The Political Economy of Communications Research

Buxton, William J.

doi:10.1007/978-94-011-2204-7_6

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…In the bitter aftermath of the Act, the Rockefeller Foundation sought to reconcile the commercial networks with the educationalists' moderate wing. The strategy hatched by the foundation's John Marshall was to commission research on listeners, with the hope that the data would convince NBC and CBS that edifying programs weren't a threat to their bottom lines (Buxton, 1994). By late 1937 Marshall's research vehicle, the Princeton Radio Research Project (PRRP), was up and running under the leadership of Paul Lazarsfeld, a gifted Austrian psychologist and future eminence in American sociology.…”

Section: Media Research Circa 1937mentioning

confidence: 99%

Data dependencies and funding prospects: A 1930s cautionary tale

Pooley

2021

HKS Misinfo Review

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Misinformation studies relies, to some extent, on access to data from large technology firms, which also seed grants, sponsor events, and support think tanks working in the field. These companies, facing scrutiny from regulators and critics, have a stake in their portrayal. This essay recounts a pair of episodes in early radio research, as a cautionary tale. The Princeton Radio Research Project, the leading U.S. media research program of the 1930s, had multiple ties to the radio industry. The project’s leadership, and its main philanthropic sponsor, were keen to maintain good relations with the networks. A pair of critical researchers, James Rorty and Theodor Adorno, violated the project’s de facto ban on scrutinizing radio’s commercial underpinnings. They were both dismissed. Could ongoing access to data, and the prospect of future funding, lead today’s researchers—and even other, non-corporate patrons—to conclude that certain questions are too incendiary to pose?

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Section: Media Research Circa 1937mentioning

confidence: 99%

Data dependencies and funding prospects: A 1930s cautionary tale

Pooley

2021

HKS Misinfo Review

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“…In print, Chicago Journalism Review began publishing in 1968 (Benton gave it US$2,500 [Dorfman, 1968]), followed by [More] and Washington Journalism Review (later renamed American Journalism Review ) in the 1970s. As some of these examples attest, leading foundations grew increasingly interested in media issues in this period; foundation interest, as several scholars show (e.g., Buxton, 1994), can influence the paths of media research and activism. To be sure, the majority of these organizations and projects came and went.…”

Section: The Press Council Without a Homementioning

confidence: 99%

Reluctant to Criticize: Media, Academia, and the Press Council Without a Home

Bates

2020

Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly

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The earliest recommendation for an American press council appears in A Free and Responsible Press (1947), the report of the Commission on Freedom of the Press. Few people know that Commission chair Robert Maynard Hutchins and two allies between 1959 and 1962 tried to create the press council. They wanted an organization that would evaluate television as well as print, and entertainment as well as news, with Adlai Stevenson as chair, Edward R. Murrow as staff director, Henry R. Luce as a major funder, and an elite university as a base. In substantial part because of resistance from the universities, they failed.

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“…The sociologists, political scientists, and psychologists who populated the public opinion field were not-most of them anyway-attracted to media questions per se. But the Rockefeller Foundation's interest in educational broadcasting, along with media firms' willingness to commission research on their audiences, meant that communication topics were prominent (Buxton 1994). When German tanks rolled into Poland in 1939, a Rockefeller-sponsored "Communications Seminar" just underway, comprised of leading public opinion researchers, recast its mission to address the international emergency .…”

Section: Us Field's Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Wilbur Schramm and the “Four Founders” History Of U.S. Communication Research

Pooley¹

2019

Preprint

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In its postwar institutional infancy, American mass communication research badly needed a history. Communication study in the United States, jerry-rigged from journalism schools and speech departments in the years following World War II, has from the beginning suffered from a legitimacy deficit. This talk traces Wilbur Schramm’s self-conscious and successful effort to supply such a history in the form of an origin myth, complete with four putative founders.

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The Political Economy of Communications Research

Cited by 6 publications

References 5 publications

Data dependencies and funding prospects: A 1930s cautionary tale

Data dependencies and funding prospects: A 1930s cautionary tale

Reluctant to Criticize: Media, Academia, and the Press Council Without a Home

Wilbur Schramm and the “Four Founders” History Of U.S. Communication Research

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