Media Theory Contributions to an Understanding of American Mass Communications

Media Theory: Contributions to an Understanding of American Mass CommunicationsAuthor(s): Michael R. RealReviewed work(s):Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 3 (1980), pp. 238-258Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2712449 .

Accessed: 13/12/2012 08:42

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toAmerican Quarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded on Thu, 13 Dec 2012 08:42:32 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2712449?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


MEDIA THEORY: CONTRIBUTIONS TO AN

UNDERSTANDING OF AMERICAN MASS COMMUNICATIONS

MICHAEL R. REAL San Diego State University

IN A STUDY TITLED "THE EFFECTIVENESS OF SYMBOLS,"' CLAUDE LEVI- Strauss locates a concept that is central to any genuinely theoretical understanding of communication. The study examines a shamanistic curing text of considerable antiquity from the Cuna Indians of Panama. The text is a rite for releasing blockage from a particularly difficult childbirth. In the rite, the shaman narrates a long dramatic myth seemingly unrelated to childbirth. In his textual analysis, Levi-Strauss brings to the surface hid- den parallels between the characters, settings, and actions of the narrated myth and the directly emotional and indirectly physiological obstacles preventing delivery of the infant. Like a yarn-spinning psychotherapist, the Cuna shaman engages the mother in an imaginary recitation of fantas- tic events in which the focus of obstruction is identified and overcome. As Levi-Strauss explains the rite, through the crucial assistance of symbols, the child is born. This human ability to represent and thereby control experience and the environment, this "effectiveness of symbols," lies at the heart of the workings of shamans, psychotherapists, and mass com- municators. If the role of "symbols" is as central to human culture and all

1 Claude Levi-Strauss, "The Effectiveness of Symbols," Structural Anthropology, trans. by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963). First published as "L'Efficacit6 Symbolique," Revue de iHistoire des Religions, 135 (Jan.-Mar. 1949), 5-27.



Media Theory 239

life as Levi-Strauss, Ernst Cassirer, and many other commentators would have us believe, we have in the notion of symbols both a justification for the study of mass communication and a central concept in the theoretical underpinnings of such an endeavor.

This bibliographic essay considers in a rather eclectic manner what elements 6f "theory" have evolved to explain the recurring patterns and principles uncovered in mass communication research and practice. Stepping back from the specifics of film, television, radio, and print dealt with in other essays in this issue, what can be said of theoretical significance about media in general? The term "theory" is used here to mean coordinated sets of statements (observations, principles, axioms, or conclusions) which in their generalization account for relationships and patterns (perhaps "causality") within a range of related phenomena (objects, processes, or events) that constitute a scholarly field or discipline. Theory requires a substantial "level of abstraction," as Jacques Maritain uses that phrase, and, as Noam Chomsky has shown in linguistics, demands deductive impositions of human thinking as well as inductive processing of the details of concrete research data.3 These concerns have not been particularly prevalent in what has passed for theory in mass communication, making it necessary here to consider atomistic and empirical descrip- tions of the processing of messages and their effect on behavior as well as more holistic philosophical generalizations about the role and nature of mediated communication in society.

While this essay surveys the mainstream of mass communications research and analysis in the United States in search of media theory, the selection and integration of material seeks some originality even as it considers the standard consensus. Our designation of communication is that briefest one by George Gerbner: "interaction through messages.'4 Our definition of mass communication derives from Charles Wright: mass communication is public, rapid, and transient communication through a complex corporate organization to a relatively large, heterogeneous, and anonymous audience.5

Resisting the more usual insistence on "recency," which itself may be an academic spillover from our mass-mediated consumer culture, this bibliographic review acknowledges certain "classics" of media theory as

2 Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953).

3Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1967). 4George Gerbner, "Mass Media and Human Communication Theory," in Frank E. X.

Dance, ed., Human Communication Theory (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967); and in Denis MacQuail, ed., Sociology of Mass Communication (London: Penguin, 1971).

5Charles Wright, Mass Communication: A Sociological Perspective (New York: Random House, 1959).



240 American Quarterly

well as newer developments. The first of these classics offers Harold Lasswell's widely used segmentation of the communication process: 6

Who Says What

In Which Channel To Whom

With What Effect?

The groupings in this review are modifications of such usual headings: 1) theories of how messages are passed among and influence audiences; 2) theories of transmission of messages by media technologies and personnel; 3) theories concerning the message content and implications; and 4) for want of a better word, "critical" theories which consider the overall process and nature of mass media in themselves and in society. Of the many previous bibliographic critiques of media theory, perhaps the most relevant here is the 1973 essay by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann summarized in its title, "Return to the Concept of Powerful Mass Media."7

AUDIENCE THEORY

The "effectiveness of symbols" has remained a central question in mass communications research throughout this century, especially in reference to the ability of transmitted symbols to influence human lives. The earliest and still strongest tradition in mass communications research seeks to measure the effects of media messages on audiences, generally using the methods of social psychology. The emphasis is on audience attitudes and behavior in relation to information diffusion and influence. Public opinion polling, television ratings, and advertising research make explorations into audience effects especially lucrative and visible. Recent major works, such as Television and Human Behavior8 or High Culture and Popular Culture, 9 can be appreciated for their theoretical, rather than merely descriptive or empirical, contributions only when they are seen within the context of audience effects research as that tradition has evolved over the last half century.

6 Harold Lasswell, "The Structure and Function of Communication in Society," in Wil- bur Schramm, ed., Mass Communication (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1960).

7 Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, "Return to the Concept of Powerful Mass Medla," Studies in Broadcasting, 9 (Tokyo: Nippon Hoso Kyokai, 1973), 67-112; also excerpted in Everette E. Dennis, Arnold H. Ismach, and Donald M. Gillmor, eds., Enduring Issues in Mass Communication (St. Paul: West Publishing, 1978).

