Mass Media as a Macrolevel Source of Social Control: A New Direction in the Community Structure Model

Abstract

A community structure model is grounded in the structural model of mass media originally formulated by the Minnesota team of Tichenor, Donohue, and Olien. Although recent theoretical and empirical work has led to major refinements of the community structure research, there remain substantive and promising issues that deserve to be examined by mass communication scholars. This article recasts the original structural model by integrating a community-oriented approach to social control and formulates a set of hypotheses with regard to the role of local mass media in community social control.