Public opinion

For the book by Walter Lippmann, see Public Opinion.

Public opinion is the aggregate of individual attitudes or beliefs held by the adult population.

Public opinion developed as a concept with the rise of a 'public' in the eighteenth century. The English term ‘public opinion’ dates from the eighteenth century and derives from the French ‘l’opinion publique’, first used by Montaigne two centuries earlier in 1588. This came about through urbanisation and other political and social forces. It became important what people thought as forms of political contention changed.

Adam Smith refers to it in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, but Jeremy Bentham was the first British writer to fully develop theories of public opinion. He reasoned that public opinion had the power to ensure that rulers would rule for the greatest happiness of the greater number.

Using the conceptional tools of his theory of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies argued (1922, "Kritik der öffentlichen Meinung"), that 'public opinion' has the equivalent social functions in societies (Gesellschaften) which religion has in communities (Gemeinschaften).

The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas contributed the idea of "Public Sphere" to the discussion of public opinion. Public Sphere, as he argued, is where “something approaching public opinion can be formed”(2004, p.351). It is featured as universal access, rational debate, and disregard for rank. However, these three features for how public opinion SHOULD be formed are not in place in western democracy. Public opinion is highly susceptible to elite manipulation.

Herbert Blumer, American sociolologist, has proposed a somewhat different conception of the "public," as a form of collective behavior (another specialized term) which is made up of those who are discussing a given public issue at any one time. Given this definition, there are many publics; each of them comes into being when an issue arises and ceases to exist when the issue is resolved. Blumer claims that since people participate in a public to different degrees, public opinion polling cannot measure the public: An archbishop's participation is more important than that of a bum. The "mass," in which people independently make decisions about, for example, which brand of toothpaste to buy, is a form of collective behavior different from the public.

Public opinion can be influenced by public relations and the political media. Additionally, mass media utilizes a wide variety of advertising techniques to get their message out and change the minds of people. A continuously used technique is propaganda.

The tide of public opinion becomes more and more crucial during political elections, most importantly elections determining the national executive.

It is frequently measured using the method of survey sampling.

Mass media and public opinion

The mass media plays a crucial role in forming and reflecting public opinion: it communicates the world to individuals, and it reproduces modern society's self-image. Critiques in the early-to-mid twentieth century suggested that the media destroys the individual's capacity to act autonomously - sometimes being ascribed an influence reminiscent of the telescreens of the dystopian novel 1984. Later empirical studies, however, suggest a more complex interaction between the media and society, with individuals actively interpreting and evaluating the media and the information it provides. In the twenty-first century, with the rise of the internet, the two-way relationship between mass media and public opinion is beginning to change, with the advent of new technologies such as blogging.

Early theories of the public sphere

Habermas

In historical terms, as Thompson (1995) points out, the development of communications and transport is one of the driving forces behind the development of modern society. It made possible the industrial revolution and continues to be essential to the coherence of modern society. For Jürgen Habermas, the development of mass media was a crucial factor in the transition from an absolutist regime to liberal-democratic society. He develops the notion that society became increasingly polarised into the spheres of 'public authority' on the one hand (referring to the emergence of the state and associated political activity); and the 'private' sphere on the other (which was the intimate domain of private relationships and the family). With the invention of the printing press and the subsequent availability of newspapers and various other forms of printed literature, however, Habermas sees the emergence of an intermediate sphere which he refers to as the ‘bourgeois public sphere’. Here, individuals gather together to critically discuss and evaluate contemporary issues, stimulated by the contents of the open press, in a fashion reminiscent of the Greek agora. Habermas claims that this public use of reason not only acts as a regulatory mechanism over the state, which is now highly visible, but also as a catalyst for the replacement of the absolutist regime with a liberal democratic government.

However, this sphere of public discourse is transient, and will eventually disappear as increasing state intervention blurs the boundaries between public and private. At the same time, commercialisation of the media will radically alter its characteristics, as it becomes merely a tool for political manipulation, largely dependent on satisfying advertisers, readers and information sources such as the government. This can easily lead to a chase towards the lowest common denominator. This can be justified on the grounds of the massive widening of audience compared to the pre-industrial press, but it must be remembered that what is being conveyed to the masses is radically different from what was newsworthy then. Mass media today is about culture - but a culture selected for representation by the media. This process of the ‘refeudalisation of the public sphere’ will leave the public exempt from political discussions. It could be argued that a new kind of absolutism emerges as a result of an abuse of democracy.