8 George Comstock et al., Television and Human Behavior (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1978).

9 Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (New York: Basic Books, 1974).



Media Theory 241

In a benchmark essay of 1948,10 two of the most respected contributors to this tradition summarized media effects on audiences with three phrases. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton wrote first of the statuts-conferral function of the media, in which "the mass media confer status on public issues, persons, organizations and social movements," giving them recognition and legitimization. A generation later, Maxwell McCombs and others would develop this theme into the notion of the "agenda-setting function" of the mass media; in the words of B. C. Cohen: "It Ithe press] may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about." 11 Lazarsfeld and Merton labelled a second media function the enforcement of social norms. At the same time as press coverage confers status on selected persons, policies, and groups, "mass media clearly serve to reaffirm social norms by exposing deviations from these norms to public view." Later theorists expanded this function into the "cultural norms theory" of media effects. Essentially, this theory holds that a person's behavior is normally guided by the individual's perception of cultural norms while the mass media, through selective presentation and emphasis, establish audience impressions of such common cultural norms.12 It thus argues the indirect rather than direct effectiveness of media, through modification of the audience's assumed definition of the situation. The third generalization in the essay by Lazarsfeld and Merton identified the narcotizing dysfunction of the media. They argued that increasing dosages of mass communications may be inadver- tently transforming the energies of men from active participation into passive knowledge, leaving large masses of the population politically apathetic and inert.

In their essay, Lazarsfeld and Merton were attempting to strike a balance between contending positions. The 1930s had been the highwater mark in the belief, especially in the public mind, in the omnipotence of media, summarized as the "hypodermic needle" theory of media effects. Mass fads during the Roaring Twenties and the Depression Thirties, advertising successes, the effective use of radio by Roosevelt and Hitler, Hollywood's supply of universal idols and images, Orson Welles' infamous

10 Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton, "Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Social Action," in Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1957).

11 B. C. Cohen, The Press, the Public and Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), 13. See also Donald L. Shaw and Maxwell E. McCombs, The Emergence of American Political Issues: The Agenda-Setting Function of the Press (St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing, 1977).

12 Melvin L. DeFleur, Theories of Mass Communication (New York: David McKay, 1966).




panic broadcast on Halloween, 1938-these and many more examples lent themselves to a simple stimulus-response theory of the automatic effectiveness of messages injected into the body public by the mass media. But the research of the 1940s by Lazarsfeld, Merton, Bernard Berelson, Karl Hovland, Irving Janis, Joseph Klapper, and others con- tradicted such oversimplifications. Hadley Cantril's research on the Welles broadcast highlighted the uniqueness of the social and historical conditions and the style of the broadcast which made possible its panic results.13 The seminal analysis by Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet of voting preferences in Erie County, Ohio, in the 1940 presiden- tial campaign, published as The People's Choice,14 gave birth to the immensely productive research tradition centered on social relations, personal influence, and the two-step flow of information from media to influential persons to the less active sectors of the populace. This emphasis on social process variables intervening between the transmissions of mass media and the behavior of the audience was complemented by psychological research on individual differences and personal judgment variables which also modified or prevented media effectiveness.15 Under the im- petus of such research, generalizations were beginning to swing in the opposite direction and imply that mass media were virtually insignificant as social forces. Lazarsfeld and Merton, in delineating the status- conferral function, the enforcement of social norms, and the narcotizing dysfunction, reminded observers that, if media were not omnipotent, neither were they sterile and impotent. Recently, Steven Chaffee has reexamined seminal works on the influence of the media and has found more evidence of causality than many secondary writings had come to assume. 16

The most reliable and thorough recent book in the "effects" tradition strikes a similar balance although it lacks theoretical intent. Television and Human Behavior, by George Comstock, Steven Chaffee, Nathan Katzman, Maxwell McCombs, and Donald Roberts,17 summarizes in one volume the incredible array of research findings on television content,

13 Hadley Cantril, The Invasion from Mars (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1940). 14 Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berefson, and Hazel Gaudet, The People's Choice (New

York: Harper and Row, 1944). 15 The best known of these studies is the Yale program represented by Carl I. Hovland,

A. A. Lumsdaine, and F. D. Sheffield, Experiments on Mass Communications (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1949).

16 Steven H. Chaffee, "Mass Media vs. Interpersonal Channels: The Synthetic Competi- tion," paper presented to the Speech Communication Association, San Antonio, Texas, November 1979; see also Chaffee's earlier work, "The Interpersonal Context of Mass Communication," in F. Gerald Kline and Philip J. Tichenor, eds., Current Perspectives in Mass Communication Research (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1972).

17 Comstock et al., Television and Human Behavior.



Media Theory 243

audiences, viewing patterns, political and commercial persuasiveness, and behavioral effects. Its contribution to theory may be primarily nega- tive: no attempt at media theory can fail to take into account its findings, and the empirical conclusions may conflict with many otherwise tempting generalizations. Its strengths and weaknesses are those of the audience effects tradition in general: it clarifies the details of the processes and conditions of media effectiveness and ineffectiveness without establishing an explanatory theoretical framework that accounts for the details.

