Overview

Agenda setting theory emerges from communications studies and focuses on mass media influence on setting political agenda, as articulated in the seminal article by McCombs and Shaw (1972), which through content analysis of a local election documented a high correlation between media agenda and the public agenda - a correlation corroborated in numerous studies since. Their 1972 article coined the phrase "agenda-setting." Subsequent agenda setting theorists have followed their lead in contending that the media agenda influences the political agenda more than vice versa.

Key Concepts and Terms

• Agenda setting Agenda setting is giving priorities to alternative policy issues. Whereas early communications studies had shown a mixed picture about the ability of media to influence opinions on a given issue, Cohen (1963) and others showed that the media had much greater capacity to influence which issues were perceived as important. That is, the media agenda (policy rankings by importance in the media) influences both the public agenda (rankings in opinion surveys) and the policy agenda (rankings in legislative bodies).

• Salience transfer refers to the capacity of the media (or other actors) to influence the relative importance individuals attach to policy issues. A notable study proving the existence of salience transfer was that by Iyengar, Peters, & Kinder (1982), where experimental groups gave baseline priorities, then were exposed to different news broadcasts with different policy emphases over four dayst, then rated priorities again. The authors found subjects' issue rankings realigned to match the media agenda.

• Gatekeeping refers to how media content is controlled. Gatekeeping determines the content of salience transfer.

• Framing. The importance and interpretation people attach to potential items on the public agenda are strongly influenced by how the media present news stories (Chyi & McCombs, 2004). Entman (2004), for instance, attributes differential foreign policy perceptions to how the media cheered American victories in Grenada and Panama but took scant note of success of far more difficult missions in Haiti and Kosovo. Another example cited by Entman is the media labeling an incident in which a U.S.S.R. aircraft shot down a civilian aircraft as an "attack," while labeling as a "tragedy" a similar incident in which an American aircraft shot down a civilian Iran Air airplane. Earlier work by Entman (2001) focused on framing examples related to racial issues in the U. S.

• Priming. Where framing centers on political loading of the presentation of news, consciously or not, priming has to do with drawing attention to certain issues even in a neutral manner. For instance, priming survey respondents with information about street crime may affect the views expressed on crime policy as compared to the same survey administered without priming.

• Determinants of agenda-setting effects.
  • Media exposure: Wanta & Ghanem (2006) found exposure was a stronger determinant than media credibility or media reliance, which were unrelated, in a study of Hispanic cable news. Earlier, Wanta and Miller (1996) had found exposure to be more important than media credibility in relation to presidential state of the union addresses. The same study found exposure led to thinking issues were important.
    • Obtrusiveness refers to the extent that the public has experience with the policy issue. The nor unobtrusive the issue, the more the individual may rely on media exposure for orientation. Zucker (1978) found that salience transfer was greatest for unobtrusive issues.

  • Need for orientation. Weaver (1977) and others found that some individuals have greater need for policy orientation and thus are more affected by salience transfer. Need for orientation, in turn, is a function of individual interest in the policy topic combined with issue undertainty...

Assumptions

• Content analysis is frequently assumed to adequately reflect agenda rankings, based on frequency of word/phrase citations, newspaper column inches, etc.

Illustrative Hypotheses

• Agenda priorities of a legislative body will be more influenced by media priorities than candidate priorities.

• Agenda priorities of a legislative body will be more influenced by media priorities than public opinion priorities.

• Media priorities will tend to lead rather than follow public opinion priorities.

• Public priorities will correlate with media exposure.

• The interaction of policy interest and policy uncertainty correlates with the effectiveness of salience transfer.

• The more unobtrusive the issue, the more the effect of salience transfer.

Frequently Asked Questions

• How is agenda setting theory related to the garbage can (multiple streams) theory of public administration?
  John Kingdon, a developer of the multiple streams model, viewed the mass media as one of the multiple streams feeding in to agency policy-makers as they set their agendas. He explicitly incorporated elements of agenda setting theory and noted that media influence was correlated with public attention to issues. Multiple stream theory, however, gives much more attention to multiple determinants of policy agenda, including factors such as cost, interest group power, and the power of political parties and actors.

• How is agenda setting theory related to frame analysis/framining theory?
  Framing is a central construct in agenda setting theory, and scholars who emphasize agenda setting not infrequently cite Erving Goffman (1974), the father of frame analysis. Goffman defined frames as cognitive structures which unconsciously lead the individual to what is to be noticed and which define that situation for the individual. For instance, if the individual carries a "stop light frame," the important elements to be noticed are a line of cars and a red light; other attributes such as colors of the car, race of the drivers, etc., are not definitions of the "stop light frame" and will be less noticed and less recalled by the individual. A variety of theoretical perspectives, including agenda setting theory and later versions of framing theory, tended to move away from the unconscious nature of frames in Goffman and instead emphasize how frames can be manufactured, as by the media in agenda setting theory.

Bibliography

• Chyi, Hsiang Iris & McCombs, Maxwell (2004). Media salience and the process of framing: coverage of the Columbine school shootings. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 81(1): 22-35.
• Cohen, Bernard C. (1963). The press and foreign policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Craft, Stephanie & Wanta, Wayne (2005). U. S. public concerns in the aftermath of 9-11: A test of second-level agenda-setting. International Journal of Public Opinion Research 16(4): 456-462.
• Entman, Robert M. (2001). The black image in the white mind: Media and race in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Entman, Robert M. (2006). Framing public life: Perspectives on media and our understanding of the social world. Political Communication 23(1): 121-122.
• Entman, Robert M. (2004). Projections of power: Framing news, public opinion, and U. S. foreign policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Goffman, Erving (1974). Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience.NY: Harper & Row.
• Iyengar, Shanto, Peters, Mark, & Kinder, Donald (1982). “Experimental demonstrations of the ‘not-so-minimal’ consequences of television news programs. American Political Science Review 76(4): 848-858.
• Kingdon, John W. (2003). Agendas, alternatives and public policies. Second ed. NY: Addison-Wesley.
• McCombs, Maxwell E. (2004). Setting the agenda: The mass media and public opinion. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. McCombs' retrospective on the emergence of agenda setting theory.
• McCombs, Maxwell E. (2005). A look at agenda-setting: Past, present and future. Journalism Studies 6: 543-557.
• McCombs, Maxwell E. & Shaw, D. L. (1972). The agenda-setting function of mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly 36(2):176-187.
• Wanta, Wayne (1997). The public and the national agenda: How people learn about important issues. Mahwah,. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Wanta, Wayne & Ghanem, Salma I. (2006). Effects of agenda setting. Pp. 37-52 in Preiss, R., Gayle, B, M., Burrell, N., Allen, M. & Bryant, J., eds. Mass media theories and processes: Advances through meta-analysis. Mahwah, N. J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Wanta, Wayne & Miller, Randy (1996). Sources of the public agenda: The president-press-public relationship. International Journal of Public Opinion Research. 8(4): 390-402.
• Weaver, D. H. (1977). Political issues and voter need for orientation. Pp. 107-119 in Shaw, D. L. & McCombs, M. E., eds., The emergence of American political issues: The agenda setting function of the press. St. Paul, MN: West Publishers.
• Zucker, H.G. (1978). The variable nature of news media influence. Pp. 154–72 in Ruben, B., ed., Communication Yearbook 2. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.

Copyright 1998, 2006 by G. David Garson.