Some Highlights In Media History
Classical era (4th-5th centuries B.C.): concern that sophists were manipulating impressionable students through powerful rhetoric but faulty logic
19th – early 20th centuries: partisan and “yellow” presses
- Newspapers were often little more than party mouthpieces
- Media moguls such as William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer sensationalized the news to attract readers
Walter Lippman's insights: the media create “pictures inside our heads”
W.W.II Era
- Nazis, Churchill, and F. D. Roosevelt effectively used mediated propoganda to mobilize support for their respective war efforts
- 1938: Orson Welles’s broadcast of “The War of the Worlds”
- Hovland group’s research into the psychology of persuasion