CONCEPT
Powerful Mass Media
Noelle-Neumann's 1973 challenge to the reigning 'minimal effects' paradigm in communication research — the argument that mass media's power lies not in changing what people think but in shaping what people perceive others think.
The powerful mass media thesis is Noelle-Neumann's 1973 challenge to the reigning 'minimal effects' paradigm in communication research. Her essay Return to the Concept of Powerful Mass Media constituted a deliberate provocation: the field had settled into the view that media rarely changed minds, that audiences filtered messages through pre-existing beliefs and social networks, and that mass media's influence was therefore limited. Noelle-Neumann did not dispute the evidence behind the minimal effects hypothesis. She disputed its conclusion. The evidence showed that media rarely changed what people thought. What the evidence had not measured — and what her research at the Allensbach Institute was beginning to reveal — was that media profoundly changed what people perceived other people thought. That distinction is the hinge on which the entire spiral of silence theory turns. Media do not need to change your mind to change your behavior. They need only to change your perception of the climate of opinion.
