ABSTRACT
Michael Sproule’s articulate reminder of the significance of propaganda studies as an important part of our intellectual heritage in the twentieth century could not have come at a more opportune moment. A close reading of this essay and the other important perspectives that he has provided us in the last two years opens up an important new debate about the past, present, and future of the field of communication studies in the United States (Sproule, 1989). In the last decade, we have witnessed a bewildering shift in the dominant methodologies (paradigms) of communication studies in American universities. Where only a decade ago there was almost complete domination by a largely statistically based empiricism, in the decade of the 1980s new, humanistically based methodologies emerged to provide a serious challenge to this hegemony. Whether they be called “critical inquiry,” “cultural studies,” or the host of other names under which these new modes of analysis go, they have already had an observable impact on the literature of the field, and are the subject of intense debate at academic conferences. The proponents of the “critical” approach, as well as some of its detractors, feel that it is only a matter of time before critical studies achieves an equal status with the statistically based empiricism. In fact, critical studies’ strongest supporters have as their stated aim the displacement of so-called objective empirical research from its lofty perch by a more socially and politically aware hybrid combination of empiricism and critical research (Grossberg, 1987).
