of representation would alter or amplify information. Orr poses the question of the day as follows (2006: 40):
Could rationality and the imperatives of reason withstand the mass illusions or delusions made more likely, and more mass(ive), by the senses and sensations excited through the new broadcast media?
Analysis after the broadcast showed that the initial talk of mass panic was probably inaccurate or at least exaggerated. Newspapers were happy to play up and censure what they highlighted as the irresponsibility of radio, a relatively new medium which was already threatening to eat into their advertising revenues. ‘Radio is new but it has adult responsibilities’, said the New York Times. ‘It has not mastered itself or the material it uses.’ Hadley Cantril, a psychologist at Princeton University, conducted a study published in 1940 in which he concluded that at least one million of the six million listeners were ‘frightened or disturbed’ (1940: 57). The study showed that the majority of listeners had, however, been able to use their critical abilities to discern the true nature of the programme. As such, the study undermined prevailing theories that audiences could be wholly manipulated by media. The incident also crucially raised questions about the interplay of news and entertainment and looked forward to contemporary discussion about the blurring of boundaries and the affective potential that mixed media formats such as Reality TV and docudrama can command.
But Cantril represented a minority view in a period in which theories of the suggestibility of audiences and mass society tended to predominate. Given the developments in Nazi Germany following Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, some exiled scholars from Germany’s Frankfurt School were to take a less nuanced view than Cantril. They interpreted the media through their neo-Marxist background in a way that rendered ordinary people as a ‘mass society’ helpless to resist media manipulation (Curran & Seaton, 1997). Such an interpretation was clearly influenced by the ability of dictators such as Hitler and Mussolini to captivate the masses. Indeed, Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, had studied Le Bon’s La psychologie des foules in the 1920s (Der Spiegel, 1986). Gorton (2009) argues that scholars of the Frankfurt School such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno believed that fascism in Europe had demonstrated the power of mass propaganda and the arts.
By the summer of 1934, members of the Frankfurt School led by Horkheimer had begun to establish themselves in exile in New York at Columbia University, regarded as having the second major department for Sociology after Chicago. By 1941, Horkheimer and a whole colony of exiled German writers, composers and playwrights – for example, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht and Arnold Schoenberg – had all moved to Los Angeles, but many of them found the Hollywood film industry depressing (Wiggershaus, 1994) as reflected in key writings during the war period. Referring to Hollywood, Horkheimer and Adorno argued that the American film industry dominated by large profit-driven corporations created ‘dupes’ of the masses, who would mindlessly consume material (Gorton, 2009). They dedicated a chapter of their work Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1944/1979: 137) specifically to the Culture Industry, stating:
No independent thinking must be expected from the audience: the product prescribes every reaction: not by its natural structure (which collapses under reflection), but by signals. Any logical connection calling for mental effort is painstakingly avoided.
This deeply sceptical view reduces the audience to a passive receiver of messages, speaking of a compulsive imitation (1944/1979: 167):
The most intimate reactions of human beings have become so entirely reified, even to themselves, that the idea of anything peculiar to them survives only in extreme abstraction: personality means hardly more than dazzling white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions. That is the triumph of advertising in the culture industry: the compulsive imitation by consumers of cultural commodities which, at the same time, they recognize as false.
Horkheimer and Adorno’s highly negative views on mass society and the influence of big business help explain why the war years were crucial in the United States to the establishment of journalism’s normative values. On the one hand, this was a reaction against the power of suggestion that was believed to be so pervasive in society, politics and the entertainment industry. But on the other hand, newspapers, well aware of their ability to shape opinion from the earliest days of their history, were also keen to set themselves above the masses. Tudor (1999), reviewing the study of ‘media effects’ in this period, characterises thinking in the 1940s and 1950s as deeply hierarchical in which it was considered that the elite could exercise control over a passive mass population, with inevitable anti-democratic consequences. This viewpoint is constructed around the concepts of ‘us and them’ in which ‘the vast ordinary population cannot resist the all-powerful constraint of the mighty media although the fact of this restraint is immediately apparent to the enlightened and therefore resistant elite’ (1999: 25).
Post-War norms consolidated
It was against this background that the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press, set up during World War II, consolidated still further the normative path for American journalism in the immediate post-war period.
The report (1947: vi) set out not only the requirement for a free press, but also the duty on the press to serve the public good, stating clearly in its introduction:
This report deals with the responsibilities of the owners and managers of the press to their consciences and the common good for the formation of public opinion.
This championing of journalistic autonomy, standards and public service was anchored by adherence to the codes and procedures of objective reporting (Curran, 2011). With hindsight, the Hutchins Commission probably represents the high point in codification of journalistic norms in the Anglo-American sphere and its recommendations set high store by the professionalism of journalists. It recommended that ‘the press use every means that can be devised to increase the competence, independence and effectiveness of its staff’ (1947: 94). Two years later in 1949, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) introduced what it termed a ‘fairness doctrine’, requiring broadcasters to discuss controversial issues of public interest but also to ensure that contrasting views were aired. This held sway until its elimination in 1987, opening the way for partisan journalism on the airwaves such as the right-wing Rush Limbaugh Show just one year later (Curran, 2011). There was a similar development to Hutchins in the United Kingdom when a 1947–49 Royal Commission described the press as ‘the chief agency for instructing the public on the main issues of the day … the main source from which information, discussion and advocacy reach the public’. The combination of the Hutchins recommendations, ‘fairness doctrine’ and Royal Commission held out the prospect of a rational space in the media for discursive debate that would sustain liberal democratic society.
That idea is still central to today’s discussion on the role of the media, not least because of the influence a decade later of the German philosopher and social theorist Juürgen Habermas. Representing a second generation of the Frankfurt School academics, Habermas had sketched out a ‘public sphere’ of rational-critical debate with remarkably similar goals. This public sphere was based on reason, logic and argument. Emotion, on the other hand, was understood as being deviant from the ideals of the public sphere (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019: 31). Habermas traced the development of this public sphere back to the 18th-century salons, coffee houses and early press. For him it was instrumental in the constitution of a liberal democratic society. But echoing the Marxist roots of the Frankfurt School, he argued that the state and corporate interest, manifested by mass media, public relations and consumerism, had subsequently made this ideal unattainable. Despite this, the translation of Habermas’s theories into an English-speaking academic environment led to discussion of the concept not as an ideal but as a reality (Curran, 2011), though many proponents and critics alike argue it has only ever been an ideal (Kavka, 2008: 53).
Challenges
