1 gen 1940 anni - Science of coercion : communication research and psychological warfare, 1945-1960 (Rockefeller Foundation)

Descrizione:

During the second half of the 1930s, the Rockefeller Foundation under wrote much of the most innovative communication research then under way in the United States. There was virtually no federal support for the social sciences at the time, and corporate backing for the field usually remained limited to proprietary marketing studies. The foundation’s administrators believed, however, that mass media constituted a uniquely powerful force in modem society, reports Brett Gary, 28 and financed a new project on content analysis for Harold Lasswell at the Library of Congress, Hadley Cantril’s Public Opinion Research Project at Princeton University, the establishment of Public Opinion Quarterly at Princeton, Douglas Waples’ newspaper and reading studies at the University of Chicago, Paul Lazarsfeld’s Office of Radio Research at Columbia University, and other important programs.

As war approached, the Rockefeller Foundation clearly favored efforts designed to find a “democratic prophylaxis’’ that could immunize the United States’ large immigrant population from the effects of Soviet and Axis propaganda. In 1939, the foundation organized a series of secret seminars with men it regarded as leading communication scholars to enlist them in an effort to consolidate public opinion in the United States in favor of war against Nazi Germany—a controversial proposition opposed by many conservatives, religious leaders, and liberals at the time and to articulate a reasonably clear cut set of ideological and methodological preconceptions for the emerging field of communication research.

Aggiunto al nastro di tempo:

Data: