ABSTRACT
Concern over the effects of media can be traced back as far as the fifth century BC (Perloff, 2009), long before what we now think of as “media” came into modern parlance. However, a more modern and perhaps scientific approach to the study of media is more commonly thought of as having its nascent beginnings in the early twentieth century (Greenberg & Salwen, 2009; see Chapter 3). Although scholars who were interested in the effects of media on audiences came from disciplines such as sociology, psychology, education, and political science, the commonality of their questions drew them together, at least topically if not always in terms of method. In fact, if we consider newspapers, radio, and, later, television to be the earliest forms of mass media, these forms were often studied by individuals who were not trained or identified as mass communication scholars for perhaps no other reason than mass communication was not yet established as its own discipline.