Frankfurt School

Habermas depends to some extent on some early critiques of the media from the ‘Frankfurt School’, such as that of Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the media was a 'culture industry' impacting on a sea of passive individuals, who merely absorb any information they are exposed to. (There is an influence from Karl Marx here, with links to the theory of alienation.) The cause of this is the commodification of art and culture, which allows the possibility of "manipulation by demagogues" (Thompson, 1995). The Frankfurt School, which arose as an attempt to explain the success of Nazism in Weimar Germany, sees the loss of individuality through decline of privacy as the cause of dependence on great mass organisations. The interdependence of highly specialised individuals, or what Émile Durkheim called ‘organic solidarity’, is seen as being succeeded by a new and barbarous homogeneity. Only a ‘mechanical’ cohesion is possible, dependent on similarity and standardisation. Horkheimer argued that, paradoxically, individuality was impaired by the decline in the impulse for collective action. ‘As the ordinary man withdraws from participating in political affairs, society tends to revert to the law of the jungle, which crushes all vestiges of individuality.’ In this analysis the Frankfurters saw totalitarianism emerging as a result of corrupt social institutions and the decline of liberal principles. Thus Horkheimer: “Just as the slogans of rugged individualism are politically useful to large trusts in society seeking exemption from social control, so in mass culture the rhetoric of individuality, by imposing patterns for collective imitation, subverts the very principle to which it gives lip service.” Adorno in The Jargon of Authenticity notes that “mass media can create an aura which makes the spectator seem to experience a non-existent actuality”. Thus a mass-produced, artificial culture replaces what went before.

As in Jerry Mander’s work (see below), atomised individuals of mass society lose their souls to the phantom delights of the film, the soap opera, and the variety show. They fall into a stupor; an apathetic hypnosis Lazarsfeld was to call the ‘narcotizing dysfunction’ of exposure to mass media. Individuals become ‘irrational victims of false wants’ - the wants which corporations have thrust upon them, and continue to thrust upon them, through both the advertising in the media (with its continual exhortation to consume) and through the individualist consumption culture it promulgates. Marcuse describes this as a process where addiction to media leads to absolute docility, and the public becomes ‘enchanted and transformed into a clientele by the suppliers of popular culture.’ David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd claims that “Glamour in politics, the packaging of the leader, the treatment of events by the mass media, substitutes for the self-interest of the inner directed man the abandonment to society of the outer directed man.” In other words, the creation of the public sphere implies a fundamental change in social relations and individuals’ ability to model their self-image on some projected normality.

Thus, according to the Frankfurt School, leisure has been industrialised. The production of culture had become standardised and dominated by the profit motive as in other industries. In a mass society leisure is constantly used to induce the appropriate values and motives in the public. The modern media train the young for consumption. ‘Leisure had ceased to be the opposite of work, and had become a preparation for it.’ Marcuse points out the ‘Bach in the kitchen’ phenomenon: the fact that modern methods of reproduction have increased the quantity of music, art, and literature available to the public does not mean that culture spreads to the masses; rather that culture is destroyed in order to make entertainment. ‘At its worst mass culture threatens not merely to cretinise our taste,’ argues Rosenberg, ‘but to brutalise our senses while paving the way to totalitarianism.’ Lazarsfeld and Merton put the case succinctly: ‘Economic power seems to have reduced direct exploitation and to have turned to a subtler type of psychological exploitation,’ they wrote of the US in the 50s. Overt totalitarian force was increasingly obsolescent. Radio, film and television seemed even more effective than terror in producing compliance.

Marcuse notes a key part of this process is its sheer, relentless omnipresence: “The preconditioning does not start with the mass production of radio or TV [at a given point in time]. The people enter this stage as preconditioned receptacles of long standing. In this more complex view the public do no abdicate rational consideration of their interest blindly. More subtly, the whole basis of rational calculation is undermined.”

The modern public sphere

Some argue that this is a highly pessimistic view of individuals' cognitive and interpretative capacities. Thompson (1995) thinks that individuals do not absorb information from the media passively. In his words:

“Media messages are commonly discussed by individuals in the course of reception and subsequent to it … [They] are transformed through an ongoing process of telling and retelling, interpretation and reinterpretation, commentary, laughter and criticism… By taking hold of messages and routinely incorporating them into our lives .. we are constantly shaping and reshaping our skills and stocks of knowledge, testing our feelings and tastes, and expanding the horizons of our experience.”