Another important and relatively recent book in the sociological audience tradition provides a contrasting extreme. Herbert Gans' High Cul- ture and Popular Culture 18 proposes categorizations and explanations but lacks empirical specifics, especially in its treatment of mass media. He argues that policy-makers, including those funding the arts, should accept and support the pragmatic legitimacy of popular forms of culture as well as high culture. Recalling the highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow categories of an earlier generation, Gans defines and defends what he calls "taste cultures" ranging through creator-oriented high art, less abstract upper-middle culture, light popular expressions of lower-middle culture, predictable low culture of the working classes, "quasi-folk" low culture of poor and rural origins, and the distinct cultures of youth, ethnics of color, and ethnics of European descent. He concludes that people have a right to the culture they prefer and that, while higher cultures may be more comprehensive, it would be wrong "to support through public policies the welfare of the higher cultures at the expense of the lower ones." Gans' policy recommendations may be more satisfying than his theoretical judgments. Without citing evidence, he seems to attack the audience research tradition by asserting, "People pay much less, attention to the media and are much less swayed by its contents than the critics ... believe." On the influence of popular culture as a whole, Gans appears inconsistent, asserting at one time, "popular culture does not harm either high culture, the people who prefer it, or the society as a whole," and at another time, " [popular culture has played a useful role in the process of enabling ordinary people to become individuals, develop their identities, and find ways to achieving creativity and self-expression." Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence point out that this reasoning "suggests that popular culture, while powerfully influential in benign areas of behavior, lacks the power to corrupt and destroy-an obvious contradiction.'"

18 Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture. 19 Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, The American Monomyth (Garden City,

N. Y.: Doubleday), 4.




Michael Jerome Carella reminds us that the descriptive taxonomy of Gans and similar sociologists of popular culture cannot do the work of theory.20

Ithiel de Sola Pool, Harold Lasswell, and George Gerbner have each commented on the contribution of political science to media theory.21 Conflict between the ideals of liberal democracy and the realities of mass persuasion has forced many media questions onto the agenda of political research and theory. The policy importance of such questions, locally, nationally, and internationally, has been clarified by comparative and applied political research. Political persuasion and campaign tactics in the United States in the 1950s were often exempted from consideration as "propaganda." More recent works, however, tend to accept opinion manipulation as a domestic reality and consider political persuasion as the direct counterpart to advertising persuasion, in that both forms of persuasion oppose the ideal of free autonomous decision-making by informed individuals.22

The "uses and gratifications" approach to media audience theory may be a more congenial location for Gans and other traditional sociologists than the "effects" approach described above. "Uses and gratifications" theory focuses on the needs satisfied by individual consumers in using the media, without regard to the effects sought by the media producers. In this sense, it is nominally more an "audience" theory than is the "effects" tradition.

Harold Lasswell's provocative essay on "The Structure and Function of Communication in Society"23 in 1948 set the stage for much subsequent thinking on mass communication and anticipated functionalist categories of the uses and gratifications type. The essay develops analogies between the role of mass communication in society and the role of communication within zoological primary groups and individual organisms. The universal necessity of surveillance of the environment was later dubbed the news function, the requirement of correlation of the parts became the editorial function, and needed transmission of the social heri- tage was labelled the educational function. Subsequent attempts to add an "entertainment" function and an "advertising" function fail to capture

20 Michael Jerome Carella, "A Critique of Popular Culture Theories," paper presented to the Popular Culture Association/West, April 1978, San Diego.

21 For a summary, see especially Gerbner, "Mass Media and Human Communication Theory."

22 A significant example of this acceptance of similarities between political persuasions is chapter seven, "Politics and Purchases" in Comstock et al., Television and Human Behavior.

23 Lasswell, "Structure and Function."



Media Theory 245

Lasswell's intent but provide the largest "use and gratification" cited by, for example, television viewers.24

Jay G. Blumler and Elihu Katz provide an overview and details of this useful and controversial approach in The Uses of Mass Communica- tions.25 They cite five elements dominant in the uses and gratifications model: 1) the audience is conceived of as active and goal-directed, rather than passive, and purposeless; 2) the audience member links media choice and gratification, thus limiting any straight-line effect of media by producers-that is, audiences use media rather than media using audiences; 3) media compete with other sources of need satisfaction, and understanding media requires taking into account personal and other functional alternatives to media; 4) audience members can articulate or at least recognize their interests and motives in attending to media, and explanations of their activities more appropriately start with the audience rather than the producer; and 5) value judgment about the cultural significance of mass communication should be suspended while audience orien- tations are being explored on their own terms. This last proposal indicates why "uses and gratifications" represents an alternative approach which is in opposition to approaches via "effects" research, popular culture, and critical theory.

Perhaps the greatest limitation on audience theory, whether "effects" or "gratifications" oriented, is that it has been blessed with so much empirical data and has developed so many related or contending concepts that it has tended to remain self-contained. Rather than contributing to a theory of mass communications in toto, audience research has pursued its own purposes. It has yet to be integrated into an overall schema including transmission theory, message theory, and critical theory.

TRANSMISSION THEORY

How is the effectiveness of symbols influenced by the ways in which mass media institutions create, multiply, and convey messages? Trans- mission theory, or perhaps more critically "institutional theory," concerns the process through which messages are developed, duplicated, and relayed to audiences. The bulk of media research has studied media

24 The "entertainment" function was added by Charles Wright, Mass Communications: A Sociological Perspective (New York: Random House, 1959). Wilbur Schramm at one time proposed a fifth function, "advertising," but his later works do not retain the addition; see Men, Messages, and Media (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).

25 Jay G. Blumler and Elihu Katz, eds., The Uses of Mass Communications: Current Perspectives on Gratifications Research (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1974). See especially their preliminary overview essay with Michael Gurevitch, "Utilization of Mass Communication by the Individual."




consumers and media impact on behavior and decision-making. Less attention has been paid to the intricacies of transmission-that is, to the media institutions which develop messages or the media systems which relay them. This imbalance is understandable in the American commercial context where media are financed largely as vehicles for selling and where, therefore, producers spend lavishly to learn about and control buyer behavior. Yet no "media theory" could hope to be complete without considering media transmission as well as audience effects; in fact, the central component of overall media theory is the specific communication medium which connects sender and receiver.

