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Historical developments played a major role in how scholars would specifically conceptualize media effects. The period around World War I turned out to be crucial. In Europe, media were being used in new ways to create propaganda to support the war aims of either side. Newspapers and other print media such as posters developed very graphic depictions of each other as the enemy (British propaganda, for instance, referred to the Germans as the “Hun”), and these messages reached across the Atlantic as well. It was a major moment of reckoning for Americans with their still-developing mass media system. While every war had featured to some degree the effects and influences of communication, its role was greatly heightened in World War I, with newspapers actively playing a role in fomenting American involvements. Woodrow Wilson’s government used specific techniques of organized public communication to create support for US participation. After the war there was significant disappointment with the US role, and a sense that the country had been duped into something it might not have otherwise done given better information. Given that the war did not really produce any better outcome in Europe – things actually got worse – Americans were left wondering whether their participation had been worth it, or had they been fooled by the new mass messaging?

“Propaganda,” a term that had languished somewhat since its coinage by the Catholic Church in the seventeenth century, thus began to come to the fore as the “dark side” of the emerging mass media phenomenon. “A word has appeared which has come to have an ominous clang in many minds – Propaganda” (Lasswell, 1927b, p. 2). What to do? From a research standpoint, scholars in the social sciences began to wonder whether it would be possible to document or even measure its negative impacts. The earliest and most prominent of these was Harold Lasswell, a political scientist whose work became very influential in the development of models and research questions in media effects. Lasswell wanted to move the study of media phenomena in a behavioral direction:

The strategy of propaganda, which has been phrased in cultural terms, can readily be described in the language of stimulus-response…. The propagandist may be said to be concerned with multiplication of those stimuli which are best calculated to evoke the desired responses, and with the nullification of those stimuli which are likely to instigate the undesired responses. (Lasswell, 1927a, p. 631)

Lasswell was reflecting the emergent confidence that social scientists could make something of an exact science of mediated communication, with the ability to predict outcomes and perhaps even to create messages based on quantitative understandings of audience characteristics and reactions. Terms such as “stimulus-response,” “instigate,” “evoke,” and “calculate” are words that are starting to move toward what would become the dominant American approach to media effects research. It was not long after Lasswell’s words that scholars from a variety of disciplines were pushing toward what would eventually become the media effects field.