The Relationship between Frankfurt School and Critical School

Traditional school, also known as empirical school or management school, mainly refers to the school that investigates social phenomena from empirical facts and focuses on the study of communication effects, which is opposite to the critical school that is good at examining social phenomena in a speculative way. Generally speaking, the empirical school mainly refers to the mainstream communication research led by the United States, and lasswell, lazarsfeld, Levin and hovland, regarded as the four founders of communication by Shi Lamu, are typical representatives of the empirical school.

Second, the critical school

The critical school of communication is a school of communication formed in some western European countries after the 1960s. The critical school is deeply influenced by the Frankfurt School in Germany and holds a critical attitude towards the existing communication system. Critical school is a complex group of scholars, divided into various schools. The research of critical school corrects the deficiency of American communication studies to a certain extent, and can make a comprehensive investigation of complex social communication phenomena from another angle. But its views are often biased.