Communication Research and Media Studies, History of

Michael Meyen, Institute for Communication and Media Research, University of Munich, Mnchen, Germany
2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract

Communication research is both the latecomer of the social sciences and a product of political and economic necessities. The
disciplines formation took the search for effective propaganda designs and a growing interest of both media industry and
students. Furthermore, the elds development is inseparably linked to the history of US universities. First, the strong
emphasis on quantitative research was invented precisely there. Second, communication research made in the US was
exported worldwide.

Communication research is both the latecomer of the social
sciences and a product of political and economic interests.
In the rst half of the twentieth century, other social
science disciplines like sociology, economics, anthropology,
psychology, and political science were born but not commu-
nication (Abbott, 2002). The disciplines formation took World
War II with its interdisciplinary work on propaganda that was
clearly conditioned by Rockefeller Foundations support,
military, CIA, and State Department funding (Pooley, 2008)
and the search for effective propaganda designs in the early
Cold War sponsored by the very same agents (Simpson, 1994;
Glander, 2000). Last but not least, it was a growing interest of
both media industry and students that communication
research began to be recognized as a distinct academic eld
(Craig, 2008) or, as in the case of German Pub-
lizistikwissenschaft, solved its legitimacy crises by a shift from
a humanistic to an empirical social science pleading for the use
of quantitative methods (Lblich, 2007). However, Robert
Craig (2008) associated the rapid growth and institutional
consolidation as an academic discipline that communication
underwent since then with certain problems: strain on
resources, an overemphasis on practical training of under-
graduates, and the threat of cooptation by commercial inter-
ests. To put it in a nutshell, in terms of scientic capital, the
latecomer communication research seems to be still at the
bottom of the table rather than at the top.
As the articles title already suggests, both the elds name
and status are contested. All over the world, communication
research and media studies are torn between social sciences and
humanities and highly diverse in methods, theories, and objects
of study (Craig, 2008; Averbeck, 2008). Not even in the US, the
eld has a singular authoritative institution like the Modern
Language Association or the American Anthropological Associ-
ation. In addition to purely academic associations such as the
International Communication Association (ICA, more than
4000 members in over 80 countries) and the International
Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR,
1500 members from some 100 countries), there are both
associations that also embrace educators, teachers, politicians,
and practitioners (National Communication Association,
Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communi-
cation, World Association for Public Opinion Research) and
those that focus on very specic topics in cross-disciplinary
elds (Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Association of
Internet Researchers). Furthermore, even some of the elds
most prominent gures such as Byron Reeves (2012) from
Stanford view communication very much as a subject and not
as a discipline like psychology or biology to this very day. For
all these reasons, the question continues to be key today
whether communication research and media studies is already
(or still) a discipline rather than one of the great crossroads
where many pass but few tarry as Wilbur Schramm (1959)
puts it against Bernard Berelsons death pronouncement in the
Public Opinion Quarterly debate some 50 years ago when this
academic enterprise was just new born (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2004).
Part of the elds legitimation and identity problem are the
notions of an academic Taiwan (claiming all of China as its
own, Peters, 1986), or, similarly unfavorable, of a stepchild that
is tolerated by university administrators only because commu-
nication research and media studies helps pay the bill for the
departments they really care about (Meyen, 2012).
The Fields Historiography
From the early days on, the history and present day structures
of communication research and media studies have been of
particular interest to those who are within this eld (Dennis
and Wartella, 1996); in part as a tool for authentication and
legitimation, easy to understand against the just outlined
background, and partially because there seems to be neither
signicance nor identity without historiography (Hardt, 2008).
The rich and growing body of literature on the elds origins
has a certain focus on the intellectual roots of the discipline
(Peters, 1986, 1999; Rogers, 1994; Hardt, 2001; Park and
Pooley, 2008). There are milestones (Lowery and DeFleur,
1983), edited collections of key or canonic texts (Katz et al.,
2003; Peters and Simonson, 2004), myths told over and over
again about both the four founding fathers Carl Hovland
(191261, a psychologist), Harold D. Lasswell (190278,
a political scientist), Paul F. Lazarsfeld (190176, a sociolo-
gist), and Kurt Lewin (18901947, a psychologist again) and
the institution builder Wilbur Schramm (190787) who star-
ted the programs and institutes at Iowa in 1943, Illinois in
1947, and at Stanford in 1955 (Rogers, 1994; Chaffee and
Rogers, 1997). On the one hand, those biographical
approaches have been criticized as great-men-make-history
tales (Lblich and Scheu, 2011; Simonson, 2008) but on the

278 International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 4 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03054-3

other hand, there are portrays of the most promising female
communication scholars based on personal conversations
(Signorielli, 1996) or archival work (Dorsten, 2012) as well as
current interviews with 57 leading scholars (Meyen, 2012).
