Agenda-setting theory describes the "ability [of the news media] to
influence the salience of topics on the public agenda."
[1]
Essentially, the theory states that the more salient a news issue is - in terms
of frequency and prominence of coverage - the more important news audiences will
regard the issue to be. Agenda-setting theory was formally developed by Dr. Max
McCombs and Dr. Donald Shaw in a study on the
1968 presidential
election. In the 1968 "Chapel Hill study," McCombs and Shaw demonstrated a
strong correlation (r > .9) between what 100 residents of Chapel Hill, North
Carolina thought was the most important election issue and what the local and
national news media reported was the most important issue.
[2] By
comparing the salience of issues in news content with the public's perceptions
of the most important election issue, McCombs and Shaw were able to determine
the degree to which the media, in Bernard Cohen's words, "tell us [(the public)]
what to think about."
[3] Since the
1968 study, published in a 1972 edition of
Public
Opinion Quarterly, more than 400 studies have been published on the
agenda-setting function of the mass media, and the theory continues to receive
support even in today's fragmented media environment.
[4]
[edit]
History
The theory of agenda-setting can be traced to the first chapter of
Walter Lippmann’s 1922
classic,
Public Opinion.
[5] In that chapter,
called “the world outside and the pictures in our heads,” Lippmann argues that
the mass media are the principal connection between events in the world and the
images of these events in the citizens' minds. Thus, without using the term
"agenda-setting," Walter Lippmann was actually writing about what today we would
call "agenda-setting." Following Lippmann, in 1963, Bernard Cohen observed that
the press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to
think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think
about. The world will look different to different people,” Cohen continues,
“depending on the map that is drawn for them by writers, editors, and publishers
of the paper they read."
[3] Clearly,
as early as the 1960s, Cohen had expressed the metaphor that led to
formalization of agenda-setting by McCombs and Shaw.
In fact, while on the faculty at
UCLA, Maxwell McCombs picked up Cohen’s book containing
this quote at a local bookstore. McCombs had already been interested in the
idea, but it was Cohen’s work that heavily influenced McCombs, and later
Shaw.
[6]
The concept of agenda setting is launched by Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw
during the 1968 presidential election in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. They
examined Lippmann’s idea of construction of the pictures in our heads by
comparing the rank-order issues on the media agenda with the key issues of the
day on the undecided voters’ agenda. They found the evidence of agenda setting
by identifying that salience of the news agenda is highly correlated to that of
the voter’s agenda. Critically, it also developed a method – content analysis
compared with survey results – that scholars could use to explore
agenda-setting. This method would spawn hundreds of agenda-setting studies in
the following 40 years.
For instance, as a follow-up to the Chapel Hill study, during the summer and
fall of the
1972 presidential
election, Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw (1977) studied agenda-setting
effects among a representative sample of all voters in Charlotte, North
Carolina. The researchers interviewed voters in three very different cities -
Lebanon, New
Hampshire;
Indianapolis,
Indiana; and
Evanston, Illinois - nine times between
February and December and content analyzed election coverage by the three major
network television news channels and local newspapers in the three cities at the
same time. They found that both television and newspapers affected the salience
of all seven issues on the public agenda, replicating the initial agenda-setting
findings in new contexts. McCombs and Shaw would go on to conduct dozens of
agenda-setting studies over the next 40 years and receive lion's share of credit
for establishing one of the most influential theories of mass communication
effects.
However, it should also be mentioned that a relatively unknown scholar named
G. Ray Funkhouser performed a study highly similar to McCombs and Shaw’s around
exactly the same time the authors were formalizing the theory.
[7] All three scholars -
McCombs, Shaw, and Funkhouser - even presented their findings at the same
academic conference. Funkhouser’s article was published later than McCombs and
Shaw’s, but we have to ask why Funkhouser doesn’t receive as much credit as
McCombs and Shaw for discovering agenda setting? According to Everett Rogers,
there are two main reasons Funkhouser doesn't receive as much credit.
