Agenda Setting Theory: Chapter 30

What are the two levels of agenda setting?

(1) The transfer of salience of an attitude object in the mass media's pictures of the world to a prominent place among the pictures in our head. (2) The transfer of salience of a dominant set of attributes that the media associate with an attitude object to the specific features of the image projected on the walls of our minds

Agenda-setting theory boasted two attractive features

(1) it reaffirmed the power of the press while still (2) maintaining the individuals were free to choose

Although McCombs and Shaw first referred to the agenda-setting function of the media in

1972, the idea that people desire media assistance in determining political reality had already been voiced by a number of current events analysts.

Index of curiosity

A measure of the extent to which individuals' need for orientation motivates them to let the media shape their views.

McCombs and Shaw no longer subscribe to

Bernard Cohen's classic remark about the media's limited agenda-setting role. They now headline their work with a revised and expanded version that describes agenda setting as follows: The media may not only tell us what to think about, they also may tell us how and what to think about it, and perhaps even what to do about it.

Christians' communitarian ethics are based on the

Christian tradition of agape love: an unconditional love for others because they are created in the image of God. He believes journalists have a social responsibility to promote the sacredness of life by respecting human dignity, truthtelling, and doing no harm to innocents. He judges journalists on the basis of how well they use the media's power to champion the goal of social justice

A tightly controlled experiment run by Yale researchers established a cause-and-effect chain of influence from the media agenda to the public agenda how?

For four days straight, three groups of New Haven residents came together to watch the evening news and fill out a questionnaire about their own concerns. Each group saw a different version - one version contained a daily story on environmental pollution, another had a daily feature on national defense, and a third offered a daily dose of news about economic inflation. Viewers who saw the media agendas that focused on pollution and defense elevated those issues on their own lists of concerns.

Does media agenda cause public agenda? Or vice versa?

McCombs and Shaw believe that media agenda causes public agenda but their findings were equivocal. A true test of the agenda-setting hypothesis must be able to show that public priorities lag behind the media agenda. Critics have suggested that both the media agenda and the public agenda reflect current events as they unfold, but that news professionals become aware of what's happening sooner than most of us do. Two studies provided evidence that the media agenda is the cause and the public agenda is its somewhat delayed effect

Who is most affected by the media agenda?

McCombs and Shaw understood that "people are not automatons waiting to be programmed by the news media." They concluded that people who have a willingness to let the media shape their thinking have a high need for orientation - others refer to it as an index of curiosity

Type of theory and tradition it follows?

Objective theory that follows the socio-psychological tradition

Critique

Perhaps the best that could be said until the mid-1990s was that the media agenda affects the salience of some issues for some people some of the time. So in 1994, McCombs suggested that "agenda setting is a theory of limited media effects."

Will new media still shape the agenda, opinions, and behavior?

Scott Althaus and David Tewksbury predicted that traditional print media would be more effective than new electronic media in setting a reader's agenda. They reasoned that people who are reading a newspaper know that editors consider a long, front-page article under a banner headline more important than a short story buried on an inside page. Not only are these comparative cues absent on the computer screen, but online readers can click on links to similar stories and never see accounts of events that paper readers see as they thumb through the pages.

Who sets the agenda for the agenda setters? (two views)

View (1): regards a handful of news editors as the guardians, or "gatekeepers," of political dialogue. Nothing gets put on the political agenda without the concurrence of a few select people - he operations chiefs of the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. View (2): regards candidates and office holders as the ultimate source of issue salience. Current thinking on news selection focuses on the crucial role of public relations professionals working for government agencies, corporations, and interest groups. Interest aggregations.

Communitarian ethics

a moral responsibility to promote community, mutuality, and persons-in-relation who live simultaneously for others and for themselves

Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw regard Watergate as a perfect example of the

agenda-setting function of the mass media.

What was considered prominent for news magazines?

an opening story in the news section or any political issue to which editors devoted a full column

Agenda-setting theory represents a

back-to-the-basics approach to mass communication research. The focus is on election campaigns. The hypothesis predicts a cause-and-effect relationship between media content and voter perception. The theory rises or falls on its ability to show a match between the media's agenda and the public's agenda later on. McCombs and Shaw's analysis of the 1968 race for president between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey set the pattern for later agenda-setting research.

Althaus and Tewksbury concluded that

by providing users with more content choices and control over exposure, new technologies may allow people to create personalized information environments that shut them off from larger flows of public information in a society.

