The Persuasion Paradigm

The development and spread of radio and film increased public awareness and scholarly interest in the phenomenon of the mass media and in issues regarding the impact on public opinion in the 1920s and 1930s. The extensive use of propaganda as an instrument of policy by all sides in World War I, and the participation of social scientists in the development of this instrument, provided an impetus for the development of both mass communication and international communication studies. There is some variation in the early histories of systematic communication research, but the three scholars who are generally cited and who are also most relevant to international communication are Harold Dwight Lasswell, Paul Felix Lazarsfeld, and Wilbur Lang Schramm (Lerner & Nelson, 1977; Rogers, 1994).

Lasswell’s (1948, p. 37) five-question encapsulation of the communication process—“Who says what to whom, through what channels, with what effects?”—provided a framework for much future communication research. His scholarship on communication began with his dissertation at the University of Chicago, Propaganda Technique in the World War, which was published in 1927. His advisor, Charles E. Merriam, had worked for the Creel Committee on Public Information, which had designed, organized, and conducted extensive domestic and international propaganda activities during World War I. Lasswell’s dissertation/book analyzed the various propaganda techniques and strategies used by the Germans, British, French, and Americans and indicated factors that affected their impact. He defined propaganda here as “the control of opinion by significant symbols [. . .] by stories, rumors, reports, pictures and other forms of social communication” (Lasswell, 1927, p. 9). His focus on the symbols and themes used in the messages foreshadowed his later development of content analysis as a research tool (Lerner & Nelson, 1977). His research and teaching on propaganda and public opinion helped to launch the teaching of university courses on this subject and contributed to the growth of scholarly interest during the 1930s. By 1935, there were already 4,500 publications listed in an annotated bibliography on the subject by Lasswell and colleagues (Lasswell, Casey, & Smith, 1935), which was compiled under the auspices of the Social Science Research Council. Meanwhile, as the decade progressed, the rise of Fascism in Italy and the National Socialist Movement in Germany intensified scholarly interest in the subject.

Lasswell’s book World Revolutionary Propaganda: A Chicago Study (Lasswell & Blumenstock, 1939) was another empirical investigation of symbol manipulation. The book was a case study of communist propaganda among Chicago’s unemployed during the Great Depression. The findings indicated that, despite some favorable circumstances, communist propaganda was blocked by American nationalism and individualism. Lasswell’s interest in the factors that facilitated and inhibited the communist world’s revolutionary appeal to a particularly vulnerable population demonstrated the interaction of macro and micro factors in politics at the local, national, and international levels (Almond, 1996).

The intellectual environment of the University of Chicago played a vital role in the development of Lasswell’s scholarship and in the origins of communication research. Significant funding for social science research in the 1920s and 1930s from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund and Rockefeller Foundation (which merged in 1932) attracted a highly competent group of scholars from various disciplines and encouraged exchange and collaboration among them. It was at the University of Chicago during those two decades that empirical social science research began to flourish and where cross-disciplinary collaboration established a pattern for future political communication research (Nimmo & Sanders, 1981).

The Rockefeller Foundation took a particular interest in communication research and helped to shape its direction in even more direct ways. From 1937 to 1944, it supported the Radio Research Project, directed by Paul F. Lazarsfeld. The impetus for this project came from several directions (Czitrom, 1982). Analysis of propaganda and its effects led logically to investigations of public opinions and attitudes: how to explain their origins, persistence, and shifts. George Gallup’s founding of the American Institute of Public Opinion, in 1935, and his statistical method of survey sampling held out the promise of a new scientific approach to these questions. There was a growing sense that increased literacy and the spread of newspapers, periodicals, motion pictures, and especially the radio had created a new situation that needed investigation. As described in the foreword to the first issue of Public Opinion Quarterly in 1937, “Always the opinions of relatively small publics have been a prime force in political life, but now, for the first time in history we are confronted nearly everywhere by mass opinion as the final determinant of political and economic action” (Czitrom, 1982, p.124). Sociologists and social psychologists had begun to look at the individual and social effects of what came to be known later (1940s) as the mass media. For example, the sociologist Robert Park (1922), at the University of Chicago, had studied the immigrant press in the United States, and the Payne Fund Project (Charters, 1933) had conducted an extensive quantitative study on the role of motion pictures in American society, particularly their effect on children. Finally, the rapid diffusion of radio was spurring advances in market research, a measurement challenge for a medium without subscriptions or circulation figures (Czitrom, 1982).

The rather vague purpose of the Rockefeller grant for the Radio Research Project, initially located at Princeton, was to study the psychological and social effects of radio. The associate directors were Hadley Cantril, a psychologist at Princeton and a founder of Public Opinion Quarterly, and Frank Stanton, a CBS researcher (later president of the network). Under Lazarsfeld’s direction, the project conducted dozens of studies that analyzed radio content and the demographics of the radio audience, correlating preferences with social stratification (Czitrom, 1982). In addition to several project summary publications, Lazarsfeld incorporated some of this research in his book Radio and the Printed Page: An Introduction to the Study of Radio and its Role in the Communication of Ideas (Lazarsfeld, 1940), which Czitrom (1982) claims was a key step in the consolidation of the field of communication.

