Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture

CHAPTER FIVE: TELEVISION AND MEDIA EFFECTS

167 CHAPTER FIVE TELEVISION AND MEDIA EFFECTS In his introduction to the  edition of Joseph Klapper’s influential study, The Effects of Mass Communication, Paul Lazarsfeld speculated about why the study of media effects was not yet a well-established academic specialization. For Lazarsfeld, the problem with the study of media effects was methodological. Where media effects had previously been debated by public intellectuals assured of the untested validity of their theses, the terrain now belonged to researchers trained in the social sciences who remained unconvinced.About media effects, therefore, Lazarsfeld suggested , “the main difficulty lies in formulating the problem correctly. For the trouble started exactly when empirical research stepped in where once the social philosopher had reigned supreme. To the latter there was never any doubt that first the orator and then the newspaper and now television are social forces of great power” (:–). The shift that Lazarsfeld described was evident in early research by sociologists and communications scholars into comic books. Research undertaken by Katherine Wolf and Marjorie Fiske of Lazarsfeld’s Bureau for Applied Social Research at Columbia University stressed, in contrast to Fredric Wertham’s approach, children’s individual and developmental needs. In “The Children Talk about Comics,” Wolf and Fiske argued that “comics satisfy a real developmental need in normal children and are harmful only for children who are already maladjusted and susceptible to harm” (:). Having conducted one-hour interviews with  children between 168 TELEVISION AND MEDIA EFFECTS the ages of seven and seventeen,Wolf and Fiske classified reader preferences along an age-based schema.They then determined the needs that they found to be satisfied by comic books in each age group. More importantly, however, the authors suggested that so-called normal children ultimately outgrew their interest in comic books while “maladjusted” children fixated on the medium. The source of maladjustment was not comics, however, but the family.Wolf and Fiske proposed that psychological or social maladjustment was present in children before they turned to comics:“The possible dangerous effects of comics on fans must not be overestimated. The child’s problems existed before he became a fan, and the comics came along to relieve him” (). These findings, published in the Lazarsfeld and Stanton–edited volume Communications Research, –, were far removed from those of Wertham, whose first comments on comic books appeared at almost exactly the same time.The distance between Wolf and Fiske’s conception of a needssatisfying media industry and Wertham’s articulation of a debasing and corrupting culture delimited the postwar difference between empirically trained social scientists and what Lazarsfeld termed “social philosophers.” That difference is the subject of this chapter and can best be illustrated by shifting the point of reference to the debate over television that emerged in the early s and that has continued more or less to this day. Shifting the terrain from comic books to television highlights the transition from an aesthetic to an empirical model in the study of the mass media and popular culture. With the exception of Wolf and Fiske, comic books were rarely studied from research perspectives specifically rooted in the social sciences, and the dominant media-effects paradigm was little utilized in relation to discussions of the form. Social science researchers in the mid-s, conversely , quickly took up television as it emerged as the leading cause of concern in the domain of mass communication. In altering the object of study, therefore, research methods and approaches were also realigned. Just as comic books were rarely read through the specific lens of the media-effects paradigm, television was seldom regarded from any other perspective. Concern about the influence of comic books on young readers dissipated as the critique of mass culture shifted with the coincidental rise of television and of empirically grounded social science mass media research in the postwar period. However, the media-effects paradigm that developed from the study of television was supported by an assumption rooted in preexisting critiques developed by Lazarsfeld’s“social philosophers.”They held that mass culture was atomizing and narcotizing and further that television represented its nadir. Television, as Patrick Brantlinger notes, is the mass medium that took the abolition of Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “aura” of older cultural forms to its absolute limit (:). It should come as no surprise, therefore, to discover television at the apotheosis of the anti-massculture critique. Despite nostalgic depictions...