
spring-driven player had about reached their high point of de¬
velopment. To be sure, the systems could not reproduce the
range of frequencies that were to characterize the records we
know today. Yet they seemed great at the time, especially in com-
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 531 ■

parison with the old Edison cylinders. By 1910 full symphony

orchestras were recording, and opera singers remained a staple.
And beginning in about 1914 a dance mania swept the country.
Newspapers were advertising fancy restaurants that provided
modern music and a dance floor so that customers could do
their thing between the courses. Soon, the record companies all
began to market a growing number of records so that people
could dance to the turkey trot, one-step, the Boston, and the
new tango. This passion for dancing provided a great stimulus
to the whole industry.

Evolving Because the mechanical phonograph was so simple and reliable,

Tfechnology there was no great pressure before the 1920s to bring out an
electric machine. Experiments had been tried as early as 1903.
But the thing could have not worked without a condenser micro¬
phone and a vacuum tube amplifier, which were not yet avail¬
able. As the basic technology of radio developed, the next
obvious step was to adapt its principles to the problem of sound
reproduction from records. In 1919 Bell Telephone Laboratories
assumed the initiative and brought the expertise of sophisti¬
cated scientists to the problem. An electrical phonograph trans¬
forms mechanical energy (from the moving needle in the
grooves) into electrical energy. This electrical energy is then am¬
plified and transformed back into mechanical energy at the
speaker, which then moves air in the form of sound waves that
reach our ears. Electric systems can be used to make the record¬
ings with the same principles. A microphone changes sound
waves to electrical energy. This in turn is amplified and drives
the apparatus that cuts the grooves.
The process is much more sensitive than the simpler me¬
chanical systems that had been used. One result was a new
quality of sound. The early electrical recordings produced a fre¬
quency range of from 100 to 5,000 cycles per second. In view of
the fact that stereo equipment today commonly handles from
about 20 to 25,000 cycles per second, that may not seem so
great. But compared with the old flat-sounding mechanical re¬
cording, it was a new listening experience. Deep bass notes
could be heard for the first time as well as the higher ranges and
overtones of treble instruments. In fact, most people can’t hear
much beyond the 100 to 5,000 range in any case.
After much foot-dragging, fumbling, and dithering, the major
record companies and the manufacturers of home machines be¬
gan making the change to electrical systems in 1925. It was a
bench mark year, and the whole industry entered a new era. The
last half of the 1920s was a period of spectacular growth in the
sale of records. Machines were being manufactured that con¬
tained both a record player and a radio. The public loved them.
■ 532 Media Support Systems

Almost every artist who could play an instrument was recorded.

There was a huge outflow of opera, symphonic works, and pop¬
ular dance music. Toward the end of the decade, in 1927, some
104 million discs were sold in the United States. In addition,
some 987,000 record players were purchased.14 Times were
good, and people were eager to spend their money on the new
electrical machines and records.
Then came the stock market crash of 1929. The recording in¬
dustry soon crashed along with it. As the new decade began, the
luxury of phonograph records was one of the first to go, as peo¬
ple struggled to make ends meet. By 1932 only 6 million records
were sold in the United States. This represents a drop of nearly
95 percent from the high reached in 1927!15 The economic fac¬
tor was clearly a cause. But another significant factor in the
near-death of the record industry in the early 1930s was the
soaring popularity of radio as a medium of home entertainment.
In 1925 only about 14 percent of American households had at
least one radio set. But by 1935 the figure had shot up to more
than 95 percent of the nation’s homes.16 This in itself might not
have done in the record industry, but radio stations were filling
their time by playing dance music over the air. In the evenings
live broadcasts of dance bands from fancy hotels and supper
clubs added to the availability of free music. When it could be
had for nothing with a mere twist of the dial, why buy expensive
records? Indeed, people didn’t, and by 1933 the industry was
practically extinct.
Then, with a new administration in Washington, things be¬
gan to turn around. As the dreadful figures on unemployment
were slowly reduced, people were willing to spend just a little on
small luxuries again. The phonograph industry started to re¬
cover. By 1938, 33 million records were sold. The idea of albums
began to take hold, and this helped sales. Prices were also much
reduced. Some classical music records had retailed for as much
as $7 each before the crash. Comparable discs were on the mar¬
ket in 1940 for $1 apiece. The smaller dance records that one
paid 75$ for during the 1920s were selling for 35$. As 1941
ended, the record industry was astonished to learn that 127 mil¬
lion records had been sold that year. The industry had clearly re¬
covered.17 However, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor
stopped the growth of the industry, which didn't resume until
the war was over.
Meanwhile, the juke box had entered the picture in the mid
1930s. Before long, eating and drinking establishments all over
the nation were equipped with a brightly lit, garish, nickel-eat¬
ing record player. Young people adored them, and a whole new
industry came on line to increase interest in popular music and
records. The new swing music played by the big bands also
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 533 ■

helped, along with boogie woogie beats and vigorous new styles
of dancing.

■ High-Fidelity Recording. During the war the British-owned

Decca Record Company had been called on by the military to
help train naval personnel in tracking German submarines.
They were asked to make phonograph records that would cap¬
ture the very subtle differences in sound made by U-boats versus
British submarines. They were able to do it with what they
called “full frequency range reproduction.” As soon as the war
was over, they used the techniques to record music. It was a
great step forward, and it brought a new range of sound to the
listener.
Yet for all the electric devices and fancy new sounds, the
phonograph record of 1946 was still pretty crude. In fact, in
some ways, it wasn’t very different from what it had been in
1903. It retained the 78 rpm of the earlier days, and it lasted
only four minutes at most. Although many improvements had
been made, the shellac from which it was still manufactured was
easy to scratch.

■ Long-Playing and Stereo Records. Magnetic tape and wire

recordings came on the market shortly after the war. They were
heralded as a great advance over the disc because there was little
to wear out. Magnetic tape, especially, could be played over and
over thousands of times without hurting the quality of the
sound. If a tape broke, it could easily be spliced, and a reel could
play for half an hour without interruption. In 1947 experts were
predicting the death of the old record-playing phonograph, just
as soon as mass production could get the prices down.
Then, in 1948 Columbia Records revealed a new kind of
phonograph record. It was a remarkable product. It was made of
new and virtually unbreakable materials. It had “micro” grooves
and would play an unbelievable twenty-three minutes on each
side. Not only that, but it incorporated the new full-frequency
sound. Columbia developed a cheap attachment that made ex¬
isting phonographs capable of handling the new LP microgroove
records, and they hit the market with a stock of recordings al¬
ready manufactured. They sold well over a million of the new rec¬
ords in six months. Although Columbia had offered to share the
new technology with other recording companies in order to help
standardize the industry, RCA Victor decided to go its own way
and brought out a funny little 45 rpm microgroove record. They
were cheap to produce and sell.
The main consequence was a great deal of confusion among
buyers. Now they had an old collection of 78s, some of the new
33 Va LPs, and some of the little 45s. The new record players had
 ■ 534 Media Support Systems

to be built to handle all three. During at least part of the 1950s

all three were on the market. However, the‘older 78 rpm shellac
discs went into a sharp decline, and production quickly ceased.
The outcome of the whole confusing mess was that wire record¬
ing dropped out by the end of the 1940s. Tape found a place in
the market, especially in music production, among high-fidelity
hobbyists, and ultimately in the little cassettes that are so widely
used today.
Another revolution in recording came with stereophonic
sound in the early 1960s. Techniques were developed for having
more than one soundtrack recorded on the disc. Special micro¬
phones pick up the sounds of an orchestra or performer from
different locations. Stereo equipment can reproduce the sounds
and send them to different speakers. The result is a distinctive
sound experience, almost as though one were in the studio with
the musicians. Once again, consumers had to face the prospect
of abandoning their existing records, their monaural LPs, to be¬
gin their collections anew. For a while it looked as if still further
changes might come in the form of quadraphonic systems, us¬
ing four speakers instead of two and resulting in yet another
problem of obsolescence. Apparently, however, quadraphonic
sound is not going to sweep the market as did LPs and stereo
systems.
Tape recording has faced similar transformations. First there
was the simple reel. Then came the cassette, along with devices
for recording and listening. It was adapted to the stereo system
with little difficulty. Lurking in the background has been the
eight-track tape cassette—not really a different technology, but
packaged in a different manner and requiring distinctive equip¬
ment. At present it seems to be fading. As we will see in a later
section, in the uncertain territory ahead lie new technologies
that move entirely away from Edison’s procedure of recording
sound mechanically in a groove on a moving surface.

Music and Records At present the recording industry is doing well. It has annual
as Business sales of over $3 billion. Since 1950, when the new LP technology
began to take hold, consumers have increased their expendi¬
tures over 600 percent for its products. Among the media, only
television exceeds its revenues. Adding to the importance of the
recording business is its role as a major supplier to the broad¬
cast media: “Typically, radio stations rely on records for the ma¬
jor proportion of their programming. Surely, with the con¬
tinuing dominance of television as a supplier of variety
entertainment, radio stations have come to increasingly rely on
music formats to attract audiences.”18

H Making a Profit In spite of the seemingly rosy picture, a

closer look at the economics of the record industry presents a
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 535 ■

■ Producing a record album in a form ready to sell to the public

can be very expensive. However, many make the attempt even if only
a few succeed. If an album does catch on and sell widely, profits can
be astronomical. (© Randy Matusow/Archive Pictures, Inc.)

more sobering view. It is a business endeavor in which there is

little room for either the faint of heart or the unwary. Companies
that produce and market records must sell them in very large
numbers just to break even. They also have to accept great risks.
For example, suppose we want to go into the record business be¬
cause we have a good friend who has put together a really terrific
rock group. We think that people will really love his music and
buy albums if they become available. We decide to get an album
cut and market it through a cooperative arrangement with other
small producers.
First, let’s look more closely at what kind of an investment we
are getting into. What will be our costs and how likely is it that
we will make a nice profit? Our future star agrees that he and
his musicians will settle for a royalty of 5 percent on every record
sold. So far, so good. Then we discover that it costs about
$100,000 just to record an album in a form suitable for repro-
■ 536 Media Support Systems

duction and marketing. We are prepared to invest that much in

the hope of making a lot of money when the album becomes a
hit. Still, it’s a real gamble. If we do not produce any beyond the
first one, obviously we would have to sell it for more than
$100,000 to make any profit. Rather unlikely, to say the least.
However, we clearly plan to produce as many as we can sell.
Now we find out that if a large number are produced, adver¬
tised, distributed, and sold at retail, it costs about $1 per album
to cover all the additional associated costs, including royalties to
the performers. Thus, if 10,000 albums were produced and sold,
the total investment would be $110,000 (the original $100,000,
plus the additional $1 per album). In order to just break even
with such a small production, each album would have to be sold
for $11. That’s pretty expensive, and probably not many would
sell for that price. We would obviously take a loss.
On the other hand, if production and sales were doubled to
20,000 albums, the costs would still be the original $100,000,
plus an additional $1 per album, for a total of $120,000. Now
the prospects are better. The albums would retail for a more re¬
alistic $6, but we would have reached the break-even point. We
wouldn’t lose, but we wouldn’t make any money either. (Ac¬
tually, the break-even point for contemporary records ranges
from 100,000 to about 150,000.)
Let’s speculate that the album becomes a smash hit and sells
a million copies. Now the profit picture becomes breathtaking.
We are going to be rich! The cost of each album is still the orig¬
inal $100,000, plus $1 per album. Although this comes to an in¬
vestment of an impressive $1,100,000, the break-even point is
now only $1.10. Anything we can get above that is gravy. A hit
album would bring at least $6. This yields a tidy profit of $4.90
each. Since we have sold a million records, we take in a total
profit of $4,900,000 on our investment after paying all costs!
Clearly, there is money to be made in the record business if
one is lucky. But before everyone rushes out to invest in albums,
there are additional data to take into account. One disturbing
fact is that about three-fourths of all albums produced fail to sell
the number necessary to reach the break-even point. The figure
for albums of classical music is a scary 95 percent. The vast ma¬
jority of record albums, in other words, are financial failures. To
make it in the record industry, a company must be prepared to
lose money on almost all the albums it produces. The small re¬
mainder that actually make a profit must support the vast ma¬
jority that do not. For that reason, a great deal of investment
capital is required.

■ Marketing Records. The selling of popular music as a prod¬

uct is dominated by a relative handful of so-called majors. Cur¬
rently, the six largest are CBS, EMI/Capital, MCA, Polygram,
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 537 ■

RCA, and the Warner-Elektra-Atlantic division of Warner Com¬

munications.19 These companies have vast financial resources
that enable them to absorb failures and concentrate on promot¬
ing and marketing the limited number of records that rise to the
top of the ratings. These companies are so successful that they
regularly own and distribute between 75 and 80 percent of the
largest selling albums every year. An important key to under¬
standing the role of the majors is that they not only produce the
music of artists under contract but also manufacture the discs
in the large numbers needed, distribute them to their own
wholesale outlets, and in some cases retail them as well. On oc¬
casion, the majors also buy up the work of artists who have con¬
tracted for production of their work with smaller companies.
Then they manufacture, distribute, and retail the product under
their own label.
In contrast to the majors are the independent record compa¬
nies, or “indies,” as they are called in the trade. Sometimes em¬
ploying only a dozen or fewer full-time people, these smaller
companies have long played a significant role in the development
of popular music in America. The majors concentrate on works
that are popular at the moment, that will sell in large quantities
and have a chance of making a substantial profit. Well-known
performers with established reputations usually contract with
the majors. Their records are likely to sell well, and the majors
have the financial means to promote them effectively. The in¬
dies, on the other hand, are the risk takers. They seldom have
the opportunity to produce the works of well-known musicians.
Often, they have been started by fans of a particular form of mu¬
sic—musicians determined to present their favorite styles or in¬
dividuals devoted to the presentation of works by significant but
perhaps obscure musicians.20
Actually, the term independent is somewhat misleading. The
indies are, in fact, very dependent on wholesale record distrib¬
utors, who assume responsibility for distributing, promoting,
and selling the music that the indies have produced and manu¬
factured. In other words, the indies find talent, place the per¬
formers under contract, arrange to make the recordings, and
have the records manufactured. They then sell the records to a
network of distributors that in turn sells them to a network of
retailers. The retailers then sell them to the public. It is a very
convenient arrangement for the indies, who do not have to
maintain a large wholesaling and retailing system. It also allows
a large number of indies to stay in business, even though any
given one may command only a tiny share of the total sales of
records in a given year. It is also a system that provides oppor¬
tunity for new talent looking for their place in the sun. If the per¬
formers can convince one of the indies to make a record, they
have a shot at the big time. It may be a remote chance, but it is
 ■ 538 Media Support Systems

Box 14

Suiting Every
Taste: The
Indies

Think about the people you know and the 415 Records. Based in San Francisco, 415
kinds of music they like. No two people have is only one of several successful indies that
exactly the same taste. Sure, your friends specialize in new-wave rock groups. Its aver¬
might listen mostly to rock music, but do they age album costs $30,000 to produce, and 415
favor Lionel Richie, the Rolling Stones, a local has sold about 50,000 albums each for its four
band, or some European group that you never biggest bands. As president Howie Klein says,
heard of? Maybe your parents listen to the mu¬ “The advantage we have is that we’re looking
sic they grew up with; is it the Supremes, Elvis for bands that are the cutting edge of what’s
Presley, or the Kingston Trio? Does one of happening culturally.”
your roommates play nothing but reggae, Rhino Records. From its beginnings as a
while the other one is glued to the local clas¬ novelty-rock and comedy record publisher,
sical-music station? Rhino has grown to include reggae, new wave,
Diverse tastes in music are the reason in¬ and especially reissues of hard-to-obtain clas¬
dies (independent record producers) exist If sics by such artists as Richie Valens, Slim
you are looking for Welsh folk songs, string Harpo, and vocal groups from the early days of
quartets from the 1930s, avant-garde jazz, the soul music.
latest in synthesized rock, rhythm-and-blues Rounder Records. Rounder was founded in
reprints, or anything else your local record the late 1960s as a collective by three devotees
shop doesn’t carry, the indies could be your of folk and bluegrass music (in photo above).
answer. Just as in the 1950s, when they intro¬ After George Thorogood and the Destroyers
duced country music, rock and roll, and r & b were successful with their first two Rounder
to the public, the indies in the 1980s are the releases a decade later, Rounder expanded
source of most genuinely new popular music from its folk/blues base to record r & b and reg¬
and of traditional forms that don’t have a large gae. A giant indie today, the company distrib¬
audience. Some examples: utes dozens of smaller labels and carries more
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 539 ■

than 3,000 titles on its list very well why the indies continue to succeed
Windham Hill Records. A California indie, although the majors control 85 to 90 percent
Windham Hill is known for its top-quality jazz of the market: “Narrowcasting is so efficient
recordings and has led the way in recording One thing about any narrow musical genre is
technology. Its first hit record was by pianist that you can easily find its market: there are
George Winston; before that, Windham Hill only a certain number of writers who will write
records were distributed through health-food about it, only a few radio stations—if any—
stores and alternative bookstores, because no that will play it, and only a certain group of
one else was willing to sell them. dealers who will sell it well. So there’s always
Gramavision, Inc. Based in New York, Gra- an appropriate circle to be completed.”
mavision carries a diverse line including
soundtracks, sacred music, jazz, and pop, and
its president, Jonathan Rose, has explained (photo: © 1984 Stanley Rowin Courtesy Rounder Records.)

a chance nevertheless. Since they employ only a handful of peo¬

ple, costs are kept down. Because the indies account for less
than 20 percent of the hit records, the risks are high. But if a
big hit does come, the profits that can be made by a small inde¬
pendent producer can be impressive indeed.
Once the records have been produced and manufactured, dis¬
tribution takes place. Selling the records was much simpler in
the earlier days. Then the system consisted essentially of pro¬
ducers who manufactured the records, wholesalers who distrib¬
uted them nationally, and retailers who sold them to the public.
Today, the majors operate their own systems. In addition, inde¬
pendent distributors work with the indies. Recently there has
been a sharp growth in rack jobbers, who serve many types of
retail establishments where records are but one of many prod¬
ucts that are sold. Rack jobbers are essentially middlemen
whose goal is to manage and maximize profits in the record de¬
partments in retail establishments—department stores, dis¬
count centers, supermarkets, variety stores, and even drug¬
stores—that lack the expertise needed to select, display, and
promote an ephemeral product like popular music. In some
cases, they even supply the racks on which the records are dis¬
played (hence their name).
Another important means of marketing popular music is the
record club. Currently, such clubs account for about 15 percent
of the total sales. The clubs (almost all of which are subsidiaries
of the majors) offer albums at rather large discounts. They can
do so in part because they use records that have been returned
to distributors by retailers. About 25 percent of those offered at
regular retail prices are returned to the distributor. Since the
majors own the whole system, they can get rid of them at re¬
duced prices via the record clubs. In other words, the clubs ab¬
sorb excess production by offering somewhat obsolete and
 ■ 540 Media Support Systems

overproduced albums at reduced prices to. their members. In

some instances the clubs market albums that are specially pro¬
duced from existing master tapes that the majors already own.
Since production costs are low, costs can be kept down.
Direct TV advertising for purchase by mail order is another
marketing method. Often advertised as “not sold in stores,”
such albums are either leftovers that have been purchased in
quantity or specially reproduced products bought at discount
prices directly from the manufacturer.
In short, the record industry is a volatile, risky business,
somewhat dominated by a small number of major companies
who make the lion’s share of the profits. At the same time, doz¬
ens of risk-taking, independent companies constantly seek new
talent to offer to the public in hope that theirs will be the solid
gold hit that sells a million records. Occasionally, it does
happen.

Changing Styles Our brief review of the record industry as a marketplace shows
of Popular Music one reason why one of the most basic features of popular music
is change. Popular music is a commodity sold in an intensely
competitive mass market. Success to the seller can come only if
the public is offered something new and exciting, something
that they don’t already have. Thus, the pressure is intense to
produce new tunes, new stars, new beats, and above all, new
records. If popular music styles did not change, the profits to the
industry would soon decline. In the aggressive popular music in¬
dustry, that would be unthinkable.
With change so central to the flow of popular music, a song
or even a style in vogue just a few years ago can seem hopelessly
out of date. A “golden oldie” is a record that today’s young adults
remember hearing a few years ago as teen-agers. A “classic” is a
tune that can be recalled fondly by mature adults as having been
popular during their youth. All earlier music is simply “historic”
(i.e., forgotten). Needless to say, today’s fabulous hits will also
fade into obscurity. What lies ahead cannot easily be predicted.
All that can be said confidently is that it will be different from
the past. However, a brief review of musical styles from the end
of the Dixieland era to the present can provide insight into some
of the factors that cause one form of popular music to replace
another. It may also help in speculating about the nature of
things to come.

Swing and the Big As the 1930s began, radio had penetrated the majority of Amer¬
Bands ican homes and was playing an increasing role in developing
America’s appetite for popular music. Meanwhile, popular music
itself had undergone a transformation. Dixieland jazz had faded
as bands slowed down and developed “swing,” a sweeter, softer
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 541 ■

form of music. The bands got larger and larger. Some had as
many as thirty musicians, and the music had to be very carefully
arranged. Few musicians just played it by ear any more. But the
new music was great for dancing or just for easy listening. The
radio played more and more records, and the nation became ac¬
customed to having music in the home or car almost constantly.
As always, there was keen competition for success in the mu¬
sic industry. In the late 1930s the top level of the big bands es¬
tablished their reputations by playing in swanky places where
people went to eat, drink, or dance. Large hotels in major cities
like New York had supper clubs where the very best dance bands
were hired. There was the Manhattan Room of the Hotel Penn¬
sylvania, the Terrace Room of the New Yorker, and the Palm
Room of the Commodore. Also, in cities everywhere were well-
known ballrooms where the big bands appeared from time to
time—the Roseland, Savoy, Aragon, Trianon, and Palomar were
all famous at the time. If a band was really popular, they played
on the stages of major movie theaters, and huge crowds of fans
came to hear. The popular music concert had become a reality.
As radio became more technically sophisticated, network
broadcasts of the music of the big bands were made in the late
evening hours right from hotels and dance halls. People all over
the country could feel that they were in glamorous surround¬
ings, listening to the music of Benny Goodman, Jimmy Dorsey,
Guy Lombardo, Woody Herman, or Glen Miller. There were doz¬
ens of bands whose leader’s names became household words.
There were hundreds more that were known only locally. Each
band had its own style and special arrangements, often devel¬
oped around the instrument played by the leader.
Singers were important too. In fact, some of the vocalists be¬
came more famous than the bands in which they got their start.
A “star” system had developed. As the nation moved through the
1930s and on into the 1940s, many singers established their in¬
dividual names. People still recognize such celebrities as Bing
Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee,
Rosemary Clooney, Dale Evans, and Perry Como. Hundreds
more were known at the time and had their loyal fans.21
In many ways, radio made the big bands, along with their vo¬
calists and the swing music they performed. During the 1930s
much of the music sent out over the airways was live. There
were not only the late evening dance broadcasts, but many com¬
mercially sponsored programs featured one of the famous
bands. Disc jockeys soon established themselves, and playing
records over the air helped build the popularity of both the
bands and their music. An early program called “Make-Believe
Ballroom” had particular significance during the 1930s. It at¬
tracted a huge and enthusiastic following of young people and
■ 542 Media Support Systems

Wfff/MMl
■ During the 1930s and 1940s the names of the leaders of the Big
Bands, like Tommy Dorsey, above, became household words. Such
groups often had more than twenty musicians playing carefully or¬
chestrated swing music. It was a time when weekly ratings of tunes
became a nationwide preoccupation. Live band concerts were widely
attended; juke boxes became popular; and a star system brought na¬
tional recognition to singers. (Brown Brothers.)

remained on radio for many years. From this style of broadcast¬

ing came another idea: a weekly poll to see which songs had the
greatest appeal to the listeners. It was a pretty haphazard sur¬
vey, but millions tuned in every week to the “Lucky Strike Hit
Parade” to see how the songs were ranked. If these two program
formats sound familiar, it is because they have been around in
one form or another ever since.
The movies finally discovered popular music. Starting in
about 1940, they made a number of low-budget (and low-quality)
films featuring the best-known bands and their leaders. Today,
in contrast, popular music plays a central role in movies. Much
of the theme music from motion pictures is eagerly exploited by
the industry and snapped up by consumers.
Swing seems innocuous, even innocent, by comparison with
what came both earlier and later. Nevertheless, it came in for its
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 543 ■

share of criticism. For example, on August 14, 1938, the New

York Times carried an article suggesting that swing music was
responsible for all kinds of human problems, such as emotional
unbalance, sexual excess, and even rape. A psychologist was
quoted concerning the dangerous hypnotic influence of swing.
The grounds for this condemnation were that the music had
been cunningly devised around a tempo that was faster than the
human heart. Presumably, by some subtle interaction between
music and the body, listeners were being driven toward evil and
sin.

