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During most of the nineteenth century, philosophers such as Alexis de Tocqueville based their analysis of news and print media on moral and political arguments.³ More scientific approaches to mass media research did not emerge until the late 1920s and 1930s. In 1920, Walter Lippmann’s Liberty and the News called on journalists to operate more like scientific researchers in gathering and analyzing facts. Lippmann’s next book, Public Opinion (1922), was the first to apply the principles of psychology to journalism. Considered by many academics to be “the founding book in American media studies,”⁴ Public Opinion deepened Americans’ understanding of the effect of media, emphasizing data collection and numerical measurement. According to media historian Daniel Czitrom, by the 1930s “an aggressively empirical spirit, stressing new and increasingly sophisticated research techniques, characterized the study of modern communication in America.”⁵ Czitrom traces four trends between 1930 and 1960 that contributed to the rise of modern media research: propaganda analysis, public opinion research, social psychology studies, and marketing research.