The decisive end of the hypodermic needle model resulted serendipitously from a classic study of the 1940 presidential election in Erie County, Ohio (Lazarsfeld et al., 1944). This investigation was designed with the hypodermic needle model in mind as was aimed at analyzing the role of the media in changing political decisions. A panel study was conducted with a sample of six hundred voters over each of the six months prior to the November election and found; to the researchers’ surprise, that very few voting decisions were directly influenced by the media. “This study went to great lengths to determine how the mass media brought about such changes. To our surprise we found the effect to be rather small. . . . People appeared to be much more influenced in their political decisions by face-to-face contact with other people…then by the mass media directly” (Lazarsfeld and Menzel, 1963).