"Gatekeeper" research over three decades has identified especially the role that editors play in the transmission of news between event and public. Developing an idea of Kurt Lewin, journalistic research initiated by David Manning White and Warren Breed has spelled out motives, characteristics, and results of selectivity among personnel in wire ser- vices, news organizations, and similar decision-making positions.26 The gatekeeper model developed by Bruce Westley and Malcolm MacLean portrays the mass communication process with particular emphasis on the 'co-orientation'' of gatekeepers inserted between news source and audience.

Ethnomethodological studies of professional media personnel by Har- vey Molotch, Gaye Tuchman, David Altheide, and others have deepened this analysis by describing how social routines in a newsroom and social definitions of reality shared by newspersons and entertainers determine the possibilities of news and entertainment-of what gets covered and talked about, and how.28 Historical studies by Erik Barnouw, David Halberstam, and others describe how media owners and managers set policy and relate to the day-to-day operations of their institutions.29

26 For a review of this tradition, see George A. Donohue, Phillip J. Tichenor, and Clarice N. Olien, "Gatekeeping: Mass Media Systems and Information Control," in Kline and Tichenor, eds., Current Perspectives.

27 Bruce H. Westley and Malcolm S. MacLean, Jr., "A Conceptual Model for Communi- cations Research," Journalism Quarterly, 34 (1957), 31-38.

28 See, for example, David Altheide, Creating Reality: How TV News Distorts Events (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1976) and Gaye Tuchman, Making News>; A Study in the Construction of Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978). Altheide and Tuchman have also expanded to considerations of media content as well as personal processes; see, for example, David Altheide and Robert P. Snow, Media Logic (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979) or Gaye Tuchman, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, and James Benet, eds., Hearth and Home: Images of W, omen in the Mass Media (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978).

29 Halberstam provides exceptional anecdotal verification of the frequently assumed but seldom confirmed relationship between media ownership and media practice see David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979). Barnouw has fol- lowed his definitive three-volume history of broadcasting with such works as The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978) and a condensed history, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975).



Media Theory 247

What these studies give us is not so much a theory as a description of social processes which precede messages reaching the audience, much as social relations effects research identifies the social processes which fol- low that point of impact where messages encounter audiences. Recent work on the "production of culture" provides a broader context for understanding these processes. The Production of Culture,30 edited by Richard Peterson, develops analogues in the transmission of art, science, and religion in technological societies; Paul Hirsch has applied these analogues to an understanding of the productive role of mass media in society. The application of organizational and institutional models to mass media research and theory moves us beyond the individualistic analysis which has plagued audience research and critiques of kitsch and popular culture and brings us closer to critical discussions of media as industries.

The question of the impact of media technologies on duplication and transmission rose to special prominence with Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s. He reminded researchers that the role of the technical media of communications-print, electronic, aural-is as integral to the communication process as are the roles of messages and audiences. For a time, the intriguing case for media as the cause of all major historical shifts seemed to make technological determinism the dominant form of media theory.

McLuhan's emphasis revolved around the assertion that communications media, apart from their message content, structure and determine the dominant definitions of personal and social reality in any given historical period; such media are inclusive ("cool") or intensive ("hot"). The origins of many aspects of this insight can be found in a journal edited from 1953 to 1959 as part of a Ford Foundation study by McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter.31 The numerous contributors explored differences between aural and visual cultures, between print and electronic societies, between lineal and non-lineal codifications of reality, between the eye and the ear, and various other dichotomies, all around the recurring theme of the nature and impact of communications media.

McLuhan also borrowed from his fellow Canadian Harold Adams Innis. In comparing the thought of these two, James W. Carey has made an important contribution to media theory.32 Carey's comparison notes that

30 Richard A. Peterson, ed., The Production of Culture (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1976); Paul M. Hirsch, "Organizational Analysis and Field Studies," in Paul M. Hirsch, Peter V. Miller, and F. Gerald Kline, eds., Strategies for Communication Research (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1977).

31 Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan, eds., Explorations in Communication (Bos- ton: Beacon Press, 1960). McLuhan's most prominent book, Understanding Media: The Extension of Man, was published in 1964 but appeared in an earlier form in his report to the United States Office of Education in 1960, titled "Understanding Media."

32 James W. Carey, "Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan," in Raymond Rosen- thal, ed., McLuhan Pro and Con (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968).




Innis initiated the claim that progressive changes in the dominant form of media in the history of Western civilization had a determinate influence on the character of social institutions and the nature of culture. He distinguished "time-biased" media, which are durable and difficult to transport, from "space-biased" media, which are light and less durable. Because spoken language carries only a short distance, Innis defined traditional aural societies as time-bound with a heavy emphasis on tradition, religion, and morality. Societies relying on print, in contrast, are space- bound and tend to emphasize the secular state, expansionism, and the technical order. Innis sees the history of the modern West as a monopoly of knowledge founded on print. Those familiar with McLuhan will recognize the argument, despite certain variations in vocabulary. Carey em- phasizes that, "Whereas Innis sees communication technology princi- pally affecting social organization and culture, McLuhan sees its principal effect on sensory organization and thought." McLuhan' s position be- comes then, to Carey, very similar to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in linguistics, a hypothesis which is plausible but has produced little research and few advances in the study of language and perception. The flaw is in developing a very general theory with very narrow evidence. Innis' approach is historical, social, and institutional; McLuhan is more personal and speculative. According to Carey, "for Innis, the oral tradition repre- sentative of man's concern with history and metaphysics, morals and meanings had to be preserved if we were not to fall victim to a sacred politics and a sanctified science." Carey concluded that McLuhan finally fell victim to the technology and science which Innis so profoundly criticized.

