ABSTRACT
Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann has been a journalist, an opinion pollster, a market researcher, an adviser to statesmen, and a university professor. She has made lasting contributions to social science, most notably the theory of the spiral of silence. The idea of the mighty media is once more a focus but in a new, more sophisticated guise. Among others, attention is devoted to ideas brought up in Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann's theory of and research into the "spiral of silence". The liberal press ideology that prevails in the Western world has the same starting-point. Diversity in the press can be achieved only through a multiplicity of owners representing different interests. Hierarchical ideology organizes life in accordance with such stratifications. Those who embrace this ideology usually prefer an organization with stable ranks to a market that can give rise to disorder and untidy ranks of nouveau riche.
