Arguing for a General Framework for Mass Media Scholarship. W. James Potter. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009. 416 pp.
James Potter has undertaken a monumental task: He sought to create a framework for the whole of mass media research.
The author, a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California-Santa Barbara and former editor of The Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, began this effort by reading and rereading the literature of the field for a decade. Then he began writing to bring what he had read into focus. This book is the ninth major revision of his first effort to make sense of the field.
The magnitude of this endeavor is indicated by the fact that the book includes about a thousand references. That may seem like a lot, but it seems likely that he considered 10,000 articles, though he indicates that he examined only 936. That still sounds like a lot, but last year’s AEJMC convention included 853 new research papers on the program, and there were another 977 submitted and rejected. This, plus the fact that AEJMC comprises seventeen divisions and ten interest groups, reflects the rich diversity of our field. Furthermore, Lee Becker et al. report 6,725 full-time faculty in journalism and mass communication programs.
Potter is concerned about the wide diversity of approaches he found, and he sought to create a more unified approach to communication research. This begins with how we define mass media. There is little agreement about the exact meaning of either word. Yet part of the difference he found is the result of the wide range of material he consulted. The bibliography lists forty-nine different journals, including some in political science, psychology, and sociology. Also, some of the difference stems from the widely varied endeavors that may come under the heading of mass media.
After two introductory chapters explaining the need for a general framework for studying mass media, the author divides the book into four major sections: media organizations, media audiences, media messages, and media effects. In each section he develops a conceptualizaton and deals with specific issues in studying each of them.
In his final chapter, entitled “Integration of Explanations,” Potter offers a general summary of the four areas, and then offers insights on crossing those boundaries to produce more complete results, something that happens too seldom in mass media research. For example, media effects obviously are related to media content, but many studies deal with only one, not both, of these matters. More often, we infer what the effects of the content studied will be or infer what content must have produced the effects studied. Likewise, ownership and content are related, but are more frequently studied separately.
This is not a book to be read from front to back. Researchers undoubtedly will find one of the four major sections more useful than the others. Each section provides major guidance as to what the researcher needs to think about, what the problems are, and what the limitations are.
Furthermore, the author acknowledges that not all readers will buy into his perspective, and he welcomes their disagreement. In the final paragraph in the introduction, Potter says,
Some scholars will find the insights presented here helpful and will want to use those definitions and ways of thinking in de-signing their research studies…. Other scholars will undoubtedly disagree with my vision; their oppositional stance will serve to challenge the assumptions, definitions and propositions I present in this framework. The resulting argument and debate will also serve to increase our knowledge about the mass media.
Monumental as this effort is, Potter does not cover the entire field. No one book or person could do so in a field that is producing two thousand research studies each year. However, I do wonder why three winners of the AEJMC Deutschmann Award for Excellence in Research of the last decade—Cliff Christians, James Grunig, and Ivan Preston—are not listed in the index. In part this is related to the fact that The Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Newspaper Research Journal, Pubic Relations Review, and Mass Communication and Society are not among the nearly fifty journals cited. Also missing are discussions of selectivity and avoidance, diffusion, congruence, and dissonance reduction, areas that were considered very important just a few years back, but that are largely ignored by researchers now.
Potter has achieved a great deal with this book, and our field will be better because of this important step forward. Significant new ideas and new approaches will come as a result of it.
GUIDO H. STEMPEL III
Ohio University