Boogie Woogie Swing was the music of a nation depressed. It was gentle and
comforting during a time of economic hardship. During the
worst years of the Great Depression, it was just what the nation
wanted to hear. Then things started to get better. To be sure,
war clouds were gathering in Europe. In Germany a man with a
funny-looking mustache was stirring up a lot of trouble. But
America was isolated from Europe not only by the Atlantic
Ocean but by an ideology that focused attention inward rather
than on the troubles of foreigners. It would all change on Decem¬
ber 7, 1941.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere came a new kind of music. It
had a fast style, and it provided the basis for a new kind of danc¬
ing that would become known as the “jitterbug." The new beat,
“boogie woogie,” actually had its origins in the early 1900s in
Chicago, where in obscure saloons in the black part of the com¬
munity entertainers continued the tradition of constantly im¬
provising new rhythms. They were playing a primitive piano-
blues rhythm they called “laying down the beat.” The world
wasn’t ready for boogie woogie at the time. But by 1938 the new
rhythm became popular in New York’s cafe society through the
startling piano playing of several black musicians who remem¬
bered very well how to “lay down the beat. Soon the throbbing
sound of the fast-paced rhythm, played eight to the bar, with a
heavy hand on ostinato bass figures, had become popular. As
the war came, boogie woogie music and the vigorous jitterbug
swept an entire generation. It was exciting, pulse-pounding, and
just right for an energetic America caught up in a global struggle
for survival.

Change at an As the country settled down after the war, new forms of music
Increasing Pace began to arrive at an almost dizzying pace. One that most who
lived through it want to forget was called “bebop." It was a kind
of mindless and repetitive vocalizing of monosyllables inter¬
spersed with words that told a simple story. The musicians and
singers were white, and the words dealt with themes of interest
to preteens. Fortunately, it didn’t last long, and it apparently
made no lasting impression on popular music as a whole.
 ■ 544 Media Support Systems

Meanwhile, black musicians wefe developing a new form of

blues that was accompanied by a more powerful rhythm. Even¬
tually, it became known as “rhythm and blues.” This form of
music retained the basic blues structure but added the more
powerful pulsating beat of electric guitars. It was catchy and
easy to dance to in an energetic way. It was played rather loudly,
and the vocalist had to shout in order to be heard. It was rhythm
and blues that would provide the basis for the rock and roll rev¬
olution in popular music that would soon sweep the younger
generation. First, however, it had to emerge from the black com¬
munity and be accepted by white audiences.

I Rock and Roll In the early 1950s the rhythm and blues music of black musi¬
cians was being discovered by at least some white audiences.
Alan Freed, a white disc jockey, became instrumental in pushing
the trend along. He organized concerts for well-known black mu¬
sicians in large auditoriums and ball parks, where teen-agers of
both races could attend. They were tremendously successful. He
used the term rock and roll to characterize the music, and the
phrase caught on. It was actually the rhythm and blues that
black musicians had been playing for years, but it was a great
new musical experience for most in the audiences. By the mid
1950s, record companies were producing the music, and it
started to grow in popularity. In 1953 a white group, Bill Haley
and the Comets, appeared in a film Rock Around the Clock.
They played a song with the same name, plus others in the same
style. This gave the music national visibility. Other stars, both
black and white, made an increasing number of records, and
rock and roll was well on the way to becoming popular.
Then came Elvis Presley. He was already something of a star
among country-western fans. His song “You Ain't Nothin’ But a
Hound Dog" achieved success not only in country-western sales
but as a “cross-over” among those who liked rhythm and blues
as well. Presley had a unique and flashy style of dress. He was
resplendent on stage in light costumes with bright sequins. He
was darkly handsome, with sideburns and slicked-back hair.
His style of performing included sexually suggestive body move¬
ments while belting out songs to the accompaniment of an am¬
plified guitar. His voice had a bit of a nasal twang, but the
combination electrified females in the audience, and his popu¬
larity quickly soared. Presley brought together many of the ele¬
ments of rhythm and blues, energetic body movements, and
country style. He became the first superstar of rock and roll.
By the end of the decade, rock and roll was waning. In the
competition for fans, other types of music came in for brief pe¬
riods of substantial popularity. One was the cha cha, reviving
temporarily American interest in Latin music. But rock rhythms
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 545 ■

continued to dominate. In 1961 people were soon dancing the

twist, a kind of spine-wrenching maneuver that undoubtedly
added to the income of numerous chiropractors. Another popu¬
lar form was “surf’ music. Introduced by the Beach Boys, it used
four- and five-part harmony against a strong beat. Electric gui¬
tars were very prominent, and the words usually dealt with such
themes as hot-rod racing and surfing on the California beaches.
For most young people it was scarcely the stuff of everyday life,
but they liked it and bought the records that the industry re¬
lentlessly promoted. The Beach Boys remain popular.
Then, tastes among the youthful generation began to take a
more ominous turn. In the early sixties a counterculture that
had its beginnings in the outlook and activities of the 1960s'
beatniks began to take hold. The hippies of Haight-Ashbury (a
district in San Francisco) were developing a new lifestyle that
would spread through much of the younger generation. As the
decade went on, drugs became an important part of the counter¬
culture, and marijuana, LSD, and other substances were used
for mind and mood manipulation. Music seemed to add to the
mental states achieved, and drug themes became a more com¬
mon part of rock. Strobe lights, visual projectors, and other par¬
aphernalia added to the effects in places where young people
went to dance. Older generations were frightened. They felt that
youthful lives were being destroyed, and they laid the blame
squarely on the new music.
Meanwhile, a more innocuous form grew up alongside the
rock that had seemed so ominous. A small group of English
young men created a sensation. The Beatles were introduced to
American television audiences on the “Ed Sullivan Show" in
1963. By the end of the next year, their rather mild rock tune
“I Wanna Hold Your Hand” sold millions in this country, and the
Beatles became international superstars. The Beatles brought
together elements from both English music, such as a balladlike
style, and American music, the rhythm and blues beats, and
combined them with a form of singing that was a sort of sub¬
dued emotional shouting in unison. They were a versatile and
innovative group, and they changed their style from time to
time. As they became increasingly popular, they brought in ex¬
otic instruments, electronic organs, and computer-generated
sounds. Their music ranged from the rather simple and repeti¬
tive sounds of their early records to the psychedelic rock of their
later period. They made full use of concerts, television, records,
radio, and the movies. By the time they disbanded in 1970, they
had become the most widely known and successful group of mu¬
sicians in history.
Rock continued to multiply its forms during the same years
and has continued this proliferation up to the present. Hard
■ 546 Media Support Systems

■ In the mid-1960s a group of young musicians from England be¬

came international superstars of rock. The Beatles combined Ameri¬
can and British musical forms into a unique style that made them
media heroes almost overnight (The Bettman Archive, Inc.)

rock—a very loud and driving form of music that made heavy
use of electronic amplification and sound distortion tech¬
niques—was one form. Soul rock made a special appeal to black
Americans, combining elements of the earlier rhythm and blues
with gospel songs. Motown was still another form of the 1960s.
It brought together a variety of elements of popular music, but
it added a balladlike form.
Punk rock, popular during the late 1970s and early 1980s,
was a more recent English contribution. Its emphasis was on a
combination of bizarre dress, themes of violence, and driving
rock music. By the mid 1980s, punk had evolved into a form
called 'new wave rock". The various specialized forms into
which rock splintered are all part of the contemporary music
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 547 ■

scene. Also included are the inevitable country-western, cross¬

over tunes with elements of both rock and country, revivals of
earlier forms, and a mixed bag of innovative forms trying to gain
a following.
Popular music today is dominated by small groups with lim¬
ited talent in the traditional sense of instrumental technique,
but with a lot of innovation in appearance and action. Above all,
they put out the decibels. The bands are very heavy on guitars
and amplification. Singing tends to be a sort of shout in which
the vocalist tries to compete with the high output of the instru¬
ments. No current musical form or rhythm is showing any sign
of dominating all others as has happened in the past. However,
there are clear signs that we are about to experience a musical
revolution. This time it will be based on electronics rather than
on a change in musical style.

The Sound and One major aspect of the unfolding future will be the new forms
Sight of Things to of technology that will make another revolution in popular mu-
Come sic possible. It is abundantly clear that the popular music of the
future will not depend on the current LP stereo record. It is rap¬
idly heading toward obsolescence. It is also clear that a true rev¬
olution in the way we experience music is bursting upon us.
Combining the sound of music with the visual experience of
video is an almost inevitable outcome of advances in media
hardware for home entertainment.

■ The Digital Laser Disc. The device that we will use in the fu¬
ture for recording and listening to music is the compact digital
disc. It is a small plastic diskette only 4x/2 inches in diameter,
and it has no grooves. It is based on a totally new technology
that transforms the performance of the musicians directly into
a computer information storage system. From this source,
rather than from master tapes, the discs are produced electron¬
ically rather than mechanically. In one’s home machine a laser
beam passes through the disc as it rotates and feeds the sound
information through the stereo system.
The digital disc has several advantages. For one thing the
disc can never wear out. Second, its small size makes storage
and handling easy. Third, it holds about twenty minutes more
music than the standard vinyl stereo record. Finally, it produces
no noise at all other than the music. There is little doubt that it
represents a genuine advance over existing technology of the
same order that the LP microgroove record represented over the
old shellac 78s. Its developers predict that it will be in wide use
within a few years. Record companies are gearing up rapidly to
use the new system extensively. The compact digital disc will not
in itself bring forth new kinds of music. It will simply make lis¬
tening more pleasurable. At present the discs seem expensive,
■ 548 Media Support Systems

but as mass production and large-scale marketing take over,

their prices will become more competitive.

■ Seeing the Music: A Look at the Future. A much different

matter is music video. It is a child of cable TV, and its influence
on the marketplace and on the whole music industry is cur¬
rently intense. It is bringing not only new kinds of music but
new stars and a very different experience for the music con¬
sumer. Music video seems to be emerging as a true revolution in
popular culture.
Music video got its start in August of 1982, when the Warner
Amex Satellite Entertainment Company launched a cable service
called MTV (Music Television). At first it was little noticed, and
it lost a lot of money. By 1984, however, it was serving more
than 15 million households through 1,700 local cable services.
This means about 20 percent of American households, and the
number was going up rapidly. Advertisers wery paying premium
prices for spots on its prime viewing time.
At the heart of MTV is the video that is shown on the TV
screen along with the sound of the music. These are 3 Vi-minute
vignettes that accompany a song as it is played by the artists
who recorded it. The video illustrates or enhances the ideas sug¬
gested by the music. Sometimes the video seems to tell a little
story that is loosely related to the words of the song. Others are
abstract montages with bizarre images superimposed over shots
of the musicians. Each song is introduced, along with some
chatter, by a video jockey. Currently, most videos present rock
music in one form or another. However, there is no reason what¬
ever why the concept cannot be expanded to include country-
western, gospel songs, oldies, and even classical music. In fact,
this has already begun.
In any case, there is unlimited room for creativity, and some¬
times things can get pretty strange. The producers of rock video
seem to like strange-looking people dressed in unusual ways.
This is particularly true of the current wave of British imports:

Lined up, they would form an improbable parade of ghouls, trans¬

vestites, bikers with spiked dog collars, mercenaries in battle fa¬
tigues, tie-dyed tramps and dapper young squires.22

They also like fast action, bright colors, flashing lights, unu¬
sual contrasts, surprise images, and anything else that will cap¬
ture and hold attention. It is in this sense that music video,
especially rock video, is a new experience. In the record era it
was enough just to listen to the sounds of the music. One could
do other things at the same time. Rock video, on the other hand,
demands complete attention. In fact, it absorbs its audience
shutting out other forms of mental action.
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 549 ■

■ The music industry has created singing idols from generation to

generation, such as Frank Sinatra (left) and Michael Jackson (right).
Frank Sinatra relied heavily on radio and recordings for exposure
during the early years of his career; Jackson, on the other hand, has
had the aid of music video in making him a superstar. (Culver Pic¬
tures, Sygma.)

We can only guess about its impact, but a few influences are
already clear. Music video promises to alter music performance,
production, distribution, and consumption—in other words, the
entire music and recording industry. It may also have a consid¬
erable impact on other media and their current systems.
First of all, music video makes new demands on performers.
Not only do they have to play and sing in a manner that brings
audience approval, but they have to look and act right, some¬
times in a complex story situation compressed into a short time.
New kinds of superstars are being created by music video. For
instance, Michael Jackson, although he has been a well-known
performer since he was a child, has become a superstar with the
help of music video.
■ 550 Media Support Systems

■ Music video has become a popular form of expression for con¬

temporary musicians. MTV (Music Television) offers a variety of
video performances, including the one by Cyndi Lauper, above. MTV
was launched by the Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company
in 1982, but did not gain real popularity until 1984, when it was
serving more than 15 million households through 1,700 local cable
services. (© Allan Tannenbaum/Sygma.)

Music video could eventually displace radio to a considerable

extent. Radio today is almost completely devoted to presenting
music. If audiences become accustomed to seeing a vignette
along with the music, radio sounds alone may seem boring. If
the number of listeners declines and advertisers withdraw, radio
will be in serious trouble. At present, music video is viewed
mainly during prime evening hours by a relatively young audi¬
ence. It has had little impact on radio—yet! However, as the in-
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 551 ■

novation diffuses more widely, and particularly as it expands

beyond rock into a vast audience with other musical tastes, ra¬
dio may suffer very badly. On the other hand, radio has survived
and even thrived on change in the past, as when television
came. Perhaps its role as a background for activities where video
would be inappropriate will allow it to survive once again.
The new form of popular music presentation may hurt TV ad¬
vertisers. Cable subscribers are already using rock video as a
means of avoiding commercials on other channels. When the
commercials come on, many viewers jump to MTV to catch a bit
of exciting video. Then they jump back to their program, miss¬
ing the commercial altogether.
Finally, the record player as we know it will probably become
a quaint antique, along with the silent film and the vacuum
tube radio. Fans are already using the video cassette recorder to
replay and see their favorite rock performances again and again.
However, the recorders and tapes are still quite expensive. If mu¬
sic video, with its attention-holding vignettes, can be recorded
on a mass-produced digital disc that can in turn be played
through the television receiver via a cheap and simple machine,
the whole entertainment industry may be jolted. Who will need
MTV, or broadcast television programs at all, if they can spend
an evening with their favorite music accompanied by satisfying
video scenes selected from their own collections?
Whatever the outcome, it is clear that we have come a long
way from the “Maple Leaf Rag" pounded out on the home piano.
Our range of choices in popular music has been extended to
mind-boggling proportions, and the future will expand them
even more. What will the new video music do to us as individu¬
als and as a society? Probably a lot less than critics assume.
After all, every form of popular music was charged with being a
cause of moral collapse when it came on the scene. Yet our so¬
ciety has somehow held together. Undoubtedly, it will survive
the forthcoming revolution that is marrying sound and sight
into the experience of video music. In any case, the popular mu¬
sic industry and the business of recording and selling its prod¬
ucts remain intimately tied to our major mass media and to the
daily lives of most Americans.

■ Summary Popular music has a rich history and complex beginnings. It is

a product deliberately prepared for sale, as opposed to folk music
that emerges from people’s daily lives. Black entertainers in the
sporting houses along the Mississippi developed ragtime from
many musical sources and rhythms brought to this country
originally by slaves. Ragtime made the transition from bawdy
houses to middle-class living rooms when the works of compos-
■ 552 Media Support Systems

ers such as Scott Joplin were published in sheet music form. As

ragtime began to catch on in the early years of the century, Tin
Pan Alley music publishers cashed in on the trend and created
thousands of new tunes every year. The principal mass medium
involved in the spread of ragtime as popular music was the
printing press. Fortunes were made in the sale of sheet music.
Finally, by the time of World War I, the public became satiated
with ragtime and ready for a change. Meanwhile other forms of
popular music were being developed. William C. Handy created
a unique form of blues based on black folk music. Some years
later, gospel songs emerged from the tiying times of the Great
Depression. During the same period, the movies and radio made
popular many of the old cowboy songs. Bluegrass folk music in
popular forms gained a following. Nashville eventually became
the capital of popular country-western that incorporated these
various styles.
As public interest in ragtime waned, Dixieland jazz swept the
country and the jazz age began. It got its start in New Orleans
where street bands and traditions of musical innovation were
strong. An obscure band playing in Chicago and then New York
played a key role in gaining public acceptance of the new music
and in giving it its name. But Dixieland, like ragtime, was not at
first a product of modern mass media. It was the dancing craze
of the 1920s that made Dixieland America’s new form of popular
music. As interest spread, the record companies somewhat re¬
luctantly began to produce and market it.
The recording industry grew out of Edison’s invention of
1877. The device was slow to catch on and remained mainly a
novelty until the turn of the century. Then, technology and
sound quality slowly improved and various companies produced
records for a growing market. The majority were recordings of
classical music. By World War I, reliable spring-driven phono¬
graphs were being mass produced and marketed at modest cost.
Interest in the device spread rapidly. Recording companies be¬
gan to produce jazz records and the market for popular music
grew swiftly, interrupted only briefly by hard times and the ef¬
forts of critics.
High-fidelity recording grew out of World War II, when techni¬
cians were able to reproduce the sounds of German submarines
for training purposes. This technology was combined with the
use of new vinyl materials for records after the war and the long-
playing microgroove record was the result. Wire and then tape
were added as recording media, and stereo systems eventually
became standardized.
As a business the recording industry is characterized by high
risks of capital but also by the potential of great profit. It is dom¬
inated by a small number of major companies, but small inde-
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 553 ■

pendent producers continue to play a part. Today, records are

marketed through a complex system of chains of music stores,
independent retail outlets, rack jobbers, record clubs, and direct
television advertising. The industry sells more than $3 billion
worth of products annually.
As the recording industry improved its technology and mar¬
keting and as radio and the movies became national media, new
forms of popular music displaced Dixieland jazz. By the early
1930s, swing was being played by dance orchestras in major cit¬
ies. Live broadcasts of the music helped make it popular. The
media brought fame to many band leaders and singing stars.
The era of the big bands flowered just before World War II. As the
war started, boogie woogie and jitterbug dancing became the
fashion and added to the excitement of the times. Juke boxes
helped popularize the products of a growing recording industry,
and radio kept a constant flow of tunes before the public.
The postwar world brought high-fidelity records, stereo
sound, and above all rock and roll. It also brought new super-
stars such as Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Popular music today
is dominated by small groups who play and sing with high dec¬
ibels, great enthusiasm, and sometimes fabulous success. Rock
music clearly dominates, but it has split into many forms. Coun¬
try-western and gospel continue to have large followings. Some¬
times the various forms cross over in a particular hit record.
The media of popular music continue to change. During the
1960s, television began to play a more important role. Tape cas¬
settes, portable radios, FM radio broadcasts in stereo, and in¬
creasingly sophisticated sound systems for use in homes or cars
added to the instant availability of popular music. Today, MTV
is rapidly emerging as a dominant form of home musical enter¬
tainment, with consequences that are difficult to predict. The
new laser and digital technologies promise substantial changes
in the way music is consumed by the public.
From its beginnings, popular music was, and remains, con¬
troversial. Ragtime brought only sneers from musical conserva¬
tives. Dixieland jazz was opposed vigorously during the 1920s.
Swing and boogie woogie were loudly denounced as immoral.
Rock music was resented bitterly by conservative Americans
during the decade when it became associated with assorted po¬
litical positions and liberal ideas about drugs and sex. Punk and
new wave rock are seen by some as still another threat to civili¬
zation. Meanwhile, millions of fans, particularly young people,
love popular music and adore its performers.
In the future we can expect new technologies, new super-
stars. new rhythms, and thousands of new tunes to emerge con¬
stantly. Change is the essence of the popular music industry'.
The drives to produce hit records, to gain personal fame, and to
 B 554 Media Support Systems

make high profits all result in an industry that is intensely com¬

petitive and boldly innovative. Today, stars and would-be stars
are willing to dress, sing, dance, or play in any unusual, even
outlandish, way that has any remote chance of capturing the
public’s imagination. Those of us who are looking on find this
either a delightful source of new and exciting entertainment, or
a clear sign that our society is on the road to ruin.

Notes and 1 Steven Urkwitz and Lawrence Bennett, “Early American Vocal
References MusicJournal of Popular Culture, 12, No. 1 (Summer 1978),
pp. 5—10.
2 Cited in Irving Lowens, Music and Musicians in Early America
(New York: Norton, 1964), p. 282.
3 Frank Shay, American Sea Songs and Chanteys (New York:
W. W. Norton and Co., 1948), pp. 38, 5—10.
4 Isaac Goldberg, Tin Pan Alley (New York: John Day Co., 1930),
p. 45.
5 Ibid., p. 55.
6 David A. Jason andTrebor J. Tichenor, Rags andRagtime: A Mu¬
sical History (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), p. 5.
7 Paul Oliver, The Blues Tradition (New York: Oak Publications,
1970), p. 23.
8 Lena McLin, Pulse: A History of Music (San Diego:NielA. Kjos Mu¬
sic Co., 1977), p. 116.
9 Harry O. Brunn, The Story of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960), p. 21.
10 New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 20, 1918.
11 Noted in Thomas A. Edison's original (unpublished) labora¬
tory log.
12 Scientific American, December 1877, p. 17.
13 Appleton’s Magazine, December 1906, p. 34.
14 Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph (Philadelphia: J. B.
Lippencott, 1954), p. 255.
15 Ibid.
16 Melvin L. DeFleur and Sandra Ball-Rokeach, Theories of Mass
Communication, 4th ed. (New York: Longman, 1982), p. 89.
17 Gellatt, Fabulous Phonograph, pp. 267—276.
18 James Dertouzas and Steven Wildman, A Study of Economic Is¬
sues in the Recording Industry (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univer¬
sity Department of Economics, 1979).
19 Marc Kirkeby, “The Changing Face of Record Distribution,” New
York Times, February 18, 1979.
 Popular Music and the Recording Industry 555 ■

20 Herman S. Gray, “Independent Cultural Production: Theresa Rec¬

ords, A Case Study of a Jazz Independent” (Ph.D. diss., University
of California, Santa Cruz, 1983), p. 34.
21 George T. Simon, The Big Bands, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan
Publishing Co., 1976), pp. 33—39.
22 “Britain Rocks America—Again,” Newsweek, January 23, 1984,
p. 50. See also “Sing a Song of Seeing,” Time, December 26, 1983,
pp. 54-56, 61-63.
 556 Media Support Systems

■ What do women
want? Advertisers
seem to think they
have the answer, and
throughout this cen¬
tury they have pro¬
duced images of
women that influ¬
ence our attitudes.
For instance, the dif¬
ficult job of home¬
making has been
devalued by the im¬
age of the “happy
housewife,” relent¬
lessly cheery and de¬
pendent on her
detergent for her
sense of self-
worth. (above: EKM-
Nepenthe. below: ©
Ellen Pines Sheffield
1980/Woodfln Camp &
Associates.)
I Clean My hVhole House fVith the
AICOWANfi
Vacuum Cleaner
 Photo Essay: Advertising and the American Dream 557 ■

"Light a Lucky
and you'll never miss sweets
that make you fat”

•REACH FOR A LUCKY

insteaI> or a sweet

‘It's toasted
No Throat Irritation-No Cough

■ According to ad¬
vertising, all women
want to be very slen¬
der, quite young,
overly sexy, and
(these days) healthy.
The unspoken mes¬
sage contained in
images of female ce¬
lebrities is that
physical appearance
is all-important, and
that anyone who
buys the product
will soon look like
the star, (above
left: The Bettman Ar¬
chive, Inc. ABOVE
right: © Margaret
Thompson/The Picture
Cube, right: © Erika
Stone 1983/Peter Ar¬
nold, Inc.)
■ 558 Media Support Systems

THE BEST OF AMERICA

discriminating spectator, ing is sound. We secured the services
with the smartest equip- of one of America's foremost automo-
ld abroad, Buffalo Electrics bile engineers, so that Buffalo Electrics
; appeal, by reason of their might be The Best of America,
litectural excellence. Any engineer can design and build
know, who look beneath a car which will sell, but it is
: for those elements of a master mind applied to the design
struction which are recog- and construction of Buffalo Elec-
st in automobile engineer- tries which insures their success and
discover in Buffalo Electrics your permanent satisfaction with
rinsic value to the owner them.
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it reason, and their reason- shows. Advanced booklet on request.

BUFFALO ELECTRIC VEHICLE CO.

