German Publizistikwissenschaft and its Shift from a Humanistic to an Empirical Social Scientific Discipline: Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, Emil Dovifat and the Publizistik Debate

German mass communication research today describes itself as an empirical social scientific discipline, but it has not always been so defined. For several decades Publizistikwissenschaft had considered itself as one of the humanities. But at the beginning of the 1960s, a scientific debate started about the discipline’s subjects, its methods and tasks. The forum for this debate was in the scholarly journal Publizistik. This article identifies the arguments and rhetorical repertoires employed by two scholars from opposite sides of the debate, Emil Dovifat and Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, to convince the scientific community to side respectively with either the social science or the humanities camp. It is shown that an array of arguments were utilized, from the political meanings and ethical aspects of media, to epistemological reasoning. Furthermore, it is surprising to see how dramatic and emotional the rhetorical repertoires were. The article also presents the biographical, historical and political context of the development of Germany’s Publizistikwissenschaft.