Elihu Katz
It is a rare honour for a student of media effects to be invited to introduce a book on media history. The best explanation for this seeming anomaly is that the book, and this foreword, are dedicated to James Curran who, almost alone among his peers, has encompassed the entire field of media studies and understands the relationships among its parts.
In tribute to James, I will try to rise to the occasion. I will attempt to show that media histories, including those recorded in these pages, have direct bearing on the study of media effects, and vice versa. Indeed, I believe that all of media studies aims to unveil effects, whether it be audience research, content analysis, technological theories, or institutional histories. These branches of media study – whatever their other uses – seek, respectively, to comprehend the reach, the rhetoric, the technical, and the organizational production of influence. I am not so much referring to persuasive influence – not the kind that concentrates on immediate change of opinions, attitudes, and actions – but on the kind of long-run effects that describe Curran’s interest in media history, that is “how the media contribute to the making of modern Britain.” And one should add, in deference to the radical narrative, how these institutions may interact to avert change!
Blissfully ignorant as I am of most media history, allow me to share several reactions to the enlightening set of combative papers collected here.
Let me begin by pointing out some of the parallels between these narrative histories and the several “schools” of research on media effects (Katz 2001; Katz et al. 2003). The radical narrative, obviously, echoes the neo-Marxism of the Frankfurt School, as well as some of Birmingham and Glasgow. The technological narrative corresponds almost exactly to the Toronto School of Innis (1951) and McLuhan (1964), as well as their disciples and critics. The anthropological narrative encompasses a variety of nation-builders from the Chicago School (e.g., Wirth l948), their predecessors (e.g., Tarde 1898) and descendants (e.g., Cardiff and Scannell 1987; Anderson 1991). Effects of the liberal narrative may be found among students of the “cognitive turn” (see Beniger and Gusek 1995), who are occupied with diffusion (Rogers 2003), agenda-setting (McCombs and Shaw 1972), the knowledge gap (Tichenor et al. 1970) and, more generally, with providing the kinds of information that underlie deliberative democracy. The populist and feminist narratives find their parallel in the functional analysis – begging your pardon – of cultural studies, including so-called gratifications research (Blumler and Katz 1974), reception theory, research on resistance, women’s studies, and the like. The divisions among these schools, as indeed among the narratives, are often blurred, but the parallel between them is reasonably clear. If the narrative approach tends toward the historical, the schools of effect have a sociological bent, even if there are crossovers on both sides.
The interesting byproduct of this comparison is the revelation – obvious to some, but not to me – that the historical approach supplies the ingredient that is most lacking in the study of effects, namely time. From the earliest days of empirical research on mass communication, emphasis has been placed on the short run – that is, on persuasive effects, on “campaigns” – not only because these were of interest to politicians and advertisers, but because they were measurable. It is easy to answer the question whether this or that advertisement affected the behavior of some subsample of the population, while it is very difficult indeed to measure the impact of the introduction of commercial broadcasting on consumer culture. How shall we answer the question whether public television has enfranchised the viewer? How shall we discover whether the introduction of television broadcasting in Israel or in Ireland strengthened or weakened the renaissance of national culture and language in those nations?
Historians of the media, willy-nilly, help to answer such questions – even if this may not be their intent. The narrative histories in this book come even closer to providing answers, because they are themselves interested in highlighting effects. At the very least, these histories provide over-time observations and informal “measures” that allow for falsifying or confirming expectations, whether popular or scholarly. The ironic finding that abolishing the stamp tax and other government fetters “freed” the British press to move closer to the conservative establishment is one such example.
