Which of the following believed in the technocratic control of media?

Concept — Views on who should govern the mass media lie on a spectrum. At one end is the libertarian or free-press doctrine: the press should be left unlicensed, and truth is expected to emerge from the open contest of ideas. At the other end is the technocratic doctrine: mass communication is treated as a scientific instrument of social management, so its planning and control should rest with trained experts and communication specialists rather than with unregulated public debate or ordinary political majorities.

Application — The stem asks for the thinker attached to the technocratic end of that spectrum. That thinker is Harold Lasswell, the American political scientist who built his career on the systematic study of propaganda and public opinion:

• In Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927) he analysed wartime propaganda as an engineerable technique rather than as mere rhetoric.

• In his 1948 essay he reduced the communication act to the formula "Who says what in which channel to whom with what effect" — an explicitly analytic, measurable model of communication.

• In his policy-sciences writing he argued that a modern democracy needs a trained elite of policy scientists and communication specialists to survey the environment and manage the flow of symbols to the public.

Together these commit Lasswell to the view that the media should be steered by expert managers of communication — that is, the technocratic control of media.

Contrast — The other names in the item belong to different traditions:

• John Milton — his Areopagitica (1644) attacked the licensing of printing and defended the self-righting power of free discussion, the opposite pole from expert control.

• Rabindranath Tagore — poet, playwright and educationist, Nobel Laureate in Literature (1913), whose writing concerns aesthetics, nationalism and education rather than the governance of mass media.

• K. Rama Rau — a journalist and newspaper editor of the Indian nationalist era, a practitioner of the press rather than a theorist of how media should be controlled.

Cross-check — Read the stem as a test of theory attribution: among the four names, the empirical propaganda-and-policy-science tradition that treats communication as something to be scientifically administered is Lasswell’s, and the remaining three sit in the free-press, literary-educational and working-journalism traditions respectively.