ABSTRACT
The mass media loomed as agents of evil aiming at the total destruction of democratic society. First the newspaper, and later the radio, were feared as powerful weapons able to rubber-stamp ideas upon the minds of defenseless readers and listeners. The media of communication were looked upon as a new kind of unifying force—a simple kind of nervous system—reaching out to every eye and ear, in a society characterized by an amorphous social organization and a paucity of interpersonal relations. Mass media research has established very persuasively what social psychologists have confirmed in their laboratories—that an individual’s attitudes or predispositions can modify, or sometimes completely distort, the meaning of a given message. The image of the process of mass communications with which researchers set out, that the media play a direct influencing role, has had to be more and more qualified each time a new intervening variable was discovered.