BUFFALO, N. Y
NEW YORK PHILADELPHIA BOSTON MONTREAL

■ Advertising fosters certain assumptions about all of society, not

just about women. Ideas about the American Dream—about what we
all want—are reflected in these ads from the 1920s, which stress the
importance of possessions. Those values have not really changed;
we still covet the large house and expensive car. Modern advertising
is often more subtle, but the message comes through loud and
clear: affluence is a very important thing to Americans, (left: Histori¬
cal Pictures Service, Chicago, right: Culver Pictures, opposite page; top: Cour¬
tesy Apple Computer Inc. bottom left: Courtesy Panasonic, bottom right:
Courtesy Citibank.)
Photo Essay: Advertising and the American Dream 559 ■
 Promise, large promise, is the soul oj an advertisement.
Samuel Johnson

■ Advertising and Public

Relations

As the English historian and essayist Thomas Macaulay wrote,

“Advertising is to business what steam is to industry—the sole
propelling power. Nothing except the Mint can make money
without advertising.” Almost without exception, Macaulay’s
principle holds true for businesses today, and it is especially
true for the mass media. Their solvency as businesses depends
to a great extent on advertising, and advertising depends heavily
on the mass media as its vehicle. It is impossible to imagine the
American mass media without advertising, for they have grown
up together and each depends on the other.
Advertising is basically a form of mass communication. We
will examine how it differs from other types of communication,
what its functions and content are, and how it has developed.
We will look, too, at how the advertising message is manufac¬
tured. How large is the industry? Who produces the messages?
How are they organized? Advertising messages, we will see, are
very closely tuned to public taste, but still they are the object of
much criticism. Finally, we examine a field that is related to ad¬
vertising: public relations.

Advertising as Advertising is not a mere appendage to the mass media. It has

Communication a structure and existence of its own, and it is an important part
of the American economy. Moreover, as economic historian
David Potter wrote, “Advertising now compares with such long¬
standing institutions as the school and the church in the mag-
 Advertising and Public Relations 561 ■

nitude of its social influence. It dominates the media, it has vast

power in shaping popular standards, and it is really one of the
very limited group of institutions which exercise social control.”1
But we should look at advertising not only as an economic
and social force but also as a form of communication. A televi¬
sion commercial, a catchy slogan, a full-page spread in a maga¬
zine, a pencil with the name of a firm embossed on its side, a
card above your seat on a bus or subway—all these are forms of
advertising. What do they have in common? We begin our ex¬
amination of advertising with a look at its definition, functions,
content, and history.

What Is One definition suggests that advertising is simply “the action of

Advertising? attracting public attention to a product or business [as well as]
the business of preparing and distributing advertisements.”2 Ac¬
cording to the American Marketing Association, advertising is
“any paid form of nonpersonal presentation and promotion of
ideas, goods, and services by an identified sponsor.”3 But nei¬
ther of these definitions notes the role of the mass media in
advertising. To correct this deficiency, a leading advertising
textbook defined advertising as “controlled, identifiable infor¬
mation and persuasion by means of mass communications
media.”4
Advertising is controlled in that it is prepared in accordance
with the desires of the firm or other group it represents. Unlike
a person who grants an interview to the press not knowing how
his or her words will appear, the advertiser knows exactly what
the message will say. Furthermore, advertising is identifiable
communication. The message may be subtle or direct, but you
know it is advertising and not, for example, news. Advertising
can be entertaining, but few would claim that this is its primary
goal. If advertising entertains, that is only a means to an end.
The end is to increase sales. Advertising tries to inform con¬
sumers about a particular product and to persuade them to
make a particular decision—usually, the decision to buy a prod¬
uct. Its avowed goal is to guide and control buying behavior, to
move the consumer toward one product instead of another.
Thus it is a form of social control, urging the consumer to con¬
form within a range of product choices, “providing norms of be¬
havior appropriate to current economic conditions.”5
We can also define advertising in terms of the meaning theory
of mass communication’s effects presented in Chapter 10: it is
an attempt to establish, extend, substitute, or stabilize people’s
meanings for symbols that label the advertiser’s products or
services. Advertisers seek to influence language conventions,
individual interpretations, and the shared meanings of such
symbols so that people will make choices that are favorable to
 ■ 562 Media Support Systems

the advertiser’s purposes. In other words, they hope that

through communication they can get people to like and pur¬
chase their wares.

The Content of To accomplish its ends, advertising must make a persuasive ap¬
Advertising peal. Sometimes that appeal is simple and descriptive; some¬
times it is subtle and sophisticated. Communication critic
James Carey says advertising is persuasive—and thus acts as a
form of social control—mainly by providing information.6 In¬
deed, some advertising content is direct and makes rational
appeals, mentioning characteristics of the product, relative
advantages, and price. A Firestone tire commercial, for example,
talks about the durability of the tire and its worth compared to
competitors’ tires.
Much advertising, however, has little to do with direct infor¬
mation or rational appeals. Instead it attempts to manipulate
the consumer by indirect appeals. As David Potter wrote, “Adver¬
tising appeals primarily to the desires, the wants—cultivated or
natural—of the individual, and it sometimes offers as its goal a
power to command the envy of others by outstripping them in
the consumption of goods and services.”7 Thus advertising may
try to get you to buy a product, not because of its advantages
and not because of your existing needs, but because of a need or
desire that the advertisement itself tries to create.
Almost every appeal imaginable has been used in advertising.
Some ads have traded on prestige; others have used fear. Some
have promised glamour and the good life. Some have embraced
fantasy and others have been firmly fixed in reality.
To make these appeals advertisers associate their product,
verbally and visually, with other images, symbols, and values
that are likely to attract consumers. For example, advertising for
the auto rental firm Avis appealed to love of the underdog when
it promised, “We try harder.” Another kind of dog—the trust¬
worthy family dog—was used by an early manufacturer of the
record player that advertised its Victrola with the slogan “his
master’s voice” and showed a dog listening to recorded music.
The starched but debonair look of “the man in the Arrow shirt”
provides a model for the well-dressed man. Elegant, tastefully de¬
signed advertisements for Cadillacs convey an image of quality
and excellence. Coca-Cola’s successful “it’s the real thing” adver¬
tisements show happy, fun-loving, youthful people drinking
Coke against the backdrop of melodious music—without saying
anything about taste, nutritional value, or price.
Institutional advertising is even less direct. For example, a
firm that makes paper and other forest products presents a com¬
mercial about the virtues of a beautiful, well-managed forest—
showing cute animals but saying nothing about its specific
 Advertising and Public Relations 563 ■

product. The company hopes, of course, that the public will as¬
sociate it with the “selfless" ad and lovely images.
The visual and verbal content of advertising has changed con¬
siderably over time—from the ornate and highly decorative soap
and cosmetic ads of the 1890s to the cleaner lines of the art deco
designs of the 1920s and 1930s, the bizarre psychedelic posters
of the 1960s and 1970s, and the clean, orderly, Swiss Gothic
look of the 1980s. It is, says design expert Roy Paul Nelson, all a
matter of coordinating art and typography with content. These
changes reflect the efforts of entrepreneurs to fashion effective
messages. Obviously, in order to be effective an advertisement
must have an appeal to its audience; it must reflect shared val¬
ues. Advertising that works is therefore an index to popular cul¬
ture. As Norman Douglas wrote, “You can tell the ideals of a
nation by its advertisements."8 Thus changes in advertising over
the years have been closely tied to changes in America.

Advertising in Until recently, social histories all but ignored advertising. Even
America: A Brief histories of journalism failed to deal with advertising’s role in
History creating the modern mass media. But since our country’s begin¬
nings, advertising has had an important place in the life of the
nation. According to Daniel J. Boorstin,

Advertising has remained in the mainstream of American civiliza¬

tion—in the settling of the continent, in the expansion of the econ¬
omy, and in the building of an American standard of living.
Advertising has expressed the optimism, the hyperbole and the
sense of community, the sense of reaching which has been so im¬
portant a feature in our civilization.9

American society provided one important precondition for ad¬

vertising: abundance. According to David Potter, advertising can
thrive only in a society where there is abundance. When re¬
sources are scarce, there is little or no need for manufacturers
or producers to promote their wares. As Potter wrote:

It is when potential supply outstrips demand—that is when abun¬

dance prevails—that advertising begins to fulfill a really essential
function. In this situation the producer knows that the limitations
upon his operations and upon his growth no longer lies, as it lay
historically, in his productive capacity, for he can always produce as
much as the market will absorb; the limitation has shifted to the
market, and it is selling capacity which controls his growth.10

America has usually provided the relative abundance necessary

for advertising to be useful. And American businesses, with the
help of advertising, have been veiy successful at increasing sell¬
ing capacity. The result is today’s so-called consumer society.
 ■ 564 Media Support Systems

very method France developed and uses

Made by the method France for her finest toilet soaps. For wise France
developed — for the gift of a knew that her matchless powders and
perfumes lose half that magic unless the
Smooth Skih skin itself ts Jmootli. exquisite.
r * Your delighted fingers rccogni* this
Y OU adored the way French scops
satin-smooth, firm, fine-textured cake as true
saven Ji toilette. How good it is to feel again
made you feel—satin-smooth, charm¬ ttiat carcsiing, gentle, lather, magic, delicious,
ing, luxurious. But oh! how costly they you so adored in French soaps Ah. it tends
were! your skin the true French way. And. some¬
"Baby's Ivory Bath: “We just can't pay so much all the how you do feel lovelier, more gracious,
time," you told us. "Do. do make a soap afterward*.
as delicious os French soap but not nearly France with her passion for perfection,
Nothing is more easily affected by irritation than the ^, • so costly." And wc did! We made Lux America with her genius for achievement
-for Lux Toilet Soap is just «oc wherever
dainty, delicate skin of a young child. Ivory Soap is heal- ‘'ta Toilet Soap. White, delicious!
ooap a sold. Parisian luxury without extrava¬
Made it just as you asked—"as exqui¬ gance! Lever Bros. Co,, Cambridge, Mass.
ing, cleansing and refreshing. It is wholly free from impurities, site as French soap." Made it by the

and leaves the tenderest skin soothed by its mild, creamy lather.

IT FLOATS. LUX TOILET SOAP IO<

■ Advertising copywriters try to anticipate the public’s needs and

desires with appealing copy and attractive visuals that reflect cur¬
rent styles and values. Soap advertising has often been an indicator
of both these contemporary marketing approaches. Here, two differ¬
ent ads emphasize practicality and prestige. (Historical Pictures Ser¬
vice, Chicago.)

Of course, advertising is older than America. The earliest ad¬

vertising messages were probably those of criers or simple signs
above shops. Modern advertising had its origins in the trade¬
marks used by craftsworkers and early merchants to distinguish
their wares from those of others. With the advent of printing and
an expanding world trade, there was even more advertising. The
watermarks of printers were distinctive forms of advertising.
Coffee, chocolate, and tea, to name a few, were hawked in mes¬
sages on broadsides and in newspapers and other periodicals.
Proving that advertising could be compelling and useful, the
London Gazette in 1666 published an advertising supplement
to help lost and homeless fire victims get in touch with one
another.
 Advertising and Public Relations 565 ■

In colonial America advertising had many vehicles—news¬

papers, pamphlets, broadsides, and almanacs. Early communi¬
cations media thus became factors in the marketplace for goods
and services. But advertising was not a very important source of
revenues for early newspapers. They depended more on govern¬
ment printing contracts and the price paid by the reader. This
early advertising was somewhat subdued by our standards, and
it rarely overshadowed the editorial content of the papers. Still,
it often got front-page billing, probably because the news was
often less-than-fresh reports from distant Europe, whereas the
advertising was current and local.
From the early days of the Industrial Revolution onward, ad¬
vertising grew naturally as markets expanded and factories tried
to sell their goods. In the nineteenth centuiy advertising came
to account for more of the content of newspapers and maga¬
zines—and for more of their revenue. Like the press itself during
this time, advertising was fiercely local and was paid for by local
merchants.
Then, around the middle of the nineteenth century, national
advertising developed. In America the first advertising aimed at
a national audience appeared in magazines, which were really
the first medium of nationwide communication. Many of the
new national magazines appealed to women, and soaps, cosmet¬
ics, and patent medicines were among the products frequently
advertised in their pages. These ads created a market for new
products; that is, advertising proved that it could accelerate ac¬
ceptance of new products and get people to change their buying
habits. For example, in 1851 people still bought soap by the
pound. Then a soap manufacturer named B. T. Babbitt intro¬
duced the bar of soap. When the public was unresponsive to the
product, Babbitt introduced a premium: for every twenty-five
empty soap wrappers, Babbitt promised the buyer a handsome
colored picture. The lure attracted buyers, and the idea of pre¬
miums took hold. Premiums are still with us today on cigarette
wrappers, cereal boxes, and other products.
The nineteenth century saw the use of yet another advertis¬
ing gimmick: the testimonial. Some firms used photos of beau¬
tiful women and even prominent women such as the First Lady
(without her permission) to promote their products. Later,
movie stars, athletes, and television stars would be used.
In the late nineteenth century the happy combination of new
postal rates favorable to regularly issued publications, improved
transportation, and the desire of business for national markets
stimulated the growth of the national magazines and advertis¬
ing. Magazine publishers, like newspaper publishers, adopted
the revolutionary idea that the reader should be able to buy a
magazine for a fraction of its actual cost (that is, the cost of pro-
 ■ 566 Media Support Systems

■ Advertising has
a long history in SARAH SELL-S,
in
TAKES this Method of informing her
American media of Muffin-Maker, Eroad-Streft .*
providing practical
consumer informa¬
tion to readers and Friends, and the Publick in general, that fhe
viewers. It has been
with us since the be¬ continues making Muffins and Crumpets hot twice
ginning of American every Day ; humbly thanks her Friends for their former
media as this colo¬
nial newspaper indi¬
Favours, and intreats the Continuance of them, which
cates. (Culver fne will make it her conftant Endeavour to deferve, and
Pictures.) which will be ever gratefully acknowledged.

duction); advertising revenue would pay most of the cost. By the

1890s nickel and dime magazines flourished even though the
cost of production was much more.
The importance of advertising in delivering information and
entertainment products accelerated as radio and television en¬
tered the marketplace. It could be said that “Marconi may have
invented the wireless and Henry Luce may have invented the
news magazine, but it is advertising that has made both wire¬
less and newsmagazine what they are in America today.”11
The go-getters of American business fought vigorous battles
for larger sales in an expanding economy. One of their weapons
in this war was advertising. At first essential goods and services
had been advertised, then luxury items, and then new products
and services. Advertising became the expression of America's
commercial self.
As the advertising industry grew, newspapers and magazines
developed advertising departments catering to the commercial
interests that wanted to buy advertising space. Publications be¬
gan to compete aggressively for the advertiser’s business, espe¬
cially in towns where there were competing media. Large retail
organizations placed large amounts of advertising, and eventu¬
ally they too established advertising departments to plan their
advertising and place ads. By the 1930s there were middlemen
who facilitated the relationship between the commercial enter¬
prise and the media organization. At first these middlemen were
space brokers—just arranging for the placement of ads—but
later they expanded their operations and became the world’s
first advertising agencies, organizations that eventually provided
creative and research assistance and advertising strategies.
Thus the main features of the modern advertising industry
were established. Its development both depended on and stimu¬
lated the growth of the mass media, of businesses eager to ex-
 Advertising and Public Relations 567 ■

pand, and of consumers who might be persuaded to buy. It has

become a mass communication content important to the sur¬
vival of the mass media and most other businesses as well as a
rather large industry in itself.

The Advertising The advertising industry exists for the purpose of putting busi-
Industry nesses who want to market and distribute goods and services in
touch with consumers who want to buy and use them. Viewed
in this way, the advertising industry itself is a kind of middle¬
man. Components of the industry include:

• Advertising agencies
• Media services organizations
• Suppliers of supporting services ranging from public opinion
research to commercial art
• Advertising departments of retail businesses
• Advertising media: print and electronic media, outdoor adver¬
tising, specialty advertising, direct-mail advertising, and
business advertising (and the various departments of these
organizations that deal with advertising)

These are only the bare bones of the industry. Everything on the
list comes in several sizes. Take advertising agencies, for exam¬
ple. There are massive national advertising agencies with offices
in scores of cities in the United States and abroad, and there are
small, local agencies with only a few accounts.
Although the advertising industiy is made up of independent
business interests and is by no means a tightly controlled na¬
tional entity, it is held together by various voluntary organiza¬
tions and associations. There are, for example, associations of
advertisers and advertising agencies. These include the impor¬
tant American Association of Advertising Agencies (or 4As, as it
is called) and the Association of National Advertisers (which are
the agencies' accounts), as well as regional and state groups.
There are also media associations concerned with advertising,
including the Newspaper Advertising Bureau, the Outdoor Ad¬
vertising Institute, the Television Bureau of Advertising, and the
Cable Television Advertising Bureau, to name only a few.
These organizations and others produce regular publications
that carry news of the advertising industry. Some are general-
interest publications for advertising (like Advertising Age),
whereas others are very specific (like Art Direction, which deals
with graphics). Each category of advertising (direct mail, out¬
door signs, packaging, and so on) has its own publications. In¬
formation and research services as well as publishing houses
and organizations produce much on the subject of advertising.
All this adds up to an industry with a substantial economic
■ 568 Media Support Systems

■ Advertising uses a number of "media” to present its messages.

Outdoor advertising as seen on billboards is an example. An adver¬
tiser working through an advertising agency has several different
media to choose from including outdoor advertising, newspapers,
magazines, radio and television, cable and others. (Eileen Christelow/
Jeroboam, Inc.)

impact. In 1982, for example, American businesses spent more

than $66.7 billion on advertising, with advertising agencies tak¬
ing in about $35.6 billion of this amount. It has been estimated
that more than 175,000 people are employed in advertising, ap¬
proximately 125,000 of them in advertising agencies. The U.S.
Bureau of the Census has estimated that there are nearly
10,000 establishments engaged in the advertising business, in¬
cluding 6,800 advertising agencies.
The trend toward concentration into large firms that we have
seen elsewhere in the communications industry is present in ad¬
vertising as well. A listing of the top ten agency billings, as
shown in Table 15.1, reveals that less than 0.1 percent do over
 Advertising and Public Relations 569 ■

Table 15.1 The Top Ten Advertising Agencies, 1982

WORLD GROSS WORLD U.S.

INCOME BILLING BILLING TOTAL
AGENCY (millions) (billions) (billions) EMPLOYEES

1. Young & Rubicam 376.6 2.511 1.645 7,025

2. Ted Bates Worldwide 356.1 2.374 1.555 5,041
3. J. Walter Thompson Co. 347.1 2.315 1.115 7,443
4. Ogilvy & Mather 315.0 2.151 1.179 7,010
5. McCann-Erickson
Worldwide 276.1 1.841 550 5,850
6. BBDO International 238.3 1.605 1.050 3,583
7. Leo Burnett Co. 221.2 1.487 919 3,498
8. Saatchi & Saatchi
Compton Worldwide 186.5 1.302 510 1,140
9. Foote Cone & Bending 178.1 1.195 853 3,888
10. Doyle Dane Bernbach 175.9 1.235 920 2,986

Source: Reprinted with permission from the March 16, 1983 issue of Advertising Age. Copyright
1983 by Crain Communications Inc.
n

50 percent of the total business! Young & Rubicam, the largest

agency in the United States, has billings of $2.51 billion an¬
nually, with forty U.S. offices as well as one hundred offices in
foreign countries.
The various elements of the advertising industry are inter¬
related parts of a dynamic system that is very competitive. The
image of the harried advertising account executive often pre¬
sented in movies and television may be an overstatement, but
advertising is a field marked by much stress and competition as
agencies and other firms do battle for accounts. We look next at

■
each of the major components of the industiy.

Advertising Advertising agencies have come a long way since the nineteenth
Agencies century, when they were essentially space brokers. Today, the
full-service agency employs writers, artists, media experts, re¬
searchers, television producers, account executives, and others
as part of the organization. John S. Wright and his colleagues
have identified three main functions for the full-service advertis¬
ing agency:
 570 Media Support Systems

1 Planning The agency must know the firm, its product, the
competition, and the market well enough to recommend
plans for advertising.
2 Creation and execution The agency creates the advertise¬
ments and contacts the media that will present them to the
intended audience.
3 Coordination The agency works with salespersons, distribu¬
tors, and retailers to see that the advertising works.12

Within the full-service agency there are several major func¬

tions and groups:

1 Account management The account executive and his or her

staff provide services to a firm or product. An account man¬
agement director is responsible for relations between the
agency and the client.
2 The creative department The creative director supervises
writers, directors, artists, and producers, who write and de¬
sign ads.
3 Media selection A media director heads a department in
which the specific media to be used for particular ads are
chosen.
4 The research department Advertising messages are pretested
and data are gathered to help the creative staff fashion a spe¬
cific design and message. The research director supervises in-
house research and hires public opinion firms for more ex¬
tensive national and regional studies.
5 Internal control The administrative operations of the agency,
including public relations, are concentrated in one de¬
partment.

An administrative director runs the agency. Of course, large

agencies have a board of directors and the usual trappings of a
big business.
Unlike the full-service agency, a boutique has more limited
goals and services. It is essentially a creative department and
may hire other agencies and independent services to provide ad¬
vertising services for particular clients and products. Often bou¬
tiques work closely with in-house agencies—that is, a small ad
agency formed by a business to handle its own products. Most
boutiques are small agencies established by persons who once
worked for full-service agencies.

I Inside the Agency What an advertising agency offers is service, and it is confidence
in that service that brings clients to pay 15 percent of their total
 Advertising and Public Relations 571 ■

billings to the ad agency. Just what happens from the initial

contact between an agency and a client to the finished advertis¬
ing campaign varies considerably, depending on the size of the
agency and the nature of the account. But, essentially, this is
how it works:
The account management director either calls on a busi¬
ness—say, a local company that manufactures solar heating de¬
vices—or someone from the business contacts the advertising
agency. Indeed, the solar heating company may contact several
agencies and ask all of them for proposals, with the understand¬
ing that only one will receive the account. The account manage¬
ment director selects an account executive from within the
agency, who arranges a meeting of executives from the solar
heating company, his or her boss, the account management di¬
rector, and other appropriate people from the agency. They dis¬
cuss potential advertising objectives with the client. For
example, who are likely consumers for the device? How can they
best be reached? Through what medium? With what appeals?
Then the account executive goes to work inside the agency.
Research is done to answer some of the questions about poten¬
tial consumers. The agency’s creative department has brain¬
storming sessions, discussing ideas for potential ads and a
potential campaign. Artists and writers draw up sample ads.
These may be rough sketches of newspaper and magazine adver¬
tisements as well as broadcast story boards, which are a series
of drawings on a panel indicating each step of the commercial.
Depending on how complex and detailed the campaign is to be,
a variety of other specialists may be involved, such as sound en¬
gineers, graphic artists, lighting experts, and actors.
What results from all this are sample ads, which are then pre¬
tested on potential consumers. The agency's research depart¬
ment goes over this pretesting and suggests which of several
approaches would be best for the client. This research also
guides the agency and client in deciding what media to use—
print or broadcast, outdoor advertising, or matchbook covers.
The account executive then pulls this information together
and, along with other agency personnel, conducts a presentation
for the company. But first, potential costs are clearly laid out so
that the solar heating company can evaluate the proposed. The
presentation is often elaborate, with slide and tape presenta¬
tions and sample ads. Research and creative personnel are called
on to discuss the ads, and people from the media department
discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using particular
media for the campaign. Now the ball is in the company’s court.
They either accept or reject the agency’s proposal. Their accep¬
tance may, of course, be conditional on various modifications.
 ■ 572 Media Support Systems

Box 15

What’s in a
Name?

Suppose you are a business executive in have made a number of such gaffes recently;
Shanghai, in the People’s Republic of China for example, they have tried to export a line of
Your government is encouraging trade with lipsticks called Fang-Fang and a brand of
the West, and you manufacture a product— men’s underwear named Pansy. But they
batteries—that you think you could sell in the aren’t alone in making this kind of mistake;
United States. Your labor is cheap and you can the Directory of Trade Name Origins is lit¬
use existing networks for promotion, so you tered with examples. Imagine the reaction of
believe you can undersell your American com¬ English-speaking people to advertisements
petitors and still make a good profit You call for the French soft drink Pschitt or the Ger¬
in an expert on Western merchandising, and man aircraft Fokker. The Finns tried to market
together you plan packaging, price, and pro¬ a de-icing compound called Piss in Britain; the
motion in American publications. In a year’s British tried to sell Germans a Rolls Royce
time you have introduced your product on the called Silver Mist (mist is the German word for
West Coast—and it isn’t selling at all. Bewil¬ manure). The Russians too have had problems
dered, you check with your distributors, your with cars; one of their Volgas, which is called
factories, and your advertising agencies. Fi¬ Zhiguli in the Soviet Union, is marketed in the
nally somebody tells you that your trade name West as the Lada, because Zhiguli sounds too
has negative connotations to Americans: much like gigolo in English and French and
White Elephant suggests the meaning of “fake” to those who
This is a classic example of cultural incon¬ speak Arabic.
gruency—the failure of a communicator to get How can advertisers avoid making such
his or her message across because of subtle mistakes? For one thing, they shouldn’t rely
differences in languages. According to Sinolo¬ too heavily on the advice of computers, which
gist Ross 'Ibrrill, the Chinese Communists cannot be programmed to understand innu-
 Advertising and Public Relations 573 ■

endo. For another, they should investigate ply lack positive connotations (for instance,
their potential markets carefully for hidden the name Cortina seems exotic to Americans,
dangers. Not all names have negative mean¬ but is simply the word for “curtain” in Italy).
ings in other languages, but some might sim¬ (photo:© 1983/Stanley Rowin.)

