Chapter Summary-Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research

Media_Effects_Advances_in_Theory_and_Research_—-_1_HOW_THE_NEWS_SHAPES_OUR_CIVIC_AGENDA1

Summarize the book chapter in your own words (3-6 paragraphs). Make sure you explain what the theory is and how people are affected.
Explain why this theory is important (one paragraph).
Discuss one current media example related to the theory. It can be a scene from a movie, TV show, videogame, Facebook, etc. Make sure you explain how the example illustrates the theory. (2-3 paragraphs) Please include a link to the content if possible (it is okay if no link is available).
Explain what action, if any, you would take if you were in charge of the example you discussed (refuse to show it, edit the content, add warnings, include additional content, etc.). Make sure you explain why you would take that action. (1-2 paragraphs)
Discuss how you think this media effect has affected you personally (either you were affected or someone you know was affected). Was the effect strong or weak? What would have made the effect stronger or weaker? (2-3 paragraphs)

HOW THE NEWS SHAPES OUR
CIVIC AGENDA

Maxwell McCombs
University of Texas at Austin

Amy Reynolds
Indiana University at Bloomington

The war in Iraq dwarfed all other topics reported in the U.S. news media during the first
three months of 2007. And public opinion polls during the same time showed that
Americans thought the Iraq War was the most important issue as they began to think
about electing a new president in 2008. Through their day-to-day selection and display
of the news, journalists focus our attention and influence our perceptions of the most
important issues facing the country, and in early 2007 the focus was on the Iraq war.
This ability to influence the salience of topics on the public agenda has come to be
called the agenda-setting role of the news media.

Establishing this salience among the public so that an issue becomes the focus of
public attention, thought, and perhaps even action is the initial stage in the formation of
public opinion. While many issues compete for public attention, only a few are success-
ful in capturing public attention. The news media exert significant influence on our
perceptions of what are the most salient issues of the day.

Because people use the media to help them sort through important political issues
before they vote, scholars have spent nearly 70 years studying the effect of mass com-
munication on voters. In the 1940 U.S. presidential election, Paul Lazarsfeld and his
colleagues at Columbia University collaborated with pollster Elmo Roper to conduct
seven rounds of interviews with voters in Erie County, Ohio (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, &
Gaudet, 1944). Those surveys and many subsequent investigations in other settings over
the next 20 years found little evidence of major mass communication effects on atti-
tudes and opinions. Many scholars have argued that little evidence of effects was found
because these early studies focused on the mass media’s ability to persuade voters and
change their attitudes. However, traditional journalism norms emphasize that the media
are trying to inform, not persuade. These early studies did support that idea, demon-
strating that people acquired information from the mass media, even if they didn’t change
their opinions. In an ironic turn of history for communication research, recent elabor-
ations of agenda-setting theory discussed later in this chapter are investigating the
relationship between the effects of agenda setting and public opinions and attitudes
(Kim & McCombs, 2007).

But, as a result of the early election studies, a limited-effects model for mass

Media Effects : Advances in Theory and Research, edited by Mary Beth Oliver, Taylor & Francis, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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communication emerged. Summarized in the law of minimal consequences (Klapper,
1960), this notion ran counter to the ideas that Walter Lippmann, the intellectual father
of agenda setting, proposed back in the early 1920s. Lippmann’s opening chapter in his
1922 classic, Public Opinion, which is titled “The World Outside and the Pictures in Our
Heads,” summarizes the agenda-setting idea even though he did not use that phrase.
His thesis is that the news media, our windows to the vast world beyond our direct expe-
rience, determine our cognitive maps of that world. Public opinion, argued Lippmann,
responds not to the environment, but to the pseudo-environment, the world constructed
by the news media (Lippmann, 1922).

This scientific shift of perspective away from the law of minimal consequences took
hold in the 1960s, and during the 1968 presidential election McCombs and Shaw (1972)
launched a seminal study that would support Lippmann’s notion that the information
provided by the news media plays a key role in the construction of our pictures of
reality. 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. Those issues
emphasized in the news come to be regarded over time as important by members of
the public. McCombs and Shaw called this hypothesized influence agenda setting.

To test this hypothesis that the media agenda can set the public agenda, McCombs
and Shaw conducted a survey among a sample of randomly selected undecided voters
in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. These undecided voters were asked to name what they
thought were the key issues of the day, regardless of what the candidates were 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.

Concurrent with this survey of voters, the nine major news sources used by these
voters—five local and national newspapers, two television networks, and two news
magazines—were collected and content analyzed. The rank-order of issues on the media
agenda was determined by the number of news stories devoted to each issue. The high
degree of correspondence between these two agendas of political and social issues
established a central link in what has become a substantial chain of evidence for an
agenda-setting role of the press.

