Radio and Television Studies and American Culture

Abstract

WHILE MASS MEDIA THEORY IS THE SUBJECT OF ANOTHER ESSAY IN THIS issue, for our purposes a brief discussion of some of the major mass media theorists who matured during and after World War II would be useful. It is important to keep in mind that these theorists, influenced by the propagandistic emphasis of the war years, sought to learn techniques to manipulate the mass media rather than to comprehend those media deeply. It is also important to keep in mind that television and radio were viewed as non-distinctive media during this period when the transportation theory of mass communication prevailed. That is, the importance of getting a message effectively from point A to point B with minimum distortion or noise occupied the attention of many mass media theorists. From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, research in mass media focused on their effects; the dominant assumption was that given a certain set of repeatable stimuli, certain effects could be achieved. Implicit in this pattern was the belief that there was a large, uniform mass audience. It was, according to Paul Hirsch, the theory of the undifferentiated horde.1 Paul