Читать книгу Media Effects - James Shanahan - Страница 14

Concurrently, in journalism, prescient commenters were beginning to recognize the power of media to present and even shape political reality in newspapers and in other print media. The most well-known of these was Walter Lippmann, a columnist and an early example of a public intellectual. In Public Opinion (1922), Lippmann put forth a concern with the “pictures in our heads,” which often did not coincide with reality. These were images about reality that were largely gained through media exposure. Lippmann pointed out that many (or even most) of the things we “know” to be true of the world can only be gained through media exposure. The superimposition of media images and constructions onto the world of politics and culture threatened a cherished principle of our democracy: that we can adequately know reality and base deliberative action by working from our own sense data. For Lippmann, influenced himself by his own experiences in World War I, we more often worked from “stereotypes.” Rather than observing and then defining what we saw, we defined first and then observed. Or worse: others defined for us and then we saw. This fact – the power of media to set conditions for and then structure human observation – would become very much a leitmotif in looking at media effects from both sociological and psychological perspectives. Ultimately, Lippmann was concerned that our actions, based on media-supplied images, were taking place in a pseudo-environment, one which paradoxically became, through our collective actions, the actual lived environment.

Overall, Lippmann’s stance on the media question was negative, leading to conclusions that it would be difficult to harness media power toward deliberative democracy. He imagined a possible solution to create a sort of “information bureau” that could be in charge of making sure that information was presented more objectively. Information would be “professionalized,” creating standards of ethics and truthfulness that would guard against the excesses of the propaganda era. Such an idea, of course, was never implemented, although later theories that argued for a “social responsibility” ethic of journalism (Siebert, Peterson, & Schramm, 1956) came close to Lippmann’s ideas. It would not be the first time that policy suggestions based on media effects ideas would find it hard to be implemented.