[6]
First, Funkhouser didn’t formally name the theory. Second, Funkhouser didn’t
pursue his research much past the initial article. Rogers also suggests that
Funkhouser was geographically isolated at Stanford, cut off from interested
researchers, whereas McCombs had Shaw and got other people interested in agenda
setting research. For all of these reasons, Funkhouser does not get as much
credit as McCombs and Shaw. McCombs and Shaw have heavily pursued agenda-setting
theory, establishing an "invisible college" of researchers around the
theory.
[edit]
The Cognitive
Accessibility Mechanism
Accessibility is the cognitive process through which agenda setting is said
to occur.
[8][9]
Basically, accessibility implies that the more frequently and prominently the
news media cover an issue, the more instances of that issue become accessible in
audience's memories. When surveyors then ask what the most important problem
facing the country is, respondents answer with the most accessible news issue in
memory, which is typically the issue the news media focus on the most.
[edit]
Obtrusive vs.
Unobtrusive Issues
Another factor that causes variations in the correlation between the media
and public agenda is whether an issue is "obtrusive" or "unobtrusive."
[10]
Obtrusive issues are generally issues with which we can have some kind of
personal experience, (e.g., city-wide crime or inflation at the gas pump).
Unobtrusive issues are issues we cannot directly observe (e.g., national unity).
To learn about unobtrusive issues we can't directly observe, we must turn to
news media. As such, there tends to be a higher correlation between the salience
of unobtrusive issues presented in the news media and audience's perceptions of
these issues as important problems.
Research performed by Zucker in 1978 suggested that an issue is obtrusive if
most members of the public have had direct contact with it, and less obtrusive
if audience members have not had direct experience. This means that agenda
setting results should be strongest for unobtrusive issues because audience
members must rely on
media for
information on these topics.
[11]
[edit]
Framing or
Second-Level Agenda-Setting?
As agenda setting theory has been developed, scholars pointed out attributes
that describe the object. Each of the objects on an agenda has a lot of
attributes containing cognitive component such as information that describes
characteristics of the object, and an affective component including
tones(positive, negative, neutral) of the characteristics on agenda.
McCombs et al. (1998)
[12] demonstrated that
agenda-setting research at the second level deals with the influence of
‘attribute’ salience, whereas the first level agenda-setting illustrates the
influence of ‘issue’ salience. Balmas and Sheafer (2010)
[13]
argued that the focus at the first level agenda-setting which emphasizes media’s
role in telling us “what to think about” is shifted to media’s function of
telling us “how to think about” at the second level agenda-setting. The second
level of agenda-setting considers how the agenda of attributes affects public
opinion (McCombs & Evatt, 1995). Furthermore, Ghanem(1997)
[14]
demonstrated that the certain attributes agendas in the news with low
psychological distance, drove compelling arguments for the salience of public
agenda. The second level agenda setting differs from traditional agenda setting
in that it focus on attribute salience, and public’s attribute agenda is
regarded as one of the important variables.
There is a debate over whether
framing theory should be subsumed
within agenda-setting as "second-level agenda-setting." McCombs, Shaw, Weaver
and colleagues generally argue that framing is a part of agenda-setting that
operates as a "second-level" or secondary effect. Dietram Schefuele has argued
the opposite. Scheufele argues that framing and agenda-setting possess distinct
theoretical boundaries, operate via distinct cognitive processes (accessibility
vs. attribution), and relate to different outcomes (perceptions of issue
importance vs. interpretation of news issue).
[15]
According to Weaver,
[16] framing and
second-level agenda setting have the following characteristics:
Similarities:
- Both are more concerned with how issues or other objects are depicted in
the media than with which issues or objects are more or less prominently
reported.
- Both focus on most salient or prominent aspects of themes or descriptions
of the objects of interest.
