SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

In 2007 film critic Michael Medved accused Happy Feet, the digital animation film about penguins, of containing a bizarre anti-religious bias, an endorsement of gay identity, and a propagandist theme of condemnation of the human race, support for environmentalism, and exaltation of the United Nations. During the 1930s, German Nazis improved on World War I propaganda techniques and ruthlessly exploited new media technology like motion pictures and radio to consolidate their power. Viewed from America, the Nazis seemed to have found powerful new ways to manipulate public attitudes and beliefs. All across Europe, totalitarian leaders like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini rose to political power and were able to exercise seemingly total control over vast populations. The best explanation for these sudden changes seemed to be propaganda delivered by newspapers, radio, and movies. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, mass society notions began to be empirically investigated by Paul Lazarsfeld, who would eventually overturn some of its basic assumptions. Trained in psychological measurement, Lazarsfeld fled the Nazis and came to the United States on a Ford Foundation fellowship (Lazarsfeld, 1969). For the emerging field of mass communication research, he proved to be a seminal thinker and researcher. In 1941 Lazarsfeld argued that it wasnt enough to merely speculate about the influence of media on society. Instead, he advocated the conduct of carefully designed, elaborate surveys and even field experiments in which he would be able to observe media influence and measure its magnitude. By the mid-1950s, Lazarsfelds work and that of other empirical media researchers had generated an enormous amount of data (by precomputer standards). Interpretation of these data led Lazarsfeld and his colleagues to conclude that media were not nearly as powerful as had been feared or hoped. Instead, these researchers found that people had numerous ways of resisting media influence, and their attitudes were shaped by many competing factors, such as family, friends, and religious community. limited-effects theory View of media as reinforcing existing social trends and strengthening rather than threatening the status quo