Once the green light is given, the account executive coordi¬

nates activity within the agency to produce the actual ads and
then works with the media department to contact the media and
arrange that the advertising campaign actually reaches the pub¬
lic. The research department usually prepares to evaluate the
campaign so that the agency can present evidence about whom
the campaign reached and with what effect—and thus ensure
that the account will be renewed in the future. Eventually, the
advertisement for solar heating devices reaches the consumer.
The success or failure of the campaign depends on whether an
ample number of consumers head toward a local store to buy the
device.

I Media Service
Organizations
There are also specialized organizations that spend their time
on particular advertising functions, such as buying space in the
media and negotiating with advertising agencies for it. Many
people in these media service organizations once worked for ad¬
vertising agencies. One type of media service organization is the
national advertising representative, which has special expertise
about network television rates and knows the ideal times to dis¬
play particular kinds of products. Often, national advertising
representatives buy blocks of television time in advance and
then sell the time to various advertising agencies for particular
accounts. They get involved with an account late in the game,
usually after much planning has been done. Other kinds of me¬
dia service organizations include independent design firms and
television production companies. Usually they work with the ad¬
vertising agency, not directly with the advertiser.

I Advertising
Departments
Whole industries as well as large department stores sometimes
have advertising departments. Unlike advertising agencies,
which are independent middlemen serving several accounts or
businesses, the advertising department of a business works
with that firm’s products and is part of its staff. This depart¬
ment has an intimate knowledge of the business or industry and
makes proposals for advertising plans and strategies. Its main
concern is the final outcome: increasing sales or heightening the
awareness of a particular product or service. Advertising depart¬
ments work closely with advertising agencies, which compete for
 ■ 574 Media Support Systems

their business and present alternative proposals for the adver¬

tising campaign. Some retail advertising departments resem¬
ble small advertising agencies and place advertising directly with
local media. For more complicated transactions that involve
research and other specialties they look to the agency for
assistance.

Advertising Media The standard mass media are, of course, advertising vehicles.
Newspapers, magazines, television stations, radio stations, ca¬
ble companies, and other media outlets have advertising depart¬
ments. At both the national and the local level, the media
compete vigorously for advertising dollars. Each of the major
media has some kind of national advertising association that
gathers data and tries to show that that medium is the “best
buy” for reaching a particular audience. At the local level adver¬
tising salespersons who work for media organizations sell space,
either directly to a business or to a business through an adver¬
tising agency or media service organization.
In selecting a medium, the business or advertising agency
considers the target audience to be reached, cost of advertising,
and effectiveness of a medium in doing the job that the adver¬
tiser wants done. Newspapers get the largest share of the adver¬
tising dollar among the traditional mass media (30 percent),
followed by television (19.7 percent), radio (6.7 percent), and
magazines (5.3 percent). Other types of advertising account for
38.3 percent.
These “other types” of advertising include retail advertising
(signs and displays in stores), specialty advertising (pencils, cal¬
endars, and similar items), direct-mail advertising (which takes
advantage of special mailing rates to send fliers and brochures
to homes), outdoor advertising (billboards and other signs), and
transit advertising (cards on buses, and so on), as well as busi¬
ness advertising (special advertising directed to an industry or
business as in trade magazines and displays at trade shows).
There is also electronic advertising on videotex systems (see
Chapter 3), and even an electronic headline advertising service
in taxicabs. But even this listing gives only a hint of the diverse
media for advertising. There are firms that specialize in exhibits
for trade shows and fairs, firms that do skywriting, and many,
many other outlets.

Research on The advertising industiy is a great generator of research. Each

Advertising of the advertising media hires research firms, rating services,
and other groups to gather data that show the pulling power of
that medium; agencies conduct research on the effectiveness of
their ads, awareness of their clients’ products, and the public’s
 Advertising and Public Relations 575 ■

response to them. And, of course, academics—including sociol¬

ogists, psychologists, and anthropologists—conduct research on
the industry and its effects, studying topics such as marketing,
product appeals, the psychology of advertising, and consumer
behavior. Marketing researchers probe the effects of different ap¬
peals on various audiences, and mass communication research¬
ers examine the role of particular media in communicating
advertisements, among other things.
All this research can be found in many sources. Trade publi¬
cations and trade journals as well as the Journal oj Advertising
and Journal oj Advertising Research publish some of it. Some
associations and groups will provide a copy of research (for ex¬
ample, on the ability of magazines to sell a particular product
such as whiskey) to anyone who asks for it.
Much of the research on the effectiveness of advertising, how¬
ever, is hidden from the public. Some of it is gathered by re¬
search firms and then sold to the highest bidder; some of it is
conducted by a specific company for its own use; and some of it
is conducted by agencies for particular clients. Moreover, much
of this research is self-serving, designed to demonstrate that a
consumer or advertising agency or business should take a cer¬
tain action. As a result, businesses sometimes hire consultants
to help them sort out the various claims of researchers.

■ Studying the Effectiveness of Advertising. Advertising re¬

searchers may use surveys, panel studies, or experiments. In
panel studies they take a group of subjects and analyze their at¬
titudes or behavior over time. In experiments they might set up
experimental and control groups in order to determine the effect
of advertising messages. But whatever the method, Russell Col¬
ley has claimed that good research on advertising effectiveness
must make “a systematic evaluation of the degree to which the
advertising succeeded in accomplishing predetermined goals.”13
What are these goals? If advertising is successful, said Colley,
it results in a sale, and to do that it must carry consumers
through four levels of understanding: (1) awareness of a brand
or company, (2) comprehension of the product and what it will
do for them, (3) a conviction that they should buy the product,
and (4) action—that is, buying the product.14 Colley urged ad¬
vertisers to use precise research to evaluate whether an adver¬
tisement has succeeded, including the following types of
research:

1 Audience research Basic data are gathered on the audience

to be reached, including the number of people in various
■ 576 Media Support Systems

groups (based on age, sex, religion, and so on) who see and
respond to advertising.
2 Media research The particular characteristics of each me¬
dium and what it can do, including comparisons of the pull¬
ing power and persuasiveness of various media, are studied.
3 Copy research Comparisons are made of audience reactions
to particular advertisements. For example, researchers might
compare the effectiveness of ads using an underdog appeal
and others that arouse fear, instill pride, or reinforce old
values.

■ Consumer and Lifestyle Research. More accessible than re¬

search on advertising effectiveness is research on consumer be¬
havior, though some of it, too, is privately funded and hidden
from public view. From their studies of consumers, researchers
help businesses and ad agencies learn who their most likely con¬
sumers are and what kind of advertising is most likely to reach
them. They might study how needs, drives, and motives affect
consumers’ buying; how perception of an advertisement might
vary among consumers; and what opinions, attitudes, beliefs,
and prejudices should be taken into account in fashioning a
message.15 Some researchers focus on one group, such as chil¬
dren. These specialists might examine children at different
stages of their development and then predict what kinds of
things children like at certain ages and what influence they can
have on their parents’ purchases of toys, food, and so on. Adver¬
tising agencies then use this information to prepare commer¬
cials for Saturday morning cartoon shows.
Another area of study is lifestyle research, which grew out of
research surveying trends in American living patterns and buy¬
ing behavior. These studies tell advertisers about the changing
attitudes and lifestyles that characterize potential consumers at
different ages and stages—information that can be immensely
helpful in fashioning an advertising campaign. For example, if
older people today are moving out of large old houses into small
new apartments where they live alone, and if they are interested
in simplifying the tasks of managing their new homes and hav¬
ing more free time, then they are new potential consumers for
several types of goods—such as frozen foods packaged for just
one or two servings, toaster ovens, and airline tickets.16 It might
be worthwhile, then, for companies providing these items to use
ads that might have special appeal to older people.
Generally, advertising research is mostly applied research; its
purpose is to help stimulate sales. This use of research to ma¬
nipulate people has, not surprisingly, aroused considerable crit¬
icism, as has advertising itself.
 Advertising and Public Relations 577 ■

■ An Age of Market Segmentation. The preoccupation of ad¬

vertisers and advertising professionals with research is under¬
standable in today’s era of market segmentation. Although
advertisers would like to sell their wares to everyone, they know
that isn’t possible or perhaps even desirable. So they go after a
particular segment of the market. That segment may be defined
by age, income, geographic location, race, and so on. Once most
advertising was product oriented; that is, the content was
mainly concerned with a persuasive message about the attri¬
butes of the product. Now, most advertising is user oriented
with messages aimed at the specific needs, interests, and de¬
sires of particular consumers. As historian Daniel Pope put it:

Segmentation campaigns are user-focused and concentrate on con¬

sumer benefits rather than product attributes. They show people
with whom the target audience can identify; people who represent a
credible source of authority for them or who express their latent de¬
sires and dreams. Marketeers hone in on consumers whose life¬
styles and personalities have been carefully profiled.17

This new emphasis also suggests problems for the ethical

presentation of advertising. It is much easier to apply a “truth
in advertising” standard to statements about the qualities of a
product than to indirect appeals to the desires of a segment of
the audience. The trend toward market segmentation has also
led to some specialization in advertising agencies and promoted
the growth of media that appeal to a specific rather than a gen¬

I Criticism and
Control of
eral audience.

Few people doubt that advertising has a significant impact or

that it plays an important role in America. Most would agree
that it reflects the culture and ideals of America—although
Advertising many people also find that idea appalling. Noting its importance,
however, is far different from granting approval, and advertising
has been criticized on many grounds. Some critics take on ad¬
vertising in general, analyzing its economic and social effects;
others criticize the content of some advertisements or the effect
of advertisements on some groups. These criticisms, as we shall
see, have led to attempts to regulate advertising.

I The Nature of
Advertising:
A favorable view of advertising claims that it stimulates compe¬
tition, which is good for the economy, and stimulates the devel¬
Economic and opment of new products, which can be good for the consumer.
Social Criticisms Proof of the pudding, defenders say, is that people choose to buy
the new products. And consumers are happier because they can
choose from a great diversity of goods—a diversity stimulated by
advertising. By encouraging people to buy more, advertising
 578 Media Support Systems

■ Sometimes adver¬
tising carries a so¬
cial message. The
portrait of women in
advertising has at¬
tracted considerable
scholarly and profes¬
sional attention over
the years. That por¬
trayal includes sex
symbol advertising
featuring actresses
as well as ads like
this one showing
women in tradition¬
ally male roles. (Erik
Anderson.)

helps keep the economy, and the number of jobs, growing. By

giving consumers information, advertising helps them buy
wisely. Advertising, then, is a key cog in the economic machine
that can give us the good life, the fruits of capitalism, the Amer¬
ican dream.
Critics have many answers to these comments. First, much
advertising has nothing at all to do with objective information;
it does not help consumers make wise choices. Still, they must
pay for advertising, since its cost raises the price of the goods
they buy. Thus, say its critics, advertising is wasteful. It makes
 Advertising and Public Relations 579 ■

consumers pay higher prices, and it directs money away from

channels that would be far more useful than advertising.
What’s more, say its critics, far from helping competition, ad¬
vertising contributes to monopoly. Large firms can afford to in¬
vest in expensive national advertising, whereas smaller firms
perhaps cannot. So larger firms can perpetuate and even expand
their hold on the market; in other words, those that have, get.
Even in the absence of an actual monopoly, some economists see
advertising as hindering the development of perfect competition
and leading to the condition called imperfect competition. Sev¬
eral consequences follow, including, according to Neil Borden,
“improper allocation of capital investment,” “under-utilization of
productive capacity and underemployment,” "relatively rigid
prices,” and increasingly severe cyclical fluctuations in busi¬
ness—from inflation to recession and back again.18
According to Borden, even the diversity of goods stimulated
by advertising is not beneficial. Consumers, said Borden, “are
confused by the large number of meaningless product differen¬
tiations and consequently do not make wise choices.”19 Other
critics point to more general supposed effects of advertising on
individuals and society. Advertising is said to be often manipu¬
lative and deceptive, indirectly teaching people that other people
are objects to be manipulated and deceived. By creating new
wants and desires, advertising is said to distract people from
their “true” selves, to contribute to their alienation and dissat¬
isfaction. It makes of life an unending, hopeless quest for trivial
goods or the perfect image.
We certainly cannot evaluate point by point either the eco¬
nomic or the social analysis of advertising’s critics here, and we
have stated their complaints rather succinctly. But note that ad¬
vertising is a form of mass communication, and the principles
we have reviewed in earlier chapters regarding the media’s influ¬
ence on individuals and society apply in general to advertising
as well. That is, we should not think of advertising as a magic
bullet, or the people seeing or hearing them as passive dolts re¬
ceiving the message in identical ways. Nor should we think of
advertising as a single, isolated cause; it not only affects society
and culture but is affected by them. Perhaps in the future eco¬
nomics and other social sciences will progress enough to allow
us to know and weigh more precisely the benefits and the harms
coming from advertising.

Children and Few aspects of advertising have generated more concern or more
Advertising research than advertising directed at children, specifically tele¬
vision commercials. Critics fear that this advertising creates in
children wants that cannot be fulfilled; that by prompting them
to ask their parents for innumerable things, it generates tension
and conflict in the family; and that it “teaches” many lessons
 ■ 580 Media Support Systems

■ Institutional ad¬
vertising tries to in¬
spire confidence in
particular values
geared to particular
ends. U.S. Savings
Bonds are promoted
to build support for
the government and
the U.S. Treasury.
(Historical Pictures
Service, Chicago.)

that are simply wrong because the children mistake the adver¬
tisement for realistic portrayals of the world. In defense of adver¬
tising, other observers note that it helps children learn to be
consumers.
Any good evaluation of advertising's effect on children re¬
quires answers to several questions, including:

• To what extent do children pay attention to commercials?

• What if any effect do commercials have on children's thinking
processes? Can they, for example, distinguish between fact
 Advertising and Public Relations 581 ■

and fantasy in a commercial? Do they know that the “Man

from Glad” isn’t real?
• What if any influence do children exert on their parents’ buy¬
ing as a result of commercials?

Government, foundations, ad agencies, and businesses have

spent much money to answer these and similar questions. Re¬
search by the advertisers and ad agencies, however, is devoted,
understandably, to one purpose—finding out how to make bet¬
ter and more persuasive commercials—and their findings are
usually kept secret. From other researchers, however, we are be¬
ginning to get some answers to these questions.
To date, research suggests that the younger the child, the
fuller the attention he or she pays to commercials.20 Very young
children don’t know the difference between commercials and
programs. Young children pay a good deal of attention even to
commercials that would seem to be irrelevant to them, such as
ads for cleaning products; perhaps they are simply using the
commercial to learn about what is unfamiliar to them. As they
get older, children pay less attention to commercials, and many
adolescents scorn them. The evidence so far indicates that chil¬
dren are influenced by commercials and that they pressure their
parents to buy the products they’ve seen advertised.21
In fact, we don’t know a great deal yet about advertising's ef¬
fect on children. Many of the findings are still tentative; many
questions have yet to be explored in depth. Meanwhile, critics
such as Action for Children’s Television are taking their con¬
cerns to the government, seeking controls on advertising.

Controls on From its earliest times advertising has been criticized on more
Advertising specific grounds than the complaints we’ve reviewed. Whatever
the general effects of advertising, the specific content of many
advertisements has often been attacked for poor taste, exag¬
gerated claims, and annoying hucksterism. As a result of these
specific sins, some controls on American advertising have
developed. Shabby practices led to a gradual erosion of the an¬
cient principle of caveat emptor (“let the buyer beware") toward
one of caveat venditor (“let the seller beware”), that is, toward
regulation. Advertisers today live with certain constraints—
some imposed by the government, some by the industry itself.
As early as 1911, Printer's Ink magazine called for greater at¬
tention to ethics in advertising and proposed a model statute
that made fraudulent and misleading advertising a misde¬
meanor. Before long, with a strong push from the Better Busi¬
ness Bureau, most states enacted the model statute. Although
there is much doubt about its effectiveness, the law was a state¬
ment on advertising ethics as well as a standard setter.
■ 582 Media Support Systems

A few years later, in 1914, the Federal Trade Commission

(FTC) also set up some ground rules for advertising. In admin¬
istrative rulings over the years, the FTC has written rules related
to puffery, taste, and guarantees, and in general it has taken a
considerable interest in the substantiation of advertising claims
(for examples, see pages 148—149). At times the FTC has de¬
manded “effective relief” for those wronged by misleading adver¬
tising, and it has levied fines against companies engaging in
unfair, misleading, and otherwise deceptive advertising.
As we saw in Chapter 4, the Federal Communications Com¬
mission (FCC) also scrutinizes advertising. In addition, several
other federal agencies influence advertising—including the Food
and Drug Administration, the Post Office Department, the Se¬
curities and Exchange Commission, and the Alcohol and To¬
bacco Tax Division of the Internal Revenue Service. State and
local governments have passed laws on lotteries, obscenity, oc¬
cupational advertising, and other matters.
In the private sector various advertising' organizations and
individual industries have developed codes of ethics to govern
advertising. The broadcasting industry, for example, had codes
that set standards for the total amount of nonprogram material
and commercial interruptions. In many states local industry or¬
ganizations such as advertising review committees and fair ad¬
vertising groups promote truth in advertising. The National
Advertising Review Council promotes ethical advertising and
fights deception, and Better Business Bureaus prepare reports
on particular firms and their advertising.
In recent years both the public and the private sectors have
followed closely various court decisions regarding whether or to
what degree the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of
speech and of the press can be extended to advertising. To date,
the courts have drawn a line between advertising that promotes
one’s views—which is protected by the First Amendment—and
advertising that is designed for commercial gain—which is not—
although at times it is difficult to separate the two. This is being
modified, however, as a doctrine of commercial speech has
grown up in the courts which have defined the rights of busi¬
nesses to communicate their views.
In addition, many consumer groups monitor advertising and
protest when they object to particular content. These groups
range from Action for Children’s Television, which opposes
much of television advertising aimed at children, to religious
groups that object to newspaper ads for sex. Advertisers have in
the past responded to public criticism and pressure, and adver¬
tising has undergone constant change. For example, for many
years radio and television commercials included very few blacks
or other minorities; and when, occasionally, they did appear.
 Advertising and Public Relations 583 ■

these people were often shown in trivial and demeaning roles.

But by the late 1960s advertisements began to include blacks
and other minorities more frequently and more realistically.
Similar changes have begun to take place in the portrayal of
women—who were shown most often either behaving rather id¬
iotically in domestic situations or as passive sexual objects—and
of elderly people—who were often made to look like doddering
simpletons. Some controversy arose, for example, in 1984 when
the Wendy's “Where’s the Beef?” commercial used an elderly
woman as a growling consumer. Whether she played a role that
stereotyped the elderly was debated.
Still, advertising often deals in stereotypes. In the 1960s
writer Betty Friedan drew attention to sex-role stereotypes in ad¬
vertising in her book The Feminine Mystique. Twenty years
later, researchers Thomas Whipple and Alice E. Courtney said
there had been relatively little change. In fact, they found that
the use of women as sex objects in advertising is growing: “Nud¬
ity, seminudity, innuendo, double-entendre and exploitive sex
are being used with increasing frequency and intensity. Adver¬
tising continues to exploit women's sexuality, to demean them,
to objectify them, and show violence and aggression against
them.”22 Critics also point to an increasing tendency to display
men as sex objects in an explicit manner heretofore unknown in
advertising.
Many advertising professionals would take issue with these
critiques, saying that advertising reflects public tastes and that
feminism has had a definite impact on advertising content.
Other advertisers, as Whipple put it in an interview, are likely to
say, “Gee, I’d really like to avoid these stereotypes, but I’ve got to
use them to survive.”23 Whipple argues that research shows that
avoiding stereotypes can be as effective and urges a re-education
of advertisers.
If a large part of the public becomes unwilling to accept de¬
meaning stereotypes, soon advertising will probably follow the
public’s lead. Advertisers, after all, are not trying to mold society
or public opinion—though they may in fact affect both. They are
trying to sell goods, and they will change their messages if need
be to appeal to the public. If critics can arouse the public to com¬
plain enough or can convince advertisers that the public is an¬
noyed, they have a good chance of changing specific aspects of
advertising messages.
Critics who object not to specific aspects of some advertise¬
ments but to advertising's broader effects on individuals or the
society or the economy will have longer to wait for the changes
they desire. Government is unlikely to impose stringent con¬
trols. Advertisers are likely to continue to appeal to our desire to
be attractive or liked or somehow better than our neighbor, to
 ■ 584 Media Support Systems

have more or better of just about anything, whatever the psycho¬

logical or cultural or economic effects of thSse appeals, as long
as they think the messages work. And advertisements are likely
to remain nearly ubiquitous unless there are monumental
changes in the economy and society. The media, the economy,
and advertising are too interwoven today for a workable alterna¬
tive to the status quo to be evident or for significant change in
the near future to be likely.

■ Public Relations Public relations is probably the inevitable result of the growing
complexity of society generally and of the communication system
that holds it together. If an individual or a unit of society wants
to be known and understood by the public at large, it must mas¬
ter and use mass communication. This is true whether we are
talking about a little-known politician who wants to run for
president, a giant oil company that wants the public to think
well of it, or a mental hospital that wants its patients to be
treated with dignity and respect. In all three'instances, it is dif¬
ficult to think that these goals can be accomplished without
some access to at least part of the media and receptive treatment
by it.
Individuals or social units wanting to achieve a positive pub¬
lic image through the mass media face at least two barriers.
First, the media and the organizations that service them, such
as advertising agencies, are independent entities with their own
goals, which might be far different from those of the publicity
seekers. For example, the politician who wants to be seen in a
positive light on the 6 p.m. news might not merit any coverage at
all in the view of the local television news staff. Or, worse yet for
the politician, reporters might be preparing an expose of his or
her alleged wrongdoing. Second, there is great competition for
space and time in the news media, and many worthy individuals
and causes simply won’t get media attention and public expo¬
sure. Thus, people and institutions who want public under¬
standing need help. Enter public relations.

I A Definition Because the term public relations is used in several ways, it is

difficult to define it to everyone’s satisfaction. There is agree¬
ment, however, that public relations is a planned and organized
communications process that links particular elements of soci¬
ety together for particular purposes. A leading public relations
text says:

The term public relations is used in at least three senses: the rela¬
tionships with those who constitute an organization's publics or
constituents, the ways and means used to achieve favorable rela¬
tionships, and the quality or status of the relationships. Thus the
 Advertising and Public Relations 585 ■

one term is used to label both means and ends, to name a condi¬
tion, and to express the conduct or actions related to that
condition.24

The term is also used to describe a group of professional com¬

municators who call themselves public relations people and who
have a code of ethics and a professional accrediting process.
Sometimes the term is used to describe an attempt to mislead
the public. For example, during the Watergate scandal President
Richard Nixon used to speak of finding a “public relations solu¬
tion," meaning a seemingly plausible explanation that would get
the public and the press off his back.
Scott Cutlip and Allen Center, authors of a leading public re¬
lations text, settled on a rather upbeat definition: “Public rela¬
tions is the planned effort to influence public opinion through
good character and responsible performance, based upon mu¬
tually satisfactory two-way communications.”25 This rather san¬
guine definition may be more wishful thinking than reality. It
may describe a desirable goal but it hardly offers a neutral de¬
scription. More accurate is Edward L. Bernays’s definition of
public relations as a “profession that deals with the relations of
a unit and the public or publics on which its viability
depends.”26 Bernays added that public relations should serve the
public interest, but people have been squabbling for years about
just what that is.
Notice that these definitions of public relations sound re¬
markably like advertising. Like advertising, public relations is a
communications process. It is planned and organized and de¬
pends, at least in part, on the mass media to carry its messages.
But unlike advertising it is really not controlled. Advertising is
controlled because it consists of purchased space and time. In
contrast, public relations personnel use persuasive means to
build a favorable climate of opinion but rarely pay for it directly.
Nor is public relations always identifiable. You know an ad when
you see it in a magazine, but you don’t always know that the
sources for a news article were public relations personnel or that
a public event, be it a demonstration or a neighborhood block
party, was planned as part of a public relations campaign.
Rarely do public relations people announce exactly what they are
doing. In fact, public relations personnel may use advertising as
part of their overall activities, but they are much more involved
than advertising personnel in the total process of communica¬
tion—from initiating the message to getting feedback from the
public.
What, then, is public relations? Basically, it is a communi¬
cations process whereby an individual or unit of society at¬
tempts to relate in an organized fashion to various groups or
 ■ 586 Media Support Systems

publics for particular purposes. The purposes usually center on

a positive public image. But some institutions—for example,
foundations with limited purposes—may want to have a low pro¬
file or be regarded as crusty and arrogant in order to avoid pub¬
lic contact and public curiosity. Clearly, public relations is a type
of manipulation of meanings, although that manipulation need
not be deceptive.

