Text-only propaganda analysis cannot establish how audiences actually respond.

Evidence

Lowenthal and Gutermann’s volume was rather like the handbook for demystifying fascist agitators which had been planned. But it was based purely on analysing texts, not on any research on the actual audience reaction. They had not even attended any agitators’ meetings, as Adorno had suggested. … Instead of successfully making a virtue of necessity, the editors’ refusal to sketch out a systematic maximal programmeproviding a background against which the volumes which had actually been published might appear as fragmentsactually made it more difficult to appreciate the works properly. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 434

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies what the ‘handbook’ project actually was: text analysis without audience research.
• XREF: connects to: Repeated absurd propaganda can still drive voters to elect its authors.; Analyzing news text alone cannot explain how anti-Muslim framing gets produced. — Nadia Haq, ‘The National Media Just Sees Muslims…, 8; Content analysis alone cannot explain how media discourse reproduces racism — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1088 (+2 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Repeated absurd propaganda can still drive voters to elect its authors.; Analyzing news text alone cannot explain how anti-Muslim framing gets produced. — Nadia Haq, ‘The National Media Just Sees Muslims…, 8; Content analysis alone cannot explain how media discourse reproduces racism — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1088 (+2 more)