In 1939, Lazarsfeld moved to Columbia University with the Radio Research Project. The project, which had been renamed the Office of Radio Research, became in 1944 the Bureau of Applied Social Research, with a much broader focus. The emphasis here, as in the project’s earlier stages, was on the social psychology of short-term effects of the mass media. In the early years, commercially sponsored research made up about half of the budget (Rogers, 1994). Later, during World War II and for the decade that followed, more than half of the budget came from funding for government projects (Rogers, 1994).

Lazarsfeld used a variety of quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches, including survey research, laboratory experiments, community studies, content analysis, and a few innovations. He advanced survey research methodology by combining the survey interview with multivariate data analysis. His focused interview was designed to access the individual’s perception of a media message. Focus group interviews and a method for measuring the emotional responses of the audience to radio programming were two of his most important methodological contributions (Rogers, 1994). He conducted the first comprehensive studies of radio in the United States and was the most important single individual in launching mass communication research (Rogers, 1994). Lazarsfeld, even more than Lasswell, helped to shape the early direction of communication research to emphasize mass communication effects (Rogers, 1994). Their heavy emphasis on micro-level effects narrowed the focus of communication study to “essentially a process of persuasion” (Czitrom, 1982, p. 132) and steered communication scholars away from other topics, notably macro-level issues (Rogers, 1994). Strategic considerations prior to and during World War II reinforced the emphasis on this genre of research.

One response to the approaching involvement of the United States in World War II was the Rockefeller Foundation’s convening and funding of a communication seminar, which met monthly at its headquarters in New York between 1939 and 1940. The initial purpose of bringing together this diverse group of leading scholars interested in communication (including both Lasswell and Lazarsfeld) was to provide theoretical guidance regarding future communication research (Rogers, 1994). Lasswell’s five-question formulation became the basic framework for discussion. Communication was conceptualized as “one-way, and intentional, oriented toward achieving a desired effect” (Rogers, 1994, p. 223). As the crises mounted in Europe, the discussions began to direct the application of communication research to government policy. When the United States entered the war at the end of 1941, the network of scholars who had participated in the seminar moved almost en masse to Washington, DC, to play an important role in conducting applied communication research (Rogers, 1994).

World War II became an important catalyst for research in mass communication, increasing its legitimacy and visibility and guaranteeing funding and support, as well as bringing together scholars from around the country interested in studying media and public opinion. Analytical tools of communication research were applied to the tasks of mobilizing domestic public support for the war, understanding enemy propaganda, and developing psychological warfare techniques to influence the morale and opinion of allied and enemy populations (Simpson, 1994).

As these tasks required an interdisciplinary approach, a network of relationships developed among the social scientists who were located in numerous agencies and involved in various aspects of the war effort. In the War-Time Communications project for the Library of Congress and the Department of Justice, Lasswell developed a systematic, quantitative content analysis method for monitoring the foreign language press. Along with other social scientists, including Nathan Leites and Edward Shils, Lasswell analyzed the content of Nazi communications for information on internal political and morale conditions in Germany and occupied Europe for the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service of the Federal Communications Commission (Almond, 1996). Lazarsfeld and other specialists in survey research and social psychology were also employed by the military services. Survey research and various interviewing methods were used by the military services to address personnel issues such as recruitment and morale, by the Department of Agriculture in its effort to increase food production, by the Treasury Department in its efforts to sell bonds, and by the various intelligence services (Almond, 1996).

The Cold War Impact

World War II generated intense scholarly interest in the potential of the mass media for influencing opinions, attitudes, and behavior to meet U.S. strategic needs (Czitrom, 1982). As the hot war segued into a cold war, U.S. foreign policy goals continued to shape the direction of much research in international communication. Besides the East–West conflict, two other international developments influenced scholarship: the integration and disintegration of Europe and the rise of new nationalisms in countries that were former European colonies. In this new international context, efforts to conceptualize international communication as a field of study accelerated. A major impetus to the development of the subject as a field was a Ford Foundation four-year grant in 1952 to the Center for International Studies (CIS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for a research program in international communication, which became an influential center for research in the field in the 1950s and 1960s.

The approach of the scholars associated with this center was to view international communication as a more complex process than a simple one-way reaction to mass media. The basic orientation of the work emanating from the center was articulated in the report that the Planning Committee, which the center had appointed to advise on the use of the grant, published in condensed form in the journal World Politics (MIT, 1954). It defined international communication in very broad terms as “the interchange of words, impressions and ideas which affect the attitudes and behavior of different peoples toward each other” (Mowlana, 1996, p. 9). In even more sweeping terms, the report declared: “The study of communication is but one way to study man, and the study of international communication is but another way to study international relations” (MIT, 1954, p. 359).

The MIT Planning Committee report referred to the large body of cumulative research and indicated two recurring problem areas: (a) “To what extent do changes in the structure of world politics interact with changes in the structure of world communication?” and (b) “What are the strategy and tactics of communication in achieving the aims of national policy in world affairs?” (MIT, 1954, pp. 374–375). Although the criteria for selecting areas for future research were both “scientific merit and political significance,” the latter dominated the discussion. Indeed, the report asserted that “there was every reason why a program in communication research should select the great problems of our time.” These were stated in almost apocalyptic terms: (a) “The conflict between the Communist and the free worlds is of decisive importance to the balance of power and the future character of our civilization”; (b) “The future course of Western civilization is dependent upon the result of efforts to find new and stronger forms of economic, political, and military organization in Western Europe”; and (c) “The rise of new nationalisms in Asia and Africa [. . .] may profoundly affect balance of power and the status of Western civilization in the years to come” (MIT, 1954, pp. 365–366).