How It All Began: Public relations is a rather new field. It began just a few decades
Origins of Public ago with publicity campaigns designed to persuade the public
Relations to a particular point of view. Its roots are found in the efforts
of both private press agents and government propaganda
machines.
In part the field of public relations grew out of reactions to
the “public be damned” era when big business did as it pleased
regardless of public opinion. Early in this century Ivy Lee, a for¬
mer journalist, recognized the value to business of a positive
public image and the possibilities of creating such an image
through favorable publicity. He set up an agency to help busi¬
nesses communicate with the public, and his clients eventually
included the Pennsylvania Railroad and John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
Governments also saw the need for persuasive communica¬
tion with the public. Around the time of World War I, govern¬
ment propaganda machines were competing for the minds and
hearts of Americans. The U.S. government set up the Committee
on Public Information under George Creel to create public con¬
fidence in the war effort and in war bonds.
Creel’s success impressed men like Carl Byoir and Edward
L. Bernays, who set up their own firms after World War I and be¬
gan using the term public relations to describe their activity.
Bernays, who is sometimes called the father of public relations,
described his efforts as the “engineering of consent.” He devel¬
oped an eight-stage process from planning to feedback and re-
evaluation, wrote the first book on public relations, and organ¬
ized the first university course on the subject.
The Great Depression of 1929 gave business a black eye, and,
not surprisingly, public relations practitioners went to work to
create a positive image for commerce and industry. During the
1930s and 1940s business, labor, and government began to em¬
ploy public relations practitioners in greater numbers, both to
increase public confidence and support and to help the public
understand the growing complexity of society. During the 1950s
and 1960s political and social movements also began to use pub¬
lic relations to achieve their aims and purposes. In the 1970s
the consumer movement spurred much public relations activity
in the private and public sectors. Business responded to the
movement’s criticisms both defensively and with reforms: con-
 Advertising and Public Relations 587 ■

sumer groups tried to reach target audiences to warn them of

dangers and to seek their support; and the government set up
special consumer protection and environmental safety offices.
All this activity was closely linked to public relations.
Since World War I public relations practitioners have become
more sophisticated, in both research techniques and in the
means they use to reach the public. Even on the international
scene, the means and methods of public relations have been ev¬
ident. For example, some commentators wondered how the Ay¬
atollah Khomeini had managed to come to power in Iran in
1979, given the fact that the shah of Iran had controlled the
mass media in that country while Khomeini was in exile in
Paris. Khomeini’s supporters revealed that they had made tele¬
phone calls to Khomeini, recorded them on cassettes, and then
passed the cassettes from person to person. In addition, they re¬
produced other messages on photocopy machines and distrib¬
uted them widely. Clearly, this was a public relations program
that worked even without the mass media.

Public Relations in An industrial polluter wants to convince us that it is doing

Practice something to benefit the environment; a health organization
wants to break down the stigma attached to mental illness; a
government agency wants citizens to make better use of its ser¬
vices. How do they achieve these goals? Public relations.
According to Cutlip and Center, any public relations program
must include four basic steps:27

1 Fact-finding and feedback This stage includes background

research on the audience to be reached by the program, in¬
cluding impressionistic observations by knowledgeable ob¬
servers as well as scientific studies of public opinion. The
public relations practitioner uses this information to define
the problem and identify the publics to be reached.
2 Planning and programming The public relations practitioner
takes the information from the fact-finding stage and puts it
to work by plotting a broad strategy for the public relations
program. This strategy includes a timetable, budgets, and
probable targets for the message.
3 Action and communication In this stage the public relations
program is initiated, using whatever tools and media are ap¬
propriate. This is the actual communication in which pam¬
phlets are distributed, speeches are given, or news releases
are sent to media organizations.
4 Evaluation After the program is initiated and carried out, it
is assessed in several ways—by measuring changes in atti¬
tudes and opinions among particular publics, by counting
news clippings or reports on radio and television to evaluate
 ■ 588 Media Support Systems

■ The public rela¬

tions case study
mentioned in this
chapter would likely
use advertising as
part of its strategy
for communicating a
message about New
York State as an at¬
tractive vacation
site. (New York State
Department of
Commerce.)

This fall come see nature display her brilliance in New York.
Come and see nature explode in living color spread For a sneak preview of what's in store, send for
over 42 of the highest peaks In the East. The crimsons and your free New York State vacation kit.
golds of fall are natures most colorful gift to New York.
Come sample the local harvest In New York's wine
country and savour that first crisp apple you picked
yourself from one of our famed orchards.
Come celebrate autumn off the beaten path—stroll
I*NY
Please send me my “I Love New York' Vacation Kit.
through rustling leaves and make stones dance on water.
Tkke a forest walk in brisk morning air and return to a Address -——•— I
hearty steaming breakfast. Escape to New York State in
autumn and discover nature at one of her most dramatic Slate---2|P-- I
moments. Send lo: "I Love New York" Vacations
Come for a day, come for a weekend or come for a P.O Box 808-575. Latham. N Y. 12110
week and be dazzled by what we have right here around us. .Z_J

the success of contacts with the news media, or by interview¬

ing key opinion leaders. If carried to its logical conclusion,
evaluation should affect future public relations activity, de¬
pending on what worked and what didn’t.

In actual practice, a public relations campaign begins with

the recognition of a problem or a perceived need for an image
change of some sort. Let's say, for example, the tourism board of
the state of New York is unhappy with the state’s tourism reve¬
nues and thinks this might be caused by a poor public image.
The group decides to investigate further and hires a public re-
 Advertising and Public Relations 589 ■

lations firm. The firm conducts research, including surveys of

selected publics such as Americans who regularly take vaca¬
tions, travel agents, and perhaps travel writers for newspapers
and magazines. The survey assesses what these people know
about vacation possibilities in New York State, points up igno¬
rance and misconceptions, and reveals some genuine worries
that keep people from vacationing in New York City.
Next the public relations firm prepares a campaign proposal.
It suggests a variety of means most likely to increase tourism in
the state. Suppose that because all Americans cannot be
reached through a limited campaign, the firm decides to aim its
efforts at travel writers, in the hope that they will write some¬
thing about the state as a good place to vacation. To influence
the writers the firm might propose news releases, press brief¬
ings, and tours for the writers. In addition, the firm might sug¬
gest special mailings to travel agents, who could direct their
clients to select New York State for their vacations. To reach the
general public, the firm might plan a series of advertisements on
national television and in the news magazines. It would use ad¬
vice from advertising agencies and research on the demon¬
strated effectiveness of particular media to choose the best
media for the advertisements.
The proposed campaign is presented to the leaders of the
tourism board. Suppose they accept it with a few minor modifi¬
cations and commission the public relations firm to cariy out
the campaign. At the end of the campaign the firm conducts an
evaluation that includes another survey of the same groups who
provided the initial evaluation of attitudes and opinions. In ad¬
dition, members of the firm look at tourism figures and attempt
to ascertain whether the campaign had any effect on them.
This is one of the real problems with public relations: the
people who carry out information campaigns are not disinter¬
ested social scientists but profit-making entrepreneurs (or gov¬
ernment employees eager to keep their jobs and get advanced).
Thus they look for “proof’ that their information campaign has
worked. If it clearly has not, they may try to convince those who
hired them that other factors—the economy, overwhelming neg¬
ative public events, like violent murders—caused the public re¬
lations program to fail. Naturally, those who do the hiring are
free to make their own judgments about what works and what
doesn t. Scholarly evidence about information campaigns—and
there is little of it—suggests that many public relations efforts
are not successful, but practitioners would dispute this with
practical and often compelling examples.
Leaders in public relations are quick to point out that their
work includes a great deal more than mass communication.
Sometimes they distinguish between internal and external com-
 ■ 590 Media Support Systems

munication. Internal communication is communication within

the organization itself—to its internal publicsr For example, a la¬
bor union communicates to its members through newsletters,
meetings, bulletin boards, and other media. Internal messages
are aimed at a discrete group of people. This is not communi¬
cation with the general public through public media. External
communication, on the other hand, is communication to large,
diverse publics, or to particular segments of the population out¬
side the organization, usually through the mass media.

The Public Public relations practitioners today go by many names: public

Relations Industry relations counselors, account executives, information officers,
publicity directors, house organ editors, and many more. They
are nearly everywhere—in the private sector in business, indus¬
try, social welfare organizations, churches, labor unions, and so
on; and in the public sector in government at all levels from the
White House to the local school or fire station. The number of
people employed in public relations is impressive. The U.S. De¬
partment of Labor estimated that there were about 19,000 per¬
sons engaged in public relations and publicity work in 1950;
76,000 by 1970; and nearly 125,000 by the mid 1980s.
Public relations organizations take many forms, including
the following:

1 The independent public relations counselor or agency This

person or firm operates much like an advertising agency or
law firm. It takes on clients and represents them by conduct¬
ing public relations activities on their behalf. The client may
be an individual who wants to be better understood by the
public or a large company that wants an experienced firm
with special services such as the ability to conduct research
or to design publications in order to help the company’s own
in-house public-relations staff.
2 Public relations departments oj businesses or industries
These departments act as part of the overall management
team and attempt to interpret the firm to the public and in¬
ternal constituents and to provide channels for feedback from
the public to management. These departments are expected
to contribute to the firm’s profits by helping it to achieve its
overall business goals. The public relations department of
General Motors, for example, will set communication goals to
support and enhance the corporation’s general goals.
3 Public relations departments oj nonprofit or educational in¬
stitutions Public relations for organizations such as colleges
and labor unions usually involves a range of internal and ex¬
ternal activities from publications to fund drives.
 Advertising and Public Relations 591 ■

4 Governmental or public-sector public relations In govern¬

ment the terms public information and public affairs are
most often used to describe activity that communicates the
purposes and work of the agency to the general public or to
users of the agency’s services. For example, welfare recipients
need to know about the policies of the state welfare depart¬
ment and taxpayers need to know how their money is being
spent.
5 Political consultants and other public relations specialists
There are many, many types of public relations practitioners,
from political consultants who work exclusively on election
campaigns to information specialists who are experts in both
communications and a field such as health, transportation,
or insurance.
6 Communication policy consultants A new type of practitioner
is the consultant who formulates plans and suggests courses
of action to public and private institutions that want to de¬
velop a policy on the use of information resources. They may
want to affect the policies of Congress or the Federal Com¬
munications Commission or to develop an early-warning sys¬
tem for a corporation to assess and trace the impact of a
particular issue or program. This new area of public relations
has expanded considerably in the 1980s. Indeed, to cover
some of the implications of this field Business Week estab¬
lished an information management section.

Recently advertising agencies have been buying up estab¬

lished public relations firms or setting up new ones within their
larger advertising organization. Many public relations practi¬
tioners and media critics view this pattern with alarm because
they believe that if public relations becomes a branch of adver¬
tising, it will not maintain ethical practices and will become a
part of product promotion. They assert that the credibility of an
independent public relations agency is greater than that of a
public relations program under an advertising agency.

Criticizing Public Almost from its beginning, public relations has had its critics.
Relations Early efforts were often called propaganda, which took on a neg¬
ative connotation even though the term originally had a neutral
meaning. Public relations, in one view, is manipulative, self-
serving, and unethical. It distorts and blurs issues in its at¬
tempts to persuade the public, say its critics, and practitioners
use just about any means to assure a favorable image for their
clients.
Certainly there are some unscrupulous people in public rela¬
tions, as there are in any profession. Public-spirited groups and
the news media, however, try to ferret out deceptive activities.
 ■ 592 Media Support Systems

As a result, public relations practitioners are in the public eye

much more often than they once were, and therefore unethical
practices can backfire, harming the image that public relations
is meant to polish. Abuses are discouraged, too, by the growing
professionalism of the field. To be accredited by the Public Rela¬
tions Society of America, public relations personnel must pass
tests of their skill in communications and ascribe to a code of
good practice. In addition, colleges and universities now have
training programs in public relations.
These changes seem likely to decrease the frequency of fla¬
grant deceptions of the public, but they are not relevant to those
who criticize the basic task of public relations. The question of
whether there is something a bit less than honorable in working
just to polish the image of a corporation or individual remains.
Defenders say that a corporation or individual has every right to
try to put the best face possible before the public. Moreover,
public relations does provide useful information to a public
sometimes confused by an increasingly bureaucratic world—
although that information should be balanced, when possible,
with information from more reliable, more objective sources.

Both advertising and public relations are activities of profes¬

■ Summary
sional communicators who attempt to influence audiences
through the manipulation of meanings. They try to establish,
extend, substitute, or stabilize the interpretations those audi¬
ences place on products, services, groups, or individuals
through the deliberate use of mass communication.
Advertising is a form of mass communication that puts busi¬
nesses in touch with consumers through paid, controlled, iden¬
tifiable messages that try to persuade the receiver to make a
specific decision—usually, the decision to buy a product. Adver¬
tising may also provide information to consumers, but it often
appeals not to a rational consideration of the product s costs
and benefits but to the consumers' needs and desires; it may in
fact try to create new needs and desires in order to sell a prod¬
uct. To be effective, advertising must appeal to its audience. It
has therefore been closely tied to public taste and popular cul¬
ture and has changed as America has changed.
The history of advertising is very closely tied not only to pub¬
lic taste but also to the growth of the American economy and the
mass media. Unless there is relative abundance in a society,
businesses are not likely to find advertising worthwhile. The
nineteenth century in America saw the growth of national me¬
dia, national markets, and national advertising. Advertisers
showed that they could create markets for new products, and
newspapers, magazines, and broadcasting stations eventually
became dependent on advertising for most of their revenues.
 Advertising and Public Relations 593 ■

As advertising grew, organizations that specialized in the

production of advertisements developed. Today advertising
agencies include managers, writers, artists, researchers, and
other specialists. Boutique agencies and various media service
organizations offer more limited, specialized services, and many
businesses and media organizations have departments that deal
exclusively with advertising. Advertising today employs more
than 100,000 people in America. Concentration into large firms
seems to be a trend here, as in other industries.
The advertising industry has many critics. Some economists
claim that advertising is economically wasteful, decreasing com¬
petition, adding to consumers’ costs, and channeling invest¬
ment away from more productive uses; other economists claim
that it promotes competition, diversity, and wise buying deci¬
sions. Some critics are most concerned that advertising some¬
how debases individuals and the culture. Yet other criticism is
directed more specifically at advertising that makes exaggerated
claims, is in poor taste, is directed at children, or presents neg¬
ative stereotypes of particular groups. In response to such com¬
plaints, both government and the advertising industiy have set
up guidelines to prevent misleading, offensive, and excessive ad¬
vertising. And advertising has changed frequently to suit public
taste.
Unlike advertising, public relations communications are not
always controlled and identifiable, but the two fields have some
similarities. Public relations is a process of communication in
which an individual or group attempts to relate in an organized
way to various groups or publics for particular purposes—gen-
erally, to promote a good public image. The field developed after
World War I, growing out of the efforts of press agents and gov¬
ernment propaganda machines. Today it includes both internal
and external communications and both the public and the pri¬
vate sectors. It takes a number of forms—including independent
public relations counselors or agencies; the public relations de¬
partments of business, industry, or nonprofit organizations;
governmental public relations; political consultants and special¬
ists; and communication policy consultants.

Notes and
1 David M. Potter, People of Plenty, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of
References Chicago Press, 1969), p. 167.
2 The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), p. 19.
3 John S. Wright et al.. Advertising, 4th ed. (New York- McGraw-
Hill. 1977), p. 6.
4 Ibid., p. 9.
■ 594 Media Support Systems

5 James W. Carey, “Advertising; An Institutional Approach,” in The

Role of Advertising, ed. C. H. Sandage and V. Fryburger (Home-
wood, Ill.: Richard D. Irwin, 1960), p. 16.
6 Ibid.
7 Potter, People of Plenty, p. 172.
8 Norman Douglas, in South Wind (1917). See Bartletts Familiar
Quotations, 13thed., p. 840.
9 Daniel J. Boorstin, “Advertising and American Civilization,” in
Advertising and Society, ed. Yale Brozen (New York: New York
University Press, 1972), p. 12.
10 Potter, People ojPlenty, p. 172.
11 Ibid., p. 168.
12 Wright et al.. Advertising, pp. 161-162.
13 Russell H. Colley, Defining Advertising Goals for Measured Ad¬
vertising Results (New York: Association of National Manufac¬
turers, 1961), p. 35.
14 Ibid., p. 38.
15 Wright et al., Advertising, p. 392.
16 Otto Kleppner, Advertising Procedure, 6th ed. (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 301—302.
17 Daniel Pope, The Making of Modem Advertising (New York: Basic
Books, 1983), pp. 289—290.
18 John S. Wright and John E. Mertes, Advertising’s Role in Society
(St. Paul, Minn.: West, 1974), pp. vii-viii.
19 Ibid.
20 George Comstock, Television and Human Behavior (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1979).
21 Ibid.
22 Thomas Whipple and Alice E. Courtney, Sex Stereotyping in Ad¬
vertising (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath/Lexington Books, 1983).
23 Kitty Chism, “Advertising Stereotypes,” Washington Post, Decem¬
ber 13, 1983, p. 135.
24 Scott M. Cutlip and Allen H. Center, Effective Public Relations,
5th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978), p. 4.
25 Ibid., p. 16.
26 Edward L. Bemays, “Public Relations,” Lecture at School of Jour¬
nalism and Mass Communication, University of Minnesota, Oc¬
tober 19, 1979; also mentioned in his several books on the
subject. Other information about Bemays in this chapter comes
from several personal interviews conducted by one of the authors
(Dennis) of this text while on sabbatical in Cambridge, Massachu¬
setts in 1978—1979.
27 Cutlip and Center, Effective Public Relations, pp. 138-230.
Glossary

Accuracy (in communication) The degree to than others and that this sets the rank order
which the meanings intended by a commu¬ of importance that the public gives to issues.
nicator arouse similar meanings in a
Alternative press Special-interest newspa¬
receiver.
pers that promote ideas counter to conven¬
Activation An effect of a mass media elec¬ tional norms or beliefs. Such newspapers
tion campaign. Voters who are predisposed were especially popular during the late 1960s
to support a particular candidate (because of and early 1970s. when many people were crit¬
their social, economic, and political back¬ icizing established social life.
ground) are persuaded to go to the polls and
AM See amplitude modulation.
actually vote.
Amplitude modulation (AM) A technique of
Active precision journalism A type of re¬
broadcasting sound via radio waves that uses
porting in which reporters use social science
differences in the strengths of waves to trans¬
methods (for example, polls) themselves,
mit variations in sound. A carrier wave is
rather than relying on information obtained
transmitted and an information wave is
by others. Contrast with reactive precision
superimposed on it, altering its height to
journalism.
produce different sounds. Compare with
Adoption The act of taking up and using frequency modulation.
some innovation.
Associate editor Often, the editor of an edi¬
Adversarial journalism A style of reporting torial page of a newspaper or a person in
similar to investigative reporting, especially charge of special sections; the term is used
related to coverage of governmental activity differently in various settings.
that leads to exposes of wrongdoing.
Assumptions of science Beliefs about the
Advertising Messages designed to inform nature of reality which are adopted by re¬
and persuade consumers to buy a particular searchers. Researchers assume that events
product or service. They are often presented and conditions are brought about by orderly
via mass media. sequences of cause and effect that operate ac¬
Advertising agency An organization that de¬ cording to laws and principles that can be
signs and distributes advertising messages discovered. After causes are identified, how¬
on behalf of businesses that pay fees for their ever, it is always assumed that the conclu¬
services. sions reached might be improved by further
Advocacy journalism A reporting style that research.
openly advocates a position or cause, such as Attitude A person's pattern of evaluative be¬
feminist reporting, radical reporting from a liefs (feelings of acceptance or rejection) to¬
leftist perspective, and so on. ward a topic, category of people, or public
Agenda theory An explanation of why the issue. Attitudes can be measured by attitude
public regards some public issues as more scales that ask people to record their patterns
important than others. Basically, the theory of belief.
holds that the news media present some is¬ Auteur A film-maker, usually a director, who
sues more often and with greater emphasis creates his or her own personal style. Exam-
 ■ 596 Glossary

pies are Alfred Hitchcock, who became fa¬ Broadband communication Typically, the
mous for his scary movies, and Cecil B. De use of cable to transmit complex video sig¬
Mille, who developed the big historical epic nals, as opposed to the narrower character¬
with a cast of thousands. istics of information that can be transmitted
Author A very creative and hard-working in¬ by a telephone line.
dividual who is regularly hoodwinked and Broadcasting The dissemination of mes¬
economically exploited by publishers. sages via transmission over radio or televi¬
Auxiliaries Groups that provide services for sion that provides for reception by the public
media. Examples are wire services, feature (as opposed to closed systems).
syndicates, rating services, and research or¬ Cable TV A system for sending and receiving
ganizations. Essentially, they provide con¬ television signals by wire from a central facil¬
tent, feedback, or data needed in decision ity in a community to homes or other loca¬
making. tions. The central facility can pick up signals
Blacklisting A practice of movie producers from satellites or other broadcasting sources,
during the late 1940s and the 1950s. They or it can originate its own material. The set
agreed jointly to bar specific actors from em¬ owner is charged a monthly fee for the
ployment in the industry. The practice has service.
been used in other industries as well. Carrier wave A high energy radio wave that
Block booking The practice of requiring a is capable of reaching over a long distance. A
theater owner to agree to take a whole set of second (information) wave is superimposed
films (good and bad) produced by a studio— on this powerful carrier to transmit mes¬
or get none at all. sages. The information wave encodes the
message into the carrier wave by either am¬
Bluegrass A form of folk music originally plitude modulation (AM) or by frequency
from Kentucky and the Mid-South, charac¬
modulation (FM).
terized by an unaffected rhythmic quality
and usually played on stringed instruments Catharsis In media theory, a process of re¬
such as the banjo. It is currently a form of ducing the urge to engage in violent acts by
country western popular music. seeing violence acted out. More generally, the
reduction of emotional stress by vicarious ac¬
Blues A form of folk music that originated
tivities or soothing experiences.
among poor blacks. Later, blues became a
form of popular music both performed and CATV Community antenna television. A TV-
distributed for commercial purposes. The reception system used mainly in rural loca¬
music is played in 4/4 time, with a melody tions where it is difficult for the home-owner
characterized by lowered third and seventh to pick up a signal. A large central antenna is
(“blue”) notes. Typically it has a 12-measure mounted in a favorable location and home
harmonic pattern. sets are served by cable from this central
facility.
Boogie Woogie A style of jazz piano playing
in which repeated bass figures played in 8/8 Censor To delete part of a message in order
rhythm accompany improvised variations in to prevent receivers from understanding part
the treble. The term came to be applied to a of its meaning. A person performing the dele¬
popular dance form associated with the mu¬ tions, usually on behalf of a government, is
sic during the 1940s. called a censor and the practice is called
censorship.
Bop or bebop A style of popular music char¬
acterized by complex rhythms, numerous Chain A number of newspapers that are
harmonic structures, and instrumental vir¬ owned by one company.
tuosity. Popular during the late 1950s, this Cinema A term used in Europe for film and/
form of jazz faded as rock came in. or movies. It has a variety of special mean¬
Boutique agency A relatively small advertis¬ ings among different groups.
ing agency that subcontracts many of its Cinema verite A style of film making usually
services. associated with documentaries. It became a
 Glossary 597 ■

fashionable term in the 1960s for what used cations that involve both the public and the
to be called candid camera, a style of record¬ private sector.
ing life and people with hand-held cameras
Communicator Any person who formulates
and natural sound.
a message composed of one or more symbols
Circulation The number of copies sold to that is intended to result in shared meaning
people who subscribe to or otherwise pur¬ and directs the message toward a receiver or
chase a newspaper or magazine. receivers.
City editor An editor of a newspaper who su¬ Compositor Originally, a person who set
pervises the coverage of news of a local area type letter-by-letter. Today the term identifies
or city; in contrast with national, foreign, or a company that performs a service for a pub¬
state editors, he or she is usually in charge of lisher by using computers and photographic
reporters covering news of a city or metropol¬ processes to transform an edited manuscript
itan area. into a version ready for the printer.
Classified advertising Brief announcements Configuration A pattern in which the whole
in newspapers concerning items for sale or is more than the sum of its parts. An exam¬
rent, services, jobs, and other information: ple in communication is the meaning that
usually arranged by categories such as “help emerges from a grammatically correct ar¬
wanted," “apartments for rent,” and so on. rangement of words (parts) in a sentence (the
Coaxial cable A special way of transmitting whole).
television signals. The cable has two main
Conglomerate A corporation or other busi¬
parts: one wire is tightly enclosed inside a
ness group that owns a number of different
plastic or rubber tube (like the lead in a pen¬
companies.
cil); the other is a flexible metal sheath sur¬
rounding the plastic and coated with more Congruency (in meanings) A situation in
plastic. This arrangement prevents signal which all elements of meaning in the mes¬
leakage and electrical interference. sage of the communicator are identical with
those aroused in the receiver. In other words,
Codex An early form of the book. Mayan cod¬
perfect accuracy in communication.
ices were folded like an accordion with
wooden plates at each end. Roman codices Content analysis A research procedure with
were much like modern books, with binding many variations used for the purpose of un¬
on one side. derstanding and summarizing the major
Colonial press The newspapers produced in qualitative and/or quantitative features of
the colonies that eventually formed the mass communications content.
United States. Generally, they were small, Control group A set of persons used in a re¬
controlled by the British Crown, and de¬ search study. They are as similar as possible
signed for more educated and affluent mem¬ to another set who serve as an experimental
bers of society. group and receive some form of treatment.
Commercial paper An early form of Ameri¬ Because the control group does not receive
can newspaper devoted mainly to announce¬ the treatment, the two groups can be com¬
ments of interest to the business, pared before and after the treatment of the
commercial, and financial community such experimental group to see if it had an effect.
as the recording of sales or purchases of Conversion An effect of a mass-mediated
stock, ship movements, and news of specific election campaign. Voters attending to polit¬
industries. ical messages are persuaded to change their
Communication The achievement of very loyalty from their party or candidate to
similar (parallel) meanings in the person ini¬ another.
tiating a message and those receiving it. Country or country western A form of pop¬
Communication policy Principles and plans ular music that includes a variety of Ameri¬
in the development of communications tech¬ can rural styles. It had its origins in
nology and other issues related to communi¬ bluegrass and cowboy folk music of earlier
 ■ 598 Glossary

