The Press and Public Opinion

Abstract

In 1910, in a lecture addressed  at the 1st Congress of the German Sociological Association held in Frankfurt, Max Weber (1864-1920) urged German academics to promote research on the condition of the press and the practice of journalism from an objective sociological point of view. Twenty years after the Weberian reflections, Siegfried Kracauer's (1889-1966) work "The Press and Public Opinion" is published in the Frankfurt Zeitung, from which we present here an extract. It is a critical essay by the great essayist and expert in social communication, full of nuances about the study of the press as of the great devices for shaping mass society. Kracauer faces the sociological formalism  in the approach of the first studies on the press. The author encourages an empirical analysis of the just born processes of manipulation of public opinion, and of the trivialization of communication that emerged on the horizon of that time.