The report suggested various research approaches that would be appropriate for addressing these problems and that also had scientific merit. Stressing the importance of studying the structure of a society in order to understand the communication processes within it, the report identified “elite communication” as an important direction for future research. For example, who are the opinion leaders in a society, what are their characteristics, how are their images formed, what is the relationship between elite and mass opinion, what is the process of mediation between the mass media and the audience, and how do attitudes and behavior change under the impact of communication? The report (MIT, 1954, p. 366) identified “historical studies, field research, and laboratory experiments” as important types of research and expressed the need for improved methodologies for field research abroad, especially in nonwestern and communist societies. It outlined a sample field study in India as an area in which to study the rise of new nationalisms and the impact of international communication on political decision making in the Third World. Suggested sample projects for studying the East–West conflict were diplomatic negotiations between Soviet and Western powers and non-Western interpretations of news from communist versus Western sources.

Two special issues of Public Opinion Quarterly, Winter 1952–1953 and Spring 1956, were devoted entirely to research in international and political communication respectively, to demonstrate the large volume of research that was accumulating in the field and to serve as a forum for discussion on the subject. These special issues were a product of a committee for the development of research in the field of communication that was appointed by the parent organization of the journal, the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). Both issues grappled with the difficulties encountered in defining the field, establishing boundaries, and conducting the necessary interdisciplinary research. A section on problem areas focused on such methodological issues as how to modify research methods, notably survey research, to populations abroad, especially non-Western and those not accessible for political reasons. The need to develop better concepts, better methods, and more pertinent and far-reaching data was noted repeatedly.

The MIT Planning Committee report and the two issues of Public Opinion Quarterly exemplified scholarly pursuits in international communication that were already under way and that foreshadowed much of the research to be conducted in the late 1950s, 1960s, and beyond. A sample of articles from the journal issues illustrates how the three problem areas outlined in the MIT report provided direction for future research.

The first might be summarized by the title of an article by Peter H. Rossi and Raymond A. Bauer (1952–1953), “Some Patterns of Soviet Communications Behavior.” This particular article was concerned with the patterns of exposure to the media among the population in the Soviet Union (radio, foreign radio, newspapers, magazines, books, movies, theater, and lectures) and how that exposure was related to involvement in the system. A variety of indirect approaches were employed by researchers on communication within the Soviet system, and there was considerable discussion within the two Public Opinion Quarterly issues about the validity of these methods. The Bauer and Rossi study involved interviews with Soviet displaced persons in the United States and Europe, and the data pertained to 1940. It was part of a larger study on Soviet communications behavior, which in turn was part of the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System (Bauer, Inkeles, & Kluckhohn, 1956). Another study, by Ivor Wayne (1956), explored Soviet and American themes and values through a content analysis of popular magazines in both countries.

To assess the impact of the Voice of America on the Soviet system, Alex Inkeles (1952 – 1953) analyzed references to the VOA in the Soviet media, because access to the Soviet population as an audience was not possible. This approach represented only the “official reaction” to U.S. broadcasts, but he claimed that it offered some clues about the impact on the system. The study also provided a case study of “the exchange of propaganda between two vast, competing mass communication systems” (Inkeles, 1952–1953, p. 612). This strain of research obviously represented a further development of the earlier propaganda studies, concerned with the effects of mass media on strategically important populations. This article was part of his work on Soviet society, published in Public Opinion in Soviet Russia: A Study in Mass Persuasion (Inkeles, 1958).

The assumption, that international broadcasting was playing an increasingly important role in the worldwide tug of war for the minds of men, encouraged considerable research that compared the characteristics of international communications from Soviet and non-Soviet sources. Paul Kecskemeti (1956) looked at the “operating principles of Soviet foreign mass propaganda,” Harold Mendelsohn and Werner Cahnman (1952–1953) examined communist broadcasts to Italy, and Daniel Lerner (1952–1953, p. 681) discussed the theory of international coalitions and suggested how international communication research could help to identify common interests that would draw “neutralists” into the “American-centered coalition.”

Winning hearts and minds in the “non-industrial countries” —the second problem area—was deemed particularly important among these scholars in the early 1950s. Bruce Smith (1952–1953) analyzed the predispositions and “value constellations” of “non-industrial audiences” and suggested lines of communication research in this area. He indicated some significant advantages of Soviet communications and problems that hampered Western efforts, including past behavior that belittled and insulted the cultures of these countries.

Communism’s appeal and the challenge it posed to the West received considerable attention during the 1950s; see, for example, Gabriel Almond’s The Appeals of Communism (1954). Although this theme did not disappear, a different approach, as well as terminology, came to dominate both scholarship and policy making regarding so-called less developed countries or the Third World in the 1960s. The word propaganda appeared less often because, as Ralph K. White (1952–53, p. 539) pointed out, “The world is more and more tired of propaganda.” A more indirect approach to the Cold War goals of containing the Soviet Union and gaining the allegiance of developing countries would use international communication research as a tool of development and modernization. That development paradigm is discussed later.