If this correlation between the voters’ agenda and the total news agenda was the
highest, it would be evidence of agenda setting. If the correlation with the voters’ pre-
ferred party’s agenda in the news coverage was higher, it would be evidence of selective
perception. The concept of selective perception, which is often cited as an explanation
for minimal media effects, locates central influence within the individual and stratifies
media content according to its compatibility with an individual’s existing attitudes and
opinions. From this perspective, it is assumed that individuals minimize their exposure
to non-supportive information and maximize their exposure to supportive information.
The vast majority of the Chapel Hill evidence favored an agenda-setting effect.

ACCUMULATED EVIDENCE

Since the Chapel Hill study, researchers have conducted more than 425 empirical studies
on the agenda-setting influence of the news media. This vast accumulated evidence
comes from many different geographic and historical settings worldwide and covers
numerous types of news media and a wide variety of public issues. The evidence also
provides greater detail about the time-order and causal links between the media and
public agendas.

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Shaw and McCombs’ (1977) follow-up to the Chapel Hill study examined a represen-
tative sample of all voters in Charlotte, North Carolina during the summer and fall of
the 1972 presidential election and found that the salience of all seven issues on the
public agenda was influenced by the pattern of news coverage in the Charlotte Observer
and network television news. During the 1976 presidential election, voters in three
very different settings—Lebanon, New Hampshire; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Evanston,
Illinois—were interviewed nine times between February and December (Weaver, Graber,
McCombs, & Eyal, 1981). Simultaneously, election coverage by the three national
networks and local newspapers in the three cities was content analyzed. In all three
communities the agenda-setting influence of both television and newspapers was greatest
during the spring primaries.

Although election settings provide a strong natural laboratory in which to study
agenda-setting effects, the evidence that supports the theory is not limited to elections.
Winter and Eyal (1981) took a historical look at the civil rights issue between 1954 and
1976 using 27 Gallup polls. Comparison of the trends in public opinion with a content
analysis of the New York Times yielded a correlation of +.71. Similar findings about
the impact of news coverage on trends in public opinion come from an analysis of
11 different issues during a 41-month period in the 1980s (Eaton, 1989). In each of these
analyses, the media agenda is based on a mix of television, newspapers, and news maga-
zines, while the public agenda is based on 13 Gallup polls. All but one of the correla-
tions (the issue of morality) were positive, although a pattern of considerable variability
in the strength of the correlations was visible.

More recently, Holbrook and Hill (2005) explored the agenda-setting effect of enter-
tainment media. They used data from two controlled lab experiments and the 199

National Election Study Pilot Study to show that the viewing of crime dramas signifi-
cantly increased concerns about crime and that those concerns affected viewers’ opinions
of the president. Gross and Aday (2003) compared the effects of watching local televi-
sion news with direct experience measures of crime on fear of victimization and issue
salience. They found that local news exposure did account for an agenda-setting effect.
They did not, however, find that television viewing cultivated fear of becoming a victim
of crime. Hester and Gibson (2003) combined data from four years of print and broad-
cast news about the economy in time series analyses with two indicators of consumer
economic evaluations and three measures of real economic conditions. They concluded
that the media’s emphasis on negative economic news may have serious consequences
for both economic performance and expectations.

Agenda-setting effects also have also been found outside of the U.S. In Pamplona,
Spain during the spring of 1995, comparisons of six major concerns on the public
agenda with local news coverage showed a high degree of correspondence (Canel, Llamas,
& Rey, 1996). In Germany, a look at national public opinion patterns during 198

through weekly comparisons of the public and media agendas showed that television
news coverage had a significant impact on public concern about five issues, including
the country’s energy supply (Brosius & Kepplinger, 1990). Early in 1986 the energy
supply issue had little salience on either the news agenda or the public agenda. But a
rapid rise in May on the news agenda was followed within a week by a similar rise on
the public agenda. When news coverage subsequently declined, so did the size of the
constituency expressing concern about Germany’s energy supply.

Again at the local level, agenda setting occurred in the October 1997 legislative elec-
tions in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area (Lennon, 1998). In September, the public
agenda and the combined issue agenda of five major Buenos Aires newspapers only

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modestly agreed overall, but as election day approached in October, the correspondence
between the agendas soared, an increase that suggests considerable learning from the
news media in the closing weeks of the election campaign.

Using a cross-national comparative perspective that involved 14 European Union
(EU) member states, Peter (2003) explored whether the amount of television coverage
of the EU affected the extent to which EU citizens perceived European integration to be
important. He found that the more EU stories people watched in countries in which
the political elites disagreed about integration the more important they considered
integration. But in countries in which elite opinion about integration was consensual
this pattern did not repeat.

