Agenda-Setting Function

OfMaxwell McCombs & Donald Shaw

inEm Griffin

A First Look at Communication Theory

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Prior to a short while ago, how likely would it have been for you to discuss something Barak Obama said:

A = VERY LIKELYB = VERY UNLIKELYC = MEDIUM LIKELY

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Have you discussed anything that Michelle Obama has said or done?

A = YESB = NO

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• In addition to whether or not you found yourself talking about Barak or Michelle Obama, did you find yourself discussing in terms of various attributes, such as racism, hypocracy, corporate greed, or politics?– A = TRUE– B = FALSE

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The Agenda-Setting theory is saying that: journalists are attempting to influence the audience;

TRUE = AFALSE = B

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Lots of research on the power of the media shows that the media can have a direct effect on what

people think:TRUE = AFALSE = B

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Framing is when someone is set up to look like they committed a crime:

A = TRUEB = FALSE

ABC

MSNBC

Associated Press

Online Newspapers

WHO OWNS WHAT?

The Agenda

• Not what to think, but what to think about;

• McCombs & Shaw believe that “the mass media have the ability to transfer the salience of items on their news agenda to the public agenda;”

The Process of Agenda-Setting

• The theory is not suggesting that journalists are attempting to influence the audience;

• Instead, the theory is claiming that we look to news for cues on where to focus our attention;

• We judge as important what the media judge as important;

Similar Ideas

• Pulitzer Prize-winning author Walter Lippmann had said years earlier that the media act as a mediator between “the world outside and the pictures in our heads;”

• Political scientist Bernard Cohen observed: “The press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about;”

Theodore White Wrote [The Making of the

President, 1972]

• “The power of the press in America is a primordial one. It sets the agenda of public discussion; and this sweeping political power is unrestrained by any law. It determines what people will talk and think about--an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties and mandarins.”

Research on Effects of Media

• Roughly speaking, social science research on the effects of media on the audience has been done from around the 1930’s;

• Initially, there was lots of talk about how powerful the media are in influencing people, ideas and behavior--The Hypodermic Effect;

• But the research just did not support that view;

Effects of the Media

• So, gradually, new theories came along to try and explain how the effects worked and how the media alone were not powerful enough to influence people;

• The Two-Step-Flow Hypothesis was developed to suggest that the media influence certain people--leaders-- and then these people influenced others;

Media Effects

• Eventually, even the Two-Step-Flow Hypothesis was played down and the influence of newspapers, radio, television, magazines was seen as limited;

• Even research into the influence of television and films on violent behavior did not result in clear cut findings of effects;

Agenda-Setting Idea Comes Along

• The Agenda-Setting Function theory came along in this atmosphere of limited effects thinking;

• The Agenda-Setting Function gave back the idea that the media have power to influence;

• But, instead of changing opinions and attitudes and behaviors about what to do, the media were seen as changing ideas about what to think about;

Agenda-Setting Idea

• The Agenda-Setting Function reaffirmed the power of the media while still maintaining that individuals were free to choose;

• The Agenda-Setting Function was consistent with the theory that “uses and gratifications” accounted for media use: people’s motives for attending to the media;

Research on the Agenda-Setting Function

• The theory of Agenda-Setting depends on [survey] research showing a connection between the media’s agenda and the public’s subsequent rank-order of concerns;

Media Agenda & Public Agenda

• McCombs and Shaw determined the major political news sources for Chapel Hill, North Carolina residents, a mix of print and broadcast;

• They used position and length of story as the criteria of prominence;

• The public’s priorities were measured by asking voters what they thought were the key issues of the campaign;

Media Agenda & Public Agenda

• The specific answers of undecided voters were assigned to the same categories as the media items and compared;

• The rank of the five issues on both lists were nearly identical;

What Causes What?

McComb’s & Shaw’s Agenda-Setting Function suggests:

Media agenda Voter’s agenda

Correlation is not Causation

Perhaps media coverage reflects public concerns that already exist:

Voter’s agenda Media agenda

The test of the Agenda-Setting Hypothesis will need to show:

• That the public agenda lags behind the media’s presentation of priorities;

• Studies were done that measured the public’s opinion on salience of the issues 2 or 3 times during the campaign;

• The results are promising, with voter opinion lagging behind in some studies;

The Results are not Conclusive

• Only about half the studies demonstrated the lag between public opinion and media coverage;

• And one concern raised was whether or not the correlation itself reflected true concern or only a knowledge of what was being talked about;

Fine-Tuning the Theory• The theory postulates a “index of curiosity,” or a combination of relevance

and ambivalence;• In other words, a person will be attuned to media emphasis if they carry

two traits:– 1. They are interested in a particular story--it is relevant to them;

– 2. They are not certain about how they feel about the topic; • Under these conditions, if the media think the story is important, they

think it is important;

Fine-tuning the Theory

• Given enough motivation to read the article, a newspaper story has greater agenda-setting power than a piece on the television news;

Who Sets the Agenda for the Agenda Setters?

• 75% of the stories that come across a news desk are never reported;

• Who sets the agenda for the agenda setters?;

• One view claims it is 8 men--the operation chiefs [media elite] of Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, ABC, NBC, & CBS;

Who Sets the Agenda?

• An alternative view is that the candidates themselves are the source of issue salience;

• Yet another view is that “interest aggregations” focus the attention of the news on their causes, anti-abortion, anticommunism, antiwar, antipollution, etc.;

Are the Issues the Real Campaign Issue?

• A considerable amount of campaign news is not devoted to major political issues, but rather to an analysis of the campaign itself;

• The media assign the highest priority to questions of campaign strategy;

CRITIQUE

• The research support for the theory is spotty--inconclusive;

• A variety of procedures have been used to ascertain the public agenda, resulting in uncertainty in how to interpret findings;

• A weakness is in the limited number of categories used to compare media and public agendas;

CRITIQUE

• Nagging questions remain about the direction of the effect & limitations on the effect:– Media priorities may simply reflect public

opinion;– The original theory spoke only of issue

salience during political campaigns, but later discussion extends the theory to candidate image and some nonpolitical topics;

– The agenda-setting hypothesis is limited to members of the public who wish political guidance;

CRITIQUE

– Those already committed to candidates and those who use the media just for entertainment are not expected to be affected by the agenda-setting function;

– The media have less effect on local issues or matters with which the reader/viewer has hands-on experience;

Framing

The concept of framing has been added to the theory;Framing is concerned with the context in which something is understood;Framing is a concept associated with the process of interpretation--making meaning;

FRAMING

• There are 2 levels of agenda setting: – 1. The transfer of salience of an idea

in the mass media to the public’s mind--emphasizing certain aspects of an issue and not others;

– 2. The transfer of a dominant set of attributes that the media associate with an idea to the public’s mind;

News Stories

• News stories are stories;• Stories always require

interpretation;• The process of interpreting uses

framing to arrive at meaning;