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now exists, possessed of its own specialist discourse about 'media effects',
'condensation symbols', 'framing' and so on. A perennial question has,
unsurprisingly, been: to what degrees and in what ways does the mass media
influence its mass audiences? Initially, profound interest in this question
arose in the 1930s because of the highly effective use of propaganda by the
Nazi Party, which enabled it to replace the Weimar Republic (a representa-
tive democracy) with the Third Reich (a one-party state that instigated the
Second World War). Propaganda, as Garth Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell
say in their book on the topic,
is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cogni-
tions, and direct behaviour to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent
of the propagandist.
( Jowett and O'Donnell, 2005: 7)
They forgot to add that it appeals largely to people's emotions and senti-
ments, rather than to logic or 'reason'. Before, during and after the Second
World War, propaganda was state-led, occurring during an era where peo-
ple had relatively little choice on the news stands, in cinemas and on
the radio.
The success of propaganda in Nazi Germany and elsewhere encouraged
a very strong, one-way conception of the relations between 'sender', 'mes-
sage' and 'recipient'. But the unusual conditions of the 1930s - international
economic recession, a gifted demagogue (Adolph Hitler), and the festering
legacy of the Great War (1914-18) - were hardly representative of all times
and places. This is why the 'hypodermic theory' of mass media effects soon
gave way to less muscular ones that have, with few exceptions, prevailed
ever since. Starting with research into people's voting decisions in the 1940
US Presidential election, Paul F. Lazarsfeld and his students at Columbia
University suggested that
mass communication could be persuasive only under special conditions, such
as the absence of counter-propaganda, the reinforcement of media messages
by face-to-face discussion, and the strategic exploitation of [people's] well-
established behaviours.
(Peters, 2004: 19)
In their monograph Personal influence (Lazarsfeld and Katz, 1955) and
elsewhere, the Columbia researchers argued, with reference to considerable
empirical data, that mass media messages often ran up against people's
existing beliefs and needed to be relayed through 'opinion leaders'
in
interpersonal networks (e.g. families and churches) to be effective.
Subsequent research at Columbia and elsewhere in the United States
appeared to confirm that mass media audiences enjoyed a degree of auton-
omy from the communications thrown at them. It suggested too that these
 
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