When I was a master’s student in journalism and mass communication at Iowa State University back in the mid 1980s, I read a book for class that served to shape how I view mass communication effects. In fact, I would be hard pressed to name any book I read during graduate school that affected me more.
That book was Dr. Doris Graber’s Processing the News: How People Tame the Information Tide. It was based on a panel study of 23 voters during the Ford/Carter election of 1976. In the book, she studied how these voters made sense of the massive flow of information available to them.
To Graber, how was the big question:
- How do people select information for processing?
- How do they process it?
- How do people impose a structure on information to make sense of it?
- What meanings do people impose on this information?
She argued that the big question was not so much what people learned from the media but rather why they learned. She found that people who were interested in the news and had reason to talk about it at work or in their social circles could recall quite a bit about what they consumed from the media about the upcoming election. Those who did not care about the news or had no need to be prepared to discuss the material intelligently the next day could recall very little from their time with the media.
Now on the surface, this seems obvious – People who want and need to learn from the media learn more than those who don’t have that need. But to me, this was a big revelation. Because it put power in the hands of media consumers, the audience members, rather than in the hands of the people sending out the information.
Obviously this brief summary of a complex book is an over-simplification of Dr. Graber’s work, but it does get across the idea of the long-term impact it had on me. Of course the powerful media and their messages still mattered, but so did the people consuming it. We were members of an active audience, not just sheep being led to the slaughter by our all-powerful media.
Dr. Doris Graber
I ended up using Dr. Graber’s ideas as the basis for my master’s thesis. My research, unlike Dr. Graber’s panel study, was based on a random-sample telephone survey. And I used that research as the basis for my first academic conference paper, presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Association for Public Opinion Research held in Chicago in November of 1987. Imagine my terror when I discovered that the great lady was going to the discussant for my paper. Here I was, talking about Dr. Graber’s ideas, and she was going to be critiquing my paper. Put aside the whole idea that this would be my first academic paper, I’ve never in the 30-plus years since then had such a high-powered discussant of my work.
As my group of presenters gathered, a small woman with her arm in a cast from a recent skiing accident entered the room and introduced herself. Following my presentation, Dr. Graber was clearly not particularly impressed with my work, saying that her study was fundamentally qualitative in nature and that I really couldn’t try to do any kind of replication of it through survey research. (I would tend to agree with her, now.)
But she was kind the whole time. She explained her critique, but never made me feel stupid, never made me feel bad about what I had done. I’ve always remembered that kindness. I’ve seen high-powered discussants destroy grad students and junior faculty at conferences when the presenter didn’t live up to the discussant’s standards. I’ve seen presenters reduced to tears just by a discussant’s show of force. But Dr. Graber, although serious with her critique, worked to encourage me to do better, not tear me down.
I was sorry to see this morning on Twitter that Dr. Graber died earlier this month at her home in Evanston, Ill.
I want to say that I am eternally grateful for both her scholarship and her supportive critique. And I will confess a certain sense of pride that my textbook Mass Communication: Living in a Media World is published by Sage, that also published several of Dr. Graber’s many books.
It’s been