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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
News media strongly influence how we picture public affairs across the world, playing a significant and sometimes controversial role in determining which topics are at the centre of public attention and action. Setting the Agenda, first published in 2004, has become the go-to textbook on this crucial topic. In this timely third edition, Maxwell McCombs - a pioneer of agenda-setting research - and Sebastián Valenzuela - a senior scholar of agenda setting in Latin America - have expanded and updated the book for a new generation of students. In describing the media's influence on what we think about and how we think about it, Setting the Agenda also examines the sources of media agendas, the psychological explanation for their impact on the public agenda, and their consequences for attitudes, opinions and behaviours. New to this edition is a discussion of agenda setting in the widened media landscape, including a full chapter on network agenda setting and a lengthened presentation on agenda melding. The book also contains expanded material on social media and the role of agenda setting beyond the realm of public affairs, as well as a foreword from Donald L. Shaw and David H. Weaver, the co-founders of agenda-setting theory. This exciting new edition is an invaluable source for students of media, communications and politics, as well as those interested in the role of news in shaping and directing public opinion.
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Contents
Dedication
Title page
Copyright page
Boxes
Foreword: ‘Messages and Residues’ Donald L. Shaw and David H. Weaver
Preface
Notes
1 Influencing Public Opinion
Our pictures of the world
Contemporary empirical evidence
The accumulated evidence
The 1972 US presidential election in Charlotte
The 1976 US presidential election in three communities
National concern about civil rights
British and American concern about foreign affairs
Public opinion in Germany
Agenda setting in a Swedish election
Public opinion in Louisville
Local public opinion in Spain, Japan, and Argentina
Replication with other issues
Cause and effect
A new communication landscape
1. Do online media have agenda-setting effects among the public?
2. Has the proliferation of online media diminished the agenda-setting impact of the traditional media?
3. To what extent are there specific channel effects vs. the collective impact of a communication gestalt?
Summing up
Notes
2 Reality and the News
Idiosyncratic pictures
A decade of American public opinion
Creating a crisis
National concern about drugs
Fear of crime
Discovering the environment
Alarmed discovery
Perspectives on agenda-setting effects
Content versus exposure
Agenda setting in past centuries
Summing up
Notes
3 The Pictures in our Heads
Pictures of political candidates
Candidate images in national elections
Candidate images in local elections
Visual images and attributes
Attributes of issues
Compelling arguments
Agenda setting and other communication theories
Attribute agenda setting and framing
Summing up
Notes
4 Networks of Issues and Attributes
Associative memory
Networks of candidates and attributes
Accumulated evidence on network agenda setting
A new gestalt perspective
Summing Up
Notes
5 Why Agenda Setting Occurs
Relevance and uncertainty
Occurrence of agenda-setting effects
Relevance
Personal experience with public issues
Individual differences
Incidental learning
Agenda-melding
Summing up
Notes
6 How Agenda Setting Works
Carrying capacity of the public agenda
Diversity and volatility of the public agenda
Education and agenda setting
Explaining the transfer of salience
Timeframe for effects
Diversity of salience measures
Summing up
Notes
7 Shaping the Media Agenda
The president and the national agenda
Subsidizing the media agenda
Capturing the media agenda
Three election agendas
Media agendas in local elections
Attributes of local issues
Three elements of elections
A broader portrait
Intermedia agenda setting
Summing up
Notes
8 Consequences of Agenda Setting
Priming public opinion
Attribute agendas and opinions
Forming opinions
Influencing behaviour
Agenda setting role of business news
Summing up
Notes
9 Communication and Society
Transmission of culture
New agenda-setting arenas
Other cultural agendas
Concepts, domains, and settings
Continuing evolution of agenda-setting theory
Notes
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
1 Influencing Public Opinion
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Dedication
For Betsy
Maxwell McCombs
For Tere, Simón, Camilo, and Santiago
Sebastián Valenzuela
Setting the Agenda
The News Media and Public Opinion
Third Edition
Maxwell McCombs
Sebastián Valenzuela
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © Maxwell McCombs and Sebastián Valenzuela 2021
The right of Maxwell McCombs and Sebastián Valenzuela to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2004 by Polity Press
This edition published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3579-8 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3580-4 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McCombs, Maxwell E., author. | Valenzuela, Sebastián, author.
Title: Setting the agenda : the news media and public opinion / Maxwell McCombs and Sebastián Valenzuela.
Description: Third edition. | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “An anticipated third edition of the go-to text on agenda-setting”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020017655 (print) | LCCN 2020017656 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509535798 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509535804 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509535811 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Mass media and public opinion. | Mass media--Social aspects. | Mass media--Political aspects. | Mass media--Influence. | Public opinion.