Methodological purists in the effects tradition have shied away from such “data” because of their imprecision, their unrepeatability, and their frequent contradictions. Although the Columbia School from which I hail is thought to be narrowly focused in this way, it is worth noting that the founder himself, Paul Lazarsfeld, belies this image (Katz 2004). He taught us “how to read a book,” by which he meant that the prose of philosophers and historians may be recast as “hypotheses.” One of his favourite examples – and now one of mine – was the social psychologist Gabriel Tarde (1898; also see Katz et al. 1998) whose observations on late nineteenth-century France offer a wealth of directives for research on effects. Tarde proposed that the rise of newspapers: (1) consolidated the nation, drawing attention to its center; (2) overthrew the king, by challenging his ability to separate the parts of the kingdom from each other; (3) constrained parliament to supplant regionalism by majority rule, in response to the new we-feeling of nationhood; (4) supplied a daily or weekly agenda for public discussion in cafes and salons; and (5) percolated public opinion by intermixing reading and talk. In fact, Lazarsfeld et al.’s (1944) discovery of the “two-step flow of communication,” echoes Tarde’s proposition that newspapers are without influence unless they are the subject of conversation.
Indeed, Tarde’s “public sphere” (press–conversation–opinion–action) reappears in Habermas fifty years later, although Habermas is not much aware of his predecessor. As for the contribution of the press to nation-building, Anderson (2006) reiterates Tarde, while Carey (1989) makes the same claim for the telegraph as Cardiff and Scannell (1987) do for radio. Here is comparativism in action – in defiance of the assumption that history consists only of unique cases. Often enough, one stumbles on evidence of similar long-term effects, much as Curran calls for in this volume. Thus, the press not only allows for the over-time observation of single cases, but provides a basis for comparisons across media and across societies. I agree that we should not get bogged down in determinisms, but “data” are certainly available from multiple sites for the study of the interaction between media technologies and other social institutions.
Further examples of the workings of ostensibly similar processes may be found in all of the nations that have adopted the British or French systems of public broadcasting. Placing these side by side to compare their similarities and differences may begin to interest even the methodological purists.
To consider the long-run effects of television now that its prime is almost past, Paddy Scannell and I have assembled a group of media effects scholars to think together. We are reviewing some of the hypotheses that accompanied the new medium when it was launched, in its heyday, and now that it is changing form and function. We have found some beautiful hypotheses. Meyrowitz (1985) proposes, for example, that television, given its accessibility to all, has “abolished secrets,” that is, that children know as much about their parents as their parents know about them, and that the same thing is true for the mutual awareness of the sexes, of politicians and their publics, etc. Or consider the proposition that broadcasting (radio as well), having moved politics “inside,” has displaced ideology by personality, and emasculated the political parties.
But while we have found interesting long-run hypotheses, we cannot find the long-run studies that set out to track their validity over time, nor do we find many scholarly narrative histories that have tried to cope. Methodologically, there have been several such attempts, and they are worth noting here, although not all of them have been applied to television: (1) The most famous, perhaps, is Eisenstein’s (1979) attempt to identify those social institutions that underwent major change shortly after the appearance of the new technology of print. Whereupon she asked – with respect to religion (Protestantism), science (astronomy), and scholarship (of the Renaissance) – whether the printing press might be at least partly responsible for these changes. This is a method that resonates with James Curran’s proposal in this book, although it has not, so far, been applied to broadcasting; (2) A somewhat similar attempt was made in Israel, where a team of researchers conducted an elaborate survey of attitudes, values, and leisure behaviors on the eve of the establishment of television, and repeated the same study twenty years later at the point at which commercial television was being introduced (Katz and Gurevitch 1976). We examined each of the changes in order to consider which of them might be attributable to the two decades of (public) broadcasting. While we arrived at certain conclusions (Katz et al. 1997), we were stymied in our attempt to sort out television-related changes from equally powerful innovations such as the change in the percentage of women working, the introduction of a shortened working week, an overall rise in living standard, and several wars! The finding that Israelis had become more materialistic and more present oriented seemed to coincide with prior expectations – but it is clear that this method is hardly satisfying in itself; (3) Gerbner, Gross and their associates (Gerbner et al. 2002) developed still another method that they call “cultivation research,” by means of which they compare the views of “reality” held by “heavy” and “light” viewers in order to test the hypothesis that reality as portrayed on television (that the “world is a dangerous place,” for example, or the number of policemen in the city) would coincide more closely with the reality of the heavy viewers. Brilliantly, they infer a longrange effect from this short-run methodology. But there is plenty to worry about here, too.
In short, we need each other.