The third problem area considered in the international communication research of the 1950s and 1960s was Europe. Some of this research was oriented toward the effectiveness of international broadcasting, as illustrated in Mendelsohn and Cahnman (1952–1953) and in Lerner (1952–1953), but other research went beyond this dominant persuasion paradigm to develop new, less Cold War-oriented topics and substantive areas. Karl Deutsch’s work on nationalism and international integration, which also contributed to the study of international communication, was motivated less by the East–West conflict than by the desire to study the conditions that made peaceful change and collaboration possible (Puchala, 1981). His wide-ranging research was particularly concerned with patterns of social communication and their relationship to political organization and integration.

Deutsch’s dissertation, Nationalism and Social Communication (1953), developed a new model of nationalism based on the idea of “a people bound together by habits of, and facilities for, communication” (Merritt & Russett, 1981, p. 6). “Membership in a people,” Deutsch argued, “consists in the ability to communicate more effectively, and over a wider range of subjects, with members of one large group than with outsiders” (Deutsch, 1953, p. 71). His developmental model of political unification posited first the development of functional linkages and increased flows of transactions between communities that “enmesh people in transcommunity communications networks” (Puchala, 1981, p. 156). A high volume of reward-producing transactions generates social-psychological processes that lead to assimilation and integration into larger communities. This model was intended to explain the formation of large-scale political communities, hence integration at the international as well as the national level. At both levels mutual responsiveness and “two-way channels of communications between elites and mass and among non-elites are central to his conception of successful integration” (Merritt & Russett, 1981, p. 8). The empirical focus for Deutsch’s investigations into political integration was in Western Europe (Deutsch, Burrell, & Kann, 1957).

Deutsch was also interested in conditions that lead to political disintegration or dysfunctional integration. Drawing on his study of what he called the work of “communication engineers,” and foreshadowing his later work that more explicitly theorized from the field of cybernetics (Deutsch , 1963), he postulated conditions that were likely to destabilize an amalgamated political community. One was an imbalance in the loads on the system from increased transactions and the capabilities to accommodate the increased loads. Inequities in the distribution of burdens and rewards were also a source of hostility that could make integration efforts self-defeating (Deutsch, 1954; Merritt & Russett, 1981).

Deutsch was convinced not only that measuring the balance of communication flows was both feasible and valuable, but also that “statistics of communications flows constitute essential background data for almost any effective analysis of international communication” (Deutsch, 1956, p. 145). He was particularly interested in measuring the balance of communication flows within a system, such as a country, and the flow of messages across its boundaries. “Inside–outside ratios of communication or transaction flows can [also] suggest something about the extent to which some particular human activity, such as science, is ‘international’ or ‘national’ and in what direction it may be changing” (Deutsch, 1956, p. 159). His interest in cybernetics and in communication and transaction flows convinced him of the need for quantitative, replicable data, a conviction that contributed to his development as a pioneer in quantitative international relations. The balance of communication flows became a matter of controversy and concern in the 1970s.

Deutsch’s research investigated empirically idealistic assumptions about the relationship between communication flows and international understanding that were prominent in the euphoria of the immediate post–World War II period. When the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was established in 1945, the constitution expressed the belief of the parties to the constitution in the “free exchange of ideas and knowledge” and their determination “to increase the means of communication between their peoples and to employ these means for the purposes of mutual understanding and a truer and more perfect knowledge of each other’s lives.” Soon afterwards, the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press (1946) published a report that advocated the free flow of information across borders as means to a better world (Rogers & Hart, 2003). The report argued (Hutchins Commission, 1946, p. 14) that what was needed in the field of international communication was “the linking of all the habitable parts of the globe with abundant, cheap, significant, true information about the world from day to day, so that all men increasingly may have the opportunity to learn, know, and understand each other.”

In the decade that followed World War II, UNESCO sponsored the collection and publication of data on the world’s network of mass communication facilities, studies on international news agencies (UNESCO, 1953), and the handling of world news in various countries (Kayser, 1953). It published or sponsored social scientific studies on the roots of intergroup tension and on nations’ images of one another (e.g., Buchanan & Cantril, 1953; Klineberg, 1950). UNESCO also sponsored and assisted with the development of several international professional organizations, such as the International Political Science Association, which were designed to facilitate scientific exchange and communication as well as cross-cultural research.

In the context of the Cold War, however, the ideas of a free flow of information and freedom of information became another tool of U.S. foreign policy to penetrate closed communist societies and to demonstrate the superiority of the U.S. way of life. Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm (1956), Four Theories of the Press: The Authoritarian, Libertarian, Social Responsibility, and Communist Concepts of What the Press Should Be and Do provided a conceptual framework for categorizing media systems that “served primarily to celebrate the Anglo-American models” (Downing, 1996, p. xiii, 191; McDowell, 2003). Davison (1965) similarly compared the role of communication in various societies with a view to using communications to advance U.S. foreign policy.

By the middle of the 1950s, a bibliography on International Communication and Political Opinion (Smith & Smith, 1956) was published that contained almost 2,600 entries on relevant research since 1945. The categories included political persuasion and propaganda activities, channels of international communication, audience characteristics, and methods of research and intelligence. An article by one of these authors (Smith, 1956), for a special issue of Public Opinion Quarterly, that analyzed trends in international communication research over the decade following World War II, indicated that the bulk of attention had been devoted to propaganda and political warfare.

