ABSTRACT
Between World Wars I and II it was widely accepted in intellectual circles that the emerging mass media were spawning an equivalent mass audience, an audience that was unthinking, herd-like, and inherently passive yet easily swayed by skilled political and commercial demagogues (Gans 1974). The interpretation proffered by Hadley Cantril and his associates of what happened following Orson Welles’ 1938 radio dramatization of an invasion from Mars typifies this view. They quite wrongly interpreted the reaction to the broadcast as widespread panic (Cantril et al. 1940). As Rosengren and his associates were clearly able to show in a similar case in Sweden, reports about mass panics tend to be strongly exaggerated or downright false, based as they often are on hearsay and newspaper sensationalism (Rosengren et al. 1978). But things today are different. Researchers, as Jensen and Rosengren (1990) have recently found in their careful review of the five major traditions in communications research on audiences, no longer see the audience as an undifferentiated mass.