Looking at the importance of propaganda back then, it
seems easy to name the wartime research effort as the single
most important catalyst for the new eld of communication
research (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2004) and to point both to the
need for legitimization and to the scholars coming in from
various disciplines to study public opinion, mass media effects
and persuasion (Glander, 2000; Simpson, 1994). However,
there are also sophisticated trials to locate the disciplines
development and institutionalization within the context of
communication as an evolving category of cultural knowledge
and practice in society (Craig and Carlone, 1998; Craig, 1999)
or within the system of American higher education (Delia,
1987) and academic structures (Pooley and Katz, 2008).
Besides those dominant narratives, there are alternative
constructions of the research elds history available (Carey,
1992; Hardt, 1992). The very same is true for research on
almost all the facets of an academic hierarchy on the relative
positions of the different areas in relation to others in the eld
(Donsbach, 2006), on masters and doctoral programs (Craig
and Carlone, 1998; Barnett et al., 2010), on the most
important theorists (Beniger, 1990), on citation patterns
(Park and Leydesdorff, 2009), on research productivity both
of individual scholars and departments (Bunz, 2005), and on
leading associations (Weaver, 1977; Nordenstreng, 2008).
The Fields Geography
The academic discipline of communication research is (still)
a US centered enterprise with strong pillars at the Big 10
universities and the West coast. There are no communication
research and media studies programs at most Ivy League
schools and other top-tier US universities. Stanford and the two
Annenberg Schools for Communication at the University of
Pennsylvania and at the University of Southern California
(USC) in Los Angeles are three exceptions to the rule that the
elds heart beats not at private US schools but at the large
public research universities such as Illinois, Indiana, Iowa,
Michigan State, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue, Texas, and
Wisconsin. Contrastingly, the golden era at Stanford seems
to be over. According to eyewitness Everett Rogers (1994), it
is not so long ago (from roughly 1955 to 1970) when that
university dominated the eld and everybody would have
wanted to hire one of Stanfords PhDs in communication.
From that period is not too much left. Today, Stanford only
has a rather tiny number of people in humancomputer
interaction and mass media studies (Reeves, 2012).
The dominant historical narrative that explains the elds
geography is, at least in this case, quite similar both in the
journalism- and speech-derived traditions (Rogers, 1994;
Cohen, 1994; Pooley, 2008). Looking at those histories, the
development of the communication research eld is
inseparably linked to the history of US universities. The land-
grant schools were established to help develop the new
territories of the US. In these universities, practical skills such
as speech, rhetoric, and journalism were more respected. The
Communication Research and Media Studies, History of 279
focus on practical activities and the idea of instrumental
tasking attracted a certain type of students: kids of social
climbers and, in particular, of European immigrants.
Conversely, the US elite universities repositioned themselves
along the lines of science in the early 1900s (Meyen, 2012).
This narrative ts into Klaus Krippendorffs construction of
communications early days at the University of Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia. Krippendorff (2012) who became an assistant
professor in 1964 at Penn: Walter Annenberg was the owner of
The Philadelphia Inquirer and wanted to pay for a school that
would create professionals that could work in his newspaper.
The University of Pennsylvania didnt want to have a narrow
professional focus but liked the idea of a communication
school. Consequentially, the Annenberg School focused
almost exclusively on research. The strong position of the
Annenberg Schools at Penn and USC within the communica-
tion research eld is not just a heritage of the long-term dean
George Gerbner (19192005, in charge from 1964 to 1989)
or a function of the commercial context the two are settled in.
One of our strength was nancial, said Klaus Krippendorff
(2012). Walter Annenberg provided ample resources.
In the case of Stanford, it is more about reputation than just
dollars. Everett Rogers (1994) rst listed the eight US schools
with the highest prestige (they tend to be private, old, and
resistant to radical educational innovations) and then cele-
brated, logically from his point of view, Schramms move to
Stanford University in 1955 and the founding of the doctoral
program there as the key event in gaining acceptance of
communication study in American universities. However,
more than half a century later, Byron Reeves (2012),
Schramms successors successor, still has to ght for the
reputation of the discipline: Everybody is always asking what
communication is and why they dont have it at Harvard,
Princeton, Yale, or most of the other top ten or top 20
universities. Thats where the peers for all the other depart-
ments are. Therefore, both the geography of the eld and its
roots in more practical skills such as journalism and speech
have implications for communications position in the larger
scientic eld.
