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Robert K. Merton's Mass Persuasion (1946) and related 1940s communications research represent a body of work that repays those who read it carefully today. Merton charted a world that became our own, one marked by the interplay of mass media, celebrity, and “public images” that traversed cultures of entertainment, moral life, and politics. In this essay, I read Mass Persuasion through a later Merton article discussing the role of reading and rereading classic texts in the human sciences. After extending Merton's arguments about the functions of predecessor texts, I amplify aspects of Mass Persuasion that remain instructive within political communication and related fields today.

The congregational crowd was a powerful mode of political communication in the nineteenth-century US until banished by the imposition of literate modes on popular electoral politics by Progressive reformers. We examine its major channels of expression, bodily mass communication and public sensationalism, within a framework of class-based struggle, observing that the practice of live bodily assembly created broad points of entry into political life, socialized the young, and successfully conveyed the importance of voting. A text-based normative model of the informed deliberative voter, we argue, offers too narrow a conception of participation compared to a more spaciously conceived democratic community.

From at least the Progressives through recent media effects research, American thought about mass media has been marked by attention to the nexus of community, communication and democracy. Thinkers from Cooley and Dewey to Lazarsfeld and Katz have worried about the relation between local forms of civil society and far‐flung solidarity, argued about the role of communication in each, and addressed all these concerns in light of broader political visions. That tradition is marked by a recurring dream that mass communication might overcome the finitude of local civil society and bring about nationwide community. I call that dream communication hope.

Popular media may make short shrift of complex ideas and moral deliberations, but it can also serve bioethics well. Bioethics should embrace the ritual function of the media in bringing issues to public attention and in reinforcing bioethics as a field.

In this essay, I theorize communication and confidence by extending Lazarsfeld and Merton's status conferral function. Properly understood, confidence is a communal process, ‘faith-together.’ Though typically blamed for encouraging cynicism, mass media also have a very basic tendency to generate public confidence. Status conferral embeds the social objects portrayed by media in webs of value and thus recommends those objects as grounds for public confidence. At the same time, as empirical work has shown, some forms of news undo the work of status conferal and generate cynicism instead, I end by examining distinct structures of civil society that may determine the contours of mediated confidence and cynicism.