Classification: LCC P96.P83 M38 2020 (print) | LCC P96.P83 (ebook) | DDC 302.23--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017655
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017656
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Boxes
1.1 Agenda-setting role of the news media
1.2 The power of the news
2.1 Newspaper coverage and public concern about crime
2.2 The Acapulco typology: four perspectives on agenda setting
3.1 First- and second-level agenda setting
3.2 Attribute agenda setting in Spanish local elections
3.3 Compelling arguments: Another path for the transfer of salience between the media agenda and the public agenda
4.1 Matrix of candidate attributes
4.2 Media and public attribute agenda networks
5.1 Need for orientation and agenda-setting effects
5.2 Need for orientation and average level of interest in political information
5.3 Agenda-setting effects for obtrusive and unobtrusive issues (natural history perspective)
5.4 Agenda-setting effects for obtrusive and unobtrusive issues (competition perspective)
6.1 Duration of major issues on the public agenda
6.2 A comparison of attribute agenda-setting effects based on three measures of attribute salience among the public for an environmental issue
7.1 An expanded view of agenda setting
7.2A metaphorical onion of the media agenda
8.1 Consequences of agenda setting
8.2 Individual behaviour in response to news of plane crashes and skyjackings
8.3 Impact on three behaviours of object salience on the media agenda
9.1 Patterns of social consensus with increasing use of the news media among demographic groups in Spain, Taiwan, and the United States
Foreword: ‘Messages and Residues’
Even as children we know instinctively that a message, such as a cry, generates a response. This comprehensive book makes clear that many messages, especially those from news media, are not random but are ordered by journalists and others in prioritized ways, from most to least important, and that audiences have to read, watch, listen, and learn. Agendas provide priorities, not just information.
In our personal lives we live in real worlds with family and friends and street addresses, jobs, schools, and hospitals, and deserts and mountains. In our civic lives we live in imagined worlds that we learn about from others, including media. These worlds overlap, of course. There is a continuum from touching to visualizing. Information from others, including traditional and social media, providing prioritized agendas. In media the priorities are evident. Newspapers give the biggest headline to the most important topic, a presidential election result, or a tearing tornado. Television leads off with the topic, or even breaks into regular programming with ‘breaking news’. Social media lead off with the topic and stay on that topic, gathering others into the informational web like an expanding spiderweb in the attic.
Agenda setting is often described as the press telling us what to think about rather than what to think. We have long known that media coverage can magnify topics, or even people, as P. T. Barnum in the nineteenth century made an apparently good singer, Jenny Lind, into a world-famous star, the Swedish Nightingale. The power of a message, or an amplified voice one way or the other, has been known for centuries, but agenda-setting scholars have provided specific evidence of the many ways this phenomenon occurs – across time, nationalities, and political systems. Communication scholars Maxwell McCombs and Sebastián Valenzuela have surveyed a vast literature in a single volume in a way that teachers and scholars can use. This is a text and a major book of scholarship.
Agenda-setting scholarship was a long time in coming. Wilbur Schramm of Stanford more or less invented the field of mass communication scholarship seventy years ago with his own writing and collections of key insights about media and mass communication. These collections served as early texts and research guides. Scholars of journalism conducted legal and historical scholarship in the first years (as they still do) and borrowed the methods of sociology and social psychology. They also employed content analysis, the one method that naturally belongs to journalism scholarship. Decades ago, Wayne Danielson of Stanford, North Carolina, and Texas, and Guido Stempel of Ohio University, among others, began to link content with computers and find ways to generalize research samples to large populations. Schramm early on sketched a model of a communicator-to-message-to-audience message direction, with a weaker feedback loop. It was, and remains, a universe to discover.
With content analysis, one could read messages backwards to discern details of audiences and even cultures, but also could look forward more precisely at effects on audiences. Of course, there was the message itself. The agenda-setting work of McCombs and his colleagues connected content analysis with audience effects more exactly than ever before. One could make predictions, the first step in theory building. If we had time and resources, we could trace historically how the voice of a Swedish singer grew from filling auditoriums in towns and cities to filling the imagined air of listeners everywhere, with echoes even today, more than a century later. Agendas leave residues. Agenda setting provides tools as well as concepts. Agenda setting goes forwards and backwards, even as we stand, so to speak, on messages themselves.
Citation analysis of the original article of McCombs and Donald Shaw demonstrates the growth in the concept of agenda setting, along with the resistance to the simple idea it represented – if a cognitive stimulus, then a cognitive response – in a period, the 1950s and 1960s, when attitude change was the dominant paradigm. We remember reading one literature review which detailed this resistance like the lines left by the receding tides on an Atlantic beach, from: (1) there is no message residue, to (2) there is a slight, but artifactual, residue, to (3) there is a residue, but we have long known about it, to (4) there is a message effect but it’s mostly trivial and can be accounted for by other causes. That is, the review hinted, agenda-setting research is not significant, at least to those most interested in attitude change and behaviour. The first paper on agenda setting, based on the 1968 presidential election study in Chapel Hill, was rejected by the Association for Education in Journalism (now AEJMC). It was not published until 1972, slightly revised, in Public Opinion Quarterly.
But agenda-setting research continued, perhaps because of its conceptual simplicity, and by now there are more than 500 articles around the world, numerous books, and thousands of papers. The 1972 McCombs and Shaw article has drawn more than a million hits on Google. There are now different branches of agenda setting, such as attribute agenda setting, intermedia agenda setting, and agenda-melding, among others. With study of agenda-setting levels 2 and 3, one can see how the attributes of media messages are reproduced in the minds of audiences and perhaps wonder what the implications are, as China, among other nations, pulls the strings of traditional and social media content producers. The United States has its first Twitter president, but probably not its last. There is also evidence that audiences mix information from traditional and social media to find a blend that is personally comfortable, not necessarily one that is factually accurate. John Milton’s plea assumes that truth will defeat falsehood, even as we may be slipping into a post-factual society. If so, media still have the power to set agendas with messages based on facts or opinions.
Agenda setting on occasion can be a complex social topic that reaches far beyond news media and audiences. Rita Colistra of West Virginia University has explored the importance of agenda-cutting. Consider that Southern white newspapers did not carry news about African American activities in certain periods of our history, unless African Americans were associated with crime or accidents. Japan has seemingly ignored its aggressor role in the Second World War, while Germany has acknowledged its part in their history books, and history is a major agenda setter. If you are not on the news agenda in contemporary life, you do not exist in civic culture, at least to people who don’t know you personally.
There is an activist side to agenda setting. What if news media created a regular local beat about climate change, or about ending poverty and generating opportunity? Journalists would produce stories regularly. In time, audiences would think more about these topics, although this alone would not guarantee civic action. Agenda setting is the necessary first step in social change. Telling people what to think about is a considerable power. Is that not the job of teachers, parents, religious and political leaders, bosses, and even friends?
Agenda-setting scholarship has sometimes employed sophisticated methods, but the concept of communicator-to-message-to-receivers remains its simple core. This book organizes the literature and field into clear segments in a way that makes the power – and evolution – of this research discipline clear. This version of the book, the third, is different because the book, like the field, has evolved. No one knows research on agenda setting as well as Max McCombs, and now Sebastián Valenzuela. Their portrayal of agenda-setting research is emerging piece by piece, like tracing the numbers on a ‘What Am I?’ page. The third edition of this book is the most complete story yet, a rich contribution to our understanding of the processes involved in agenda setting.
We are pleased to have been contributors to this ongoing stream of communication research for the past half century, along with our students and our students’ students and many others. David Weaver remembers creating the need for orientation construct with Max McCombs in 1973, from studies of social psychology that suggested the importance of relevance and uncertainty in information seeking. It was exciting to see the data from the 1972 Charlotte study fitting the predictions of the NFO model so well, both in terms of media exposure and strength of agenda-setting correlations.
Donald Shaw remembers the afternoon in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, when Max came down the hall with the news that their AEJ paper on agenda setting had been rejected. What to do? One option was to drop the paper into the trash can and move on. After all, common sense had long made clear that news did have an impact. Who needed the precision of agenda setting? Max had a different idea. So, he tells students today that when you get a rejection of a scholarly paper or article, take a closer look at your idea: You may really be on to something.
Donald L. Shaw, University of North Carolina,
David H. Weaver, Indiana University
Preface
Setting the agenda is now a common phrase in discussions of politics and public opinion. This phrase summarizes the continuing dialogue and debate in every community, from local neighbourhoods to the international arena, over what should be at the centre of public attention and action. In most of these dialogues the news media have a significant and sometimes controversial role. Should there be any doubt about this long-standing and widespread role of the news media, note the New York Times’ description of twentieth-century British press baron Lord Beaverbrook as a man ‘who dined with prime ministers and set the nation’s agenda’.1 Or former New York Times executive Max Frankel’s description of his own newspaper:
It is the ‘house organ’ of the smartest, most talented, and most influential Americans at the height of American power. And while its editorial opinions or the views of individual columnists and critics can be despised or dismissed, the paper’s daily package of news cannot. It frames the intellectual and emotional agenda of serious Americans.2
The enormous growth and expansion of these media institutions that are now such a compelling feature of contemporary society was a central aspect of the last one hundred years. To the host of newspapers and magazines spawned in the nineteenth century, the twentieth century added ubiquitous layers of film, radio, television, and cable television. In its closing years came the internet and, in the twenty-first century, a kaleidoscopic mix of new communication technologies – most notably social and mobile media – have continued to blur the traditional boundaries between mediated and interpersonal communication, and between the various media and their content. These new channels redefine ‘mass’ communication and enlarge its agenda-setting role in society. Mass communication once meant the large-scale distribution of identical messages, particularly through newspapers, television, and radio. The new communication channels, such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, are massive, too, in that large proportions of society use them, but the messages flowing through these channels are personalized.
Although everyone talks about the impact of these emerging technologies in the current media landscape, the enormous social influence of communication was already apparent decades before Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook. In The Making of the President, 1972, American journalist Theodore White described the power of the news media to set the agenda of public attention as ‘an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties, and mandarins’.3 In the years since White’s cogent observation, social scientists across the world have elaborated the ability of the news media and an expanding panoply of communication channels to influence many aspects of our political, social, and cultural agendas.
One of the most prominent and best-documented intellectual maps of this influence is the theory of the agenda-setting role of the communication media, which is the subject of this book. Theories seldom emerge full-blown. They typically begin with a succinct insight and are subsequently elaborated and explicated over many years by various explorers and surveyors of their intellectual terrain. This has been the case for agenda-setting theory. From a parsimonious hypothesis about the effects of the news media on the public’s attention to social and political issues during election campaigns, agenda setting has expanded to include propositions about the psychological process for these effects, the influences that shape communication agendas, the impact of specific elements in their messages, and a variety of consequences of this agenda-setting process. Expanding beyond the traditional news media, agenda-setting theory has become a detailed map of the effects of the flow of information about public affairs through a growing plethora of communication channels.
The immediate origins of this idea began with a casual observation about the play of news stories on the front page of the Los Angeles Times one day in early 1967. There were three big stories that day: internationally, the unexpected shift from Labour to Conservative in the British county council elections; nationally, a budding scandal in Washington; and locally, the firing of the Los Angeles metropolitan area director of a large federally funded programme that was a keystone in President Johnson’s national ‘War on Poverty’. Not surprisingly, the Los Angeles Times put the local story in the lead position on page 1 and relegated the other two stories to less prominent positions on the front page. Any one of these stories – in the absence of the other two – easily would have been the page 1 lead, a situation that led to a speculative conversation over drinks among several young UCLA faculty members at their Friday afternoon ‘junior faculty meeting’ in the lobby of the Century Plaza Hotel. Is the impact of an event diminished when a news story receives less prominent play, we wondered? Those speculations grounded in a scattered variety of ideas and empirical findings about the influence of the media on the public were the seeds for the theory of agenda setting.
The formal explication of the idea of agenda setting began with my move that autumn to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I met Donald Shaw and began what is now a fifty-year plus friendship and professional partnership. Our initial attempt at formal research on this idea built literally on those speculations in Los Angeles about the play of news stories. We attempted to construct an experiment based on actual newspapers that played the same story in radically different ways. The Charlotte Observer was a widely respected newspaper in North Carolina, which produced a series of editions during the day, early ones for points distant from Charlotte, the final edition for the city itself. One result of these multiple editions was that some stories would begin the day prominently played on the front page and then move down in prominence in subsequent editions, sometimes moving entirely off the front page. Our original plan was to use these differences from edition to edition as the basis of an experiment. However, the shifts in news play from day to day proved too erratic – in terms both of the subjects of the stories and in the way that their play in the newspaper changed – for any systematic comparison of their impact upon the public’s perceptions.
Despite this setback, the theoretical idea was intriguing, and we decided to try another methodological tack, a small survey of undecided voters during the 1968 US presidential election in tandem with a systematic content analysis of how the news media used by these voters played the major issues of the election. Undecided voters were selected for study on the assumption that, among the public at large, this group, who were interested in the election but undecided about their vote, would be the most open to media influence. This was the Chapel Hill study, now known as the origin of agenda-setting theory.4
A fundamental contribution of the Chapel Hill study was the term itself, ‘agenda setting’, which gave this concept of media influence immediate currency among scholars. The late Steve Chaffee recalled that, when I saw him at the 1968 annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and told him about our study of agenda setting, the term was new and unfamiliar but he immediately understood the focus of our research.
Since Donald Shaw was trained in history, you might expect us to have exact records on the creation of the term ‘agenda setting’ – the ‘One Tuesday afternoon in early August …’ kind of sentence – but, ironically, neither Donald nor I recalls exactly when we came up with that name. We did not mention ‘agenda setting’ in our 1967 application to the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) for the small grant used in partial support of the research, but our 1969 report to the NAB on the results of the Chapel Hill study uses the term as if it had been around forever. Sometime during 1968 the name ‘agenda setting’ appeared,5 and Steve Chaffee undoubtedly was one of the first ‘referees’ to acknowledge its utility – perhaps the very first outside the immediate Chapel Hill circle involved in the project. Further corroboration is provided by the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which shows that 1968 was the first year in which the phrase ‘agenda setting’ was used systematically. Chapter 1 presents the details of the Chapel Hill study as well as some of the key intellectual antecedents of this idea.
To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, with the success of the 1968 Chapel Hill investigation, the game clearly was afoot. There were promising leads in hand for the solution to at least a portion of the mystery about the precise effects of the media upon public opinion. Subsequently, many detectives began to pursue these clues about how public attention and perception are influenced by the media and how various characteristics of the media, their content, and their audiences mediate these effects. Much like the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, whose cases fill nine lengthy volumes, a wide variety of links in this vast intellectual web has been chronicled. However, because the marketplace of ideas in communication research is very much one of laissez-faire, elaboration of the agenda-setting role of the communication media has not always proceeded in an orderly or systematic fashion. There have been many detectives working on many cases in a variety of geographical and cultural settings, adding a bit of evidence here and another bit there over the years. New theoretical concepts explicating the idea of agenda setting emerged in one part of this intellectual web, then in another.
For many years, the primary emphasis was an agenda of public issues. Especially in its popular manifestation of polls in the news media, public opinion is frequently regarded in these terms. Agenda-setting theory evolved from a description and explanation of the influence that the news media have on public opinion about the issues of the day. An open-ended question used by the Gallup Poll since the 1930s, ‘What is the most important problem facing this country today?’, is frequently used for this research because polls based on this question document the hundreds of issues that have engaged the attention of the public and pollsters over the decades.6 Perhaps for the first time in modern history, in 2020 this Most Important Problem (or MIP) question yielded the exact same response in all polls across the world: the coronavirus crisis.
Moving beyond an agenda of issues, agenda-setting theory has encompassed public opinion about political candidates and other public figures, specifically the images that the public holds of these individuals and the contributions of the media to those public images. This larger agenda of topics – public figures as well as public issues – marks an important theoretical expansion from the beginning of the communication process, what topics the media and public are paying attention to and regard as important, to subsequent stages, how the media and public perceive and understand the details of these topics. In turn, these stages are the opening gambit for mapping the consequences of the media’s agenda-setting role for attitudes, opinions, and behaviour.
And, in recent decades, investigation of agenda-setting effects and their consequences have expanded beyond the domain of public affairs to explore settings as diverse as sports, religion, and business. All of these media effects upon the public are presented in this volume, not just theoretically, but in terms of the empirical evidence on these effects worldwide.
In contrast to the piecemeal historical evolution of our knowledge about agenda setting since the seminal 1968 Chapel Hill study, the chapters of this book strive for an orderly and systematic presentation of what we have learned over those years, an attempt to integrate the vast diversity of this evidence – diverse in its historical and geographical settings, mix of media and topics, and research methods. Presenting this integrated picture – in the words of John Pavlik, a Gray’s Anatomy of agenda-setting theory7 – is the central purpose of the book. Much of the evidence forming this picture is from an American setting because the ‘founding fathers’ of agenda setting, Donald Shaw, David Weaver,8 and myself, are American academics, and the majority of the empirical research until recently has been conducted in the United States. However, the reader will encounter considerable evidence from Western Europe, East Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. One of the great strengths of agenda-setting theory is this geographical and cultural diversity in the evidence replicating the major aspects of this influence on society.
Beyond the immense gratitude to my best friends and long-time research partners, Donald Shaw and David Weaver, this book owes a great debt to the host of scholars worldwide who created the accumulated literature that is catalogued here. Prominent among these scholars is a leading Latin American scholar, Sebastián Valenzuela, who joins me as the co-author of this third edition. An associate professor in the School of Communications at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago, Sebastián brings an important international voice to Setting the Agenda. He continues the significant contributions to agenda setting made by University of Texas at Austin scholars over the past three decades.
The theory of agenda setting is a complex intellectual map still in the process of evolving. Although the emphasis in this book is on an empirically grounded media-centric map of what we now know about the role of the media in the formation of public opinion, there also is discussion in the later chapters of the larger context in which this media influence occurs. This agenda-setting role of the media has been a rich lode for scholars to mine for more than fifty years, and yet much of its wealth remains untapped. However, even the existing theoretical map already identifies exciting new areas to explore, and the flux in our contemporary public communication system has created a plethora of new opportunities for elaborating the map presented here.
Even within the original domain of public opinion, there is more to consider than just the descriptions and explanations of how the media influence our views of public affairs. For journalists this phenomenon that we now talk about as the agenda-setting role of the news media is an awesome, overarching ethical question about what agenda the media are advancing. ‘What the public needs to know’ is a recurring phrase in the rhetorical repertoire of professional journalism. Does the media agenda really represent what the public needs to know?9 In a moment of doubt, the executive producer of ABC News’ Nightline once asked: ‘Who are we to think we should set an agenda for the nation? What made us any smarter than the next guy?’10 To a considerable degree, journalism is grounded in the tradition of storytelling. However, good journalism is more than just telling a good story. It is about telling stories that contain significant civic utility.11 The agenda-setting role of the media links journalism and its tradition of storytelling to the arena of public opinion, a relationship with considerable consequences for society. And the expanding media landscape and evolution of journalism and political communication presents significant questions about the formation of public opinion.
Maxwell McCombs
Austin, Texas, March 2020
Notes
1
Alan Cowell, ‘New owner struggles at a London tabloid’,
New York Times
, 26 February 2001, p. C15.
2
Max Frankel,
The Times of My Life and My Life with The Times
(New York: Random House, 1999), pp. 414–15.
3
Theodore White,
The Making of the President, 1972
(New York: Bantam, 1973), p. 327.
4
Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw, ‘The agenda-setting function of mass media’,
Public Opinion Quarterly
, 36 (1972): 176–87. The early history of this study offers a salutary note about new theoretical perspectives. A few months after the 1968 election, McCombs and Shaw submitted the paper later published in
Public Opinion Quarterly
to the annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism. Their paper was summarily rejected, which explains the four-year gap between the election and the 1972 article.
5
Contrary to a published statement that the phrase ‘agenda setting’ was suggested by an anonymous reviewer of the original article published in the summer 1972 issue of
Public Opinion Quarterly
, Part I of the McCombs and Shaw report to the National Association of Broadcasters in June 1969 was titled ‘The agenda-setting function of the mass media’. The title of the full report was ‘Acquiring Political Information’. A revised version of this draft report was not submitted to
Public Opinion Quarterly
until several years later. The full statement about the phrase ‘agenda setting’ originating with an anonymous reviewer is in Robert L. Stevenson, Rainer Böhme, and Nico Nikel, ‘The TV agenda-setting influence on campaign 2000’,
Egyptian Journal of Public Opinion Research
, 2, 1 (2001), p. 29.
6
Maxwell McCombs and Jian-Hua Zhu, ‘Capacity, diversity, and volatility of the public agenda: trends from 1954 to 1994’,
Public Opinion Quarterly
, 59 (1995): 495–525; Jill A. Edy and Patrick C. Meirick, ‘The fragmenting public agenda: capacity, diversity, and volatility in responses to the “most important problem” question’,
Public Opinion Quarterly
, 82 (2018): 661–85.
7
My thanks to John Pavlik for this metaphoric comparison, made during a conversation about the first edition of this book on 12 September 2003 in Bonn, Germany.
8
David Weaver, who came to the University of North Carolina to study for his PhD shortly after the original Chapel Hill study, quickly gained a major role in the development of agenda-setting theory. His contribution as a graduate student during the 1972 US presidential election is detailed in Chapter 6 and as a faculty member at Indiana University during the 1976 US presidential election in Chapter 1. Many other contributions from Indiana University in the subsequent years are noted in other chapters, along with continuing contributions from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
9
Michael Gurevitch and Jay Blumler, ‘Political communication systems and democratic values’, in
Democracy and the Mass Media
, ed. Judith Lichtenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 269–89.
10
Tom Bettag, ‘What’s news? Evolving definitions of news’,
Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics
, 5, 3 (2000): 105.
11
Davis Merritt and Maxwell McCombs,
The Two W’s of Journalism: The Why and What of Public Affairs Reporting
(Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003).
1Influencing Public Opinion
The American humourist Will Rogers was fond of prefacing his sardonic political observations with the comment, ‘All I know is just what I read in the newspapers.’ This comment is a succinct summary about most of the knowledge and information that each of us possesses about public affairs, because most of the issues and concerns that engage our attention are not amenable to direct personal experience. As Walter Lippmann long ago noted in Public Opinion, ‘The world that we have to deal with politically is out of reach, out of sight, out of mind.’1 In Will Rogers’ and Walter Lippmann’s day, the daily newspaper was the principal source of information about public affairs. Today we have a vastly expanded panoply of communication channels, but the central point is the same. For nearly all of the concerns on the public agenda, citizens deal with a second-hand reality, a reality that is structured by journalists’ reports about these events and situations, which in turn are amplified, transformed, and commented upon by users across digital and mobile media.
A similar, parsimonious description of our situation vis-à-vis the news media is captured in sociologist Robert Park’s venerable phrase, the ‘signal function’ of the news.2 The daily news alerts us to the latest events and changes in the larger environment beyond our immediate experience. But the news media do considerably more than signal the existence of major events and issues. Through their selection and display of the news, journalists focus our attention and influence our perceptions of what are the most important issues of the day. This role of the news media in identifying the key issues and topics of the day and their ability to influence the salience of these issues and topics on the public agenda has come to be called the agenda-setting role of the news media.
News media communicate a host of cues about the relative salience of the topics on their daily agenda. The lead story on page 1 of a newspaper, the placement of a story on a website, the length of a story, even the number of social media interactions garnered by a story – all communicate the salience of topics on the news agenda. The television news agenda has a more limited capacity, so even a mention on the evening television news is a strong signal about the high salience of a topic. Additional cues are provided by its placement in the broadcast and by the amount of time spent on the story. For all the communication media, the repetition of a topic day after day is the most powerful message of all about its importance.
The public uses these salience cues from the media to organize its own agenda and decide which issues are most important. Over time, the issues emphasized in news reports become the issues regarded as most important among the public. The agenda of the news media becomes, to a considerable degree, the agenda of the public. In other words, the news media largely set the public agenda. Establishing this salience among the public, placing an issue, event, public figure, or other major element in the news on the public agenda so that it becomes the focus of public attention and thought – and, possibly, action – is the initial stage in the formation of public opinion.
Discussion of public opinion usually centres on the distribution of opinions: how many are for, how many are against, and how many are undecided. That is why the news media and so many news users are so fascinated with public opinion polls, especially during political campaigns. But, before we consider the distribution of opinions, we need to know which elements are at the centre of public opinion. People have opinions on many things, but only a few really matter to them. The agenda-setting role of the news media is their influence on the salience of an object of attention in the news, such as a controversial topic or a political candidate, an influence on whether a significant number of people regard it as worthwhile to hold an opinion about that object.
While many issues compete for public attention, only a few are successful in doing so, and the news media exert significant influence on our perceptions of what are the most important issues of the day. Within professional news outlets, this is not a deliberate, premeditated influence, as in the expression ‘to have an agenda’. Premeditated attempts at influence are the realm of the partisan media, propaganda, advertising, so-called ‘fake news’ sites, and other forms of communication that seek to persuade.3 Professional news media seek to inform, not persuade. And their agenda-setting role stems not from efforts at persuasion, but rather is an inadvertent influence resulting from the necessity of the news media to select and highlight a few topics in their reports about the most salient news of the moment.
This distinction between the influence of the professional news media on the salience of objects in the news and on specific opinions about these objects is summed up in Bernard Cohen’s observation that the news media may not be successful in telling people what to think, but they are stunningly successful in telling their audiences what to think about.4 In other words, the news media can set the agenda for public thought and discussion. Sometimes the news media do more than this. Other times, the news media fail at setting the public agenda. Hence, we will find it necessary in later chapters to expand on Cohen’s cogent observation. But first, let us consider in some detail the initial step in the formation of public opinion, capturing public attention.
Our pictures of the world
Walter Lippmann is the intellectual father of the idea now called, for short, agenda setting. The opening chapter of his 1922 classic, Public Opinion, is titled ‘The World Outside and the Pictures in our Heads’, and summarizes the agenda-setting idea even though Lippmann did not use that phrase. His thesis is that the news media, our windows to the vast world beyond direct experience, determine our cognitive maps of that world. Public opinion, argued Lippmann, responds not to the environment, but to the pseudo-environment constructed by the news media.
Still in print nearly a century after its original publication, Public Opinion presents an intriguing array of anecdotal evidence to support its thesis. Lippmann begins the book with a compelling story of ‘an island in the ocean where in 1914 a few Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans lived’. Only the arrival of the mail steamer more than six weeks after the outbreak of the First World War alerted these friends to the fact that they were enemies.5 For Lippmann, who was writing in the 1920s, these are contemporary updates of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, with which he prefaces the book. Paraphrasing Socrates, he noted ‘how indirectly we know the environment in which nevertheless we live […] but that whatever we believe to be a true picture, we treat as if it were the environment itself’.6
Contemporary empirical evidence
Empirical evidence about the agenda-setting role of the communication media now confirms and elaborates Lippmann’s broad-brush observations. When agenda setting was first proposed, it ran counter to the prevailing paradigm among communication scholars that the mass media had limited effects in changing people’s perceptions and attitudes. Agenda setting, on the contrary, showed that the news media can have strong, direct effects in the short term by influencing not what people think, but what they think about.
However, the empirical currency of agenda setting as a theory about the formation of public opinion came much later than Lippmann’s essay. When Public Opinion was published in 1922, the first scientific investigations of the influence of mass communication on public opinion were still more than a decade in the future. Publication of the first explicit investigation of the agenda-setting role of mass communication was exactly fifty years away.
Systematic analysis of mass communication’s effects on public opinion, empirical research grounded in the precepts of scientific investigation, dates from the 1940 US presidential election, when sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues at Columbia University, in collaboration with pollster Elmo Roper, conducted seven rounds of interviews with voters in Erie County, Ohio.7 Contrary to both popular and scholarly expectations, these surveys and many subsequent investigations in other settings over the next twenty years found little evidence of mass communication effects on attitudes and opinions. Two decades after Erie County, Joseph Klapper’s The Effects of Mass Communication declared that the so-called Law of Minimal Consequences prevailed: ‘Mass communication ordinarily does not serve as a necessary and sufficient cause of audience effects, but rather functions among and through a nexus of mediating functions and influences.’8
However, the early social science investigations during the 1940s and 1950s did find considerable evidence that people acquired information from the news media even if they did not change their opinions. Voters did learn from the news. And from a journalistic perspective, questions about learning are more central than questions about persuasion. Most journalists are concerned with informing. Persuasion is relegated to the editorial page and, even there, informing remains central. Furthermore, even after the Law of Minimal Consequences became the accepted conventional wisdom, there was a lingering suspicion among many social scientists that there were major media effects not yet explored or measured. The time was ripe for a paradigm shift in the examination of media effects, a shift from persuasion to an earlier point in the communication process, informing.
After Lippmann, other authors in the social sciences alluded to the idea that the news media influence what people deem to be the relevant issues of the day.9 However, it was only when two young professors at the University of North Carolina’s School of Journalism launched a small investigation in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, during the 1968 US presidential campaign, that the notion was put to proper empirical testing. Their central hypothesis was that the ‘mass media’ set the agenda of issues for a political campaign by influencing the salience of issues among voters. These two professors, Donald Shaw and Maxwell McCombs, also coined a name for this hypothesized influence of mass communication, ‘agenda setting’.10
Testing this agenda-setting hypothesis required the comparison of two sets of evidence: a description of the public agenda, the set of issues that were of the greatest concern to Chapel Hill voters; and a description of the issue agenda in the news media used by those voters. Illustrated in Box 1.1, a central assertion of agenda-setting theory is that those aspects emphasized in the news come to be regarded by the public over time as being important. In other words, the media agenda sets the public agenda. Contrary to the Law of Minimal Consequences, this is a statement about a strong causal media effect on the public – the transfer of salience from the media agenda to the public agenda.
To determine the public agenda in Chapel Hill during the 1968 presidential election, a survey was conducted among a sample of randomly selected undecided voters. Only undecided voters were interviewed because this new agenda-setting hypothesis went against the prevailing view of media effects. If this test in Chapel Hill failed to find agenda-setting effects under rather optimum conditions, voters who had not yet decided how to cast their presidential vote, there would be little reason to pursue the matter among the general public, where long-standing psychological identification with a political party and the process of selective perception often blunted the effects of mass communication during election campaigns.
In the survey, these undecided voters were asked to name the key issues of the day as they saw matters, regardless of what the candidates might be saying. The issues named in the survey were ranked according to the percentage of voters naming each one to yield a description of the public agenda. Note that this rank ordering of the issues is considerably more precise than simply grouping sets of issues into those receiving high, moderate, or low attention among the public.
The nine major news sources used by these voters were also content analysed. This included five local and national newspapers, two television networks and two news magazines. The rank order of issues on the media agenda was determined by the number of news stories devoted to each issue in recent weeks. Although this was not the very first time that survey research had been combined with content analysis to assess the effects of specific media content, their tandem use to measure the effects of mass communication was rare at that time.
Five issues dominated the media and public agendas during the 1968 US presidential campaign – foreign policy, law and order, economics, public welfare, and civil rights. There was a near-perfect correspondence between the rankings of these issues by the Chapel Hill voters, and their rankings based on their play in the news media during the previous twenty-five days. The salience of five key campaign issues among these undecided voters was virtually identical to the salience of these issues in the news coverage of recent weeks.
Moreover, the idea of powerful media effects expressed in the concept of agenda setting was a better explanation for the salience of issues on the public agenda than was the concept of selectivity, which is a keystone in the idea of limited media effects. To be clear, agenda setting is not a return to a ‘magic bullet’ or ‘hypodermic needle’ theory of all-powerful media effects. Nor are members of the public regarded as automatons waiting to be programmed by the news media. But agenda setting does assign a central role to the news media in initiating items for the public agenda. Or, to paraphrase Lippmann, the information provided by the news media plays a key role in the construction of our pictures of reality. And, moreover, it is the total set of information provided by the news media that influences these pictures.
In contrast, the concept of selectivity locates the central influence within the individual and stratifies media content according to its compatibility with an individual’s pre-existing attitudes and opinions. From this perspective, it is often assumed that the news media do little to alter the issue priorities of individuals because individuals maximize their exposure to supportive information and seek out news about issues that they already deem important. For instance, during an election, voters are expected to pay the most attention to those issues emphasized by their preferred political party.
Which does the public agenda more closely reflect? The total agenda of issues in the news, which is the outcome hypothesized by agenda-setting theory? Or the agenda of issues advanced by a voter’s preferred party, which is the outcome hypothesized by the theory of selective perception?
To answer these questions, those undecided Chapel Hill voters who had a preference (albeit not yet a firm commitment to vote for a candidate) were separated into three groups – Democrats, Republicans, and supporters of George Wallace, a third-party candidate in that election. For each of these three groups of voters, a pair of comparisons was made with the news coverage on the CBS television network: the issue agenda of that voter group compared with all the news coverage on CBS, and the issue agenda of the group compared with only the news on CBS originating with the group’s preferred party and candidate. These pairs of comparisons for CBS were repeated for NBC, the New York Times, and a local daily newspaper. In sum, there were a dozen pairs of correlations to compare: three groups of voters times four news media.
Which was the stronger correlation in each pair? The agenda-setting correlation comparing voters with all the news coverage, or the selective perception correlation comparing voters with only the news of their preferred party and candidate? Eight of the twelve comparisons favoured the agenda-setting hypothesis. There was no difference in one case, and only three comparisons favoured the selective perception hypothesis. A new perspective on powerful media effects had established a foothold.
The accumulated evidence
A year after publication of the Chapel Hill study, Theodore White’s last instalment of The Making of the President series details the agenda-setting influence of the news media in the excerpt shown in Box 1.2. Since the modest beginnings in Chapel Hill during the 1968 presidential election, more than 500 separate scientific works on agenda setting have accumulated, spanning all six continents, including political and non-political settings, across a variety of media, and dozens of issues.11 In 2011, the 75th anniversary celebration of Public Opinion Quarterly noted that the Chapel Hill study was the most cited article ever published in the journal.12 By March 2020, this article alone had over 12,000 citations in Google Scholar. Some authors even speak of the ‘agenda-setting juggernaut’13 to highlight the popularity of the agenda-setting concept when studying the influence of journalists and the news they produce. And it may well be the only theory in journalism studies to have a scholarly journal entirely devoted to it, The Agenda-Setting Journal.
Despite reams of published research, the basic idea of the theory has remained straightforward: Agenda setting refers to the process by which the elements (e.g. issues, public figures, companies, or government institutions) that are deemed relevant by the news media as well as the attributes used to describe these elements often become relevant to public opinion, too. Importantly, the basic agenda-setting hypothesis has been widely documented. The latest meta-analysis – a technique that pools in a statistically meaningful way the results of separate studies – found an average correlation of +0.49 between the media and public agendas.14 To put this number in perspective, consider that the mean effect estimate for human communication phenomena is +0.21.15 This robust collection of evidence also documents the time-order and causal links between the media and public agendas in finer detail. Here is a sampling of that evidence.
The 1972 US presidential election in Charlotte
To extend the evidence for agenda setting beyond the narrow focus on undecided voters in Chapel Hill and their media sources during the autumn 1968 election, a representative sample of all voters in Charlotte, North Carolina, and their news media were examined three times during the summer and autumn of 1972.16 Two distinct phases of election-year agenda setting were identified. During the summer and early autumn, the daily newspaper was the prime mover. With its greater capacity – scores of pages compared to half an hour for network television news – the Charlotte Observer influenced the public agenda during the early months. Television news did not. But in the final month of the campaign, there was little evidence of agenda setting by either the local newspaper or the television networks.
In addition to documenting the agenda-setting influence of the local newspaper on the public, these observations across the summer and autumn of that election campaign eliminated the rival hypothesis that the public agenda influenced the newspaper agenda. When there are observations of the media agenda and the public agenda at two or more points over time, it is possible to compare simultaneously the cross-lag correlations measuring the strength of these two competing causal hypotheses. For example, the influence of the newspaper agenda at time one on the public agenda at time two can be compared with the influence of the public agenda at time one on the newspaper agenda at time two. In Charlotte, the agenda-setting hypothesis prevailed.
The agenda of issues during the 1972 presidential campaign included three very personal concerns – the economy, drugs, and bussing to achieve racial integration of the public schools – and four issues that were more remote – the Watergate scandal, US relations with Russia and China, the environment, and Vietnam. The salience of all seven issues among the public was influenced by the pattern of news coverage in the local newspaper.
The 1976 US presidential election in three communities
An intensive look at an entire presidential election year followed in 1976 and again highlighted variations in the agenda-setting influence of the news media during different seasons of the year.17 To capture these variations, panels of voters were interviewed nine times from February through December in three very different settings: Lebanon, New Hampshire, a small town in the state where the first presidential primary to select the Democrat and Republican candidates for president is held each election year; Indianapolis, Indiana, a typical midsized American city; and Evanston, Illinois, a largely upscale suburb of Chicago. Simultaneously, the election coverage of the three national television networks and the local newspapers in these three sites was content analysed.
