ABSTRACT
Modern media and communication studies may be said to have started as a consequence of a moral panic (Cohen 1972/80; Roe 1985) about the effects of the new mass medium of film. At the initiative of the US Motion Picture Research Council, the so-called Payne Fund Studies were carried out in the late 1920s by a number of leading sociologists and psychologists including, for instance, Herbert Blumer, Philip Hauser and L.L. Thurstone (see Lowery and De Fleur 1983: 31 ff.). A couple of decades later, for similar but different reasons, comic magazines for children and adolescents triggered another moral panic. Again research into the effects of individual use made of mass media was carried out, this time by a psychiatrist who, incidentally, found an enthusiastic sympathizer in a Swedish professor of social medicine (Wertham 1954; Bejerot 1954; cf. Lowery and De Fleur 1983: 233 ff.).