These real-world examples of agenda-setting effects are compelling but are not the
best evidence for the core, causal proposition of agenda setting. The best evidence
that the news media are the cause of these kinds of effects comes from controlled
laboratory experiments, a setting where the theorized cause can be systematically manip-
ulated, subjects are randomly assigned to various versions of the manipulation, and
systematic comparisons are made among the outcomes. Evidence from laboratory
experiments provides the final link in agenda setting’s causal chain.

Changes in the salience of defense preparedness, pollution, arms control, civil rights,
unemployment, and a number of other issues were produced in the laboratory among
subjects who viewed TV news programs edited to emphasize a particular issue (Iyengar &
Kinder, 1987). A variety of controls were used to show that changes in the salience of the
manipulated issue were actually due to exposure to the news agenda. For example, in one
experiment, control subjects viewed TV news programs that did not include the issue of
defense preparedness. The change in salience of this issue was significantly higher for the
test subjects who viewed stories on defense preparedness than for the subjects in the
control group. There were no significant differences between the two groups from before
to after viewing the newscasts for seven other issues. And a recent experiment docu-
mented the agenda-setting effects of an online newspaper. The salience of racism as a
public issue was significantly higher among all three groups of subjects exposed to vari-
ous versions of an online newspaper that discussed racism than among those subjects
whose online newspaper did not contain a news report on racism (Wang, 2000).

These studies are far from all of the accumulated evidence that supports the theory
of agenda setting. A meta-analysis of 90 empirical agenda-setting studies found a mean
correlation of +.53, with most about six points above or below the mean (Wanta &
Ghanem, 2000). There are, of course, a number of significant influences that shape
individual attitudes and public opinion, including a person’s personal experience as
well as their exposure to the mass media. But the general proposition supported by this
accumulation of evidence on agenda setting is that journalists do significantly influence
their audience’s picture of the world.

Many events and stories compete for journalists’ attention. Because journalists have
neither the capacity to gather all information nor the capacity to inform the audience
about every single occurrence, they rely on a traditional set of professional norms to
guide their daily sampling of the environment. The result is a limited view of the larger
environment, something like the highly limited view of the outside world available
through a small window.

Four portraits of public opinion—the major issues of the 1960s, the drug issue in
the 1980s, crime in the 1990s, and the economy in the 2000s—tell us a great deal about
the discretion of journalists and the discrepancies that are sometimes found in mass
media portrayals of reality. In Funkhouser’s (1973) study of public opinion trends

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during the 1960s, there was no correlation at all between the trends in news coverage of
major issues and the reality of these issues. But there was a substantial correlation
(+.78) between the patterns of news coverage and the public’s perception of what were
the most important issues. In the 1980s, there was an increasing trend in news coverage
of drugs at a time when there was no change at all in the reality of the drug problem
(Reese & Danielian, 1989). In the 1990s, there was an increase in the news coverage
of crime at a time when there was a decreasing trend in the reality of crime (Ghanem,
1996). And, at the turn of the 21st century, Hester and Gibson (2003) noted that media
coverage of the economy may have serious consequences for economic expectations
and performance, particularly when the coverage is negative.

THE ACAPULCO TYPOLOGY

Explorations of agenda-setting effects have observed this mass communication phe-
nomenon from a variety of perspectives. A four-part typology describing these perspec-
tives is frequently referred to as the Acapulco typology because McCombs initially
presented it in Acapulco, Mexico at the invitation of International Communication
Association president Everett Rogers. The Acapulco typology contains two dichotom-
ous dimensions. The first dimension distinguishes between two ways of looking at
agendas. The focus of attention can be on the entire set of items that define the agenda,
or the focus of attention can be narrowed to a single, particular item on the agenda. The
second dimension distinguishes between two ways of measuring the salience of items
on the agenda, either aggregate measures describing an entire population or measures
that describe individual responses.

Perspective I includes the entire agenda and uses aggregate measures of the popula-
tion to establish the salience of these items. The original Chapel Hill study took this
perspective. For the media agenda, the salience of the issues was determined by the total
percentage of news articles on each issue, while the public agenda was determined by
the percentage of voters who thought the government should do something about each
issue. This perspective is named “competition” because it examines an array of issues
competing for positions on the agenda.

Perspective II is similar to the early agenda-setting studies with their focus on the
entire agenda of items, but it shifts the focus to the agenda of each individual. When
individuals are asked to rank-order a series of issues, there is little evidence of any
correspondence at all between those individual rankings and the rank-order of those
same issues in the news media. This perspective is labeled “automaton” because of its
unflattering view of human behavior. An individual seldom reproduces to any significant
degree the entire agenda of the media.