A variety of directions spread outward from the McLuhan/Innis focus on media technology. Split-brain research and the psychology of consciousness may clarify differential effects of media channels and provide a firmer base for the value dichotomies suggested by the contrast of visually oriented print cultures and aurally oriented non-literate or electronic cultures.33 Studies of ethnic differences and intercultural communication also offer the possibility of converging with theories of media variations.34 Anti-television arguments by such writers as Jerrv Mander and Marie Winn build from slim bases in opposing McLuhanesque canonizations of

3 The research of Robert Ornstein, Andrew Weil, and others has been tentatively applied to media analysis by McLuhan and others; I have summarized certain of these contrasts in Mass-Mediated Culture (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977), 208-12.

34 The works of Michael Prosser, Tulsi Saral, Fred Casmir, and Molefi Asante suggest possible contributions by intercultural analysis to media theory.



Media Theory 249

electronic media.35 Critiques of technology by Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mum- ford, and other social philosophers parallel the work of Innis and contrib- ute to the critical tradition in media theory.36 Engineering and mathematical theories of communication serve well the technical needs of media transmission but generally have not generated significant concepts and research integrated with social theories.37

Transmission research on media personnel, institutions, and technologies has clarified the nature and details of processes connecting audiences with creators of messages. There remains, however, a considerable gap between research evidence and theoretical speculation concerning media transmission.

MESSAGE THEORY

The "effectiveness of symbols, to which Levi-Strauss refers, depends most intrinsically on their specific content and form. Message theory concerns this content and form, that is, what travels through the channels of mass communication. Message theory links transmission theory with audience theory by focusing on the symbols exchanged. Unlike transmission and audience research, message analysis is not dominated by social scientists; scholars from the arts and humanities assert their positions with weapons of textual analysis and aesthetic theory appropriate to the subject matter.

The most common methodology for studying mass communication messages has been content analysis; 0. R. Holsti defines the method as "any technique for making inferences by objectively and systematically identifying accurate characteristics of messages." 38 For all the difficulty of identifying accurate categories and placing content within them, content analysis has been heavily used in many contexts for more than a generation. Television and Human Behavior39 illustrates what content analysis has shown us about the frequency and distribution of types of broadcast programs, themes of television drama, portrayals of race, class,

35 The book by Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (New York: Morrow Quill, 1978), contains fascinating theoretical propositions mingled with an overbearing journalistic argumentation of limited significance. A print bias seems discernible in Marie Winn, The Plug-In Drug (New York: Viking, 1977).

36 See, for example, Michael R. Real and Clifford G. Christians, "Jacques Ellul's Con- tribution to Critical Media Theory," Journal of Communication, 29 (Winter 1979), 81-88.

37 This tradition stems from Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1948) and Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communi- cation (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1949).

38 0. R. Holsti, Content Analysis for the Social Sciences and Humanities (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1969).

39 Comstock et al., Television and Human Behavior.




and occupations, news bias, and trends in violent content. Theoretical explanations, however, are absent from the voluminous compilation of Comstock and colleagues. Content analysis-from its use by the Interna- tional Communication Agency (formerly the USIA) to tabulate foreign propaganda to its application by women's groups for identifying sex role definitions in commercials and children's programs-provides a basic scorecard for identifying tendencies and tracing trends in the message content of mass communications.

The analysis of symbol, image, and icon approaches messages in a manner opposite to that of content analysis. Where content analysis, in the interest of quantification, takes many messages, shaves off the idio- syncracies, and tallies the uniformities, analysis centered on symbol, image, and icon, in the interest of qualitative analysis, zeroes in on the single expression, relishes its uniqueness, and explores meanings and parallels emanating outward.

Icon analysis has been applied successfully to the study of popular culture and plays a role in message theory. Marshall Fishwick, drawing from Herbert Read and Erwin Panovsky, has described the place of contemporary icons in introductory essays to two books on popular Ameri- can icons.40 The word icon, based on the Greek word for image, refers to "an object of uncritical devotion" and denotes medieval religious images painted on wooden panels. More generally, icons are external expressions of internal convictions tied to myths, legends, values, idols, and aspira- tions. Panovsky defined iconography as "the branch of art history which concerns itself with the subject matter or meaning of works of art, as opposed to their form." He distinguished surface data which require iden- tification, description, and authentication from interior qualities which call for deeper evaluation, interpretation, and signification. Fishwick observes, "The mainstream of iconology in our time-because of its dis- semination through mass media-is the popular stratum of our culture." 41 Icons of Popular Culture and Icons of America interpret media icons as diverse as Shirley Temple, the Beatles, citizens' band radio, comics, the Western romance, and the many icons of advertising culture. Icon interpretation nicely isolates and focuses elements of media messages and lends itself to mythic and religious theories of mass communication.42

40 Marshall Fishwick, "Entrance," in Marshall Fishwick and Ray B. Browne, eds., Icons of Popular Culture (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1970); and Marshall Fishwick, "Icons of America," in Ray B. Browne and Marshall Fishwick, eds., Icons of America (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1978).

41 Fishwick, "Entrance," 6. 42 George Gerbner has proposed religious and mythic theories of media in various pres-

entations; see, for example, "Mass Media and Human Communication Theory."



