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Elihu Katz, Penn Media Scholar, Dies at 95
OB ITUARY
JARRAD SAFFREN | JE STAFF
ELIHU KATZ, the University
of Pennsylvania professor who
brought television to Israel, died
on Dec. 31.

He was 95.

Born in Brooklyn in 1926
to Jewish parents of Eastern
European descent, Katz became
a sociologist and media scholar
whose insights shaped his field.

According to colleagues, his
biggest one was arguably about
“the social context of commu-
nication,” as Penn professor
Joseph Turow put it.

Katz theorized that “a lot of
information people get from the
media they get from people who
have heard or listened to the
media,” Turow explained.

After communication
issues during the Six-Day War,
“Israeli officials decided in 1967
to expand the nation’s broad-
cast presence beyond radio,”
said an obituary to Katz on
Penn’s website. Katz left two
academic appointments to
head up the effort. Today, Israel
has a wide-ranging television
ecosystem. The professor served in a
variety of academic appoint-
ments before arriving at
Penn’s Annenberg School for
Communication in 1993. He
remained in Philadelphia until
he retired in 2014.

“He was very much respon-
sible for positioning the field of
communication as something
that could be studied in the
university arena,” said Barbie
Zelizer, Penn’s Raymond
Elihu Katz
Courtesy of the Annenberg School
for Communication, University of
Pennsylvania Williams
Professor of
Communication. Before
Katz, Zelizer
explained, “communication
was run by the idea that the
media had large effects.” Katz,
though, argued that those
effects weren’t so large after all.

The popular notion that the
mass media had a pacifying
impact on people was not quite
right. There was an activating
element, too, according to
Zelizer. People consumed the media
and then talked to each other
about it. A person’s social circle
had perhaps as much influence
as the content itself.

“That set in place a new
paradigm for thinking about
how the media works,” Zelizer
said. Katz applied the same
concept to studying physi-
cians and how they chose
their medicines for patients.

And he came to a similar
finding: Doctors’ “peer network
Elihu Katz at a 2018 Penn reception awarding him an honorary degree
Courtesy of the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania
relationships with
their communities” had quite a bit of
influence, said Damon Centola,
Penn’s Elihu Katz Professor in
the Annenberg School.

The scholar also pioneered
other media theories, like one
about how the media created
events, including inaugura-
tions, royal weddings and
Olympic competitions, for
people to partake in from
far-flung locations.

“This is a big legacy,” Turow
said. Katz
graduated from
Midwood High School in 1944
and then served in the Army
for three years. He earned his
B.A. and M.A. from Columbia
University in Manhattan in
1948 and ’50, respectively.

The scholar published
“Personal Influence: The Part
Played by People in the Flow
of Mass Communication,”
about his seminal theory,
five years after that. A decade
later, he established the
to study how social media
networks influence actual social
networks. “Now that we understand
the role of influence, we look
at the patterns of connections,”
Centola said. “How movements
take off and whether they
succeed or fail. How social
networks shape that.”
Katz, though, was more
than just a great scholar. He
was a friend and active listener,
according to colleagues.

His curiosity never waned
through all his decades in
academia. “I just enjoyed talking with
the guy,” Turow said. “We never
worked on the same research.”
Zelizer described Katz as
interested in “whatever you
were doing.” She also said his
curiosity was a big part of his
success. “When you lose your
curiosity, you lose your ability
to reinvent,” Zelizer added.

Katz was conversing with
people right up until the end.

Earlier in his 90s, the scholar
emailed Centola at 2 a.m. with
a series of questions on a paper
that the younger man had
published. “He was completely atten-
tive,” Centola said.

On the morning of Dec. 31,
around 10:30, he sent Zelizer a
concise and lucid email. Then
he died around lunchtime.

Katz is survived by his wife,
Ruth Katz, a musicologist and
professor emerita at Hebrew
University, and two sons. l
Communications Institute
at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem. He left both that post and a
concurrent one at the University
of Chicago to help introduce
TV in Israel. For three years,
he ran Israel Television, the
Jewish state’s “nascent televi-
sion service,” the Penn obit said.

After his groundbreaking
work, Katz returned to Hebrew
University and later added a post
at the University of Southern
California’s Annenberg School
for Communication, where he
remained until taking the Penn
post in 1993.

Some of his other influen-
tial works included “Medical
Innovation: A Diffusion Study,”
“The Export of Meaning: Cross-
Cultural Readings of Dallas”
and “Media Events: The Live
Broadcasting of History.”
Katz’s research had a partic-
ular influence on Centola,
who uses the foundation that jsaffren@jewishexponent.com;
his predecessor established 215-832-0740
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