Abstract
This essay explores the use of Walter Lippmann's ideas in three areas of mass communications research: message-driven media effects research and related studies of agenda setting, priming, and framing; social histories of U.S. journalism, advertising, and public relations; and interpretive accounts of the field's genesis. It offers a new understanding of the role Lippmann played in yoking together a range of communication-related issues under a single problematic. In the process it exposes a critical lacunae stretching across (and beyond) scholarship in communications research: a lack of attention to the rhetorical deployment of Lippmann, characterized by an inclination to endow this figure's political philosophy with the power to stand in for a range of developments occurring across an emerging communications field. This essay addresses the implications of being positioned to speak not only for a field of research but for history as well, being able to so perfectly mirror shifts in cultural attitudes and emerging institutional practices.
Users
Please
log in to take part in the discussion (add own reviews or comments).