Media Theory 251

The theory of popular genres and formulas developed by John Cawelti offers an elaborate methodology for interpreting mass media content and is one of the most significant humanistic contributions to media theory. A series of essays and books on popular media by Cawelti appeared over a ten-year period, culminating in the publication in 1976 of Adventure, Mys- tery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture.43 Cawelti begins with a question commonly asked of popular media: what elements determine the parameters of genres such as westerns, detective mysteries, science fiction, and similarly obvious groupings of popular culture content? Taking cues from Henry Nash Smith and Northrop Frye, Cawelti narrows the large context of mythic and archetypal interpretations down to the concept of formula, which he defines as "a conven- tional system for structuring cultural products." Whereas myths and genres are universal, formulas are limited; they represent "the way in which a particular culture has embodied both mythical archetypes and its own preoccupations in narrative form."44 Popular formulas rely more heavily on convention than invention. Conventions are those parts of a cultural product that exist in similar products in the form of elements known to both author and audience beforehand. Conventions maintain a culture's stability. Inventions are those parts of a cultural product uniquely contributed by a particular artist; over time they may modify conventions. Inventions enable a culture to respond to changing circumstances. Works as inventive as Finnegan's Wake may break with convention but popular media rely almost exclusively on formulaic conventions. "Auteur" film criticism tends to assume this theory in assessing the inventions of a director-Hitchcock, Ford-within the conventions of a formula such as mysteries or westerns. In developing the artistic, evolutionary, and cultural implications of formula analysis, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance explains literary formulas, attempts a typology of transcultural formulas, explores crime fiction in its formulaic embodi- ments (the classical and the hard-boiled detective story), looks at the evolution of the western formula, and reviews the method by applying it to best-selling melodramas. Horace Newcomb is the best known of those who have applied Cawelti's approach. In TV: The Most Popular Art, Newcomb identifies popular formulas in prime time and argues that television is distinguished among media by the intimacy of the small screen,

43 John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976). See also John G. Cawelti, "Notes Toward an Aesthetic of Popular Culture," Journal of Popular Culture, 4 (Fall 1971), 255-68; and Cawelti, "Myth, Symbol, and Formula," Journal of Popular Culture, 8 (Summer 1974), 1-9.

44 Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, 6.




continuity of characters and series, and the use of contemporary historical concerns as subject matter even when set in earlier eras.45

The complexity, refinement, and specialization of semiotics precludes here any but the most cursory look at its applications to message theory. The work of Umberto Ecco, Roland Barthes, and others suggests the profound potential that the analogy between language and other message systems offers. Most basic among semiotics' many binary oppositions is Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between language (langue) as a system and speech (parole) as a process.46 The difference between American television as an abstract system (langue) with its infinite potential for informational and cultural exchange, and American television as an actual process (parole) confined by institutionalized mass commercial priorities, shows the kind of implications suggested by American media applications of semiotics. With some exceptions, semiotics and semiology have remained largely European in use and have been applied extensively to film but not to other media. Cultivation analysis, which explores the values cultivated by media, and the search for cultural indicators by George Gerbner and his collaborators47 (as well as my method of cultural exegesis)48 parallel the goals of semiotic analysis but avoid its use of exotic linguistic categories and terms. The many contributions of speech communications and rhetorical theory to the study of mass communications only partially substitute for the lack of successful, visible applications of formal linguistics to media theory, especially in the American context.

Sociological research on audience effects, investigations of transmission personnel and technology, measurement and analysis of message content-these are the developed traditions and theories concerning mass communications. Drawn from a variety of disciplines, the three areas have tended to remain independent and unassimilated. Can they provide the building blocks for an overall, integrated theory of media? In brief, have mass communication analysts found a forest or only trees?

45Horace Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1974); Horace Newcomb, ed., Television: The Critical View, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979).

46 See Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, trans. by An- nette Lavers and Colin Smith (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 13.

47 For a general explanation, see George Gerbner, "Communication and Social-Environ- ment," Scientific American, 227 (Sept. 1972), 152-63. For a recent example see George Gerbner, Larry Gross, Nancy Signoreielli, and Michael Morgan, "Aging with Television: Images on Television Drama and Conceptions of Social Reality," Journal of Communica- tion, 30 (Winter 1980), 37-47.

48 Real, Mass-Mediated Culture, especially pp. 37-38 and 157-59.



Media Theory 253

CRITICAL THEORY

The final effectiveness of symbols cannot be reduced to only one dis- crete area of either audience, transmission, or message theory; it requires a broader critical perspective. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, in another "classic" of media theory, originated the important distinction in 1941 between what he identified as "administrative" and "critical" communications research.49 Lazarsfeld characterized his own research as administrative but was convinced of the value of another "type of approach which, if it were included in the general stream of communications research, could con- tribute much in terms of challenging problems and new concepts."

The dominant form of communications research-administrative-is carried through in the service of some kind of administrative agency of public or private character and can be criticized for solving, in the words of Lazarsfeld, "little problems, generally of a business character." The vast majority of audience research is administrative, with its purposes defined by funding from political candidates, broadcast networks, advertising agencies, and similar self-serving, results-oriented agencies. Signif- icant portions of transmission and message research are also carried out through administrative goals and methods. The empiricism of administrative media research in America is characterized in a motto coined by Merton: "We don't know that what we say is particularly significant, but it is at least true."50

In contrast, critical research requires that, in addition to whatever special purpose is to be served, the general role of our media of communication in the present social system should be studied. Citing T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Lazarsfeld identified two distinguishing characteristics of critical research; it develops a theory of prevailing social trends of the time, and it implies ideas about basic human values. He cautions: "We cannot pursue a single purpose and study the means of its realization isolated from the total historical situation in which such planning and studying goes on." 51 To critical media research, Lasarsfeld as- signs responsibility for questions of media control, centralization of ownership, and the development of promotional manipulation into an

49 Paul F. Lazarsfeld, "Remarks on Administrative and Critical Communications Re- search," Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, 9 (1941), 2-16. Jay G. Blumler used Lazarsfeld's categories in "The Social Purposes of Mass Communication Research: A Transatlantic Perspective," Founders' Lecture presented to the Association for Education in Journalism, Madison, Wisconsin, Aug. 1977.

50 Robert K. Merton, "Patterns of Influence," in Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Frank N. Stan- ton, eds., Communications Research 1948-49 (New York: Harper, 1949).

