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The critical/hegemonic view implies a very strong view of media effects. Its early versions were a piece of what social scientists were arguing against when they created the straw-man idea of the “hypodermic needle” or “magic bullet” theory. Perhaps what was happening was something that we have seen later in media effects work, where the most fearful hypotheses about media’s very strong effects are formulated early in the experience with a new medium. The Frankfurt School’s work was powerful, but over-argued, and it became evident that their explanations, along with those of the ones who had panicked about propaganda, were not sufficient to explain the wide variety of media phenomena that were seen, as well as the wide variety of people’s reactions to them.

Moving through the 1960s and 1970s, critical work began to recognize that media did not automatically and always enforce the views of privileged classes. Stuart Hall’s idea that media messages could be encoded and decoded in different ways (“dominant,” “negotiated,” “oppositional”) moved critical theorists to lessen their overall view of media power. While still holding to the idea of media as important cultural organs in service of the state, there appeared more room for “readings” of media. In these works, culture becomes something more than the product of an artistic or literary elite; it is equated with the daily lived experience of a people. With this change, popular media take on a more important role: not just as bread and circus for the masses, but as vehicles through which cultural experiences can be both generated and consumed.

It is to Hall that we owe some of the most relevant criticism of the “behavioral” effects perspective. Hall was writing from a standpoint that was dissatisfied with empirical approaches such as content analysis, or the isolation of specific items of discourse as the meaningful causes of effects in the empirical studies. His most famous essay (Hall, 1973) sought to emphasize that isolating or counting instances of violence, let alone trying to establish whether exposure to them had any effect, was an ill-advised venture:

If we refuse, for a moment, to bracket and isolate the issue of violence, or the violent episode from its matrix in the complex codes governing the genre, how many other, crucial kinds of meaning were in fact transmitted whilst researchers were busy counting the bodies? This is not to say that violence was not an element in the TV western, nor to suggest that there were not quite complex codes regulating the ways in which violence could be signified. It is to insist that what audiences were receiving was not “violence” but messages about violence. (Hall, 1973, pp. 8–9)

Hall’s research was an important starting point for a cultural studies tradition that has been strongly concerned with not just how elite cultural producers attempt to get across messages – and do they? – but how audiences themselves see them, use them, and ultimately whether these uses make any difference (which is also a kind of “effect”).