He made her the center of controversy while she was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, as he published "The Pollster and the Nazis" in the August 1991 issue of Jewish heritage and cultural magazine Commentary, accusing her of anti-Semitic passages in her dissertation and articles she wrote for Nazi newspapers. In fact, when young journalist and sociologist Elisabeth Noelle published her 1940 dissertation "Opinion and mass research in the USA" in Germany, having spent a year at the University of Missouri to research George Gallup's methodology, Goebbels called the 24-year-old woman as an adjutant and intended for her to build up, for the ministry of propaganda, Germany's first public opinion research organization. She declined, falling sick, and angering Goebbels; she later became a newspaper journalist with Nazi publications where she wrote some articles on Jewish influence over U.S. news and elite opinion.
Bogart suggested there is a direct line from Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to Noelle's theory of the "spiral of silence" and "public opinion as our social skin," which interpreted the group pressure band-wagon effect and the domination of leading mass media over public opinion. The accused wrote a letter of apology to the magazine, explaining that the passages served alibi functions under the dictatorship and were not meant to be harmful.
John Mearsheimer, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago wrote in The New York Times on December 16, 1991:
"She has admitted she was not hostile to the Nazis before 1940. She says she was anti-Nazi after 1940, but has produced no evidence that she criticized the Nazis then. She wrote anti-Semitic words in 1938—41, and there is no evidence she was compelled to write them. Queried on her anti-Semitic writings, she told me: "I have never written anything in my life that I did not believe to be true."