51 Lazarsfeld, "Administrative and Critical Research."




"advertising culture"; he also sees the relation of research to significant social problems, trends toward better cultural conditions, issues of standardization, and threats to basic human values fitting into this category of research, a category Merton characterized by explaining: "We don't know that what we say is true, but it is at least significant."52

If theory embraces intellectual breadth and depth, fully developed media theory must be "critical" in essence even as it takes into account less abstract administrative findings. Theoretical assertions must be holistic and integrate the entirety of media-analyzing social institutions and complex channels, interpreting message and symbol systems, addressing policy questions, and providing for factors of history and context.53

Recent changes in theories of the role of mass communications in national development in the Third World illustrate the importance of the critical-administrative distinction. In the 1950s, Daniel Lerner, Wilbur Schramm, and others articulated the standard theory of using mass communications as the triggering mechanism to change attitudes and behavior from traditional to modern in developing countries. The best of administrative research and theory of the time was employed. As later summarized by Everett Rogers, the dominant paradigm provided centralized planning using capital-intensive technology to stimulate economic growth on the assumption that the primary causes of underdevelopment were internal to the country. Contrary to expectations, this model was not particularly effective. Critical theory was called on to explain the failures of purely administrative approaches. Problems included failure of native populations to be inspired by media motivation, increased dependency on foreign technology and capital, institutionalized political and economic barriers to progressive change, critical reevaluation by Third World lead- ers of the exploitative models of advanced industrial countries, and numerous practical failures to achieve the predicted dramatic break- throughs in development. The newer concept of development was rede- fined by Rogers as "a widely participatory process of social change in a society, intended to bring about both social and material advancement (including greater equality, freedom, and other valued qualities) for the majority of the people through gaining greater control over their environment." 54 The debate continues today as transnational corporations pro-

52 Merton, "Patterns of Influence." 53 An important contribution to media theory may come from the long-awaited book or

multi-volume study by Gene Youngblood, The Videosphere (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981 ?); an excerpt is available as Youngblood, "The Mass Media and the Futurdeof Desire, Co-evolution Quarterly (Winter 1977-78), 7-17.

54 Everett Rogers, "Communication and Development: The Passing of the Dominant Paradigm," in Everett Rogers, ed., Communication and Development: Critical Perspectives (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1976), 133.



Media Theory 255

pose the administrative advantages of the free flow of information across boundaries while critical theorists argue for national cultural policies that would allow some localized control over media that are dominant in a country or region.55 Which side has the more accurate and complete theory of media control will be decided not merely by partisan political measures but also by tangible long-term human costs and benefits, an area of critical rather than administrative expertise.

Recent mass culture debate further illustrates the distinction between administrative and critical theories and the need for a larger theory of cultural systems. The conservative critique of mass culture lives on and

56 liea has been finely reviewed by C. W. E. Bigsby in two essays. The liberal defense of popular and mass culture continues with prominent representa- tion from the Bowling Green Popular Press. This "great debate" tends, however, on both sides to be critical but unsystematic. The cultural content of mass communications is viewed not in itself but only as it affects art or politics. It either threatens the values of elite culture, as the conservative argues, or expresses the pluralism of liberal democracy, as the liberal contends. What is such culture in itself and within (rather than for the sake of) a cultural system?57 Theory and data concerning the position and portrayal of women and minorities in mass communications illustrate further the value of maintaining a critical starting point and a concern for cultural systems .58

Perhaps the most hopeful sources of the needed full perspective on mass communication, of "media theory" per se, are anthropological explorations of cultural systems, with acknowledgment of cybernetics and systems theory, and critical analyses of political economy, ideology, and consciousness. Anthropologists and critical theorists still exhibit a tendency to treat mass communication only in passing, as an illustration in a grander scheme rather than as a complex phenomenon in its own right. Yet auspicious beginnings are present.

Edmund Leach, Victor Turner, and Raymond Firth illustrate the sub-

55 See, for example, Herbert I. Schiller, Communications and Cultural Domination (White Plains, N. Y.: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1978).

56 C. W. E. Bigsby, "Europe, America and the Cultural Debate," in C. W. E. Bigsby, ed., Superculture: American Popular Culture and Europe (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1975); and C. W. E. Bigsby, ed., Approaches to Popular Culture (Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1976).

57 I have elsewhere argued for a six-part refinement of the positions in the so-called "great debate" on mass and popular culture and have stressed the need to view each within a larger cultural framework. See Real, Mass-Mediated Culture, 14-33.

58 Window Dressing on the Set (a report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1974) and Window Dressing on the Set: An Update (a report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 1979) (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office).




stantial interest anthropologists have in symbols and communication, although their attention to mass media is minimal.59 In his consideration of the structure of mythical thought, the psychology of emotions, and especially "The Function of Myth in Man's Social Life,"60 Ernst Cassirer moved toward applying his vast corpus on symbolic forms to contemporary political and social trends, an effort unfortunately terminated by his death. Yet his notion of "myth" as one of six symbolic sets alongside art, science, religion, history, and language provides a productive analogue to numerous dimensions of media as they relate to emotions, social life, and symbolic activity in general. Mircea Eliade's formulations on myth might likewise be translated into a productive philosophy of media.61 LeRoy E. Kennel may overstate in warning: "Of all the mutual relations between organisms and their environment, the ecology of the airwaves is probably the most crucial.' 62 Nevertheless, anthropologists investigating the relation between ritual and ecology63 offer a larger framework for explaining the ecological role of television and other media.

