Decatur Study is basically a puzzle-solving activity under Lazarsfeld’s communication research paradigm. Due to this reason, C. Wright Mills, the research manager of Decatur Study, was fred because he did not satisfy Lazarsfeld’s paradigm promises and knowledge production goals. This unsuccessful cooperation experience has generated two unintended consequences. Basing on this experience, Mills judged Lazarsfeld’s communication research as trivial and offered a very insightful explanation of this conclusion in his well known book The Sociological Imagination; Using the empirical materials of Decatur Study, Mills developed his own ideas on communication in Power Elite which are very different from Personal In?uence. Restarting from the Decatur Study, this paper claims that methodological inhibition is a main reason for the dominant paradigm’s failure of constructing generalized knowledge; Surpassing Personal In?uence, Mills offered a comparative-historical mass communication research approach with the construction of democracy in the mass communication era as its focus.