America, but today it is prepared, performed, Daguerre in 1839, the process imprinted the
and distributed for commercial purposes. image on a polished copper plate coated with
silver iodide. There was no negative. Daguer¬
Critical ability The human capacity to sort
reotypes were clear and sharp.
a situation out intelligently to determine if
what appears to be happening is actually tak¬ Daily Usually, a newspaper that appears
ing place, or if there is another more sensible seven days of the week, including a special
explanation. Sunday edition.
Cross-media ownership A situation in which Data Recorded observations obtained in re¬
a person, company, or corporation owns both search studies. Data are usually in numerical
newspapers and broadcasting stations. The form, indicating how many subjects did this
extent of such ownership is limited by law. or that, exhibited this or that characteristic,
or acted strongly or weakly in some way.
CRT Shorthand for Cathode Ray Tube,
which is a glass bulb, flat on one end, such Data base A vast amount of information of a
as a TV picture tube, on which visual infor¬ particular type that is stored in computer
mation can be displayed. They come in many files. There are thousands of data bases used
forms but all work on the same basic daily in the United States by banks, educa¬
principles. tors, scientists, government, libraries, and so
on. They range from the complete Social Se¬
Cultivation analysis An approach to the curity files of the federal'government to MED¬
study of television content that assumes ex¬ LINE, a complete file of all articles published
posure to such content helps shape (culti¬ in medical science during the last several
vates) people’s beliefs about the world of decades. Many data bases can be accessed by
reality. remotely located computers via long distance
Culture complex Any pattern of interrelated telephone lines.
beliefs, attitudes, things, and behaviors that DBS Shorthand for Direct Broadcast Satel¬
is widely shared by the people of a society lite, which is a system for sending broadcasts
and passed on from one generation to an¬ directly from the satellite to subscribers who
other. Examples are basketball, camping, use a small dish antenna.
fast foods, higher education, and political
Delayed-reward news News that provides
elections.
context and background for the consumer;
Culture lag A term from the writings of so¬ for example, coverage of economic issues.
ciologist William Ogburn referring to the fact Contrast with immediate-reward, news.
that a society’s ability to produce technology Dependence (on mass media) The degree to
often surges ahead of its ability to devise ad¬ which modern urban industrial societies
equate means for its social control.
would be unable to carry on their economic,
Cumulative influence Effects of exposure to political, educational, and other activities
mass communication that develop over time without the services provided by mass
as a result of perceiving a number of similar communications.
influences. For example, reaching a decision Diffusion The spread of an innovation
to vote for a particular candidate because of through a society as its members adopt the
exposure to a series of persuasive messages phenomenon.
over time.
Digital information Any information that
Curve of diminishing returns A plot of some has been transformed into numbers. Com¬
event that accumulates over time in which as puters use a binary system to transform let¬
more and more time goes by, fewer and fewer ters into numbers for manipulation or
events are added to those that have already storage, or to perform numerical calculations
occurred. on quantitative information.
Daguerreotype The first form of photo¬ Display advertising Newspaper or magazine
graphs in wide use. Produced first by Louis advertisements that announce the availabil-
 Glossary 599 ■

Ity of goods or services from merchants or Executive editor The chief editorial officer of
other businesses. a newspaper, who usually supervises other
Dixieland jazz A lively form of popular mu¬ editors and reports to the publisher.
sic typically played by a small ensemble con¬ Experimental group Those subjects in an
sisting of trumpet (or cornet), clarinet, piano, experiment who receive some form of treat¬
banjo, and drums. It is characterized by col¬ ment. They are compared with the control
lective improvisation, dotted rhythms, and group both before and after the experiment
syncopation. It became very popular about to see if the treatment produced some effect.
1915 and remained so through the 1920s. Extension function Adding to the meanings
Docudrama A filmed reconstruction of his¬ a person has for a given word.
torical events in which actors portray the
Fairness doctrine The policy of the FCC that
parts. The original events are often changed
grants equal broadcasting time to persons
to make a more interesting, fictionalized
representing different sides of a controversial
version.
public issue.
Documentary A film that attempts to por¬
FCC See Federal Communications Commis¬
tray and explain some real-life situation, usu¬
sion.
ally by filming the actual people in their own
setting rather than by using actors and Feature syndicate See syndicate.
props. Federal Communications Act of 1934 The
Elite art Art forms and products produced basic legislation of the U.S. Congress that es¬
by talented and creative specialists who in¬ tablished the principle that “the airways be¬
vent new aesthetic experiences through their long to the people” and the FCC as the
forms and concepts. regulatory agency to represent the public
interest.
Elite press Newspapers prepared for and
distributed to well-educated and affluent Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
members of society. More emphasis is placed Federal agency established by Congress in
on information and intellectual content than 1934 to regulate broadcast frequencies and
on diversion and entertainment. license persons or groups to broadcast. It reg¬
ulates all forms of broadcasting including
Equal time rule A policy of the FCC regard¬
ing broadcasts by political candidates. If one marine, aircraft, police, and citizen’s band
radio.
side is allowed to make a broadcast, the same
opportunity must be extended to the other in Federal Trade Commission (FTC) The fed¬
an equal manner. eral agency that regulates all aspects of com¬
petition in business and commerce, in¬
Establishment function The linking of
cluding fairness and truth in advertising.
meanings to symbols for individuals in a
shared manner among members of a group; Feedback A .form of reverse communication
for example, teaching individuals new words in which a receiver sends messages back to a
and their meanings or developing new lan¬ sender, unwittingly or deliberately. Feedback
guage conventions in a group. can be subtle, but it clarifies how well com¬
Ethnic press Newspapers designed to be
munication 4s taking place.
read by a particular ethnic group, such as Film Motion pictures as an art form, a me¬
Italian-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and so dium of mass communication, and a form of
on. Some are published in the group’s lan¬ entertainment.
guage. Such newspapers have a long history First Amendment The first article of the Bill
among immigrants to the United States. of Rights—a series of amendments to the
Event-centered news News concerned with U.S. Constitution. For mass communication
specific, finite events, or issues such as meet¬ the most significant part of the First Amend¬
ings and fires. Contrast with process- ment prohibits Congress from making laws
centered news. that limit free speech and a free press.
 ■ 600 Glossary

FM See frequency modulation. Frequency spectrum The total range of wave

Folk art Art forms and products produced by frequencies that can .be used in broad¬
ordinary people as part of their everyday life. casting.

Folk songs and folk music Songs and mu¬ Function (of a medium) That which is ac¬
sic of anonymous origins that become widely complished by a medium, for society or for
disseminated among particular categories of individuals. Among the media’s functions are
ordinary people in a given region or occupa¬ informing, entertaining, or influencing per¬
tion. American examples were the ballads of sons and, for the society as a whole, provid¬
the Appalachian highlands, blues among ing surveillance, correlation, or transmission
poor blacks, cowboy songs, bluegrass music, of the social heritage.
and gospel songs. They were usually diffused Gatekeeper Individuals or divisions in a
by word of mouth rather than by written group (such as news personnel in a television
scores.
station) who select some items for release in
Form (of a medium) The physical character¬ a medium and reject or modify others. The
istics of a medium and how it is produced. act of such selection and editing is called
For example, a newspaper with its thin gatekeeping.
sheets of paper obviously differs in form from
Genre Category or type of film distinguished
a motion picture, which is projected light
by theme or content. Examples are westerns,
through transparent film.
musicals, comedies, horror.
Fiber optics Systems for transmitting infor¬
mation as pulses of light along hair-thin Glyph A nonrepresentational symbol that
glass lines. Such transmissions are faster stands for an idea, event, or thing. For ex¬
and less subject to noise interference in some ample, a circle with three crossbars can
installations than electrical systems using mean “power.” Unlike pictographs and ideo¬
metal wires. graphs, glyphs are standardized in meaning
but are not pictures of what they represent.
“Freebies” Special favors, gifts, or services
provided to reporters, magazine writers, or Gospel songs A form of Protestant church
broadcasters in order to influence their re¬ hymns sung as emotional religious songs.
ports on the activities of the giver in a favor¬ Some sound like folk music, but technically
able direction. they are not. Many are written as inspira¬
tional expressions of faith and have their
Free press A social and political arrange¬
own unique market. The form emerged
ment of laws and practices that permits
mainly during the hard times of the Great
newspapers (or other media) to present what¬
Depression, but a related genre is the spiri¬
ever they wish to the public. In the United
tual music of poor blacks which is a form of
States the idea of a free press is valued, but
folk music.
in practice there are numerous constraints
on mass media. Hypodermic needle theory See magic bullet
theory.
Frequency allocation The assignment of
specific frequencies (positions on the radio or Identification A complex of attitudes and
television broadcasting band). In the United other beliefs shaping the perceptions of an
States these assignments are made by the individual regarding another person. The in¬
Federal Communications Commission. dividual approves of, wants to be like, or feels
Frequency modulation (FM) A technique of a similarity with the other person.
broadcasting sound via radio waves that uses Ideographic writing A form of writing in
differences in frequencies to transmit and which simple drawings or stylized marks
receive variations in sound. The frequency stand for particular ideas. For example, a
of the carrier wave is altered to produce dif¬ representation of the moon can stand for a
ferent sounds. Contrast with amplitude month, a bolt of lightning for a storm, and
modulation. a ship for a journey by sea.
 Glossary 601 ■

Immediate-reward news News that is ex¬ Institutional advertising A form of long-

tremely perishable and has an immediate range advertising designed to create a partic¬
payoff for the reader; for example, reports of ular construction of reality—the image of a
crimes, fires, natural disasters, and so on. company as wholesome, responsible, or con¬
Contrast with delayed-reward news. cerned about the important things.
Imprinting (of traces) The process of estab¬ Inverted pyramid style A somewhat stan¬
lishing traces in the brain; traces are the bio¬ dardized format for presenting a news story.
chemical basis of memory. In this format the reporter explains clearly
what happened to whom with what causes
Incidental learning The acquisition of ideas
and consequences and gives the most impor¬
or behavior patterns when neither the teach¬
tant facts first, those next in importance sec¬
ing nor the learning is deliberate. ond, and so on to the minor details.
Incongruency (in meanings) A situation in
which the elements of meaning in the mes¬ Investigative reporting (or journalism) A
sage of the communicator fail to match those style of reporting that emphasizes the careful
aroused in the receiver. In other words, in¬ assembly of facts in order to gain the inside
accuracy in communication. story and expose wrongdoing.

Individual differences theory The view that Jazz journalism A form of yellow journal¬
a person’s habits of selecting particular types ism that persisted into the twentieth cen¬
of media content and responding to them in tury. It was characterized by the tabloid
distinctive ways is due to that person's par¬ format and the extensive use of dramatic
ticular personality structure. photographs.
Influence Changing a person’s understand¬ Journalism review A publication, usually
ings, feelings, beliefs, opinions, attitudes, but not always produced by professional jour¬
or overt behaviors in any way, trivial or nalists, that criticizes the practices of the
significant. media.

Information society A society in which more Kitsch Art forms that are of low quality or
of the labor force is involved in the produc¬ are poor imitations of more sophisticated
tion, processing, or dissemination of infor¬ products or styles. Many critics claim that
mation than in the production of goods or most entertainment produced for the mass
crops. The United States passed that point in media is kitsch.
the early 1980s. Labeling In communication theory, the ac¬
Information society A society in which more tivity of assigning a particular word or other
of the labor force is involved in the produc¬ symbol to a meaning experience associated
tion, processing, or dissemination of infor¬ with a given object, event, or situation. Re¬
mation than in the production of goods or verse labeling is the opposite: assigning a
crops. The United States passed that point in particular meaning experience to a given
the early 1980s. word or symbol that has been perceived.

Information wave See carrier wave. Law of large numbers The relationship
among the size of an audience for a medium,
Innovations New ideas, technical inven¬ the profit that medium can make from adver¬
tions, or forms of behavior that a population tisers, and the taste level of the medium’s
adopts. content: the greater the number of receivers,
Institution A sociological term indicating a the greater the profit. This relationship leads
complex of social practices, ideas, and expec¬ to an emphasis on content with a low intel¬
tations deeply established (institutionalized) lectual level and aesthetic taste to attract the
in the behavior of people. The media in mod¬ largest possible audience. The larger the au¬
ern society are a social institution in this dience, the larger the profit, and the lower
sense. the taste level of the content.
 ■ 602 Glossary

Law of right people The general principle involved in hiring and some newsroom su¬
that an advertising message presented via a pervision of personnel* Reports to the exec¬
mass medium must reach the people who are utive editor.
potential purchasers of the product, or the
Marketing approach (to journalism) The
whole thing is a waste of time. For example,
practice of making editorial decisions on the
directing ads for a denture adhesive toward
basis of market research on readers and their
an audience of teenagers would violate the
needs and wants.
law of right people. See also law of large
numbers and market segmentation. Market research Investigations based on ap¬
Leaflets Usually a one-page printed docu¬ plied social science techniques that tiy to dis¬
ment containing an announcement or mes¬ cover what consumers want in a product,
sage. They are used mainly as a medium of why they do or do not buy it, and what might
last resort—for disseminating messages un¬ lead them to purchase it more frequently. A
der conditions where alternative channels frequent topic of such research is the effec¬
are not available, such as in situations of po¬ tiveness of advertising.
litical repression, war, or disaster, or wher¬ Market segmentation The principle that
ever more sophisticated media are unavail¬ only certain types or categories of people are
able or inoperative. They are often presented likely to buy a particular product. For exam¬
to their intended audiences by airdrops or ple, it is unlikely that the same segments of
are handed from one person to another the general public will buy yachts, do-it-your-
surreptitiously. self plumbing parts, and rock albums. Their
Legacy of fear A set of beliefs shared by the buyers differ in age, income, and other vari¬
public that mass communications are pow¬ ables. Market research can identify these seg¬
erful and dangerous; that is, that they can ments, but advertisers must devise messages
and sometimes do produce socially undesir¬ that will gain their attention and sell the
able effects on their audiences. product. See law of right people.

Libel The act of publishing material with Mass Members of a society with a specific
the intent of damaging a person’s reputation. set of characteristics: the mass is made up of
relatively unorganized people, not members
Longitudinal study Research that follows
of binding groups or families, who tend to act
the behavior of a group of subjects over a
and react as individuals rather than as mem¬
long time, such as several years. The study
bers of a group following norms and roles.
systematically notes changes in the behavior
that can be attributed to known influences. Mass communication A multistage process
LPTV Shorthand for Low-Powered Televi¬ in which professional communicators use
sion, which was authorized by the FCC for media to send out messages rapidly and con¬
use in local areas. Weak signals are used, tinuously to stimulate meanings and to
which permits a number of small stations to achieve change among large and diverse
operate in a particular region without inter¬ audiences.
fering with each other or with more powerful Mass media Devices for moving messages
regular channels. across distance or time to accomplish mass
Magic bullet theory An explanation of the communication. The major mass media in
effects of exposure to mass media content. modern society are books, magazines, news¬
The explanation assumes that all subjects papers, motion pictures, radio, and tele¬
will receive some critical feature of the mes¬ vision.
sage (the magic bullet) that will change them
MDS Shorthand for Multipoint Distribution
in the same way. Also called hypodermic
Service, which is a pay-TV system of broad¬
needle theory, stimulus-response theory.
casting via microwave to small dish home an¬
Managing editor A kind of editorial person¬ tennas. It is sometimes called “over-the-air
nel director on a newspaper, especially cable."
 Glossary 603 ■

Meaning The internal experiences of a per¬ etched into a small piece of silicon. It controls
son responding to an object or event that has the computer’s memory, keyboard, disc
a name (a word or other symbol) in his or her drives, and video display.
language. Shared (parallel) meanings be¬ Microwave Electromagnetic waves of ex¬
tween people are the essence of commu¬ tremely high frequency but small amplitude
nication. used to transmit television signals from
Meaning theory An explanation of the part tower to tower over long distances. Micro-
played by mass communication in the social waves have numerous other applications (for
construction of reality. The activities and sit¬ example, in ovens).
uations acted out, displayed, or described in Modeling behavior Adopting a form of be¬
media portrayals provide meanings for words havior that is performed by another person
and other symbols. who serves as a model.
Media access movement Efforts, largely by
Modeling theory An explanation of the influ¬
minority groups and other special interests, ence of mass communication that sets forth
to get access to the media for the purpose of the conditions under which a person will
having their views heard. adopt a form of behavior after seeing it por¬
Media service organizations A variety of or¬ trayed (modeled) in media content.
ganizations that for a fee provide specialized
Movies The industry that produces, distrib¬
services for advertising agencies. They buy
utes, and exhibits films to make a profit.
newspaper space or time on radio or televi¬
sion, and provide talent or other needed Muckraking A term applied by President
services. Theodore Roosevelt to the activities of some
magazine writers who exposed graft, corrup¬
Medical model A form of conceptualizing
tion, and social problems in American society
the causes of some common human problem,
during the late nineteenth century.
such as alcoholism, child abuse, insanity,
drug addiction or even criminal behavior. Multistage flow (of information) A process
The assumption is made that the problem be¬ by which a message is passed on from a per¬
havior is a manifestation of a “sickness” that son who originally received it from a me¬
was acquired by the individual without delib¬ dium. It passes through a number of
erate intent, and that a “cure” can be ar¬ additional people, often in complex chains.
ranged if only the right “treatment” can be Music video A form of popular music that
designed. Thus, the causes of the problem combines a televised vignette with the per¬
are external to the individual, and not a prod¬ formance of the instrumentalists and sing¬
uct of his or her own deliberate choices. This ers. The performance lasts several minutes
shifts the responsibility for both the behavior and often seems to tell a story, or present a
and the cure to the society at large. montage of visual images loosely connected
Medium (plural, media) Any object or ar¬ with the musical theme. Growing in popular¬
rangement of objects, at rest or in motion, ity, this form of popular music may have a
that can be used to represent meanings; for profound impact on the entire industry.
example, smoke signals, drum beats, marker Narrowcasting The use of broadcasting sys¬
stones, trail blazes, dances, markings on pot¬ tems to reach specific categories of people
tery, tattoos, ink on paper, or modern mass with a particular message. An example is the
media. use of evening TV news broadcasts, which
Message A symbol or configuration of sym¬ are of high interest to older audiences, as ve¬
bols that can arouse similar meanings in hicles to advertise such products as denture
both sender and receiver. cleaners or laxatives.
Microchip or Microprocessor A tiny device National development The process of social
that is at the heart of modern computers. It and cultural change by which traditional so¬
consists of electrical circuits printed or cieties are modernized.
 ■ 604 Glossary

Network In broadcasting, a group of radio or usually thought of as going beyond thinking

television stations that operate as part of the or talking to include physical activity, such
same corporation. Some are owned by the as is involved in buying, voting, donating,
corporation; others subscribe to its services participating in groups, or other complex
and broadcast the content released by that conduct.
corporation.
Panel design A survey research strategy for
New journalism A style of journalism that following trends over time in a sample who
emerged in the 1960s in which writers ex¬ serve as a main panel. A number of similar
pressed their feelings and values and used samples (control panels) are drawn from the
techniques usually found in fiction (for ex¬ same population for parallel interviews at
ample, extensive description and interior various points in time, such as one control
monologues). panel per month. The results obtained from
News Essentially a report that presents a the control panels are checked against those
contemporary view of some aspect of reality obtained from the main panel to see if re¬
by providing details about a specific issue, peated interviewing of the main panel is dis¬
event, or process in which an audience is torting the results.
likely to be interested. Partisan paper A newspaper published or
Newspaper A publication that regularly controlled by a political party or interest
prints and distributes news of general inter¬ group and presenting its point of view more
est to a broad audience, or of more special¬ or less exclusively.
ized interest to some category of people. Pay TV See subscription TV.
There are dozens of types of newspapers pub¬
Penetration See saturation.
lished by various groups for a variety of
purposes. Penny press The first mass newspapers.
Originating in the early 1830s in New York,
News perspective A set of criteria used by
they sold for a penny in the streets, made a
news personnel in deciding whether and how
profit from advertisers, and were oriented
to present a news item. They take into ac¬
toward less-educated, ordinary citizens.
count a story’s commercial value (that is, its
likely effect on their ratings), their limited re¬ Perception (perceive, perceiving) For hu¬
sources, the availability of alternatives, the man beings, the mental activity of organizing
audience, and their competitors' practices. the input of one’s senses (sight, hearing,
touch, and smell) into interpretations that
Nickelodeon One of the first types of motion
make sense in terms of one’s culture and
picture theaters in wide use. The term came
past experience. In other words, interpreting
from Harry Davis and John Harris of Pitts¬
stimuli in meaningful ways.
burgh, who charged a nickel for admission to
their theater in 1905. Personal influence Changes in people’s be¬
liefs, attitudes, or behavior brought about by
Objective reporting An impersonal style of
messages received by personal, face-to-face
news reporting that emphasizes the facts
communication.
rather than the reporter’s interpretations or
opinions. Phonetic writing A system of writing in
which each letter or character indicates a
Observational learning The acquisition of a
specific sound of human speech. The widely
new form of behavior that is learned by view¬
used alphabet, familiar to English speakers,
ing someone performing it.
is a good example. Many languages today
Opinion leaders Those who are directly ex¬ use phonetic writing, but some, including
posed to media content and deliberately or Chinese, do not.
unwittingly influence others to whom they
Pictographic writing An early form of writ¬
pass on such content.
ing in which ideas were represented by sim¬
Overt behavior Actions that can be easily ob¬ ple drawings. Arranged in a sequence, the
served by another person. Such behavior is drawings could tell a story (such as the tale of
 Glossary 605 ■

a military victory, a successful hunt, or a in many nations as a result of a spread of the

journey); but because the meanings of the idea since World War I.
drawings were not standardized, interpreta¬ Prior restraint A legal procedure by which a
tion was not always precise. government reviews news releases before giv¬
Pictorial journalism Reporting the news or ing permission for their release. This is not
other significant events through photo¬ practiced in countries that have freedom of
graphs. the press.
Political paper An early form of American Process Any series of activities that trans¬
newspaper controlled and often subsidized by forms something through a set of distinctive
a political party or faction. These papers em¬ operations. The term is widely used in sci¬
phasized the point of view of the political ence, engineering, and technology to describe
groups who supported and controlled them. successive stages in the production of a prod¬
Polls and pollsters See public opinion polls. uct, outcome, or effect.
Popular culture Music, drama, and other Process-centered news Complex news that
entertainment content of mass communica¬ goes beyond a single, fragmented report or is¬
tion that is simple, makes few intellectual sue to convey a comprehensive, systematic
demands, is not creative, and is largely understanding, such as reports of the conse¬
repetitive in form. quences of governmental activity. Contrast
with event-centered news.
Popular music Songs and tunes that are
written, performed, or prepared specifically to Producer A key management figure in the
be marketed in the form of sheet music, rec¬ film industry who arranges financing, ob¬
ords, tapes, and so on. tains script rights, space, and ultimately su¬
Popular press Newspapers that are prepared pervises all personnel. The producer is the
for and distributed to people in all levels of boss who coordinates the activities of direc¬
society, especially those in the middle and tors as they supervise the actors and techni¬
lower levels. They give less emphasis to intel¬ cians responsible for actually making the
lectual content than to entertainment. movie.
Pornography Printed material, pictures, or Professional communicators Those who pro¬
movies that give explicit portrayals of people duce or disseminate mass communication
in sexual situations. In particular, material content as an occupation; for example, re¬
of this type that is, according to the stan¬ porters, newscasters, sportswriters, movie di¬
dards of the community in which it is avail¬ rectors, scriptwriters, actors, and so on.
able, obscene and without redeeming social Propaganda Mass communication content—
value such as might be found in a work of whether news stories, advertisements, dra¬
art. mas, and so on—that is deliberately designed
Portrayal The representation of some aspect to change the beliefs, attitudes, or behavior
of social life or physical events or situations of an audience.
to which words or other symbols are associ¬ Protestant ethic A set of beliefs that places
ated. Portrayals in this sense show the mean¬ value on hard work, frugality, rational plan¬
ings we share for words. ning, self-denial, and postponement of re¬
Precision journalism A form of reporting ward to self. These beliefs originated in early
that makes extensive use of the methods of Protestant religious groups but eventually be¬
social science, such as polls, surveys, and came the “work ethic” of modern capitalism.
statistical analysis. These issues have been thoroughly analyzed
Press association See wire service. by the German sociologist Max Weber.
Press council A voluntary organization of Pseudoevent Events of minor significance
citizens in a community to provide a forum that the news media build up to make them
for criticism of the press. Such groups exist appear important.
 ■ 00© Glossary