As in the hot war of World War II, government support in the Cold War was a powerful stimulus for research in international communication within the persuasion paradigm. Federal funds sponsored evaluations of various informational and educational programs, such as efforts to measure audiences of the Voice of America, the United States Information Libraries, and even exhibits traveling abroad. Also sponsored were surveys of mass and leadership opinions, which formed the basis for studies of images that audiences had of the United States, the USSR, and other countries.

Modernization and the Development Communication Paradigm

As new states began to emerge from colonial empires, communication became an important component of research on development. Indeed, development communication (or communication and development) was recognized as a distinct field of research and policy (Stevenson, 1994). Two books were particularly important in establishing what remained the dominant paradigm of development for the 1950s and 1960s: Daniel Lerner’s (1958) The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East and Wilbur Schramm’s (1964) Mass Media and National Development. Both emphasized the role of the mass media in guiding and accelerating development. For Lerner, the mass media provided a vicarious contact with the world for those constrained by traditional ways of thinking, enabling them to imagine different ways of doing things and to aspire to a better life. Thus wider exposure to the media in a traditional society helped the process of transition to a modernized state; that is, one that followed the Western model of development.

Wilbur Schramm (1964) buttressed Lerner’s view regarding the potential of the mass media to raise the aspirations of people in developing countries and saw the media as a “bridge to the wider world, as the vehicle for transferring new ideas and models from the North to the South and, within the South, from urban to rural areas” (Thussu, 2000, p. 57). The mass media were “the great multiplier,” amplifying, spreading, and accelerating the efforts of all the agents of change. Schramm’s (1964) book appeared early in the UN’s designated “Decade of Development,” when its agencies, the U.S. government, universities, and private companies were beginning to provide significant funding for research on how to modernize the newly independent countries (Thussu, 2000). Schramm’s book, published in conjunction with UNESCO, became “both a technical manual for communication development and a bully pulpit for advocating the use of mass media as a key component of development programs” (Stevenson, 1994, p. 234). This paradigm guided both national and international development programs throughout the 1960s. It resurfaced in the 1980s, with a focus on telecommunication (Hudson, 1984) and again in the 1990s, in modified form under the comprehensive label “information and communication technologies for development” (See Hanson, 2008, pp. 171–173).

Critical Perspectives in the 1970s

Development communication began to meet stiff criticism in the 1970s, as the more general modernization paradigm was challenged by an array of scholars, researchers, and Third World political leaders. The optimism of the modernization theorists confronted the reality of many failed projects and a general lack of significant progress toward development. A wave of scholars criticized the focus on the internal causation of underdevelopment and emphasized external constraints, the structural biases in the international economy that put developing countries at a disadvantage, and the vulnerability of dependence. Multiple variations of dependency theory, world systems theory, and an assortment of other related approaches agreed that the modernization model of development served merely to strengthen the dominance of the wealthy, developed countries and maintain the dependence of the countries at the periphery of the global system. They viewed the modernization paradigm as an instrument of neo-imperialism.

One set of variations focused specifically on the role of communication in maintaining structures of economic and political power (Thussu, 2000). Galtung (1971), for example, cited communication imperialism as one of the five types of imperialism in his now classic article on structural imperialism. A critical perspective that is often labeled cultural imperialism (Schiller, 1976) or media imperialism (Mattelart, 1979) was concerned about the detrimental effects on developing countries of Western, and particularly American, domination and control of global communications industries. According to this view, Western media hegemony inhibited indigenous industries in Third World countries, reinforced patterns of dependency, and imposed Western cultural values.

These critical perspectives also challenged another paradigm that had reigned since the end of World War II; that is, the free flow of communications, which Schiller (1976) argued actually leads to an asymmetrical flow. UNESCO modified its position from free flow of information to free and balanced flow. Structural inequalities in international communication became a high priority concern among newly assertive developing countries, which called for a New World International and Communication Order (NWICO) linked to their demands for a New International Economic Order. In response, UNESCO appointed the International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems, chaired by Sean MacBride. The final report (MacBride, 1980) concluded with 82 recommendations all aimed at “eliminating imbalances and disparities in communication and its structures, and particularly information flows” (MacBride, 1980, p. 253). Among the specific infrastructural changes recommended was “more equitable sharing of the electro-magnetic spectrum and geostationary orbit.” The discussions of the commission and the final report generated significant political debate, with some Western countries, most notably the United States and the United Kingdom, concerned that efforts to balance the flow of communication and information across national borders could amount to impeding that flow.

International News Flow/Coverage and International Transactions

During the decade of the 1970s and somewhat beyond, voluminous research was conducted more specifically on patterns of international news flow and coverage. Mowlana (1983) estimated in an annotated bibliography that, between 1973 and 1983, there were 441 papers, books, articles, reports, and book chapters published on this subject. These included studies that dealt with the volume and direction of news flows among countries and those that analyzed not only the amount but also the type of news disseminated (Hur, 1984).

