Vulnerable Audiences

1. Vulnerable Audiences Approaches across time Payne Fund Studies (1929-1933, published 1933-35) “The publication in 1933 of a popular summary of the studies' results, Our Movie Made Children, a crude anti-movie polemic, contributed to the impression that the Payne Fund Studies were part of a moralizing crusade.” Adorno (writing in 1975): Culture industry revisited (but not revised) “Whoever ignores [the culture industry’s] influence out of skepticism for what it stuffs into people would be naïve… Because of its social role, disturbing questions about its quality, about truth and untruth, and about the aesthetic niveau of the culture industry’s emissions are repressed, or at least excluded from the sociology of communications. Wertham and the Kefauver Hearings: Seduction of the Innocent Direct effects: Critique of U.S. culture Hoggart: The Uses of Literacy Culture as Everyday Life: Celebration of “native” culture Baker on The Newsom Report (1994): “Common sense writ large” “Yet each [claim] looked disturbingly obvious and persuasive. So persuasive in fact that only a fool or a villain would ignore the obvious.”