The work of Clifford Geertz is especially useful in interpreting media. In the essay "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,"64 Geertz observes that understanding the cockfight is less like diagnosing a behavior or dissecting an organism than like penetrating a literary text. A collectively sustained symbolic structure, present in Balinese cockfights and all popular (media) expressions, offers a problem of social semantics more than one of social mechanics. In the cockfight, the Balinese forms and discovers his own temperament and his society's temper at the same time-or rather, a particular face of them, for each culture offers many faces at different times. Geertz finds functionalist and psychological interpretations of rites and pastimes to be reductionist, whereas treating the symbolic cultural form as a text enables one to seek that culture's own reading of the text. A popular expression or event may not be universal or typical in meaning but will provide a paradigm in which we can read and

59Edmund Leach, Culture and Communication: The Logic by Which Symbols Are Con- nected (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976). The series of books on "Symbol, Myth, and Ritual" from Cornell Univ. Press under the general editorship of Victor Turner is especially salient. Gavriel Salomon, Interaction of Media, Cognition, and Learning (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1979), approaches media in a cross-cultural and interactional perspective with particular reference to social symbol systems.

60 Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), 37-49. 61 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,

1957). 62 LeRoy E. Kennel, Ecology of the Airwaves (Scottsdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1971), 8. 63 See, for example, Roy A. Rappaport, Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a

New Guinea People (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968). 64 Clifford Geertz, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," in Geertz, The In-

terpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).



Media Theory 257

reread a culture's sensibility. Media may be approached with the methods of an anthropologist who, in essence, reads the texts of a culture over the shoulders of the subjects of that culture. His guiding principle is: "Societies, like lives, contain their own interpretations. One has only to learn how to gain access to them." The difference between this and mere one-dimensional message analysis is the anthropological context in which culture is defined as a system with subsystems and multiple layers of meaning. Geertz's textual interpretation, as a consequence, requires consideration of what previously happened within institutions of media and message transmission as well as subsequent aspects of audience behavior, even as it focuses attention on the immediate point-of-contact where the participant encounters the text (media). The anthropologist's appreciation of cultural expressions and social institutions as parts of a cultural system highlights perhaps the greatest blindspot among media researchers attempting to move from the level of empirical data to general theory. The idea of culture and its relation to mass communication evolved in a series of classic works now available in a fourteen volume series featuring Raymond Williams ("The Idea of Culture"), T. W. Adorno ("Cultural Criticism and Society"), Dwight MacDonald ("A Theory of Mass Cul- ture"), Edward Shils ("Mass Society and Its Culture"), and hundreds of others.65

The most specified meaning of "critical theory" refers to the Frankfurt School of Adorno, Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse. Their dated reliance on psychoanalytic phrases and elitist aesthetics tempers their contribution slightly but their tradition thrives. Dallas Smythe and Herbert Schiller have shown the necessity of identifying the political economy which undergirds mass communication systems if one is to understand the institutional factors which define individual roles and actions in creating, transmitting, and measuring message systems.66 Frederick Jameson, Stewart Ewen, and Stanley Aronowitz examine the inevitable ideological dimensions of media content and systems, dimensions of singular importance in the shaping of culture by media. European critical theorists such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger distinguish consciousness as the curious product of media industries and point toward an understanding of the sources, structures, and manipu- lations of consciousness as essential to full assessment of the role of media. Recent works on the history of the Frankfurt School have made

65 Peter Davison, Rolf Meyersohn, and Edward Shils, eds., Literary Taste, Culture and Mass Communications, fourteen vols. (Cambridge: Somerset House, 1978).

66 See, for example, Dallas Smythe, "Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism," Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 1 (Fall 1977), 1-28; Herbert Schiller, The Mind Managers (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974).




critical theory the subject as well as the source of considerable cultural research, while new collections increase our interest in the relations of critical theory to mass communications.67

The ineradicable legacy of critical theory has been to force media theorists to face the full implications of the political economy of institutionalized transmission systems, the ideology of message systems, and the consciousness resulting from changed, modified, or reinforced audience attitudes and behavior. Productive policy decisions, significant research projects, and humane media practices require media theory that confronts rather than skirts the difficult questions. If five decades of contributions to an understanding of mass communication theory tend to any single moral, it is this: no question is more central to our collective future than the accurate assessment and positive utilization of the realities and potentials of mass communication.

Symbols matter; theory and research on media bring home the realization that symbols dominating through mass means of communication matter very much. Clearly aware of this, Archibald MacLeish once addressed a meeting of professional broadcasters with this sobering reminder:

What you do matters. A man could even argue-and I should be prepared to-that what you do matters more over the long run (if our civilization has a long run ahead of it) than what anybody else does, because you are more persistently shaping the minds of more people than all the rest of us put together.68 *

67 Jameson and Aronowitz, along with John Brenkman, are editors and contributors to the new journal Social Text: Theory/Culture/lIdeology from Madison, Wisc. A classical anthol- ogy of critical theory texts has been edited by Armand Mattelart and Seth Siegelaub in two volumes under the title Communication and Class Struggle (New York: International Gen- eral, 1979). The last publisher also offers Marxism and the Mass Media: Towards a Basic Bibliography (1976).

68 Partially quoted in Fred W. Friendly, Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control (New York: Vintage, 1968), xxiv.

* The most helpful bibliographic reviews include those by George Gerbner, F. Gerald Kline, Jay G. Blumler, and Elihu Katz, all in essay form, and overview books by Wilbur Schramm, Melvin DeFleur, Sandra Ball-Rokeach, and Charles Wright. My book Mass- Mediated Culture may clarify matters necessarily compressed in this essay. Full citations are available in the footnotes. For a "must" library on media theory, very few books might be necessary, but a number of individual articles would be essential. As the text and notes indicate, among my favorites are the pieces by Harold Lasswell, Paul Lazarsfeld, Elihu Katz, George Gerbner, John Cawelti, Gaye Tuchman, George Comstock, and Steven Chaf- fee. Other useful sources include the Sage annual review of mass communications, the ICA Communications Yearbook, a new near-annual series from Ablex Press, Progress in Com- munication Sciences, and Christopher Sterling's Mass Media Booknotes.



Documents

Media Theory Contributions to an Understanding of American Mass Communications