In a summary and critique of 80 major studies of international news flows and coverage, Hur (1984) discussed research trends, categorized the different methodological approaches, and identified their shortcomings. Geographical approaches looked at the international news flow into a specific country, coverage of international news by the media of a specific country, or news flows or coverage across two or more countries. He found that the generality of theories proposed was seriously limited by unevenness and lack of inclusiveness in the geographical focus. Similarly, there was a lack of comparable data in the various media approaches and unevenness in the media selected for study. Most attention was devoted to newspapers, than television. There was a lack of cross-media research to explain variations in international news flow and coverage. Hur also found a general lack of longitudinal studies. Another category included studies focused on specific events or specific periods of time. In these studies Hur (1984) found problems of typology that limited their cumulative effect. He also noted the lack of studies looking at long-term patterns of international news flows and coverage, which was significant because these patterns are subject to change. Hur (1984, p. 374) concluded that because of these shortcomings in the research, “there are relatively few research findings that can form ‘theories’ of international news flow or coverage” and, although there were well-formulated theoretical propositions in some studies, adequate empirical support was lacking.

Hur (1984) also noted a lack of multivariate research up to that point. This was an important deficiency because so many different independent variables (many never operationalized) were proposed in this literature to explain variations in international news flows and coverage, for example the power hierarchy of nations, cultural affinity, and economic variables such as export and import values. A cross-national study of 29 countries sponsored by UNESCO (Sreberny-Mohammadi, 1984; Stevenson & Shaw, 1984) found geographical proximity to be a major determinant of news coverage for most countries. In sum, few reliable generalizations resulted from this research because of the difficulty in operationalizing some variables; because findings were divergent; and because comparability in the data across countries, time, and media was lacking.

A cursory examination of the Mowlana (1983) bibliography and the Hur (1984) critique indicates that research on international news flows and coverage during the 1970s was conducted for the most part by scholars in mass communication, with little input from or connection to scholars in international relations or political science. The 1960s and 1970s marked the rise, spread, and institutionalization of communication studies in American universities. Hundreds of university departments were established, some as completely new entities and others arising out of such existing departments as speech and journalism. Communication research as a field gained coherence and other advantages with its separate institutionalized structure; but it “lost some of its strong academic connections to the other social sciences,” which had characterized this research in its beginnings (Rogers & Balle, 1985, p. 6). A strong emphasis among the new stream of scholars was on media studies, and, even among those interested in international communication, most became more professionally integrated into communication studies than international relations. From the 1970s until the end of the 20th century, only a small number of scholars had a foot in both communication studies and international relations.

One major edited volume, Communication in International Politics (Merritt, 1972), attempted to revive the study of international communication in political science and to give it more rigor. The book, which was dedicated to Harold Lasswell, was a product of a set of panels organized at the American Political Science Association under the presidency of Karl Deutsch. It considered international political communication in broad Deutschian terms of transaction flows across national borders, which included student exchanges, tourism, trade, diplomacy, and especially the exchange of ideas. Merritt (1972) delineated three types of communicators relevant for international politics—governmental actors, nongovernmental actors, and cultures—which yielded nine types of communication flows. Merritt defined the communication process as a transmission of values, while Bobrow (1972), in another chapter, saw it as the transfer of meaning, and both deplored the lack of conceptual development in international political communication. The book’s stated purpose was to synthesize and integrate existing research beyond isolated empirical findings and to encourage the building of theory. However, most research in international communication for the next two decades took place within communication sciences and journalism. Meanwhile, during those two decades technological and political changes were occurring that would transform the communication environment and inspire a wave of research on new topics.

The Globalization of Communication

Looking Backward: 1930s to 2009

There are many other areas of research that might have been included in this historical narrative of a subject with a broad scope and no clear boundaries. Although the subject of international communication encompasses diverse and disparate topics and involves multiple disciplines, certain overlapping themes, strands, or threads can be discerned in the scholarship to 2009.

Much of the research on international communication from the beginning has focused in various ways on the impact of communication media. Early propaganda and mass communication researchers were interested in the direct effects of the media on attitudes and opinions and tended to focus on the strategic uses of communication by governments. In the context of the Cold War and an emerging Third World, communication scholars became interested in the capacity of the mass media to change societal attitudes as the essential step to development. Toward the end of the 20th century, interest in the new information and communication technologies revived this development communication strand of research. As a global communication infrastructure began to emerge, research proliferated regarding other effects of the new technologies, especially satellite television and the Internet, on the global economy, foreign policy decision making, international outcomes, and national sovereignty.

A second strand of research focused on communication flows. In the brief euphoric period after World War II, many assumed that the increased flow of messages across national borders could enhance international understanding. Karl Deutsch was also interested in the relationship between communication flows and political community, but his work investigated the conditions that affected this relationship. In the 1970s, an enormous literature, primarily in the communication sciences, examined patterns in the coverage of international news flows. Structural inequalities in communication flows between developed and developing countries also became a focus of attention in the same decade.

A third theme that runs through the literature concerns the relationship between communication and power. There is a long tradition of critical theorists who see the media and communication structures as a force to maintain the hegemony of entrenched economic and political power interests. The cultural imperialism perspective, a critical response to the development communication paradigm, has continued to focus on the deleterious effects of Western media hegemony on developing countries. As Western, especially the United States, communication industries have become global conglomerates, the issue of corporate ownership and control of the media has gained even more attention. Other strands of the power and communication theme have focused on government controls and the use of the media to advance government policies. The issue of who should control the media and for what purpose, which has long interested scholars, has generated a new line of research, namely Internet governance. Also fitting into this category are the controversies over the impact of the new information and communication technologies on state power and sovereignty and on international hierarchies of power.

