The World War I and the origins of the Theory of Effects. The case of pro-Allied and Germanophiles

Abstract

During World War I, Spain is neutral. However, in the media there is a media battle: there is a clash between Germanophiles (those media and opinion leaders who support the German Empire) and pro-Allied (the supporters of France and the United Kingdom). This phenomenon has been studied in depth in the field of the history of communication, often linked to the history of Spanish journalism (Auvert (1983, 1986 and 1989). In this paper, we analyze this phenomenon from a different perspective. We proposed the following hypothesis: policy makers, for the first time, are really aware of the power of the media to generate public opinion trends. Then a series of measures to control these effects of media were initiated, such as grants and strategic support to different media and journalist. In that way, arise the early Theories of Communication and Effects, and therefore, the first Political Communication Theories from a positivist methodology (called Behabioralism , Kegley, 2008). The historical pathway of these development was very complex and mixed business aspects related to communication industry, ideological, cultural changes (such as the incipient emergence of the society of mass communication) and scientific aspects: especially the proposals derived from the Chicago School and Yale, where, as a result of the events of the war, they were designing the first empirical models Theories Effects (Lasswell, 1927) and Political Communication.