Concentrating on communication research and media
studies beginnings in the US does not in any way mean
a devaluation of other world regions. Of course, there are
similar developments in Europe in the rst third of the twen-
tieth century. It is well known that Paul F. Lazarsfeld who
became an important point of reference for US centered
historiographies of the communication research eld started
out in Austria where he, to give just one example, collected
data on the listening habits of radio audiences in the early
1930s (Fleck, 2007). In Germany, the Zeitungswissenschaft
(newspaper science) was established at universities during
World War I in order to raise the level of journalism in the
ght for public opinion (Lblich, 2007). However, it is not
just the common root in practical training and administrative
research that legitimizes a certain focus on the United States.
First, the strong emphasis on quantitative research, including
statistical methods and sophisticated data analysis, that
became one of communication researchs key identity
elements from the late 1950s on and will be described in the
next paragraph, was invented precisely there. Second, closely
linked to the shift from training offerings to academic
280 Communication Research and Media Studies, History of
approaches, communication research made in the US was
exported worldwide. To put it another way, many of the
founding mothers or fathers of national scientic
communities were not just heavily inuenced by the North
American research tradition but rather a part of it. The
exceptions include France and southern Europe where it was
not until the 1970s that the discipline began to spread,
Eastern Europe with its roots in MarxistLeninist traditions of
journalism training, British Cultural Studies and parts of
Latin America (Averbeck-Lietz, 2013).
It is easy to see that the dominance of US-originated
approaches to communication research and media studies is
a function of both the power of English as the global
language and, probably even more important, the level of
commercialization of media systems. Media markets create the
needs for application knowledge, well-trained students, and
a public debate on the individual and societal consequences of
commercial media products. That is why it is no accident that
US universities not just exported theories and methods but
also scholars that became leading gures in other national
academic environments. To start with English-speaking
countries, the native American Jay Blumler (United Kingdom)
graduated from Antioch College. Later, in addition to his
position at Leeds where he became one of the most prominent
researchers in the eld of political communication, Blumler
was professor at the University of Maryland. Elihu Katz (Israel)
was born in New York, Akiba Cohen (a second Israeli) in
Detroit, Cindy Gallois (Australia) in Washington, and Janet
Bavelas (Canada) in Portland, Oregon. James Taylor who
inspired the famous Montreal School of organizational
communication research worked as a lecturer at the Annenberg
School in Philadelphia in the 1960s. All ve of them got their
PhDs at communication or, in Katz case, sociology schools in
the US. Youichi Ito (Japan) who is renowned for his
information society concept did a masters degree at Boston
University and had a fellowship at Tufts University in the
1970s. Osmo Wiio (Finland) attended an American seminar in
Salzburg, Austria in the late 1950s. From then on, Wiio
developed strong contacts with the US universities. The very
same is true for Kaarle Nordenstreng, the second famous Finn
in the international community. In the late 1960s,
Nordenstreng had a fellowship at Southern Illinois University
mainly working for his doctorate. He got to know
communication research by traveling the US and interviewing
American colleagues (Nordenstreng, 1968). Elisabeth Noelle-
Neumann (Germany), to give one last example, received
a scholarship at Missouris School of Journalism in 193738
and was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago on
a regular basis between 1978 and 1991. One of her students is
Wolfgang Donsbach, who served as a World Association for
Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) president in 199596 and
as an ICA president in 200405 and edited Wileys 12 volumes
International Encyclopedia of Communication (Donsbach, 2008).
The Shift from a Humanistic and Practical
to an Empirical Social Scientific Discipline
Communication research and media studies literally began
with the invention of the printed press. However, in the rst
two and a half centuries after the worlds rst newspaper
appeared in the City of Strasburg (1605, German language), the
eld remained a sphere dominated by outsiders. In the German
language area, novelists, theologians, editors in chief, other
journalists, or private scholars wrote about the topic. Although
the rst doctoral thesis on newspaper reports has already been
submitted in 1690 (at the University of Leipzig), although
there were a number of lectures devoted to the organization
and the usage of the press in the eighteenth century, and
although historians, economists, legal and literary scholars
started to explore press-related problems with the unfolding of
the mass press in the second half of the nineteenth
century, German universities were not interested in the
foundation of an independent communication discipline
until World War I. At this early stage, the impetus for
founding the Zeitungswissenschaft (newspaper science) came
from publishers and journalists associations (Meyen and
Lblich, 2006).
The German foundation history is an epitome for the elds
emergence. In all countries, rst, media distribution and
academic communication research are closely connected.
