Lis­ten:
MP3 Side 1 | Side 2
RealAu­dio

A follow-up to an inter­view con­ducted in Octo­ber of 1997, this pro­gram con­tin­ues the exam­i­na­tion of the rela­tion­ship between the U.S. psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare estab­lish­ment and Amer­i­can com­mu­ni­ca­tion research as an aca­d­e­mic dis­ci­pline. Based on the mate­r­ial in Christo­pher Simpson’s book Sci­ence of Coer­cion: Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Research and Psy­cho­log­i­cal War­fare; 1945–1960 (Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press; Copy­right 1994), the inter­view focuses on the piv­otal eco­nomic, polit­i­cal and intel­lec­tual effects that the National Secu­rity Estab­lish­ment has had on com­mu­ni­ca­tion research. With much of the fund­ing for research in the social sci­ences com­ing from the mil­i­tary dur­ing the Cold War, U.S. com­mu­ni­ca­tion research both drew from and con­tributed to psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare. The rela­tion­ship between them was so pro­found that, in effect, psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare the­ory and prac­tice became the foun­da­tion for com­mu­ni­ca­tion research as a dis­ci­pline. In addi­tion to the impact of mil­i­tary fund­ing, pro­fes­sional rela­tion­ships formed dur­ing work for the U.S. psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare pro­gram car­ried over into the civil­ian sec­tor as well. The resul­tant “Old Boy” net­works had a sig­nif­i­cant effect on com­mu­ni­ca­tion research and the devel­op­ment of the media as well. Pro­gram high­lights include: a dis­cus­sion of Pub­lic Opin­ion Quar­terly, its reflec­tion of psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare the­ory and prac­tice and its role as an aca­d­e­mic pil­lar of com­mu­ni­ca­tion research; an analy­sis of “devel­op­ment the­ory,” a the­o­ret­i­cal school of com­mu­ni­ca­tion research which became embod­ied as a National Secu­rity doc­trine as “lim­ited” or “low-intensity” war­fare; “Project Revere,” an Air Force study of “dif­fu­sion the­ory” which con­tributed sig­nif­i­cantly to the race to build strate­gic bombers; Wilber Schramm’s sem­i­nal career as a psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare grad­u­ate who went on to shape much of con­tem­po­rary com­mu­ni­ca­tion the­ory; and the effect of U. S. psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare pro­grams on the devel­op­ment of the method­olog­i­cal “par­a­digm” of com­mu­ni­ca­tion research.