Unlike Baudrillard and others, Thompson does not see ‘mediated quasi-interaction’ (the monological, mainly one-way communication of the mass media) as dominant, but rather as intermingling with traditional face-to-face interactions and mediated interactions (such as telephone conversations). Contrary to Habermas’ pessimistic view, this allows both more information and discussion to come into the public domain (of mediated quasi-interaction) and more to be discussed within the private domain (since the media provides information individuals would not otherwise have access to).

There is also some empirical evidence suggesting that it is ‘personal contact, not media persuasiveness’ which counts. For example, Trenaman and McQuail (1961) found that ‘don’t knows’ were less well informed than consistent voters, appearing uninterested, showing a general lack of information, and not just ignorance of particular policies or policies of one particular party. A similar view is Katz and Lazarsfeld's theory of the two-step flow of communication, based on a study of electoral practices of the citizens of Erie County, Ohio, during the 1940 presidential elections. This examined the political propaganda prevalent in the media at the time during the campaign period to see whether it plays an integral role in influencing people's voting. (In terms of generalising their results, one should note that there are questions about short term versus long term influence). The results contradict this: Lazarsfeld et al (1944) find evidence for the Weberian theory of party, and identify certain factors, such as socio-economic circumstances, religious affiliation and area of residence, which together determine political orientation. The study claims that political propaganda serves to re-affirm the individual's pre-disposed orientation rather than to influence or change one's voting behaviour.

In other words, political advertising impacts not on blank-sheet individuals but on people with existing beliefs formed over long periods of time, which they are correspondingly reluctant to change. Moreover, the people who are most exposed to the media are those who know from the outset whom they will vote for, and are therefore least likely to be influenced by propaganda. Thus it appears that the notion that the people who switch parties during the campaign are mainly the reasoned, thoughtful people convinced by the issues, is completely unfounded. Lazarsfeld et al claim the real influence on undecided voters is the 'opinion leader', the individual whose own vote intention is secure, and who is well informed on the issues. Thus personal influence is primarily of greater importance than media influence albeit using information initially acquired through the media. This may have something to do with trust and authority: both opinion leaders and the general public will select the evidence and information which supports their view, placing greater weight on more trustworthy sources. For the opinion-leader theory to be true, then, the general public would have to place greater trust in opinion leaders than in the media, so that the opinion leaders act as mediators between the public and the media, personalising and making authoritative the information the media provides. Thus "...the person-to-person influence reaches the ones who are more susceptible to change and serves as a bridge over which formal media of communications extend their influence." (Lazarsfeld et al, 1944). From a psychological viewpoint, we may understand the personal influence of the opinion leaders in terms of group association: perceived as representing the group's desirable characteristics, other group members will aspire to the leaders’ viewpoints in order to maintain group cohesiveness and thus indirectly self-assurance. However, the separation of group leaders from the general public is arguably an over-simplification of the process of media influences.

There are also empirical problems with many of these early surveys, with researchers often ignoring important findings which would ascribe significant influence to the media (eg Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet note in The People’s Choice that 58% of voting changes were made without any remembered personal contact and were very often dependent on the mass media - changes being widely distributed among those who changed their opinion. But this effect was ignored in their conclusion of little direct media influence). Other studies supporting the opinion leader theory failed to distinguish between opinion leading in consumer and political behaviour. In political behaviour opinion leading tends to correlate positively with status, whereas this is not the case in consumer behaviour (breakfast cereals etc). So for political behaviour, the general conclusion that the media merely fixes (confirms) people’s opinion is not supported. Hovland, using experimental psychology, found significant effects of information on longer-term behaviour and attitudes, particularly in areas where most people have little direct experience (eg politics) and have a high degree of trust in the source (eg broadcasting). It should be noted that since class has become an increasingly less good indicator of party (since the surveys of the 40s and 50s) the floating voter today is no longer the apathetic voter, but likely to be more well-informed than the consistent voter - and this mainly through the media.

Agenda-setting function of modern mass media

The commodification of the media inevitably led, through the competitive processes of capitalism, to the commercial character of the modern media industries. These have escalated into large-scale commercial concerns such as Rupert Murdoch's News Corp - Murdoch himself, of course, being a quintessentially global citizen, having changed nationality for business reasons. The consequences and ramifications of the mass media relate not merely to the way newsworthy events are perceived (and which are reported at all), but also to a multitude of cultural influences which operate through the mass media. Thus Lang and Lang claim that "The mass media force attention to certain issues. They build up public images of political figures. They are constantly presenting objects suggesting what individuals in the mass should think about, know about, have feelings about."

