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Week 6: Harold Lasswell & Propaganda Analysis, interests were so…

- - - - :red_flag: Lasswell conducted Qualitative content analysis AND Quantitative content analysis
        
        :one: Qualitative: WWI
        
        leaflets dropped, recruiting posters
        
        identify propaganda strategies and persuasion messages: divide enemy, demoralize, accusations
        
        :two: Quantitative: WWII
        
        used statistical methods to study propaganda
        
        taught courses on propaganda
  - - - :red_flag: Propaganda analysis after the 1940s disappeared, despite being extremely important in the 1920s and 1930s
        
        experiments on persuasion and surveys of media effects pushed propaganda off center stage of communication research
        
        highly statistical communication research methods began to gain popularity
        
        :!!: private foundations and governments were more eager to support research that was useful to policymakers and not revealing motives
        
        :!!: By 1941, propaganda studies was highly policized and the institute closed.
        
        fundings dried up
        
        terms like communication research and mass communication was used instead of propaganda and public opinion.
        :red_flag: Lasswell turned to quantitative methods in propaganda research during 1949
        
        moved away from citing specific case studies/qualitative interviews
- - - - founded the field of political psychology in 1930s
        
        intersects psychology and political science
      - :book: Pyschopathology and Politics (1930)
        
        psychoanalytic theory to explain why some political leaders became agitators and others became administrators
        
        gathered and analysed psychoanalytic biographies of political leaders
        
        psychoanalytic methods of free association and prolonged interviewing could help political scientists understand political motivations of their respondents
        
        In 1936, Frankfurt School's Adorno :book: The Authoritarian Personality (1950) combined Freudian theory with Marxist power relations.
        
        there was a general spread of freudian theory in social sciences
    - - taught Lasswell psychoanalytic interviewing and recording methods
        
        used to investigate the psychological aspects of political personalities
        
        served as staff psychoanalyst under Mayo
        
        psychoanalysed by Theodor Reik (Freud)
    - - very scathingly received: political science journals did not publish his works until 1950s when :silhouette:Heinz Eulau accepted his expressions and psychoanalytic vocabulary
- - - - Lasswell was very influential in shaping the seminar discussions towards communication effects
        
        "Who says what to whom in what channel with what effects was the main five-question-scheme framework designed by Lasswell that dominated the seminar
        
        :!!: 'Why' was not included
        
        why do those in control chose to use it in the way they do?
        
        :!: behavioural science of communication became restricted to only defining communication as a process of persuasion
        
        :warning: this five-question model gave coherence to communication research by focusing specifically on media effects but it also steered scholars away from other important topics
        
        :warning:
        
        assumed that communication is unidirectional from source to receiver, without feedback
        
        many scholars of his time saw communication as an act, not a process: one-way and intentional, oriented towards achieving a desired effect.
        
        :red_flag: Explicated Three Functions of Communication in Society
        
        1. Surveillance of the Environment: media allows an individual to look beyond their door and at events in the Broader World
        
        Media helps individual make sense of what is going on in the world: correlation of society's response too the events. Tells and individual hoow to interpret news.
        
        Transmission of cultural heritage: taught what is right or wrong, the history of people, how they differ etc.
        
        Entertainment
- - - - :book: drafted President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points (1918) for World Peace
        
        was a columnist for several influential intellectual newspapers
        
        adviser to 12 presidents
      - :!: When a set of individuals can prevent an audience from having their own access to news events, or prevent them from arranging the news to suit their purposes, that is potential propaganda.
        
        a barrier between the public and the event
        
        these restricted communication are due to :warning: GATEKEEPERS, what goes to the audience and what comes out
      - increased public apprehension about the role of propaganda in a democratic society
        
        government could censor the news and distort information flows by propaganda techniques
        
        :!!: The world outside and the picture in our heads are different:
        
        biggest factor in public opinion process is Stereotypes
        
        objective reality vs subjective prejudices that guide our behaviour
        
        mass media manipulates the picture in our heads & capitalizes on our subjectivity with high-degrees of gatekeeping
        
        mass media is the principle connection between real world event and the images our mind construct of the event
        
        every newspaper is the result of a series of gatekeeping decisions
        
        what is newsworthy and what is not
      - :book: The Phantom Public (1925)
        
        democratic ideal of an informed public is unlikely
        
        skepticism about public opinion being intelligent
  - - - :book: Chapel Hill 1968 Study by Maxwell McCombs & Donald Shaw (1972)
        
        media agenda correlated directly (perfectly) with public agenda
        
        How does an issue get on the policy agenda
        
        offers explanation of how social change occurs in society through mass media communication
        
        :!!: 1. Media Agenda Setting :arrow_right: 2. Public Agenda Setting :Arrow_right: 3. Policy Agenda Setting
        
        Media agenda setting
        
        amount of coverage of a particular news issue is determined by mass media gatekeepers
        
        media agenda measured by content analysis
        
        Public agenda setting
        
        the public decides which issues are of greatest importance
        
        measured by polls and surveys of the public
        
        Policy Agenda Setting
        
        the issues agenda of governmental bodies or elected officials are determined
        
        measured by the passage of laws or appropriation of funds (allocation of resources)
- - - - variety and uses of content analysis exploded as analysis of large-scale data sets was advancing
        
        1970s: emergence of the computer
  - - - Lasswell advocated the policy sciences as a means by which political and sociial problems could be resolved
        
        ameliorative approach