James Tankard defines a media frame as the

central organizing idea for news content that supplies a context and suggests what the issue is through the use of selection, emphasis, exclusion, and elaboration. The final four nouns in that sentence suggest that the media not only set the agenda for what issues, events, or candidates are most important, they also transfer the salience of specific attributes belonging to those potential objects of interest

Interest aggregations

clusters of people who demand center stage for their own overriding concern; pressure groups. These groups usually rally around a specific action that they oppose. they stage demonstrations, marches, and other media events so that television and the press will be forced to cover their issue.

As McCombs and other researchers have discovered by analyzing multiple presidential elections, it's the

cumulative effect of long-term attribute salience that can alter attitudes and behavior

On rare occasions, news events are so compelling that editors have no choice but to

feature them for extended periods of time. Example: 9/11 attack dominated U.S. print and broadcast news for the rest of the year

What was the order of importance that an index of media prominence revealed?

foreign policy, law and order, fiscal policy, public welfare, and civil rights

According to McCombs, the agenda setting of attributes mirrors the process of

framing that Robert Entman describes in his article clarifying the concept: To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communication text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and/or treatment recommendation for the item described.

Need for orientation arises from

high relevance and uncertainty. For example, because I'm a dog and cat owner, any story about cruelty to animals always catches my attention (high relevance). However, I don't really know the extent to which medical advances require experimentation on live animals (high uncertainty)

Watergate

in June 1972, five unknown men broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters looking for undetermined information. President Nixon dismissed the break-in as a "third-rate burglary." Six months after the hearings President Nixon still protested, "I am not a crook," but media spread the news like crazy. But by the spring of 1974, he was forced from office because the majority of citizens and their representatives had decided that he was.

McCombs and Shaw's first task was to measure the

media agenda: they established (1) position and (2) length of story as the two main criteria of prominence

Christians understands that a commitment to mutuality would significantly alter

media culture and mission. Report- ers' aim would thus become a revitalized citizenship shaped by community norms—morally literate and active participants, not just readers and audiences provided with data. Editors, publishers, and owners—the gatekeepers of the media agenda—would be held to the same standard. He insists that media criticism must be willing to reestablish the idea of moral right and wrong. Selfish practices aimed at splintering community are not merely misguided; they are evil.

Behavioral effects of the media's agenda

most of the research studies on agenda setting have measured the effect of media agendas on public opinion but some findings suggest that media priorities also affect people's behavior. Negative example: media portrayal of airplanes crashed and hijackings led to decreased ticket sales. Positive example: increased TV coverage of NBA and framing led to more fans and increased revenue from TV: 1970 - TV provided $10 million in revenue to the NBA; 2000 - increased to $20 billion

Instead of suggesting that broadcast and print personnel make a deliberate attempt to influence listener, viewer, or reader opinion on issues, McCombs and Shaw say that we look to

new professionals for cues on where to focus our attention. "We judge as important what the media judge as important."

The prevailing selective-exposure hypothesis claimed that

people would attend only to news and views that didn't threaten their established beliefs. Media were seen as stroking pre-existent attitudes.

What was considered prominent in television news?

placement as one of the first three news items or any discussion that lasted more than 45 seconds

Until the 1990s, almost every article about the theory included a

reiteration of the agenda-setting mantra - the media aren't very successful in telling us what to think, but they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about (the media make some issues more salient). We pay greater attention to those issues and regard them as more important. By the mid-1990s, McCombs said the media do influence the way we think through framing

Clifford Christians

rejects reporters' and editors' insistence on an absolute right of free expression that is based on the individualistic rationalism of John Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers. Believes that discovering the truth is still possible if we are willing to examine the nature of our humanity - human nature is personhood in community - convinced that mutuality is the essence of humanness. His communitarian ethics establish civic transformation rather than objective information as the primary goal of the press.

In a study reported in 2007, McCombs and Renita Coleman found that most of the younger generation

relied on the Internet for news, middle-aged viewers tended to favor TV, and older readers preferred newspapers. The correlation between the media agenda and the younger generation was somewhat lower than for the older generation, emphasizing that traditional news media may have less power to transfer the salience of issues or attributes as they have had in the past

Attitude object

target of evaluation; that which we are evaluating

For newspapers, what was counted as evidence of significant focus on an issue? (What was considered prominent?)

the front-page headline story, a three-column story on an inside page, and the lead editorial.

Public agenda

the most important public issues as measured by public opinion surveys; rank of previous five issues was nearly identical

Media agenda

the pattern of news coverage across the major print and broadcast media as measured by the prominence (importance) and length of stories

Framing

the selection of a restricted number of thematically related attributes for inclusion on the media agenda when a particular object or issue is discussed

Agenda-setting hypothesis

what McCombs and Shaw believe; The mass media have the ability to transfer the salience (most important) of issues on their news agenda to the public agenda.