Perspective III narrows the focus to a single item on the agenda but like perspective I
uses aggregate measures to establish salience. Commonly, the measures are the total
number of news stories about the item and the percentage of the public citing an issue
as the most important problem facing the country. This perspective is named “natural
history” because the focus typically is on the degree of correspondence between the
media agenda and the public agenda in the rise and fall of a single item over time. An
example of this perspective is Winter and Eyal’s (1981) study of the issue of civil rights
over a 23-year period.

Perspective IV, like perspective II, focuses on the individual, but it narrows its
observations to the salience of a single agenda item. This perspective, named “cognitive

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portrait,” is illustrated by the experimental studies of agenda setting in which the
salience of a single issue for an individual is measured before and after exposure to news
programs where the amount of exposure to various issues is controlled.

The existence of these varied perspectives on the agenda-setting phenomenon, espe-
cially an abundance of evidence based on perspectives I and III, strengthens the degree
of confidence about this media effect. Perspective I provides useful, comprehensive
descriptions of the rich, ever-changing mix of mass media content and public opinion
at particular points in time. This perspective strives to describe the world as it is.
Perspective III provides useful descriptions of the natural history of a single issue but
at the expense of the larger social context. Despite this, knowledge about the dynamics
of a single issue over an extended time period is useful for understanding how the
process of agenda setting works. Perspective IV also makes a valuable contribution to
understanding the dynamics of agenda setting. From a scholarly viewpoint, evidence
generated by perspectives III and IV is absolutely necessary for a detailed “how” and
“why” explanation of agenda setting. But the ultimate goal of agenda-setting theory
returns us to perspective I, which provides a comprehensive view of mass communication
and public opinion in communities and nations.

ATTRIBUTE AGENDA SETTING

In most discussions of the agenda-setting role of the mass media, the unit of analysis
on each agenda is an object, usually a public issue. But public issues are not the only
objects that can be analyzed from the agenda-setting perspective. In party primaries, the
objects of interest are the candidates vying for the nomination of their political party.
Communication is a process that can be about any object or set of objects competing
for attention. In all these instances, the term object is used in the same sense that social
psychologists use the term attitude object.

Beyond the agenda of objects, there is another level of agenda setting. Each of the
objects on an agenda has numerous attributes—characteristics and properties that
describe the object. Just as objects vary in salience, so do their attributes. Both the
selection of objects for attention and the selection of attributes for picturing those
objects are powerful agenda-setting roles. An important part of the news agenda is
the attributes that journalists and, subsequently, members of the public have in mind
when they think about and talk about each object. These attributes have two dimen-
sions, a cognitive component regarding information about substantive characteristics
that describe the object and an affective component regarding the positive, negative, or
neutral tone of these characteristics on the media agenda or the public agenda. The
influence of attribute agendas in the news on the public’s attribute agenda is the second
level of agenda setting.

In an election setting, the theoretical distinction between the agenda of objects
(the candidates) and the agendas of attributes (their images) is especially clear. Voters’
images of the Democrat candidates during the 1976 presidential primaries illustrate
this second level of agenda-setting effects. Eleven candidates were vying to be the
Democrat challenger to incumbent Republican president Gerald Ford. Comparisons
of New York voters’ descriptions of these candidates with Newsweek’s attribute agenda
in its candidate sketches showed significant evidence of media influence (Becker &
McCombs, 1978). Similar media effects on voters’ images of political candidates have
been found in such diverse cultural settings as the 1996 Spanish general election

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(McCombs, Lopez-Escobar, & Llamas, 2000), the 1994 mayoral election in Taipei,
Taiwan (King, 1997), and the 2002 Texas elections for governor and U.S. senator
(Kim & McCombs, 2007).

Salience, which has been a central focus of agenda-setting theory, also can be exam-
ined at a second level. Public issues, like all other objects, have attributes. Different aspects
of issues—their attributes—are emphasized to varying degrees in the news and in how
people think and talk about issues. Again demonstrating the validity of agenda-setting
theory across cultures, analysis of the 1993 Japanese general election found effects at
both the first and second levels for the issue of political reform (Takeshita & Mikami,
1995). The more people used the news media, the greater the overall salience of the
issue of political reform and, in particular, the greater the salience of system-related
aspects of political reform, the aspect of the issue emphasized in the news.

