In January 1903, S.S. McClure,
the founder and editor of the popular mass-circulation magazine
McClure's, drew his readers' attention to the "coincidental" appearance
of three articles in that month's issue--one, by Lincoln Steffens, on
corruption and machine politics in Minneapolis; the second, an installment in
Ida Tarbell's continuing history of Standard Oil; and the third, a piece by Ray
Stannard Baker critical of organized labor's attempts to keep non-union men
from working. These were not the first investigative pieces exposing what
McClure described as a "contempt for law" in American institutions. But what
McClure had discovered was the salience of these issues to his readers; what he
glimpsed was the influence that periodicals like his could have on the public's
social consciousness. "Capitalists, workingmen, politicians, citizens--all
breaking the law, or letting it be broken," he editorialized. "Who is left to
uphold it? . . . There is no one left; none but all of us."
What followed was a uniquely 20th-century phenomenon: a public crusade, fueled
by the popular press, producing within a decade sweeping reforms of municipal
government and state and federal civil service, electoral reform, pure food and
drug regulation, antitrust legislation, and myriad other "progressive" social
reforms. With no specific agenda of its own, McClure's nonetheless
launched a new era in mass communication and social agenda-setting.
Nearly 80 years later, in December 1981, an editorial in the New England
Journal of Medicine directed readers' attention to another
coincidence--independent reports from the field about the appearance of rare
opportunistic illnesses in young homosexual men.
What have we learned since McClure's day about how the media shape the social
agenda, for good or ill, or influence the public's capacity to take effective
action? In the history of the AIDS crisis, did the popular media contribute to
unconscionable inaction in the early days by relegating the story to the
margins of social deviance? Or did they ultimately help mobilize public
opinion around an extraordinarily difficult social issue? Or did they do both?
What do we know now about harnessing the power of mass communication to
influence public attitudes or change behavior? Are there lessons to be drawn
from campaigns designed to alter health-compromising behaviors, such as those
against smoking or drunk driving?
In October 1993, The Annenberg Washington Program and the Harvard School of
Public Health's Center for Health Communication convened a group of scholars,
journalists, activists, and public officials to address these questions. The
conference was funded by The Annenberg Washington Program, The Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation, and The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The meeting,
initiated by Jay Winsten, Director of the Center for Health Communication of
the Harvard School of Public Health, had two primary tasks. The first was to
take stock of what we know about these questions, generically, as Harvard
Professor Mark Moore explained in the opening session:
The group's second task was to bring these insights to bear on the
particular effort now underway to address the problem of violence in our
society.
For two days, the participants reviewed scholarly findings, reflected on their
own professional experiences concerning AIDS, smoking, and drunk driving, and
considered how the power of mass communication could be marshalled to respond
effectively to the problem of violence. The report that follows is based on
those deliberations.
We hope to learn how mass communication shapes . . . society's ability
to deal with its problems; gets issues on the public and governmental agenda;
reinforces or alters norms . . . and attitudes within the general population;
and imparts specific information to specific individuals that changes the
way those individuals behave.