Second, media innovations had and have wide implications for
researching and theory-building in the eld of public
communication. And third, the demand for qualied
journalists, PR specialists and, at least in the US case,
debaters was a major driving force of the elds academic
institutionalization. In Germany, both Zeitungswissenschafts
forefathers and founders started out in journalism. They
mainly focused on journalism education as well as on the
disciplines legitimation and, therefore, could not improve
their status at university. Furthermore, National Socialism
stopped initial steps toward theorizing communication
and media phenomena by forcing promising Jewish
scholars into exile (Averbeck, 2001; Fleck, 2007). Those
German researchers who could carry on in that period were
compromised after 1945. The disciplines reestablishment
was, again, the work of trained journalists such as
Walter Hagemann (190064) who coined the term
Publizistikwissenschaft and reinvented communication research
and media studies from scratch (Wiedemann et al., 2012).
Although Hagemann already experimented with social
scientic methods, German Publizistikwissenschaft was still
dominated by humanistic and practical approaches.
However, all over the world, well-rounded
communication-related doctoral programs were not
established until after World War II. Whether implemented
in former journalism schools or speech departments, the
new born US graduate programs emphasized quantitative
empirical work. Rogers (1994) described the not just
epistemological conict between the nonscientic Green-
Eyeshades (oriented to the profession of journalism rather
than to the new science of communication) and the Chi-
Squares who survived in the end because their scholarly
approach t with the norms of research universities. In
addition to the media industry that became engaged in
polling and market research (Rogers, 1994; Lblich, 2007),
the students experienced a kind of epiphany that matched
the habitus of social climbers who focused on the idea of
contributing socially. At least in the 1950s and 1960s,
young journalists as well as young debaters went out into

the world to make a difference. Involved into scientic
research projects, the future communication research
professors became convinced that the answers derived from
Hollerith machines and supported by statistical techniques
would inuence journalists and others (Meyen, 2012).
Michigan State University played a special role in the shift
from a humanistic and practical to an empirical social scien-
tic discipline. That shift is especially linked to the name of
David Berlo (192996) who was one of the rst individuals to
receive a PhD degree in the new eld of communication (at
Illinois). Berlo founded the department at Michigan State
and continued as chair for the rst 14 years (195771),
starting out not even 30 years old. According to Everett
Rogers (2001), Berlo saw that training large numbers of
doctoral students was the route to implementing a social
science conception of communication. To Gordon Whiting
having a speech and rhetoric training, Berlo would say, we
are making a scientist out of you. Berlos closest allies
Gerald Miller (Iowa), Hideya Kumata, and Erwin
Bettinghaus (both Illinois) had been trained at schools
founded by Wilbur Schramm too. For Rogers, who came
from an established department at Ohio State (in
sociology), at Michigan State the the close-knit nature of
faculty relationships was kind of new. That as well as the
quantitative orientation he traced back to the high degree
of uncertainty about the new eld of communication study
later. As chair, Berlo would perceive that his department was
at risk and convince his faculty to pull together against
a hostile environment. In Rogers memoir, there is also
a brief glance at Berlos habitus: a bodyweight of over
270 pounds, hidden in well-tailored dark suits and so
pretending establishment (Rogers, 2001).
There could be no doubt that the Michigan State habitus
began to rule the eld very quickly. Parts of it were the strong
emphasis on quantitative research, including statistical
methods and sophisticated data analysis, the high degree of
male bonding, the notion that communication research is an
academic underdog and the feeling that the resultant meth-
odological orientation was superior to any other approaches.
That habitus promised a defence against the possible suspi-
cion by higher levels of academic review that communication
was not rigorous enough as well as personal security for the
newcomers at university and is around to this very day
(Meyen, 2012).
However, the path to more recognition mapped along the
lines set by the natural sciences at the power pole of the
academic eld has been challenged again and again, too. In
addition to the already mentioned British Cultural Studies with
its emphasis on power, media content, and media usage, there
are other supporters of qualitative methods as well as theore-
ticians available. For example, Hanno Hardt (2001) called for
a paradigm shift to critical communication research. In
lamenting the crisis of US-based quantitative approaches,
Hardt pointed to the European tradition in analysing the
relationship between mass media and society and edited
communication-related works of famous German sociologists
and economists such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, Karl Knies,
Albert Schfe, and Ferdinand Tnnies as well as early
American trials by Albion W. Small, Edward A. Ross, and
William G. Sumner.
Communication Research and Media Studies, History of 281
Communication Research and Media Studies
on the EastWest Battlefield
It is not just the elds roots in propaganda research during World
War II and the postwar era up to the 1960s that stand for the
considerable political inuence on research problems, theories,
methods, and even appointments. A glance at communications
two leading international academic associations today shows
how long the road to more autonomy took. Until the mid-1970s,
ICA had members from government, from business, and from
teachers who did not want to do scholarship (Meyen, 2012).