Beyond election settings, in Minneapolis the correspondence between the local
newspaper’s reporting on the state of the economy and the salience of specific eco-
nomic problems, causes, and proposed solutions among the public was a robust +.81
(Benton & Frazier, 1976). For an environmental issue in Indiana, the degree of cor-
respondence was +.71 between the local newspaper’s coverage of various aspects of
this issue and the public’s perspective on the development of a large lake (Cohen, 1975).
In Japan, the correspondence between the coverage in two major dailies of the aspects
of global environmental problems and Tokyo residents’ concerns about these prob-
lems reached a peak of +.78 just prior to the United Nations’ 1992 Rio de Janeiro
environmental conference (Mikami, Takeshita, Nakada, & Kawabata, 1994).

Explication of attribute agenda setting also links the theory with the concept of
framing. Both framing and attribute agenda setting call attention to the perspectives
used by communicators and their audiences to picture topics in the daily news. How-
ever, because of the large number of definitions for framing, comparisons of the two
approaches range from substantial overlap to total dissimilarity. Recent research has
identified two types of frames, aspects and central themes, that do greatly resemble
attribute agendas (McCombs, 2004).

An example of the aspects perspective, Ashley and Olson’s (1998) catalog of the
frames in news coverage of the women’s movement ranges from feminists’ appearance,
used in more than a fourth of stories, to the seldom cited goals of the movement.
Illustrating the convergence of the aspects framing perspective with attribute agenda
setting, Miller, Andsager, and Riechert (1998) identified 28 frames describing four major
candidates seeking the 1996 Republican presidential nomination. Although the study
focused exclusively on identification of the frames in the campaign press releases and in
news stories, subsequent analysis documented substantial attribute agenda-setting
effects of the press releases on the news stories (McCombs, 2004).

In other framing research, the focus is on the dominant attribute defining the central
theme of the news stories. Significant differences in the audience’s responses were
found in Nelson, Clawson, and Oxley’s (1997) experiment comparing the effects of
two contrasting themes, free speech versus public order, in news stories about a
KKK rally and in McLeod and Detenber’s (1999) experiment with news stories whose
central theme varied in their level of support for civil protest. The idea that certain
attributes of an object are compelling arguments for their salience (Ghanem, 1996)
further links framing and agenda setting. Ghanem found that crime stories with low
psychological distance—the crimes occurred locally or easily could happen to the audi-
ence member—drove the salience of crime as a public issue in Texas. Sheafer (2007)
found that the negative valence of news stories was a compelling argument for the

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salience of the economy as the most important problem during five Israeli national
elections.

Although Price and Tewksbury (1997) and Scheufele (2000) theorized a distinct dif-
ference between agenda setting and framing on the basis of the two aspects of knowl-
edge activation (Higgins, 1996)—accessibility, which they linked to agenda setting, and
applicability, linked to framing—these theories have found limited support. Focusing
specifically on the accessibility of issue attributes, Kim, Scheufele, and Shanahan (2002)
found that accessibility increased with greater newspaper use, but the resulting attribute
agendas among the public bore no resemblance to the attribute agenda presented in the
news and did not replicate attribute agenda-setting effects found over past decades.
What emerged was a different version of media effects in which the relative amount of
increased salience for the attributes among newspaper readers in comparison to persons
unaware of the issue paralleled the media agenda. More recently, “Challenging the
assumption that accessibility is responsible for shifts in importance judgments,” Miller
(2007) reported two experiments demonstrating that “the content of news stories is a
primary determinant of agenda setting. Rather than solely relying on what is accessible
in memory, people pay attention to the content of news stories . . .” (p. 689).

NEED FOR ORIENTATION

As already noted, the news media are not the only source of information or orientation
to issues of public concern. Issues can be arrayed along a continuum ranging from
obtrusive to unobtrusive. Obtrusive issues are those that we experience personally. For
example, most people do not need the mass media to alert them to many aspects of the
economy. Personal experience usually informs people about spending patterns during
holidays or about the impact of rising gas prices. These are obtrusive issues. Some
economic issues, however, are hard to understand personally. Typically, the mass media
inform us about national trade deficits or balancing the national budget. These are
unobtrusive issues, issues that we encounter only in the news and not in our daily lives.
Some issues can be both obtrusive and unobtrusive, depending on individual circum-
stances. Unemployment is a good example. People who have never faced unemploy-
ment as a reality would see the issue as unobtrusive. But for workers who have been laid
off or for anyone who has filed an unemployment claim, the issue is obtrusive. Their
understanding of unemployment is first-hand.

Broad portraits of the agenda-setting role of the media reveal strong effects for
unobtrusive issues and no effects for obtrusive issues (Weaver, Graber, McCombs, &
Eyal, 1981; Zucker, 1978). More narrowly focused studies, which require knowing where
an issue falls on the continuum for each individual, show similar results (Blood, 1981).

