The Media and Opinion Formation

And what is a still greater novelty, the mass do not now take their opinions from dignitaries in Church or State, from ostensible leaders, or from books. Their thinking is done for them by men much like themselves, addressing them or speaking in their name, on the spur of the moment...

When Elihu Katz and Paul F. Lazarsfeld cited this passage from an essay by John Stuart Mill as the motto of their 1955 book, Personal Influence, it read like the quintessence of a decade and a half of research findings that had radically altered both communication researchers’ notions about how an electoral outcome comes to pass and theories about the influence and function of mass media in society. Of course, the authors of Personal Influence, who were researchers at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University in New York, had played a major role in this development.

The most important contribution was made by Lazarsfeld himself via his renowned election study, The People’s Choice. In this investigation, Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet tracked the decision-making process among voters in Erie County for six months during the 1940 U.S. presidential election campaign. One of the study’s primary focuses was the question of how radio, which was a relatively new mass medium at the time, influenced people’s voting decisions.

In fact, however, the findings presented in The People’s Choice with regard to this question are not very impressive, and the authors described them in a strikingly vague manner. The most important finding was that the supporters of both parties mainly preferred those media and news items that were in line with their own political convictions. Based on this finding, Lazarsfeld and other researchers proceeded to draw very far-reaching conclusions, positing that if newspaper readers and radio listeners choose the types of information they expose themselves to in accordance with their previously conceived opinions, then it follows that media content can hardly have any impact on the opinion formation process—at best, media coverage might reinforce the attitudes people already hold.

Although this conclusion was ultimately disproved, it dominated the scientific debate in the field for decades. What’s more, it raised the question of how the population does, in fact, form its opinions on political issues. Here, the second core finding from The People’s Choice offered a plausible explanation: In analyzing their data, Lazarsfeld and his coauthors had noticed that many changes in voting intentions were attributable to personal conversations. Lazarsfeld hypothesized the existence of opinion leaders based on this observation.