Public opinion poll Measures of the public’s by others; for example, using census data in
beliefs or feelings about an issue or topic. a report on a community. Contrast with ac¬
These measures are obtained by interviewing tive precision journalism.
various kinds of samples of persons in the
Receiver A person to whom a message has
population under study, usually with a
been sent and who perceives and under¬
standardized questionnaire prepared for the stands that message.
purpose.
Reinforcement An effect of a mass media
Public relations A systematic process of
election campaign. Voters attending to the
communication that involves the identifica¬
political messages of their favored party or
tion of discrete publics and the tailoring of
candidate increase their commitment.
specific messages to them.
Reliability The degree to which a form of
Publisher The person or group of persons
measurement will produce consistent results.
who exercise top management decisions over
For example, a tape measure used repeatedly
a print medium.
to measure a given board will give very con¬
Rack jobber A company that provides a ser¬ sistent (that is, very reliable) results. An IQ
vice to retailers who lack expertise in popular test given to a person on different occasions
music. The jobber maintains both stock and may give less consistent results.
displays for selling popular records and
Reverse labeling. See labeling.
tapes. The merchandise is brought into the
store, displayed on racks that are kept Reviewers Persons who view films or other
stocked with current music and albums. The communications and tell consumers how
store can then sell the goods without having good or bad the product is in terms of general
to retain a buyer or manager who knows pop¬ appeal.
ular music. Rhythm and blues A form of popular music
Ragtime Originally a lively form of folk mu¬ that originated among urban blacks. It com¬
sic played by ear on the piano, and incorpo¬ bines strong repetitive rhythms with simple
rating syncopated polyrhythms in which the melodies, along with elements of blues and
performer accents the third or weak beat of a harmonic structures. It was from this music
measure in the melody while continuing a that rock and roll evolved.
precise and normally accented base. It be¬ Role model Definitions of what activities are
came America’s first form of popular music at suitable and expected of a person in a partic¬
about the beginning of the century and died- ular social role. For example, the media por¬
out at the end of World War I. It was per¬ tray the elderly in specific ways. The same is
formed in many different ways and became true of male and female adults, various occu¬
widely familiar as a dance form, as well as vo¬ pations, the mentally ill, and so on.
cal and instrumental music.
Role-taking The use of feedback (from a re¬
Ratings Numerical data on the size of audi¬ ceiver) by a communicator to judge which
ences and/or their preferences for particular symbols will best indicate to a receiver the in¬
types of media content. tended meanings of his or her message.
Rating services Organizations that for a fee Royalty Compensation paid to an author by
provide research on audience sizes, behav¬ a publisher, representing a share of the pro¬
iors, and characteristics. Rating services ceeds from the sale of the author’s book.
measure newspaper and magazine circula¬
Sample A number of persons or families (or
tions, as well as radio and television audi¬
household units) selected from some large
ences, in terms of patterns of attention to
population (such as a city, county, or coun¬
various content and the social categories of
try) in such a way that they represent faith¬
the people attending.
fully the major characteristics of that
Reactive precision journalism Reporters’ use population; that is, the sample has the same
of social science data that have been gathered percentage of old, young, black, white, rich,
 Glossary 607 ■

poor, and so on as the population from which Social categories theory The view that a
it was selected. person’s habits of selecting particular types
of media content and responding to them in
Saturation (or penetration) The proportion
distinctive ways is heavily influenced by
of workable receivers in a given area to the norms and other shared influences that char¬
total number of households in the area. This
acterize the social categories of which he or
is one index used in studying patterns of au¬ she is a member (for example, race, educa¬
dience attention to broadcast media. It is a
tion, income, occupation, and so on).
measure of potential audience; it does not in¬
dicate how many people are listening or Social construction of reality The ongo¬
viewing. ing processes of communicative interaction
by which we collectively develop culturally
Sedition Committing any act that brings shared meanings for objects, events, and sit¬
damage to the government; for example, pub¬ uations. Explanations of the origins and con¬
lishing materials that advocate the overthrow sequences of meanings in terms of these
of the government. It has on occasion been processes have been developed in anthropol¬
illegal in the United States to publish any¬ ogy, psychology, philosophy, and sociology.
thing that scorned, abused, or showed con¬
tempt for the federal government, its flag, or Social darwinism A set of beliefs drawn
even the uniform of the armed forces (Sedi¬ from the nineteenth-century philosophy of
tion Act of 1918). Herbert Spencer. The main ideas are that so¬
ciety is analogous to a living organism and
Selectivity The principle that members of that it develops toward a better condition
an audience select content from the mass me¬ through a process of natural selection and
dia that is related to their interests, needs, survival of the fittest leaders and citizens.
predispositions, and other psychological
Social learning theory A general psycholog¬
characteristics.
ical theory that attempts to explain how peo¬
Share Numerical information provided by ple acquire behavioral patterns by observing
rating services concerning the per cent of such patterns in social settings. It is a com¬
households who have a television set in use plex theory that involves many assumptions
who are tuned in to a particular station and factors.
(viewing a specific program) during a given
Social relationships theory The view that a
time period.
person’s habits of selecting particular types
Shield law A law that protects reporters of media content and responding to them in
from demands by the police or the courts distinctive ways are heavily influenced by the
that they reveal their sources. If reporters ob¬ persons with which he or she has binding so¬
tain information regarding a crime and re¬ cial ties (for example, family and friends).
fuse to divulge their sources, they may Software Computer jargon for programs de¬
penalize the chances of a person being tried signed to achieve a specific purpose, such as
for the crime. But if reporters reveal their the transmission of information from one
sources, they may never again get confiden¬ computer to another, to use a computer for
tial information. This issue remains contro¬ word processing, or to enable it to perform
versial and is under review by the courts. calculations. In computerese the machines
Slicks A popular term for general interest, are referred to as hardware and the people
large-circulation magazines that are tradi¬ who use them as liveware.
tionally printed on rather slick shiny paper. Specialization Generally, the division of
SMATV Shorthand for Satellite Master-An¬ functions in any system into increasingly
tenna Television, a pay-TV system for apart¬ distinct operations. In magazine publishing,
ment buildings and condos, with one dish the increasing trend toward concentrating a
antenna on top of the building and cables to magazine’s content on some well-defined
each dwelling. interest.
 ■ 608 Glossary

Stabilizing function The institutionaliza¬ Supplemental (wire) service A type of wire

tion (standardizing) of a convention linking a service that gathers, prepares, and provides
word and its shared meaning. special reports and features to newspapers
Statistical analysis The use of specialized and broadcasters for a fee. Examples are
mathematical procedures to study the char¬ women’s news, gardening information, reli¬
acteristics of a set of data (numerically re¬ gious news, science coverage, and financial
corded observations). Various procedures are analyses.
used to determine averages or other central
Swing A style of music that replaced dixie¬
tendencies, variation (scatter, dispersion),
land as the nation’s most popular rhythms
and correlations.
during the 1930s. The music was scored
Stigma Any negative quality imposed on elaborately to be played by a large ensemble of
someone, such as the assumption that a professional instrumentalists, as compared
member of a given racial category may be in¬ to the primitive jazz groups of earlier times
tellectually inferior, or that mentally ill people who played by ear. Swing brought in the era
are dangerous. of the Big bands who popularized the form
Stimulus intensity The strength of a given via radio and records. It was eventually dis¬
stimulus. Intensity can be increased by mak¬ placed by rock and roll.
ing the stimulus physically stronger (as may Symbol Something that .“represents” a more-
be done with sound or light) or more or-less standardized meaning among a given
frequent. set of people. Common examples are words
Stimulus-response theory See magic ballet (that stand for the objects or events they
theory. name), military insignia, flags, a wedding
ring, traffic signs, and so on.
Subscription TV (pay TV, toll TV) A system
for transmitting television signals over the Syncopation A shifting of musical accents
air or by wire in such a way that a special de¬ from strong beat to weak beat, or to between
vice is needed on the receiver to unscramble beats. It is typical of complex African poly¬
the signal. The owner of a set pays fees for rhythms, and it played a key role in the de¬
the use of the device. Other technologies are velopment of popular music, such as ragtime
also used in some areas. and dixieland jazz.
Subcultural influence Influences on a per¬ Syndicate (feature syndicate) A group that
son’s self-selected pattern of exposure to prepares and provides specialized (feature)
mass media content that have their origins material to printed news media for a fee; for
in the subcultures in which that same indi¬ example, comics, editorial cartoons, political
vidual participates. For example, males from commentaries, gossip columns, crossword
the lower socioeconomic level might select puzzles, and serialized books.
wrestling for TV entertainment, while a
highly educated professional might select a Tabloid A newspaper whose pages are usu¬
live performance of a play. ally about five columns wide or about half the
size of a standard newspaper page. Tabloids
Subsidies Generally, any payment to sup¬
were originally associated with sensational¬
port an activity. Political parties often pro¬
ism; but today the term more commonly ap¬
vided money to support early American plies only to format, not to content.
newspapers. The federal government today
provides cheap postal rates to subsidize mag¬ Taste publics Categories of people who find
azines, books, and newspapers. distinctive levels of art products, entertain¬
Subsidy publishing See vanity press.
ment forms, and aesthetic experiences inter¬
esting and appealing. In American society
Substitution function The development of these levels include high culture, upper-mid¬
new meanings for symbols to replace those dle culture, lower-middle culture, low culture,
already established. and quasi-folk low culture.
 Glossary 609 ■

Technology The application of principles of television dial. Ultra-high frequencies are

physical, biological, or social science to pro¬ also used in many other applications of radio
vide techniques for solving specific practical waves; for example, radar.
problems. Unit (in content analysis) Any type of
Telecommunication Literally, communicat¬ theme, category of person, type of action
ing over distance. The term usually refers to word, form, or other element that appears in
such communication via electromagnetic in¬ a message. Such units are counted in a con¬
struments (telegraph, telephone, radio, and tent analysis.
television). Mass telecommunication refers
Uses and gratifications research The study
to the use of broadcast media mainly to reach of psychological variables that provide moti¬
large and diverse audiences. Surveillance vations and rewards for individuals who de¬
telecommunication scans distant places for
velop particular patterns of exposure to
specific phenomena such as hostile weapons,
media content.
weather disturbances, pollution, and so on;
radar and satellite photos are examples. Validity An assessment of how well a given
Point-to-point telecommunication refers to form of measurement actually quantifies
the electronic transmission of signals from what it is designed to measure. For example,
one point to another; messages sent by tele¬ a common tape measure provides a rather
grams or telephone are examples. valid measure of length, but an IQ test may
be a less valid measure of a person's actual
Telegraph editor See wire editor.
intellectual ability.
Tin Pan Alley A group of music publishing
Vanity press (or subsidy publishing) The
houses in New York that produced and pub¬
system for publishing an author’s work in
lished popular sheet music beginning in the
which he or she pays all the costs of produc¬
1880s. Later, they played a key role in the
production and distribution of both ragtime ing the work.
and jazz, as well as in other forms of piano VHF Very high frequencies. The letters gen¬
music and early records. erally refer to channels 2—13 on the television
set’s main dial. Very high frequencies are
Toll TV See subscription TV.
also used in aircraft radio and other applica¬
Traces Experiences stored in the brain that
tions of broadcasting.
are capable of being recalled. Traces are
thought to be biochemical records that po¬ Videotext A generic term that refers to two
tentially enable us to remember every detail systems: Videotex is a two-way system that
of our conscious experience. provides for interaction via cable between a
home TV set and a central computer. A spe¬
Transponder A transmitting device that
cial keyboard device is used at home in the
sends a series of radio signals to a station
transactions. Teletex is a one-way system,
that provides immediate replies. The time de¬
such as MDS (see above) that delivers infor¬
lay in microseconds between transmitting
mation to the TV set, but with no interactive
and receiving a given signal enables the de¬
feature.
vice to calculate the distance to the station.
They are widely used in aircraft navigation as Violence profile A chart developed annually
well as in satellites for several purposes. that shows trends in the depiction of violence
Two-step flow of communication A process by the major television networks.
by which mass-mediated content reaches a Visual persistence (or visual lag) The phys¬
population. In this process only some people iological effect that permits us to perceive
attend directly to the media; they pass on the “motion” when presented with a sequence of
information obtained to others, who are thus still pictures in which depicted objects
indirectly exposed. See also Multistage flow. change their position only slightly from one
UHF Ultra-high frequencies. The letters gen¬ picture to the next. We continue to “see” an
erally refer to channels 14-83 on the second object for a fraction of a second after the
 ■ 610 Glossary

thing itself has changed or disappeared, re¬ tions around the country that pay for the
sulting in a perception of smooth motion. service.
Weekly A newspaper that publishes only one Work songs A form of folk music that people
day a week. Many are produced in small com¬
sang, often in groups, as they worked, to
munities or rural areas; others appear in
make their tasks easier or more bearable. Ex¬
suburban sections of larger cities. There are
amples are sea chanteys, railroad gang
many different types.
songs, and the field hollers of plantation
Wire editor (or telegraph editor) An editor slaves.
in charge of editing copy from press associa¬
Yellow journalism A late nineteenth-century
tions and preparing it for publication.
type of newspaper publishing that placed
Wire service An organization that gathers profit above truthfulness and significance,
news stories, prepares them in a convenient emphasizing sensationalism, human inter¬
form, and sends them (by wire or other rapid est, and reader appeal at the expense of pub¬
means) to newspapers and broadcasting sta¬ lic responsibility.
Index

Adams, Samuel, 125 American Telephone and Tele¬ functions of, 473—475,
Adler, Richard, 243 graph, 148 482-483. 486-487
Advertising, 123, 560—594 Amplitude modulation (AM), market researchers, 489—
broadcasting, 210, 212, 206 491, 496-497
213, 216, 219-220 Arbitron rating service, 493— pollsters, 491. 497—501
and children, 579—581 494 rating services, 489—496
content of, 562—563, 581 Archimedes, 55 wire services, 475—484
criticism of, 577—581 Armat, Thomas, 59
definition of, 561—562 Armstrong, Edwin H., 66 Bagdikian, Ben, 28—29, 172.
economics of, 567—569, Armstrong, Scott, 463 174-175
577-579 Associated Press (AP), 46, 475— Bailey, Charles W., 455
history of, 563—567 484 passim Baker, Ray Stannard, 182
institutional, 562—563 Audience, 7—8, 22—23, 109— Baker, Russell. 482
magazine, 184—185 110, 422-426 Bandura, Albert, 320-321, 340
and media content, 11, advertising, 576—577 Barnouw, Erik. 243
112-113, 114-116, broadcasting, 212, 225, Barron, Jerome, 178
119-122, 216. 243, 235-236, 249, 492- Barth, Alan, 456
409-413. 447-448 496 Batchelor, Irving, 485
newspaper, 164, 170—171 and class, 60—61, 98, 158— Beatles, 545
regulation of, 146—148, 159, 182 Beatty, Warren, 283
219-220. 581-584 magazine, 181—182, 184— Bechtel, R. B., 322
research on, 574—577, 185 Bell, Daniel, 76, 80
580-581 mass, 7-8, 22-23, 294 Bennet, James Gordon, 46
television, 236—237 measurement of, 489—501 Berenson, Bernard, 310—315
see also Public relations motion picture, 60—61, 62— Bernays, Edward L., 30, 585,
Advertising industry. 567—577 63, 116-117. 264. 586
agencies, 569—573 270-274, 278-279 Bernstein, Carl, 461
associations, 567, 582 music, 538—539 Black, Hugo, 174—175
departments, 573—574 news media, 450—452 Blacklisting, 282—283, 412—
media service organizations, newspaper, 161 — 163, 425, 413
573 496-497 Black music, 507, 509—512,
publications and journals, and patterns of attention, 515-517, 519, 543-544
567, 575 422-425 Black press. 168—169
Agenda theory, 341—346. 351 — print media. 158—160 Blacks, portrayal of, 236. 267-
353 specialized, 114—116, 123, 268, 582-583
Agnew, Spiro T., 143, 145 184, 225, 249, 538- Block booking. 274—276
Alcohol-use modeling. 390-392 539, 577 Blumer, Herbert, 296—300
Alexanderson, Ernst, 69 and taste publics, 360—364 Bogart, John, 445
Alnes, Stephen, 85 and uses and gratifications, Bonaparte, Napoleon, 156
Alpert, Hollis, 262 425-426 Books, 132, 192-200
Altheide, David L., 409—410, Audit Bureau of Circulation children's, 420—422
469 (ABC). 491-492 economics of. 113—114,
American Council on Education Auxiliaries. 473—503 193-194. 198-199
in Journalism and Mass criticism of, 474—475 function and form of, 192
Communication. 28 feature syndicates, 484—489 history of, 38—40, 193
 fl 612 Index

Books, continued Cable television, 79—80, 87—93, Payne Fland Studies on,
influence of, 387—389 244-249 295-302
predecessors of, 35—37 basic and pay, 247 and sex-role models, 386—
process of publishing, 194— economics of, 92—93, 122— 388
195 123, 246-247 Children's Television Workshop,
types of, 195-196, 198-199 future of, 245, 248—249 418-420
see also Publishing history of, 89—90, 245—247 Cinema verite, 269
Boorstin, Daniel J., 344, 563 licensing of, 97—98, 246 Clarke, Arthur C., 97, 207
Borden, Neil, 579 public access to, 90—91 Clavell, James, 233
Bradshaw, Thornton, 96—97 technology of, 244—245 Cohen, Stanley, 453
Brady, Frank, 226 two-way, 245, 248 Colley, Russell, 575
Brady, Mathew, 46—47 Caldwell, Earl, 139—140 Combs, James, 469
Bridges, Peter, 140 Campbell, John, 42 “Come with Me,” 340—341
Brinkley, David, 445 Cannon, Lou, 445 Comic strips, 486—489
Broadband communication, Cantril, Hadley, 305 Commission of the Causes and
205 Capote, Truman, 460 Prevention of Violence,
Broadcasting, 132, 204—253 Capra, Frank 318-324, 417, 427, 431
and advertising, 210, 212, Why We Fight series, 307— Commission on Obscenity and
213, 216, 219-220 309 Pornography, 427—431
audience of, 212 Careers, in media, see Profes¬ Communication, basic
content of, 221—222 sional communicators complexity and accuracy,
definition of, 205 Carey, James W., 460, 562 18-21, 22
economics of, 209, 212-216 Carson, Johnny, 150 elements of, 12—21
and freedom of the press, Carter, Hodding, III, 25 preliterate, 34
126-127, 132, 145- Carter, Jimmy, 147 sending and receiving mes¬
146, 148 Catharsis theory, 319 sages, 15-18
history of, 64—73 Catledge, Turner, 445 symbols, memory and
licensing of, 67—68, 71—72, Caxton, William, 37—38 meaning, 13—15, 379—
97-98, 117-118, 122, Censorship, 38—39, 41—42 381
126-127, 145-146, challenges to, 137—139 Compaine, Ben, 111
209. 217-220, 223- and film industry, 62, 280— Computers, 78-80, 84-85
224, 246 283 Comstock, George, 422
moral code for, 62, 132, government, 133-141 Concentrated (conglomerate)
220-221 and protection of news ownership. 111, 113, 117,
noncommercial, 214—216 sources, 139—141 146, 568-569
organization of, 209-212 and regulatory agencies, cross-media, 214, 215, 219
ownership of, 65, 67-68, 145-148 motion picture, 276—277
117-118, 214, 215, and White House influence, newspaper, 172—176
219 143-145 Connelly, Marc, 115
regulation of, 216—221 see also Freedom of the Conrad, Frank, 66
religious, 214, 241 press Constancy hypothesis, 92
stations and networks, Center. Allen, 585, 587-588 Content, 22-23, 109
117-122, 209-212, Chaplin, Charlie, 274 of advertising, 562—563,
213, 216, 233-234 Charnley, Mitchell V., 446 581
technology of, 64-66, 69- Charters, W. W.. 302 and broadcasting, 221-222
70. 206-209 Chicago Sun-Times, 455 and commercialism, 243,
see also Radio; Television Children 409-411, 412-413.
Brooker, William, 42 educational programs for. 447-448, 454-455,
Brown, Les, 84, 88 240, 418-422 495-496
Brucker. Herbert, 456-457 influence of media on, 295- of motion pictures, 264-
Buchanan, Annette, 139—141 302, 315-324, 418- 274
Buckley, Peter, 274 422. 579-581 of newspapers, 161 — 163
Buel, Ronald, 452 patterns of television view¬ of radio, 224—227
Burger, Warren E., 141, 146 ing, 316-317, 422- and taste publics, 360—364
Byoir, Carl, 586 425 of television, 222, 234-244,
 Index 613 ■

Content, continued Dickson, William, 59 Farnsworth, Philo T., 70

318-324, 390-392, Diffusion, 332. 333-338 Fass. Paula, 227
369-400, 409-417 curve of, 334—337 Fear, legacy of, 291—294, 304
Content analysis, 383—386, and repetition, 335—337 Feature syndicates, 484—489
413-416 Digests, 183-184 function of, 486—487
of alcohol-use portrayal, Digital laser disc, 547 history of, 484—486
390-392 Dille, John F., 489 organization of, 487—489
of sex on television, 413— Diminishing returns, 335—337 Federal Communications Com¬
416 Direct broadcast satellite (DBS), mission (FCC), 68. 71,
of sex-role models, 386—389 92 90-91, 145-146, 147-
Cooley, Charles Horton, 382 Dissemination, 6—7 148, 217-220
Corporation for Public Broad¬ Donnelley, William, 93 regulations of, 117—118,
casting, 214—216 Donnerstein, Ed, 428—429 132, 229-231, 246,
Cosmopolitan, 182—183 Doob, Anthony, 433—434 582
Cote, J. Richard, 481 Dougherty, Philip, 185 Federal Communications Act
Courtney, Alice E., 583 Douglas, Norman, 563 (1914), 216-217, 223-
Cousins, Norman, 200 Douglass, Frederick, 168 224
Covarrubias, Ana Christina, Federal Reserve System, 99
340 Eastman, George, 56 Federal Trade Commission
Craft, Christine, 467 Economic controls, 107—123 (FTC), 147, 582
Creel, George, 586 and American values, 107— Feedback, 19—21
Crosby, John. 204 109, 111 Feinberg, Cobbett. 280
Cross-media ownership. 214, of books, 113—114 Feldman, Jacob, 334
215, 219 and concentrated owner¬ Fell, John L., 262
Crowther, Bosley, 270 ship, 111, 113, 117, Fernandez-Collado, Carlos F..
Cultivation analysis, 432—435 146, 172-176, 214, 415-416
Culture 215, 219. 276-277, Fiber optics, 79
influence of, 8, 21, 23—24, 568-569 Film, see Motion pictures
38-39, 44, 150, 271- history of, 107—108 First amendment, 125—127.
274 impact of, 108—109, 112— See also Freedom of the
and media content, 360— 116 press
364 of magazines, 113—116 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 257
Culture complex, 293 of movies, 116—117 Folk art, 354
Culture lag, 207—208 of newspapers, 112—113 Form
Cumberbatch, Guy, 320 of radio. 117—118 of books, 192
Cumulative influence, 302, of television, 118—123 of magazines, 181-182,
308, 321, 375 Economist, The, 95, 280 191-192
Cutlip, Scott, 585, 587—588 Edison, Thomas Alva, 59, 527— of media, 157—158
528, 530 Foster. Stephen, 508
Daguerre, Louis, 56 Electronic media, see Fowler, Mark S., 118
Dale, Edgar, 265 Broadcasting Franklin, Benjamin, 42, 52
Daley, Richard, 149 Elite art, 354 Franklin, James, 42, 124
Data bases, 77. 85 Ellerbee, Linda, 25—26 Franzblau, Susan, 413—414
Davis, F. James, 350 Ellsberg, Daniel, 138 Freberg, Stan, 226—227
Davis, Harry P., 60 Emery, Edwin, 41, 42 Freedom of Information Act,
Day, Benjamin, 45, 161 — 162, Epstein, Edward Jay, 443 139, 142-143. 144
373 Equal time rule, 145, 148, 220 Freedom of the press, 23, 51,
DeFleur, Melvin, 335-336, 431 Espionage Act (1897), 136 98-99, 123-151. 582
De Forest, Lee, 65 Executive, 109 and broadcast media, 126—
Democratic National Conven¬ 127, 132, 145-146.
tion (1948). 149 Face-to-face communication, 148
Dennis, Everette E., 467 see Communication, basic and court rulings, 141 — 142
de Sola Pool, Ithiel. 435 Fairness doctrine, 145, 148, and a fair trial, 130—131,
Diamond Sutra, 37 178, 220 140-142
Dickensen, John, 125 Farber, Myron, 140—141 history of, 124-127
 ■ 614 Index

Freedom of the press, continued Gaudet, Hazel, 310—315 and activation, reinforce¬
and informal influences, Gerbner, George, 319, 417, ment and conversion,
150 432-435 311-314
and legislation, 142—143 Gershwin, George, 518-519, and agenda theory, 341-
and libel, 124-125, 127- 526 346, 351-353, 483
130, 142 Gitlin, Todd, 410-411 on attitudes and beliefs, 9,
and motion pictures, 62, Greeley, Horace, 137-138 300-302, 307-309,
126, 132 Greenberg, Clement, 355 320, 378-383, 418-
and national secrets, 123, Greider, William, 463 420, 431-435 (see
133-139 Grenada, 134-135 also Meaning theory)
and newspapers, 124—125, Grierson, John, 269 on behavior, 9, 296—300,
126, 128-132, 138- Gromer, Frank J., 495 319-321, 324-327,
141, 146 Gutenberg, Johann, 37 375-378, 427-431
and obscenity, 131 — 133, (see also Modeling
146 Hadden, Briton, 183 theory)
and police, 148-149 Hamilton, Andrew, 124—125 books, 387-389
and protection of news Hand, Learned, 481—482 on children, 295-302, 315-
sources, 139—141 Handy, William C., 516-517 324, 418-422, 579-
and White House influence, Harper’s, 114-115 581
143-145 Harris, Benjamin, 41 cumulative, 302, 308, 321,
Free marketplace of ideas (com¬ Harris, Charles K., 513 375
petition), 111, 113 Harris, John P., 60 indirect, 372-403
Frequency modulation (FM), Harris, Louis, 497 and individual differences
206, 224-225 Hays, Will H., 280-281 and social categories,
Friedan, Betty Head, Sydney W., 213, 492 305-306, 317-318,
The Feminine Mystique, Hearst, William Randolph, 48— 326, 345-346, 425
583 49, 293, 478, 486 movies, 295-302, 307-309
Friendly, Fred Hermanowsky, Charles, 90 news media, 341-353,
Due to Circumstances Be¬ Heroes, 357—360 469-470, 483
yond Our Control, Hersh, Seymour, 463 and political campaigns,
447-448, 455 Hertz, Heinrich, 65 309-315, 345-346
Functions Hilliard, David, 140 and popular culture, 353-
of auxiliaries, 473—475, Hirsch, Paul, 434-435 364
482-483, 486-487 Hollywood, California, 274, public belief about, 291-
of books, 192 275-276 294
of magazines, 181 — 182, Holography, 95 radio. 302—306
189-192 Home video, 91-92, 95-97, and social change. 332-341
of media, 157-158, 161 — 122 and social problems, 9,
163 Home view network (HVN), 92 347-353
of motion pictures, 259— Hoover, Herbert, 68, 70 television, 243, 315—324,
262 Hovland, Carl, 309-310 390-392, 396-400
of newspapers, 161 — 163 Howitt, Dennis, 320 Information, definition of, 15
of radio, 209 Hunt, Todd, 162, 452 Innovation, 332-334
Future trends
International News Service
cable television, 245, 248— Imprinting, 13-14, 380 (INS), 478, 480
249 Incidental learning, 317 Interpersonal communication,
music industry, 548—550 Incongruency, 18—19 314-315, 326-327, 337-
print media, 200-201 Independent production 338, 425
radio, 226 companies Investigative Reporters and Edi¬
technology, 83-84, 97-99 broadcasting, 212, 233-234 tors (IRE), 463-464
motion picture, 275-276 Irwin, Will, 410
Gallup, George, 497 record industry, 537-539 Ismach, Arnold H., 119, 467
Gannett Corporation, 172, 175 Individual differences, 305-
Gans, Herbert, 361 306, 317-318, 326 Jay, Peter, 216-217
Gardner, Howard, 420 Influences, of the media, 8-10, Jazz Singer, The. 61
Gatekeeping, 342—343 290-403, 427-435 Jefferson, Thomas, 126
 Index 615 ■

Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 138, Lewis, Claude, 149 Marconi, Guglielmo, 65, 206—
417, 427 Libel, 124-125, 127-130, 142 207
Johnson, Nicholas, 87, 220— Licensing Market research, 194, 489—
221, 248 broadcasting, 122, 126— 491, 496-497
Johnstone, John, 28 127, 145-146, 209, Marks, John D.
Joplin, Scott, 510—511 217-220 The CIA and the Cult of In¬
"Maple Leaf Rag," 511, 514 radio, 67-68. 117-118, telligence. 123
Journalism 122, 223-224 Marshall, G. C., 307
advocacy, 177—178, 464 television, 71—72, 97—98, Mass, definition of, 7—8, 294
event-centered and process- 117-118, 122, 246 Mass media, 3—4, 10—12, 294
centered, 162, 452— Liebes, B. H., 481 audience of, 7—8, 22—23,
453 Linz. Daniel, 431 109-110, 294, 422-
history of, 40—52 Lippmann, Walter, 163, 341, 426
investigative and adversar¬ 409, 443, 444 comparison of, 417—418,
ial, 52, 461-464 Literary Digest poll, 498 420-422, 449-450,
jazz. 51 Los Angeles Times, 94—95 451
marketing approach, 466— Los Angeles TimesAVashington connections between. 77,
467 Post News Service, 484 85, 148, 192
new, 177-178, 458-461 Lowery, Shearon, 376, 390— definition of, 5—10
objective, 51, 177—178, 392, 431 economics of. 107—123
456-458 Luce, Henry, 53—54, 183 forms of, 157—158
pictorial, 46—47 Lumiere, August and Luis, 59 functions of, 157—158,
precision, 464—466 Lyle, Jack, 316-318, 376 161-163
training, 28-29 history of, 33—75
yellow, 47—49, 51—52 Macaulay, Thomas, 560 ownership of, 51, 65, 66—
see also Newspapers McCarthy, Joseph, 129—130 68, 111. 113, 117-
Journalism review, 179—180 McClure, S. S., 485 118, 146, 171-175
Jowett, Garth, 260 McCombs, Maxwell E.. 92, as process of communica¬
345-346 tion, 5—10, 21—23,
Kesey, Ken, 177 Macdonald, Dwight, 355 204, 205
Kirscher, Athanasius, 55 MacDonald. Glenn, 433—434 and professional communi¬
Kitsch. 355—357 MacDougall, A, Kent. 483 cators, 6, 24—26, 408—
McLeod, Jack, 345 411
Labeling, 15, 17, 379-381 McLuhan, Marshall, 98. 159, see also Influences, of the
Lacy, Dan, 198 200, 221, 243 media
Language symbols, 13, 15—18, Magazines, 52—55, 114—116, Meaning, 8
379-381 181-192 and language symbols, 13,
LaRocca, Dominick, 520—523 audience of, 181 — 182, 184— 15, 379-381
Larsen, Otto, 335—336 185 and memory, 13—15
Laser-disk recorders, 96 circulation of, 491—492 Meaning theory, 378—383
Lasswell, Harold, 157, 405, economics of, 185 establishment, extension,
442, 474 form and function of, 181 — substitution, and sta¬
Law of large numbers, 109— 182, 189-192 bilization, 382—383,
110, 114, 116, 119, 360 history of, 182—184 400
Law of right people, 109 and news, 459—460, 463 and portrayal of mentally ill,
Lazarsfeld, Paul, 310-315 types of, 182-184, 185-189 393-400
Learning Magic bullet theory, 302, 306, see also Influences, of the
incidental. 317 374-375 media
observational, 319—321 Magid, Frank N., 343—344, 495 Media access movement, 178—
see also Modeling theory Mailer, Norman, 460 179
Lee. Ivy, 586 Main, Jeremy, 24, 26 Media News Corporation, 480
Lefkowitz, M.. 321—322 Malamuth, Neil, 428—429 Media service organizations,
Lehmkuh, David C., 495 Mankiewicz, Frank, 225 573
Leibert, Robert, 422 Marchetti, Victor Medium, definition of, 7
Leonard, Saul F., 271 The CIA and the Cult oj In¬ Memory, 13—15
Lewis, Anthony. 142 telligence, 123 Mental illness, 393—400
■ 616 Index

Mental illness, continued technology of, 55—59, 61 — National development, 338-341

historical stigma of, 393— 62, 259 National Enquirer, 52
395 themes and styles of, 265— National Public Radio, 118,
television portrayal of, 395— 266, 271-273 216, 460
400 Mott, Frank Luther, 52 Nelson, Roy Paul, 563
“Mercury Theater of the Air,” Muckrakers, 54, 169—170, 182, Neuharth, Allen, 175
302-306 189-190 Newsmagazines, 53-54, 183-
Message patterns, 18 Multipoint distribution service 184, 186
Mexico, 338-341 (MDS), 92 News media, 11, 409-413,
Meyer, Philip, 180, 464-465, Mungo, Raymond, 443 442-472
467 Murdoch, Rupert, 172, 173- and advertising, 243, 409-
Minorities, 168—169 174, 455 411, 412-413, 447-
portrayal of, 236, 267-268, Murrow, Edward R., 447 448, 454-455, 495-
582-583 Music, popular, 504—554 496
Minow, Newton, 234 blues, 515-517 and agenda theory. 341-
Modeling theory, 319—321, boogie-woogie, 543 346, 351-353, 483
375-378 as a business, 508, 512— audience of, 450—452
and alcohol use, 390-393 515, 530-533, 534- comparison of, 449-450
identification, 376 541 and creation of news, 443-
imitation and adoption, 378 country and country-west¬ 444,. 452-454
and sex-roles, 386-389 ern, 507, 517-520, criticism of, 458
see also Influences, of the 547 and definition of news, 410,
media cowboy songs and blue- 442-446
Modulation, 206 grass, 507, 519 gatekeeping, 342-345
Monaco, James, 257, 258-259 criticism of, 513-514, 525- influence of, 341-353,
Moon, Sun Myung, 172 526 469-470, 483
Morse, Samuel F. B., 46, 64 and dancing, 523—525 and news perspective, 409-
Motion Picture Producers and Dixieland, 520—523 410
Distributors Code, 62, folk and work songs, 506— organization of, 454-455
132, 281-282 507 technology of, 455-456
Motion pictures, 256—285 future of, 548-550 and truth and reality, 443-
audience of, 60-61, 62-63, gospel, 517-520 446
116-117, 264, 270- history of, 506-526 see also Wire services
274, 278-279 jazz, 520-526 Newspapers, 132, 160-181,
awards for, 282-284 and music video, 548-550 449-450
content of, 264-274 piano roll, 514 access to, 178-179
criticism of, 283—284 ragtime, 509-512, 514, 520 and advertising, 164, 170-
definition of, 256—257 rhythm and blues, 544 171
documentaries, 269-270 rock and roll. 544-547 alternative, 169-170
economics of, 116-117, sheet music, 508, 511, 513, audience of, 160, 161-163,
274-280 515, 527 425
and freedom of the press, swing and big band, 541- black, 168-169
62, 126, 132 543 circulation of, 49-50, 160,
functions of, 259-262 technology of, 514-515, 166, 171, 491-492
genres, 267-269 527-534, 547, 550 commercial and partisan.
history of, 55-63, 258-259, Tin Pan Alley, 512-515 44, 161
260-262, 265 Muybridge, Eadweard, 57-58 content of, 161-163, 174-
influence of, 295—302,
175, 178-179
307-309 Nader, Ralph, 248 criticism of, 177-180
moral code of, 62, 132, Naisbitt, John dailies, 166-167
280-283 Megatrends: Ten New Di¬ definition of, 41, 160
organization of, 262-264, rections Transforming economics of, 112-113,
274-277 Our Lives, 501 160-161, 170-177,
ownership of, 274—277 Narrowcasting, 205 200-201
profitability of, 279-280 National Citizens Committee eighteenth-century, 41-44
regulation of, 276 for Broadcasting, 219 ethnic, 168-169
 Index 617 ■

Newspapers, continued Ownership Pornography, 131 — 133, 146,

foreign-language, 168 advertising industry, 567— 427-431
and freedom of the press, 569 Porta, Giovanni della, 64
124-125, 126, 128- broadcasting industry, 65, Potter, David, 560—561, 562,
132, 138-141, 146 66-68. 117-118, 214, 563
functions of. 161 — 163 215, 219 Presley, Elvis, 544
history of, 40—52, 161—162 concentrated. 111, 113, Press associations, see Wire
nineteenth-century, 44—49 117, 146, 172-176, services
official, 162 214, 215, 219, 276- Press councils, 179
organization of, 163—165 277, 568-569 Print media, 156—203
ownership of, 51, 171 — 175 motion picture industry, audience of, 158—160
penny press, 44—46, 161 — 274-277 economics of, 200
162 newspaper industry, 51, future of, 200—201
political, 41—42, 44, 112, 112-113, 171-175 see also Books; Newspa¬
161 pers; Magazines
and the public interest, Prior restraint, 124. 139
160-161, 174-175 Pablo, Juan, 38 Production companies,
religious, 172 Paine, Thomas, 125 independent
sensationalist, 47—49, 51 — Park, Robert E., 161, 444 broadcasting, 212, 233—234
52 Parker, Edwin, 316—318, 376 motion picture. 275—276
shoppers (free-distribution), Pastore, John, 318 record industry, 537—539
167-168 Pates, Gordon. 481 Professional communicators, 6,
and styles of reporting, 51— Payne Fund Studies 24-26, 408-411
52, 162-163, 177- Blumer, 296—302 advertising, 568, 569—570
178, 456-467 Peterson-Thurstone, 300— broadcasting, 210—211
technology of, 84-85 302 and career training, 26-30
twentieth-century, 49—52 Penny press, 44—46, 161 — 162 motion picture. 262-264.
weeklies (community or Pentagon Papers, 138—139 277
grassroots), 167 People's Choice, The, 310—315 newspaper, 163—165
see also Journalism Perception, 16 public relations, 590
New York Daily News. 109 Personal influence, 314—315, publishing, 194—195
New York Herald. 45—46 326-327, 337-338, 425 record industry, 537—539
New York Journal, 48—49 Peterson, Ruth C., 300—302 television, 232—234
New York Sun. 45, 161—162, Peterson, Theodore, 181 — 182, Profit motive, 6, 48. 51, 65,
373 190-191 107-109, 216, 360
New York Times. 84, 89—90, Phonograph, 514—515, 527— and newspapers. 160—161,
128, 137, 138-139, 140- 534 172-177
141 Photography, 56, 57—58 see also Economic controls
New York Times Service, 483— journalistic, 46—47 Programming, see Content
484 Plateau, Joseph, 57 Project Revere, 336—338
Nickelodeons, 60 Police. 148-149 Project Zero, 420
Nielsen rating service, 493—494 Political campaigns, 310—315. Protestant ethic, 107
Niepce, Joseph, 56 345-346 Public access
Nimmo, Dan, 469 Political controls, see Freedom to cable television, 90—91
Nixon, Richard, 138, 145. 428 of the press to news media, 178—179
Novak, Michael, 243, 315 Political influences, 38—39. 41 — Public Broadcasting Service.
42, 44, 427 118, 214-216
Polls, 312-313, 491. 497-501 Public Broadcasting System,
Obscenity, 131 — 133, 146, 427— Pope. Daniel, 577 119, 418
431 Popular culture. 353—364 Public interest
Observational learning, 319— criticism of, 353—354 and broadcasting, 216,
321 and heroes, 357—360 217-219
Ohman, Jack, 489 and kitsch, 354—357 and newspapers, 49, 51 —
Original Dixieland Jazz Band. and taste publics, 360—364 52. 160-161. 174-175
520-523. 526 Popular music, see Music, Public relations. 584-592
Owen, Bruce M., 211—212 popular criticism of. 591—592
■ 618 Index

Public relations, continued of advertising, 146—148, Reverse labeling, 17

definition of, 584—586 219-220, 581-584 Ripley, Joan M., 199
history of, 586—587 and censorship, 133—141 Rivera, Geraldo, 464
organization of, 587—591 of television, 90—91, 207, Rivers, William L., 179
Publishing 229-231, 246 Rogers, Everett, 332
books, 38-40, 192-196, see also Licensing Roget, Peter Mark, 57
198-199 Reid, Alastair, 459 Role taking, 19—21, 22
economics of, 193—194, Reidy, John, 92 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 136
198-199 Relative incidence, 350—352 Roosevelt, Theodore, 54, 182
history of, 37—55, 193 Religion, 305 Roshco, Bernard, 444, 446
magazines, 52—55, 182— and broadcasting, 214, 241 Roshier, Bob, 350
184 and media ownership, 172, Royko, Mike, 312-313, 455
newspapers, 40—52 480 Russworm, John B., 168
process of, 194—195 and motion pictures, 62,
software, 196—198 281 Sabido, Miguel, 340
technology of, 37, 44, 46 and music, 506, 525 Sarnoff, David, 66
Pulitzer, Joseph, 48 Repetition, 335—337 Sarris, Andrew, 284
Research, 404—439 Satellite master-antenna televi¬
Radio, 222-227 on advertising, 574-577, sion (SMATV), 92
content of, 224—227 580-581 Satellites, 78,- 84-94, 148, 228
economics of, 117-118, on alcohol-use portrayal, Sawyer, Diane, 25
222, 226-227 390-392 Schramm, Wilbur, 316—318,
history of, 65—69, 223—226 on audience, 422—426 376, 450-451
influence of, 302—306 journals of, 405-406, 426 Schwartzberg, Neal, 422
licensing of, 67—68, 117— on meaning theory, 393— Schwarzlose, Richard A., 481
118, 122, 223-224 400 Scientific method, 407—408,
and music, 541-542, 550 on media influence, 293— 426, 434
ownership of, 66—68 328 Scornia, Harry J., 212
Ramirez, Francisco P.. 169 methodology of, 299-301, Scripps, Edward Wyllis, 478
Rather, Dan, 141, 458 310-311, 406-408, Sedition Act (1898), 136
Rating services, 489—496 416, 433-435 Sevareid, Eric. 244
methodology of, 492-495 on modeling theory, 386— Sex, portrayal of, 280—283,
news, 494—496 393 413-416, 427-431
television, 492-496 Payne Fund Studies, 295— and violence, 428—430
Reagan, Ronald, 139, 144-145, 302 Sex-role models, 268—269,
148, 225-226 on perception of social 386-389, 556-559, 583
Reality problems, 351—352 Shaw, Donald L., 345—346
and media portrayals, 373— on portrayal of mentally ill, Sheatsley, Paul, 334
374, 388-389, 392, 393-400 Sheppard, Sam, 130-131
432-433 on presidential campaigns, Sherman, William Tecumseh,
and news, 409-410, 443- 310-315, 345-346 137-138
446, 469 on sex portrayal, 413-416, Shibutani, Tamotsu, 445
social construction of, 341, 427-431 Shield laws, 140—141
432, 469 on sex-role portrayal, 386- Shogun, 233
Record industry, 10—11, 534— 389 Silverman, L. Theresa, 416
541 on social change, 332-334 “Sixty Minutes,” 462—463
economics of, 534—536 on television and children, Small, William J., 480
future of, 548-550 315-323, 418-425, Smith, Anthony, 77
marketing, 536—541 580-581 Snepp, Frank
technology of, 527-534, on violence, 318—324, 417, Decent Interval, 123
547, 550 427, 431-435 Snow, Robert, 469
see also Music, popular on War of the Worlds Social and cultural influences,
Reed, Bob. 489 broadcast, 304-306 8, 21. 23-24, 38-39, 44,
Regulation, government, 126— on Why We Fight series, 150, 271-274
127, 133-149, 216-221, 307-309 and new technology, 97-99,
276, 427 Reston, James, 137 207-208
 Index 619 ■

Social categories, 305—306, Teletext, 93—95 Thompson, Hunter S., 460

317-318, 326, 345-346, Television, 117, 227—249 Thoreau, Henry David. 442—
425 and advertising, 236—289. 443
Social change, 332—341 409-413 “3-2-1 Contact," 420
diffusion of, 332—338 audience of, 235—236 Thurstone, L. L., 300—302
and national development, cable, 79-80, 87-93, 97- Time, 53—54
338-341 98, 122-123, 244-249 Times-Mirror Company, 172
Social Darwinism, 107 and children, 240, 315— Tocqueville, Alexis de, 141
Social problems, 347—353 323, 418-425 Toffler, Alvin, 249
defining, 348—350 color, 230 Trace, 13—15, 380
and relative incidence, 350— content of, 222, 234—244, Trade names, 572—573
352 318-324, 390-392, Traub, James, 87
Social science, see Research 396-400. 409-417 Trial, right to, 130-131. MO-
Software publishing, 196—198 crime-adventure dramas, 142
Sousa, John Philip, 529, 530 237, 396-400 Turner. Ted, 26, 82
South Africa, Republic of, 150 criticism of, 242—244
Spanish-American War, 293 cultural and educational Ultra-high frequency (UHF).
Speech-communications train¬ programs, 241-242, 228-230
ing, 29—30 418-422 United Press Association (UP),
Stanford, Leland, 57 economics of. 118—123, 227 478, 480
Stark, John S., 511 entertainment programs, United Press International
Steffens, Lincoln, 182 237-241. 242 (UPI), 475, 478-484
Steinem, Gloria, 429 history of, 69—73, 84 University presses, 195—196
Steinfield, J. L., 323 influence of, 243, 315—324, USA Today, 84-85. 163, 465
Stevenson, H. L., 478 390-392, 396-400
Surveillance, 442, 468—470 licensing of, 71—72, 117— Vanity press, 198
Symbols, language, 13, 15—18, 118, 122 Variety, 270-271
379-381 low power, 231—232 Very high frequency (VHF).
Syndicates, see Feature and magazines, 184, 192 228-230
syndicates networks, 117—122, 233— Video
234 home, 91-92. 95-97. 122
Talese, Gay, 460 news and public affairs pro¬ music, 548—550
Tarbell, Ida, 182 grams, 241, 243, 409— Videocassette recorders (VCRs),
Tarde, Gabriel, 294, 332 413 96-97. 123
Tarlton, Robert, 245 organization of, 232—234 Videoconferencing, 95
Technology, 23, 77-84, 97-99, public, 118, 119 Videodiscs, 95
207-208 religious programs, 241 Videodisk recorders (VDRs).
broadcasting, 64—66, 206— soap operas, 241—242, 96-97
209 390-392 Video games, 95
in the marketplace, 80—84 subscription (toll), 92, 122, Videotex, 93-95. 122, 148
motion picture, 55—59, 61 — 230-231 Viewdata, 93
62, 259 technology of, 69—70. 79— Violence, 149
news media, 455—456 80. 227-232, 244-245 on television. 150, 318—
newspapers, 84—85 viewing patterns of, 316— 324, 417, 428-430.
publishing, 37, 44, 46 317, 322, 422-425 431-435
record industry, 514—515, and violence, 150, 318— Visual lag (visual persistence),
527-534, 547, 548- 324, 417, 428-430, 56-57
550 431-435
social consequences of, 97— Television and Adolescent Weaver, David, 95
99 Aggression, 321—322 Weaver. Paul. 450
television, 69—70, 79—80, Television and Social Behav¬ Weber. Max, 107
227-232, 244-245 ior. 318-324 Wells. H. G.
wire service, 476. 478 Television Audience Assess¬ War of the Worlds. 302—
Telecommunication. 205 ment, Inc., 494 306
Telegraph, 46, 64—65 Thomas, Isaiah, 125 Whipple. Thomas, 583
Telephony. 95 Thomas, W. H., 487 Whiteman, Paul. 526
■ 620 Index

Whole Book of Psalmes (Bay role of, 482-483 Writing, 34-37

Psalm Book), 39 supplemental, 483—484 pictographic, ideographic,
Wicklein, John, 77. 99, 148 technology of, 476, 478 and phonetic, 34—35
Wietzman, Lenore, 387—389 Wolfe, Tom, 460
Yellow journalism, 47—48, 51 —
Wire services, 46, 475—484 Women, portrayal of, 268—269,
52
comparison of, 480—482 386-389, 556-559, 583
Young, Jock, 453
economics of, 480, 482, 484 Wood, James P.. 184
history of, 476—478 Woodward, Bob, 461, 463 Zenger, John Peter, 126—127
international, 482—483 Wright, Charles, 469 Zoetrope, 57
organization of, 475—476 Wright, John S., 569 Zukor, Adolph, 261
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