The concept of need for orientation provides a richer psychological explanation for
variability in agenda-setting effects than simply classifying issues along the obtrusive/
unobtrusive continuum. The concept of need for orientation is based on psychologist
Edward Tolman’s general theory of cognitive mapping. Tolman (1932, 1948) suggests
that we form maps in our minds to help us navigate our external environment. His
notion is similar to Lippmann’s concept of the pseudoenvironment. The need for orien-
tation concept suggests that there are individual differences in the need for orienting
cues to an issue and in the need for background information about an issue.

Conceptually, an individual’s need for orientation has been defined in terms of
two lower order concepts, relevance and uncertainty, whose roles occur sequentially

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(Weaver, 1977). Relevance is the initial defining condition. Most of us feel no dis-
comfort or need for orientation to issues in a number of situations, especially in the
realm of public affairs, because we don’t see these issues as personally relevant. In the
2000 presidential election, most citizens showed little interest in the issue of U.S. and
Russian relations, for example. People were much more concerned with Social Security
and the growth of the American economy. In situations when the relevance of the issue
to the individual is low, the need for orientation is low.

Among individuals who perceive a topic to be highly relevant, level of uncertainty
must also be considered. This is the second and subsequent defining condition of need
for orientation. If a person already possesses all the information he or she needs about
an issue, uncertainty is low. Under conditions of high relevance and low uncertainty,
the need for orientation is moderate. When relevance and uncertainty are high, how-
ever, need for orientation is high. This is often the situation during primary elections,
when many unfamiliar candidates clutter the political landscape. As one might guess,
the greater a person’s need for orientation, the more likely he or she will attend to the
mass media agenda, and the more likely he or she is to reflect the salience of the objects
and attributes on the media agenda.

Need for orientation provides an explanation for the near-perfect match between the
media agenda and the public agenda in the original Chapel Hill study. Although need
for orientation was not initially provided as an explanation for that early study, it seems
clear in retrospect that the original Chapel Hill findings regarding undecided voters
were evidence of agenda-setting effects based exclusively on people with a high need for
orientation.

On occasion, personal experience with an issue, rather than satisfying a need for
orientation, triggers an increased need for more information and the validation that
comes from the mass media (Noelle-Neumann, 1985). Sensitized to an issue, these
individuals may become particularly adept at studying the media agenda.

Matthes (2006) noted that when taken together, agenda-setting studies that incorpor-
ate the need for orientation as a predictor of effects largely have been successful. But
he notes that some studies with a focus on individual level analyses showed the stron-
gest agenda-setting effects at moderate levels of need for orientation. For example,
Schonbach and Weaver (1985) found that people with low interest and high uncertainty
(a moderate need for orientation) showed the strongest agenda-setting effects. Matthes
(2006) used these variable findings about the need for orientation to argue for a different
theoretical and methodological approach. He suggested that three dimensions for need
for orientation should be included in analyses—the need for orientation toward issues,
the need for orientation toward facts, and the need for orientation toward journalistic
evaluations. Although relevance and uncertainty could lead to need for orientation, the
two lower order concepts do not allow for a direct measure of the need for orientation
construct. This is why he argued for more direct indicators that express the motivation
of respondents to turn to the news media. Matthes’ scale continues to treat relevance
and uncertainty as lower order constructs that allow a prediction for need for orienta-
tion. However, his need for orientation scale specifies three additional aspects. First
is the need to orient to the issue itself; next is the need to orient to specific aspects or
themes related to an issue (this dimension concerns the selection of background and
factual information); and, finally, there is the need to orient to the journalist’s evaluation,
including the journalist’s opinion and commentary about an issue.

Matthes (2007) tested his scale using a panel survey on the issue of unemployment com-
bined with a content analysis of television and newspaper coverage of unemployment.

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He found that the need for orientation did lead to increased issue salience and that a
second level agenda-setting effect did occur. But need for orientation was not related to
the perceived salience of issue attributes. He concluded that the need for orientation
concept did explain the act of information seeking, but it did not influence the affective
tone of the information that people sought.

CONSEQUENCES OF AGENDA-SETTING EFFECTS

The distinction between the first and second levels of agenda setting, object salience and
attribute salience, also is related to consequences of agenda-setting effects for opinions
about public figures or other elements in the news. There is a fundamental link between
media attention to an object and the existence of opinions about it. During an election,
for instance, the media focus their attention on the major candidates, which results in
more people forming opinions about these candidates (Kiousis & McCombs, 2004).
Other consequences for attitudes and opinions are priming, which is a consequence
of first level agenda-setting effects, and attribute priming, a consequence of second level
agenda-setting effects. The psychological basis of priming is the selective attention of
the public. Rather than engaging in a comprehensive analysis based on their total
store of information, citizens routinely draw upon those bits of information that are
particularly salient at the time they make a judgment.

