ABSTRACT
The creation of the Listener Research Department in the BBC in 1936 has usually been treated as a natural development in a progress towards increasing public accountability: natural in a sense that it is consistent with the consultative forms of mass democracy. I shall argue that the development is more adequately understood as part of the process of broadcasting becoming a mass medium: as such it was indeed part of concurrent changes in political form but these were not necessarily leading to greater public participation or accountability. I shall not be concerned with whether we should try to determine media influence or effects because I am less interested in the ‘success’ of research than that it was developed as a bridge to public opinion. The reason for concentrating on the 1930s is that innovations in the conceptualization of public as audience were being sought and developed, innovations which were subsequently subsumed in the allocation of resources to propaganda by governments caught up in a world war at the end of the decade.
