In the early 1960s, Columbia University researcher Joseph T. Klapper asserted in his book "The Effects Of Mass Communication" that audiences were not passive targets of political and commercial propaganda from mass media but that mass media reinforces previously held convictions. Throughout the book, he argued that the media has a small amount of power to influence people and, most of the time, it just reinforces our preexisting attitudes and beliefs. He argued that the media effects of relaying or spreading new public messages or ideas were minimal because there is a wide variety of ways in which individuals filter such content. Due to this tendency, Klapper argued that media content must be able to ignite some type of cognitive activity in an individual in order to communicate its message. Prior to Klapper's research, the prevailing opinion was that mass media had a substantial power to sway individual opinion and that audiences were passive consumers of prevailing media propaganda. However, by the time of the release of "The Effects of Mass Communication", many studies led to a conclusion that many specifically targeted messages were completely ineffective. Klapper's research showed that individuals gravitated towards media messages that bolstered previously held convictions that were set by peer groups, societal influences, and family structures and that the accession of these messages over time did not change when presented with more recent media influence. Klapper noted from the review of research in the social science that given the abundance of content within the mass media, audiences were selective to the types of programming that they consumed. Adults would patronize media that was appropriate for their demographics and children would eschew media that was boring to them. So individuals would either accept or reject a mass media message based upon internal filters that were innate to that person.