- Both are concerned with ways of thinking rather than objects of
thinking
Difference:
- Framing does seem to include a broader range of cognitive processes – moral
evaluations, causal reasoning, appeals to principle, and recommendations for
treatment of problems – than does second-level agenda setting (the salience of
attributes of an object)
Based on these shared characteristics, McCombs and colleagues
[17] recently argued
that framing effects should be seen as the extension of agenda setting. In other
words, according to them, the premise that framing is about selecting “a
restricted number of thematically related attributes”
[18]
for media representation can be understood as the process of transferring the
salience of issue attributes (i.e., second-level agenda setting). That is,
according to McCombs and colleagues’ arguments, framing falls under the umbrella
of agenda setting.
According to Price and Tewksbury,
[19] however, agenda
setting and framing are built on different theoretical premises: agenda setting
is based on accessibility, while framing is concerned with applicability (i.e.,
the relevance between message features and one’s stored ideas or knowledge).
Accessibility-based explanation of agenda setting is also applied to
second-level agenda setting. That is, transferring the salience of issue
attributes (i.e., second-level agenda setting) is a function of
accessibility.
For framing effects, empirical evidence shows that the impact of frames on
public perceptions is mainly determined by perceived importance of specific
frames rather than by the quickness of retrieving frames.
[20]
That is, the way framing effects transpires is different from the way
second-level agenda setting is supposed to take place (i.e., accessibility). On
a related note, Scheufele and Tewksbury
[21]
argues that, because accessibility and applicability vary in their functions of
media effects, “the distinction between accessibility and applicability effects
has obvious benefits for understanding and predicting the effects of dynamic
information environments.”
Taken together, it can be concluded that the integration of framing into
agenda setting is either impossible because they are based on different
theoretical premises or imprudent because merging the two concepts would result
in the loss of our capabilities to explain various media effects.
[edit]
Agenda setting vs.
Framing
Scheufele and Tewksbury argue that “framing differs significantly from these
accessibility-based models [i.e., agenda setting and priming]. It is based on
the assumption that how an issue is characterized in news reports can have an
influence on how it is understood by audiences;”
[21]
the difference between whether we think about an issue and how we think about
it. Framing and agenda setting differs in their functions in the process of news
production, information processing and media effects.
(a) News production: Although “both frame building and agenda building refer
to macroscopic mechanisms that deal with message construction rather than media
effects,” frame building is more concerned with the news production process than
agenda building. In other words, “how forces and groups in society try to shape
public discourse about an issue by establishing predominant labels is of far
greater interest from a framing perspective than from a traditional
agenda-setting one.”
(b) News processing: For framing and agenda setting, different conditions
seem to be needed in processing messages to produce respective effects. Framing
effect is more concerned with audience attention to news messages, while agenda
setting is more with repeated exposure to messages.
(c) Locus of effect: Agenda-setting effects are determined by the ease with
which people can retrieve from their memory issues recently covered by mass
media, while framing is the extent to which media messages fit ideas or
knowledge people have in their knowledge store.
[edit]
Agenda
setting vs. Reversed Agenda-Setting
With the advent of the Internet, Netizens who use the Internet for a specific
purpose appeared. Some people simply search for certain information they want
through various media channels, while others post their own opinion or discuss a
certain issue on their internet homepages or internet communities. Thus,
increase in the role of citizens in agenda setting sheds light on a new
direction in the traditional agenda-setting research.
Kim and Lee (2006)
[22] noted that the
agenda-setting research on internet differs from traditional agenda-setting
research in that the Internet functions alternative media which is in
competition with traditional media, the Internet has enormous capacity for
contents, and users’ interactivity has been stressed on the Internet. Lee,
Lancendorfer and Lee (2005)
[23] argued that
“various opinions about public issues are posted on the Internet bulletin boards
or the Usenet newsgroup by Netizens, and the opinions then form an agenda in
which other Netizens can perceive the salient issue”. The researchers also
stated that the Internet plays a role in a medium for forming Internet user’s
opinion as well as the public space.