Unlike ICA, IAMCR could not really extract itself from the
grip of politicians or practitioners. IAMCR is a child of the
postwar area. Founded with UNESCO support in 1957 on
ecumenical soil crossing both East-West and North-South
divides and in its beginnings dominated by Europeans,
particularly the French (Nordenstreng, 2008), those origins
dominated the association at least till Cold Wars end. From
the mid-1960s until the fall of the Berlin Wall the
associations conferences were not just about academic results
but also (and maybe even more) ideological battleelds. The
East European countries tried to inuence both the program
including the respective publications as well as the
recruitment of leadership positions. In essence, three
objectives can be distinguished. First of all, the communists
wanted to promote their very own concept of scientic work
on journalism and mass media effects. This concept included
formulas, precepts, and doctrines of MarxismLeninism.
Second, closely linked to the rst aim, the East Europeans
wished to win colleagues from the developing countries in
Asia, Africa, and Latin America for the socialist idea on how
to educate journalists and other mass media practitioners.
This objective is part of the two systems worldwide struggle
for supremacy back then. And third, along with professors
and doctoral students from the third world, so-called
progressive Western academics, were also an important target
group. Scientists working with materialist or other classic left
theories and ideas should be encouraged and helped to
present the results of their work to an international audience.
Therefore, it was more than a battle of ideologies. Focusing
on clearly academic issues such as theory and methodology,
the denition of good science was at stake (Meyen, 2013).
Driving force of all those efforts was the German Democratic
Republic (GDR). For the communists in East Berlin, interna-
tional organizations such as IAMCR were a tool in their ght for
international recognition. Therefore, they helped to kick-start
IAMCR. Formerly known as a rather small association with
a permanent lack of money, IAMCR had a major conference
in Leipzig in 1974 with about 250 participants from all over
the world and two-volume proceedings. Emil Dusiska (1914
2002), leading professor in the communist journalism
training center at the University of Leipzig, became IAMCRs
secretary-general and did most of the associations paper work
from 1972 to 1978. In return, IAMCRs policy was discussed
in the communist partys inner circle in East Berlin.
East Berlin communists support for IAMCR and their adver-
tising for the well-equipped journalism department in Leipzig
perfectly match communication researchs general situation.
Looking back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, we nd a small
discipline ghting for its existence. ICA was more like a family
282 Communication Research and Media Studies, History of
affair back then. Klaus Krippendorff (2012) describing the
association in its beginnings: The scholars who gathered at
annual conventions knew each other, and the program was
printed on one page folded three ways. For me, one of the most
interesting conferences was in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1971. ICA
rented a motel with rooms around a swimming pool, and there
were few parallel sessions. The climate was completely different.
However, beginning in the early 1970s, in the eld of
communication research and media studies, the academic logic
began to triumph over the political one. Apart from GDRs
declining interest in IAMCR after joining the UN in 1973 that is
the second signicant reason of the decreasing inuence of
Eastern European representatives on the associations agenda.
In 1974, Western scholars rejected a plan to launch an ofcial
IAMCR journal supported by Eastern European money with
academic arguments. In the very same year, interesting enough,
George Gerbner reinvented the Journal of Communication, which
was originally set up in 1951. Within a short period of time that
ICA publication became the elds agship journal.
Summary and Current Situation
The eld of communication research and media studies does
not have the same aura like established disciplines such as
history, literary studies, linguistics, psychology, or sociology. It
is comparatively young, rather small and at the same time very
broad. Moreover, at many places it is still easy to think of
communication as primarily a technical, skills- or service-
oriented discipline, not a social science. Citation patterns are an
indicator for the elds position at large. More established
subjects do not do a good job in searching literature from
communication research. A typical political scientist might
study the impact of the Internet for political processes, without
ever reading a communication journal (Meyen, 2012). In
contrast to Sisyphus, there is hope for the eld. All over the
world, communication has been growing vastly. There is
a tremendous demand for undergraduate places. As a result, the
discipline gets the best students and therefore, probably the
best future faculty on the market. There is a second market force
working for communication: a fast growing societal interest in
media and communication issues and, linked with that
interest, growing outside funding. The access to external money
is changing the eld right now and is going to shape its future
structures, too. A prime example of the ongoing changes is the
rise of health communication, but there are other winners as
well organizational communication, new media, and
research on children and media.
See also: Human Sciences, History of; Lazarsfeld, Paul Felix
(190176); Lewin, Kurt (18901947); Mass Media and Politics;
National Socialism and Fascism; Social Science and
Universities; Weber, Max (18641920).
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Relevant Websites
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