In their benchmark research on priming, Iyengar and Kinder (1987) noted, “By calling
attention to some matters while ignoring others, television news [as well as other news
media] influences the standards by which governments, presidents, policies, and candi-
dates for public office are judged” (p. 63). Much of the research demonstrating priming
has examined the impact of news coverage on presidential approval ratings, particularly
news coverage that makes certain public issues salient among the public, issues that in
turn become significant criteria for assessments of presidential performance.

Strong evidence of priming was found during the 1986 Iran-Contra scandal (Krosnick
& Kinder, 1990). On November 25, 1986, the U.S. Attorney General announced that
funds obtained by the U.S. government from the secret sale of weapons to Iran had
been improperly diverted to the Contras, a group attempting to overthrow the Sandinista
government in Nicaragua. The story received major news coverage. By coincidence,
the National Election Study’s post-1986 presidential survey was in the field at the time
of these announcements, creating a natural before-and-after comparison of the elem-
ents of public opinion that influenced Americans’ assessment of President Reagan.
Public opinion about the importance of providing assistance to the Contras and about
U.S. intervention in Central America substantially increased from before to after the
Attorney General’s announcement.

At the second level of agenda setting, the salience of attributes in the mass media is
related to the opinions held by the audience. Focusing on the tone of the news about a
wide variety of political and non-political attitude objects, research documenting sig-
nificant links between the general affective tone of news coverage and public opinion
includes German public opinion regarding Helmut Kohl across a decade (Kepplinger,
Donsbach, Brosius, & Staab, 1989), voters’ presidential candidate preferences during
recent U.S. presidential campaigns (Shaw, 1999), and the negative tone of news stories
and consumers’ expectations about the economy (Blood & Phillips, 1997; Hester &
Gibson, 2003). Kim and McCombs (2007) found that the affective tone of individual
attributes was related to voters’ opinions about the candidates for governor and U.S.

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senator in the 2002 Texas elections. Moreover, the attributes most emphasized in
news reports about these candidates were stronger predictors of opinions among
heavy newspaper readers than among light newspaper readers. Combining both the
first and second levels of agenda setting in an analysis of the 2000 U.S. presidential
election, Son and Weaver (2006) found that the salience of both the candidates and
their attributes predicted changes in the public opinion polls about voters’ candidate
preferences.

Attribute agenda setting in tandem with priming and attribute priming demonstrate
that attention to the specific content of the news can provide a detailed understanding
of the pictures in our heads and of our opinions grounded in those pictures. These
effects of the news on our perspectives and opinions are not the result of any efforts
at deliberate persuasion by the media but rather the inadvertent byproducts of the
limited capacity of media agendas that must focus on a small number of topics and
their attributes and, in turn, the limited amount of time and attention that the public
devotes to public affairs.

WHO SETS THE MEDIA AGENDA?

As evidence accumulated about the agenda-setting influence of the mass media on the
public, scholars in the early 1980s began to ask who set the media’s agenda. In this new
line of inquiry, researchers began to explore the various factors that shape the media
agenda. Here the media agenda is the dependent variable whereas in traditional agenda-
setting research the media agenda was the independent variable, the key causal factor in
shaping the public agenda.

The metaphor of “peeling an onion” is useful for understanding the origins of the
agenda of the mass media. The concentric layers of the onion represent the numerous
influences that shape the media agenda, which is at the core of the onion. And the
influence of an outer layer is, in turn, affected by layers closer to the core of the onion.
A highly detailed elaboration of this metaphoric onion contains many layers, ranging
from the prevailing social ideology to the beliefs and psychology of an individual
journalist (Shoemaker & Reese, 1991).

At the surface of our theoretical onion are key external news sources. These include
politicians, public officials, public relations practitioners, and any individual, like the
president of the United States, who influences media content. For example, a study
of Richard Nixon’s State of the Union address in 1970 showed that the agenda of 15 issues
in that address did influence the subsequent month’s news coverage in the New York
Times, the Washington Post, and two of the three national television networks (McCombs,
Gilbert, & Eyal, 1982). No evidence was found in that study to suggest the media had
an influence on the president. Examination of the New York Times and the Washington
Post across a 20-year period found that nearly half of their news stories were based
substantially on press releases and other direct information subsidies. About 17.5% of
the total number of news stories was based, at least in part, on press releases and press
conferences, and background briefings accounted for another 32% (Sigal, 1973).