The agenda-setting process is partly one which is an almost unavoidable function of the bureaucratic process involved in newsgathering by the large organisations which make up much of the mass media. (Just four main news agencies - AP, UPI, Reuters and Agence-France-Presse - claim together to provide 90% of the total news output of the world’s press, radio and television.) For example, in order to get into the news, events have to happen in places convenient for the newsgathering agencies, come from a reliable and predictable source, and fit into journalists’ framework of news values. Jean Seaton notes that

“…journalists, who are better seen as bureaucrats than as buccaneers, begin their work from a stock of plausible, well-defined and largely unconscious assumptions. Part of their job is to translate untidy reality into neat stories with beginnings, middles and denouements. … The values which inform the selection of news items usually reinforce conventional opinions and established authority. At the same time, a process of simplification filters out the disturbing or the unexpected. The need of the media to secure instant attention creates a strong prejudice in favour of familiar stories and themes, and a slowness of response when reality breaks the conventions.”

Stuart Hall points out that because some of the media produce material which often is good, impartial, and serious, they are accorded a high degree of respect and authority. But in practice the ethic of the press and television is closely related to that of the homogeneous establishment, providing a vital support for the existing order. But independence (eg of the BBC) is not “a mere cover, it is central to the way power and ideology are mediated in societies like ours.” The public are bribed with good radio, television and newspapers into an acceptance of the biased, the misleading, and the status quo. The media are not, according to this approach, crude agents of propaganda. They organise public understanding. However, the overall interpretations they provide in the long run are those which are most preferred by, and least challenging to, those with economic power. Greg Philo demonstrates this in his 1991 article, “Seeing is Believing”, in which he showed that recollections of the 1984 miners’ strike were strongly correlated with the media’s original presentation of the event, including the perception of the picketing as largely violent (violence was rare), and the use of phrases which had appeared originally in the media of the time.

McCombs and Shaw (1972) demonstrate the agenda-setting effect at work in a study conducted in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA during the 1968 presidential elections. Having selected a representative sample of un-decided voters, they were asked to outline the key issues of the election as they perceived them. Concurrently, the mass media serving these subjects were collected and analysed as regards their content. The results showed a definite correlation between the two accounts of predominant issues. "The evidence in this study that voters tend to share the media's composite definition of what is important strongly suggests an agenda-setting function of the mass media." (McCombs and Shaw).

The long-term consequences of this are significant in conjunction with the continuing concentration of ownership and control of the media, leading to accusations of a 'media elite' having a form of 'cultural dictatorship'. Thus the continuing debate about the influence of 'media barons' such as Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch. For example, the UK Observer (March 1st 1998) reported the Murdoch-owned HarperCollins' refusal to publish Chris Patten's East and West, because of the former Hong Kong Governor's description of the Chinese leadership as "faceless Stalinists" possibly being damaging to Murdoch's Chinese broadcasting interests. In this case, the author was able to have the book accepted by another publisher, but this kind of censorship may point the way to the future. A related, but more insidious, form is that of self-censorship by members of the media in the interests of the owner, in the interests of their careers.

Long-term effects

While in the short term individuals can be expected to evaluate biased information in accordance with their existing beliefs, in the long term the cultural influence of the media on the average beliefs of individuals may be significant. This operates through a process of using the symbolic materials available to us in society and from our interaction with others to formulate a sense of self-identity (which then impinges further on our self-identity through its effects on our interaction with others and our interpretation of the symbolic materials). New encounters and experiences mean the self-image is constantly re-constructed, and the media here is a crucial source of symbolic material of everything in the world outside the private circle: it mediates Habermas' public sphere to us, and distortions in that window on the world will impinge on how we perceive the world, how we interact in our private sphere and how we interact with the public sphere. It is because of this that many sociologists view the media as negatively affecting the individual's autonomy. However, others have attempted to demonstrate that the media provides an invaluable source of multi-cultural information which enriches one's perception of the world (by enlarging our window of perception on the world) and of life, allows for a well-balanced opinion, and that the interpretation of symbolic interaction is largely dependent on cultural and socio-economic circumstances (eg Liebes and Katz found different ethnic groups had different ways of making sense of the US soap Dallas, with differing ways of negotiating its symbolic content).