Kim and Lee (2006) studied the pattern of internet mediated agenda-setting by
conducting a case study on 10 cases which have a great ripple effect in Korea
for 5 years (from 2000 until 2005). From the result, researchers found that a
person’s opinion could be disseminated through various online channels and
arouse public opinion which influences on news coverage. Their study suggests
‘reversed agenda effects’ that public agenda could set media agenda. Maxwell
McCombs (2004)
[24] also mentioned
"reverse agenda-setting" in his recent textbook as a situation where public
concern sets the media agenda.
According to Kim and Lee (2006), agenda-setting and agenda-building through
the Internet take the following three steps: 1) Internet-mediated
agenda-rippling: an anonymous netizen’s opinion spreads to the important agenda
on the Internet through online main rippling channels such as blogs, personal
homepages, and internet bulletin boards. 2) agenda diffusion on the Internet:
Online news or portal sites report the important agenda on the Internet, which
leads to spread the agenda to more online publics. 3) Internet-mediated reversed
agenda-setting: traditional media report the online agenda to the public so that
the agenda spread to both offline and online publics. However, the researchers
said that internet mediated agenda-setting or agenda-building processes not
always occur in consecutive order. For example, the agenda which was reported by
traditional media has come to the fore again through the online discussion, or
the three steps occur at the same time in a short time.
[edit]
Need for Orientation
Agenda-setting studies typically show variability in the correlation between
media and public agenda. To explain differences in the correlation, McCombs and
colleagues created the concept of "need for orientation," which "describes
individual differences in the desire for orienting cues and background
information."
Two concepts:
relevance and
uncertainty, define an
individual's need for orientation.
Relevance suggests that an individual will not seek
news media information if an issue is not personally relevant. Hence, if
relevance is low, people will feel
the need for less orientation. There are many issues in our country that are
just not relevant to people, because they do not affect us. Many news
organizations attempt to frame issues in a way that attempts to make them
relevant to its audiences. This is their way of keeping their
viewership/readership high. "Level of
uncertainty is the second defining condition of
need for orientation. Frequently, individuals already have all the information
that they desire about a topic. Their degree of
uncertainty is low."
[25]
When issues are of high personal
relevance and
uncertainty low, the need to monitor any changes in
those issues will be present and there will be a moderate the need for
orientation. If at any point in time viewers/readers have high
relevance and high
uncertainty about any type of
issue/event/election campaign there was a high need for orientation.
David Weaver(1977)
[26]
adapted the concept of ‘individual’s need for orientation’ defined regarding
relevance and uncertainty. Research done by Weaver in 1977 suggested that
individuals vary on their need for orientation. Need for orientation is a
combination of the individual’s interest in the topic and
uncertainty about the issue. The higher levels of
interest and
uncertainty
produce higher levels of need for orientation. So the individual would be
considerably likely to be influenced by the
media stories (psychological aspect of theory).
[27] Schonbach and
Weaver(1985)
[28]
’s study with a focus on need for orientation showed the strongest agenda
setting effects at a moderate need for orientation(under conditions of low
interest and high uncertainty).
[edit]
Three Types of
Agenda-Setting
Rogers and Dearing
[10]
identify three types of agenda setting:
1) public agenda setting, in which the public's agenda is the dependent
variable (the traditional hypothesis)
2) media agenda setting, in which the media's agenda is treated as the
dependent variable (aka agenda building)
3) policy agenda setting, in which elite policy makers' agendas are treated
as the dependent variable (aka political agenda setting)
Mass communication research, Rogers and Dearing argue, has focused a great
deal on public agenda setting - e.g., McCombs and Shaw, 1972 - and media agenda
setting, but has largely ignored policy agenda setting, which is studied
primarily by political scientists. As such, the authors suggest mass
communication scholars pay more attention to how the media and public agendas
might influence elite policy maker's agendas (i.e., scholars should ask where
the President or members of the U.S. Congress get their news from and how this
affects their policies). Writing in 2006, Walgrave and Van Aelst took up Rogers
and Dearing's suggestions, creating a preliminary theory of political agenda
setting, which examines factors that might influence elite policy makers'
agendas.