Inside the onion are the interactions and influence of various mass media on each
other, a phenomenon called intermedia agenda setting. To a considerable degree, these
interactions reinforce and validate the social norms and traditions of journalism. Those
values and practices are the layer of the onion surrounding the core that defines the
ground rules for the ultimate shaping of the media agenda.

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The New York Times frequently plays the role of intermedia agenda-setter because
appearance on the front page of the Times can legitimize a topic as newsworthy. The
contamination of Love Canal in upstate New York and the radon threat in Pennsylvania
did not gain national prominence, despite intensive local media coverage, until these
issues appeared on the Times’ agenda (Mazur, 1987; Ploughman, 1984). The previous
mention of the Times’ coverage of the drug problem in the 1980s also demonstrates
intermedia agenda setting. When the New York Times “discovered” the country’s drug
problem in late 1985, network news coverage and major newspaper coverage of the
issue soon followed (Reese & Danielian, 1989).

In a laboratory experiment that examined the agenda-setting function of the Associ-
ated Press, researchers found a high degree of correspondence across topics between
the proportion of news stories in a large wire file and the small sample selected by
the subjects. The subjects were experienced newspaper and television wire editors
(Whitney & Becker, 1982).

Recent intermedia agenda-setting studies have investigated the impact of web sites
and other forms of new media on more traditional media content. Ku, Kaid, and Pfau
(2003) found that web site campaigning during the 2000 presidential election had an
impact on the agendas of the traditional news media much in the same way that a
candidate’s political advertising on television has historically influenced the media
agenda. This supports the findings of studies like Boyle’s (2001), which explored the
impact that 116 political advertisements had on 818 newspaper and 101 network
television news stories during the 1996 presidential election. Ku et al. (2003) also found
that the candidate web sites’ agendas were more likely to be associated with the public’s
agenda during the 2000 election.

In an extension of intermedia agenda setting to online news services, Lim (2006)
found that some intermedia agenda setting did occur between the web sites of two
major South Korean newspapers, the Chosun Ilbo and the Joong Ang Ilbo, and the web
site of the South Korean wire service, the Yonhap News Agency. Lim found that while
the wire service did not influence the issue agendas of the two newspapers, the leading
online newspaper did influence the issue agendas of both the wire service and the other
newspaper.

Finally, in an effort to explore the impact of blogs on the traditional media agenda,
Schiffer’s (2006) case study of the Downing Street Memo controversy in 2005 found
that coverage of the controversy on the news pages of large papers and on television
relied on Bush administration statements and official sources, while the op-ed pages of
major newspapers showed coverage that was influenced by blog-based activism.

SUMMING UP

Many years ago, Harold Lasswell (1948) told us that mass communication had three
broad social roles—surveillance of the larger environment, achieving consensus among
segments of society, and transmission of the culture. Agenda setting is a significant part
of the surveillance role because it contributes substantial portions of our pictures
about the larger environment. And recent research on the consequences of both first-
level and second-level agenda-setting effects outlines significant influence on attitudes
and opinions.

The agenda-setting process also has implications for social consensus and transmis-
sion of the social culture. Evidence linking agenda setting and social consensus was

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found in Shaw and Martin’s (1992) comparison of demographic groups in the North
Carolina Poll. Although demographics typically are used to demonstrate differences
among social groups, their analysis found increased similarities between demographic
groups with increased levels of media use. The correlation between the issue agendas
for men and women who infrequently read a daily newspaper was +.55. But for men
and women who read a newspaper occasionally, the degree of correspondence rose to
+.80. And, among men and women who read a newspaper regularly, the issue agendas
were identical (+1.0). Similar patterns of increased consensus about the most important
issues facing the country as a result of greater media exposure also were found in
comparisons of young and old and black and white and was true for both newspaper
and television use. These patterns of increased social consensus as a result of media
exposure also have been found in Taiwan and Spain (Chiang, 1995; Lopez-Escobar,
Llamas, & McCombs, 1998).

The transmission of culture is also linked to the agenda-setting process. Beyond the
specifics of politics and election campaigns, the larger political culture is defined by a
basic civic agenda of beliefs about politics and elections. Exploration of yet other cul-
tural agendas is moving agenda-setting theory far beyond its traditional realm of public
affairs. These new lines of cultural inquiry extend from the historical agenda defining
a society’s collective memory of the past to the contemporary agenda of attributes
defining the ideal physical appearance of young women and men. The imprint of the
mass media that begins with its basic agenda-setting influence on the focus of attention
is found on many aspects of public opinion and behavior.

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