Jerry Mander, in Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, takes the negative view. Mander argues that television has become the new transmission mechanism for cultural influences, but that because of the nature and structure of the medium, it encourages a global homogeneity of culture based on US cultural influences. He quotes as an example the introduction of television to the Northwest of Canada, populated mainly by Dene Indians and Inuit, which led to the erosion of traditional values, pastimes and occupations, and the desire of the young to learn English and acquire material possessions such as cars. The previous mode of cultural transmission - nightly story-telling - ended almost completely with the introduction of television, destroying “a bond of love and respect between the young and the old that was critical to the survival of native culture. The old people were windows to the past and to a sense of ‘Indianness’”. Instead of dealing with their own problems, issues and culture, “they’re watching a bunch of white people in Dallas drinking martinis while standing around their swimming pools and plotting how to steal from each other.” Mander describes television as “the instrument for re-shaping our internal environments - our feelings, our thoughts, our ideas and our nervous systems - to match the re-created artificial environment that increasingly surrounds us: Commodity life; Technological passivity; Acceleration; Homogenisation.” (emphasis in original).

Mass media in the internet age

Mander’s theory is related to Jean Baudrillard’s concept of ‘hyperreality’. We can take the 1994 O.J. Simpson trial as an example, where the reality reported on was merely the catalyst for the simulacra (images) created, which defined the trial as a global event and made the trial more than it was. Essentially, hyperreality is the concept that the media is not merely a window on to the world (as if a visiting alien were watching TV), but is itself part of the reality it describes. Hence (although additionally there is the question of navel-gazing) the media’s obsession with media-created events. It is this which lead Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s to say that "the medium is the message", and to suggest that mass media was increasingly creating a "global village". Thus, for example, there is evidence that Western media influences in Asia are the driving force behind rapid social change: “it is as if the 1960s and the 1990s were compressed together.” A notable example is the recent introduction of television to Bhutan, with dramatic effects in terms of very rapid Westernization. This raises questions of ‘cultural imperialism’ (Schiller) - the de facto imposition, through economic and political power and through the media, of Western (and in particular US) culture.

What is crucial is the control of knowledge and the flow of information. Whether controlled by lack of easy means of dissipation, by feudal absolutism, state control of mass media or big business, the media sets an agenda based on who controls it, rather than necessarily being a kind of forum for bourgeois discussion of public issues. In certain circumstances this may be the case, but it will be the exception rather than the rule, and it is difficult to identify this kind of a forum with a particular stage in the development of the media. However, this does not exclude individuals from continuous, active interpretation and evaluation within the private sphere, with some feedback to the public sphere, through such mechanisms as letters to newspapers, polls and informal contacts with people who act within the public sphere. Ultimately, such interpretation and evaluation can also lead to changes in behaviour, such as voting patterns or consumer behaviour, or in social attitudes, particularly in non-Western societies open to Western media, bringing Western ideas, values and culture. Individuals’ interpretation and evaluation is constrained by the context the media provides - and the more homogeneous the media, and the more the media’s agenda is uniform, the more individuals’ ability to understand the ‘big picture’ by playing off alternative sources of information and alternative viewpoints is undermined. For the future, the internet - through blogs, forums, wikis etc - may play a role in reclaiming the public sphere for liberal-democratic debate.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Adorno, Theodor (1973), The Jargon of Authenticity
• Chomsky, Noam & Herman, Edward (1988, 2002). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon.
• Curran, J. & Seaton, J. (1988), Power without Responsibility
• Curran, J. & Gurevitch, M. (eds) (1991), Mass Media and Society
• Habermas, J. (1962), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
• Horkheimer (1947), The Eclipse of Reason, Oxford University Press
• Lang K & Lang G.E. (1966), The Mass Media and Voting
• Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet (1944), The People’s Choice
• Mander, Jerry, “The Tyranny of Television”, in Resurgence No. 165
• McCombs, M & Shaw, D.L. (1972), 'The Agenda-setting Function of the Mass Media', Public Opinion Quarterly, 73, pp176-187
• David Riesman (1950), The Lonely Crowd
• Thompson, J. (1995), The Media and Modernity
• Trenaman J., and McQuail, D. (1961), Television and the Political Image. Methuen.

Bibliography

• "The Anatomy of Public Opinion" by Jacob Shamir and Michal Shamir. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. [1]
• "Public Opinion" by Walter Lippmann, 1921.
• "Anatomy of Public Opinion" by Norman John Powell, New York, Prentice-Hall, 1951.

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