[29]
[edit]
Non-Political
Application
McCombs and Shaw originally established agenda-setting within the context of
a presidential election. Many subsequent studies have looked at agenda-setting
in the context of an election or in otherwise political contexts. Many
subsequent studies have looked at agenda setting in the context of an election
or in otherwise political contexts. However, more recently scholars have been
studying agenda setting in the context of brand community. A brand is defined as
what resides in the minds of individuals about a product or service. Brand
community is described as a “specialized, non-geographically bound community
based on a structured set of social relations among admirers of a brand.
[30]” Under these
definitions more than just material products can qualify as a brand, political
candidates or even celebrities could be viewed as a brand as well. The theory
can also be applied to commercial advertising, business news and corporate
reputation,
[4]
business influence on federal policy,
[31] legal systems,
trials,
[32] roles of social
groups, audience control, public opinion, and
public relations.
[edit]
Contributions
Since the Chapel Hill study, a great deal of research has been carried out to
discover the agenda setting influence of the news media. The theory has not been
limited to elections, and many scholars constantly explored the agenda setting
effect in a variety of communication situations. This explains that agenda
setting has a theoretical value which is able to synthesize social phenomenon
and to build new research questions.
Another contribution of agenda setting is to show the power of media. Since
the study of 1940 US presidential election in Erie County, Ohio by Paul
Lazarsfeld and his colleagues, little evidence of mass communication effects has
been found over the next twenty years. In 1960, Joseph Klapper’s The Effects of
Mass Communication also declared the limited effect of media. Agenda setting
caused a paradigm shift in the study of media effects from persuasion to
informing by connecting media content and its effects on the public.
[edit]
Future of
Agenda-Setting Theory
As a result in the changes in technology, there have been major changes in
the ways in which people receive their news. Newspapers, broadcast television,
and terrestrial radio are all examples of “vertical media” which is rapidly
declining. Now the more common form of media is “horizontal media.” The main
differences are that it is more specialized and people pay premiums for this
type of media. Horizontal media includes cable television and satellite radio as
well as other media that is paid for.
[30] Horizontal
and vertical media intersect in virtual brand communities, or the Internet. This
is because the Internet is free like vertical media but serves specialized
interest groups like horizontal media. Now people seek news in different ways,
the media and its agenda have had to adapt. Although the major tenets of agenda
setting theory have maintained their importance with the changes of new media,
an aspect of agenda setting theory has changed. This change is known as Agenda
Melding which focuses “on the personal agendas of individuals vis-à-vis their
community and group affiliations
[30] ". This
means that individuals join groups and blend their agendas with the agendas of
the group. Then groups and communities represent a “collected agenda of issues”
and “one joins a group by adopting an agenda.” On the other hand, agenda setting
defines groups as “collections of people based on some shared values, attitudes,
or opinions” that individuals join.
[30] This is
different from traditional agenda setting because according to Shaw et al.
individuals join groups in order to avoid social dissonance and isolation that
is also known as “need for orientation
[30]". Therefore
in the past in order to belong people would learn and adopt the agenda of the
group. Now with the ease of access to media, people form their own agendas and
then find groups that have similar agendas that they agree with. The advances in
technology have made agenda melding easy for people to develop because there is
a wide range of groups and individual agendas. The Internet makes it possible
for people all around the globe to find others with similar agendas and
collaborate with them. In the past agenda setting was limited to general topics
and it was geographically bound because travel was limited.
[30]
[edit]
Criticisms
1) Agenda setting is an inherently causal theory, but few studies establish
the hypothesized temporal order (the media should set the public's agenda).
2) The measurement of the dependent variable was originally conceptualized as
the public's perceived issue "salience," but subsequent studies have
conceptualized the dependent variable as awareness, attention, or concern,
leading to differing outcomes.
3) Studies tend to aggregate media content categories and public responses
into very broad categories, resulting in inflated correlation coefficients.
[10]
[edit]
See also
