ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the development of a critical approach to the problems of communication and media in American social science scholarship. It traces the understanding of a “critical” position through four successive periods and their contribution to an intellectual history of the field: the pragmatism of the Chicago School, the empirical sociology of the Lazarsfeld tradition, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, and the cultural studies movement in Great Britain. The essay argues that communication and media theorists in the United States have embraced a notion of critical research that emerged from a reformist environment and was based upon a sense of social responsibility among social scientists that operated well within the dominant ideology. Thus the introduction of radical social theories, including a critical, Marxist perspective since the 1940s, has been either ignored or considered a peripheral intellectual activity by communication and media scholarship, the most recent analyses of media and society offered by Critical Theory and Cultural Studies notwithstanding.