The themes indicated above are simply suggestive of ways in which the diverse topics in international communication might be tied together to form coherent research traditions. There are many other areas of research beyond those covered in this essay that might have been included in this historical narrative of a subject with such a broad scope and no clear boundaries. There are also areas of inquiry that could be considered in the category of international communication, although they are not generally identified as such. Signaling, diplomacy, bargaining, threats, coercion, credibility, commitment, image, conflict management, and cognitive processes that structure the way that messages are understood are some of the obvious examples. These topics are covered in many articles in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies. See in particular the entries on “Deterrence and Crisis Bargaining,” “Foreign Policy and Communication,” and “International Negotiation in a Foreign Policy Context.”

New Directions

An important institutional development in the study of international communication was the establishment of a section with that focus in the International Studies Association in 2000. Gradually, scholars with diverse interests in this broad topic came together at the annual conference to discuss their own research interests and to take stock of the scholarly response to the rapidly changing international communication environment. Meanwhile, multiple innovations were developing, and the evolution of the Internet was raising new issues, moving research in new directions. This final section identifies a few of these new directions.

Interest in the evolving structure of the Internet and Internet governance intensified as challenges mounted to earlier visions of a global, unfettered Internet. Increasing state and corporate controls generated a debate on an impending “fragmentation of the Internet.” (Kohl, 2017; Mueller, 2017; and see Lambach, 2019 for discussion of this literature). Hofmann, Katzenbach, and Gollatz (2017) also provide an overview of Internet governance research. Much of this literature emphasizes the multiplicity of actors and forces shaping the current and future direction of the Internet, most significantly, nation states attempting to establish cyberborders based on domestic law, and corporate restrictive practices. This concern about territorialization of control is the basis for the concerns about fragmentation. Mueller (2017) sees new forms of governance organized around transnational networks as the best way to preserve the integrity of the Internet. (Lambach, 2019, p. 6) takes a critical perspective on the Internet fragmentation thesis, claiming that those concerns are based on outdated “container” notions of the territorial state. To focus on the tension between the sovereignty and territorial jurisdiction of the state and non-territorial cyberspace obscures the complexity of territories in cyberspace as “nonexclusive, overlapping, and intersecting constructs, whose shapes are constantly being renegotiated” (Lambach, 2019, p. 8).

DeNardis (2012) directed attention to the “hidden levers of Internet control” in the technical architecture, the infrastructure of the Internet, where battles to control information online are often fought. She joined with other experts to produce an edited volume (Musiani, Cogburn, DeNardis, & Levinson, 2016) that further developed this idea. Case studies illustrate how political and private entities use Internet infrastructure and systems of governance, such as the Internet’s Domain Name System, for political and economic purposes. Deibert and Crete-Nishihata (2012) examined the mechanisms and dynamics that explain the growth and spread of cyberspace controls.

Attention to the use of infrastructure tools for geopolitical and security purposes has contributed to the development of a broader research area in cyber conflict. See Whyte (2018) for a review of this literature. Whyte (2018) and much of this literature examines the relevance of traditional IR concepts for the cyber realm and the utility of analogies. Nye (2016/2017, p. 44) considers the applicability of deterrence, asking “Can countries deter or dissuade others from doing them harm in cyberspace?” He identified four mechanisms for reducing the likelihood but suggests that the ambiguity of attribution and the diversity of threats diminishes the role that punishment can play. The question—how likely is a cyberwar and what shape would one take?—has been extensively debated (Whyte, 2018). Rid (2017) challenged arguments that cyberwar is inevitable. Gartzke and Lindsay (2015) questioned the widespread assumption that offense has advantages over defense in cyberspace. Some scholars have viewed the subject of cyber conflict more broadly, while others have focused more specifically on cyberwar, although it is not clear where the line for the latter is drawn. Even more problematic for categorization is information warfare. Bjola and Pammet ‘s edited volume (2018) provided an interdisciplinary discussion of the scope of threats posed by the “weaponization of digital technology” with such methods as propaganda, disinformation, fake news, trolling and conspiracy theories. Merrin (2019) surveys what he sees as an emerging field of “Digital War,” which covers an entire spectrum of wars impacted by digital technologies.

The use of digital technology in diplomacy has also become a new research area. In their edited volume, Bjola and Holmes (2015) identified and brought together different strands of research on digital diplomacy, which they defined as the use of social media for diplomatic purposes. They investigated how social media might reset the practice of diplomacy, for example, the way diplomats communicate with each other and foreign publics, the decision-making within their own bureaucracies, and their relationships with non-state actors.

Digital technology has a significant impact on both the practice and the study of public diplomacy (Bjola, Cassidy, & Manor, 2019). In the first decade of the 21st century, a literature developed on what was called the new public diplomacy (Melissen, 2005). The term was variously defined but essentially provided a more expansive view of public diplomacy to include more actors than government officials and a greater variety of objectives. The preface to a special issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, which was devoted to “Public Diplomacy in a Changing World” noted that this important subject had only recently attracted serious academic attention (Cowan & Cull, 2008). Research advanced during the second decade with new concepts, perspectives, and directions. There was also a new emphasis on more interactive communication, building relationships and networks, and collaboration among multiple actors as a supplement to the one-way dissemination of information that characterized the traditional state-centric model (see especially Zaharna, Arsenault, & Fisher, 2013). A special issue of the Hague Journal of Diplomacy (Wang & Melissen, 2019) conveys some of the current directions and issues in public diplomacy scholarship.

At the intersection of communication and foreign policy there are multiple new directions, most evolving from earlier areas of research (see the entry “Foreign Policy and Communication”). Two are identified here. First, the growth of digital media technologies encouraged scholarly reconsideration of media effects on foreign policymaking process, a genre known by its shorthand term, the CNN effect (Lusk, 2019; Gilboa, Jumbert, Miklian, & Robinson, 2016; and see the entire April issue of Media, Conflict, and War2011). A common theme among these articles was the idea that, even though the concept of CNN effect exaggerated media influence, we did learn from the CNN debate; but we need to go beyond that debate with new research in the context of a “fragmented and pluralized media environment” (Robinson, 2011, p. 6). As a result of the debate and its exaggerated claims regarding media influence, research has focused on the circumstances under which the media are likely to become more or less influential (Robinson, 2011).

Another new direction is the expansion of the research on framing to include narrative analysis. Both analytical devices emphasize the role of language and ideas in politics (Livingston, 2001). A narrative is a broader concept that ties events together in some meaningful and systematic way. The concept of strategic narrative, first developed in the context of IR literature by Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, and Roselle (2013), is producing a new genre of research (see entry Foreign Policy and Communication) and the following examples: Bentley, 2014; de Graff, Dimitriu, and Ringsmose, 2015; Hollihan, 2014; Krebs, 2015; Roselle, Miskimmon, and O’Loughlin, 2014; Subotić, 2015; Szostek, 2017; Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, and Roselle, 2017. Miskimmon et al. (2013, p. 2) defined strategic narratives as “a means for political actors to construct a shared meaning of the past, present and future of international politics to shape the behavior of domestic and international actors.” They are frameworks for understanding events, issues, and interactions, used by a political actors to promote their interests, values and aspirations for the international order. Understanding how narratives are formed, projected and received is key to understanding the complexity of influence in international politics (Miskimmon et al., 2017).

As the Internet spread in the beginning of the century, scholarly interest developed in the potential of the new technology to mobilize ideas and people (see entry on “International Communication in Social Movements and Interest Groups”). The emergence of social media moved this literature in several new directions. One direction was encouraged by the extensive use of social media in the series of anti-government protests and uprisings, known as the Arab Spring, that spread across the Middle East and North Africa in 2011 (e.g., Allagui & Kuebler, 2011; Howard & Hussain, 2013; Wolfsfeld, Segev, & Sheafer, 2013). A major issue in this literature was the role of the social media relative to other causal factors in spreading dissent and protest leading to collective action for democratic change. Wolfsfeld et al. (2013, p. 132) cautioned overemphasizing the social media in protest and concluded from cross-national research on the subject that the important question is not “whether this or that type of media plays a major role but how that role varies over time and circumstances.” As the success of these uprisings waned, a literature on digital authoritarianism developed, expanding on the earlier work on mechanisms used by authoritarian regimes to control the Internet. Diamond and Plattner (2012) demonstrated how the social media, which can be a liberation technology can be used just as effectively by authoritarian regimes to stifle dissent and target dissenters to maintain their grip on power. This literature continues to expand and to include case studies of various authoritarian regimes, especially China.

Moving forward, more interaction with scholars in communication science, political communication, and other relevant disciplines would suggest new approaches, concepts, and areas of inquiry. It was, in fact, interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration that gave rise to the earliest work in international communication, when the Chicago School and World War II physically brought together scholars from multiple disciplines. After the institutionalization of communication studies as a separate discipline, subfields relevant to the study of international communication developed, but they rarely connected with international relations scholarship. Mass communication and intercultural communication are two examples. Political communication managed to connect with both communication science and political science, but the tendency of all three to focus on the individual level (opinions, attitudes, beliefs) may have discouraged more interest on the part of international relations scholars. The micro level may have gained importance in the new media and political environments. If nonstate actors are playing more assertive roles in world politics, then the impact of new communication technologies on individual attitudes has consequences for foreign policy and diplomacy. The systematic analysis of media effects, as well as cultural exchange, may warrant renewed attention.

There are also areas of inquiry in international relations that could be studied more directly as international communication topics, although they are not generally identified as such. Deterrence, negotiation, bargaining, and conflict resolution are a few examples. Cognitively oriented approaches and concepts from the social sciences more generally that relate language, culture, and policy could also be applied to international communication.

Future research must continue to investigate the myriad ways in which new communication technologies are affecting world politics. This task has been a major focus of recent work, but it is a formidable one because of the pace of change and the scope of its impact. The task will require both macro and micro approaches, case studies, and aggregate data analysis; all the research methods that have been used thus far plus new ones. The field is vibrant, dynamic, and wide open for future research.