Research on agenda-setting goes some way to explaining the role of the media in the promotion of issues on the public agenda. As Mazur and Lee put it, “the most widely accepted effect of the news media on public opinion is agenda setting – the placing of certain issues or problems foremost in the public mind” (Mazur and Lee, 1993, p. 682). There is no shortage of research into how issues “spring to life” (Djerf-Pierre, 2012b, p. 499), but less on how they “fall from grace”, on “why real problems fall from the news - beyond the cliché that they become ‘stale’” (Mazur, 1998, p. 470). A paper published by Anthony Downs in 1972 attempted an explanation: issue attention cycles. Issues go through a predictable five stage cycle, he argued:
(i) A pre-problem stage, in which “some highly undesirable condition exists” but has yet to come to public attention;
(ii) An alarmed discovery and euphoric enthusiasm stage, in which a series of dramatic events (Downs offers the example of ghetto riots) both informs and alarms the public. There is great optimism about society’s ability to ‘solve’ the problem in this stage also;
(iii) Realising the cost of significant progress, a stage in which it comes to be understood that ‘solving’ the problem is not that straight-forward and is going to be expensive and will involve sacrifice by a large section of society; (iv) Gradual decline of intense public interest, a stage in which, once the costs and
sacrifices involved are known, people become discouraged, threatened or bored;
(v) A post-problem stage, in which the issue is replaced on the public agenda and retreats to a “twilight world”. This is not equivalent to the pre-problem stage, for the issue retains the ability sporadically to recapture national interest; (vi) Downs speculated that environmental issues would not enter the fourth “post-
problem stage” as rapidly as other issues, because environmental damage was continually occurring, pollution was a persistent public topic, environmental issues lend themselves to “heroes and villains” narratives, and various technological solutions proposed for environmental problems were also interesting to the public.
Not every issue was subject to such an attention cycle. To qualify, an issue must affect a minority of the population, it must have been created away from public attention and be capable of creating peaks of public attention. In the second half of his 1972 paper, Downs gave consideration to environmental issues, suggesting that, at the time, the environment was about half way through his attention cycle (1972, p. 43).
Downs set forth his model “in largely anecdotal fashion” (Howlett, 1997, p. 7), and his criteria for the types of issues that go through the issue cycle process left many important social problems out. In considering the effectiveness of Downs’s issue attention cycle theory and Baumgartner and Jones’s punctuated equilibrium theory (discussed below), Holt and Barkmeyer suggest both could work simultaneously when it comes to coverage of environmental sustainability in worldwide print media from 1990 to 2009 (Holt and Barkemeyer, 2012). In a study of a decade of environmental coverage in the US, Downs’s model was found to be a “good fit” for the pattern of coverage (Trumbo, 1996). Indeed, Trumbo, although his research is over 20 years old, makes a salient point when it comes to the relevance of attention cycles to climate change research. He argues that Downs’s model “can be used as a more general basis” for examining and dividing patterns of coverage (Ibid 1996, p. 280). Other researchers have applied the model to media treatment of climate change (Brossard, Shanahan and McComas, 2004; Nisbet and Huge, 2006), but it has been criticised for being vague (Howlett, 1997), too inflexible, too linear, and in focusing on the media and public agendas, it does not account for other influences:
“The problem with Downs’s model is that it is too linear and inflexible. His approach tends to focus narrowly upon a limited number of fora, or arenas of influence, namely: the media and public agendas (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988). We should not underestimate the role of political institutions, NGOs, the wider political culture and the scientific community in defining the important issues of the moment. None of these public arenas are discrete units; they encompass a wide range of overlapping platforms employing
different strategies and targeting a diverse range of audiences. This ‘one model fits all’ approach tends to downplay the complexity of public debates.” (Anderson, 2009, p. 169)
Downs’s attention cycle describes what happens to certain issues with regard to the media and the public agenda, but not why. As Alison Anderson has pointed out, the model does not take account of other actors and claimsmakers in the issue process. Nor does it take into account factors internal to the functioning of the media themselves. In particular, the influence of news values is unaccounted for. News values (discussed in Chapter 2, section 2.7 and also in Chapter 6) is a key concept in journalism studies, and shows that that the news media favour new information in particular (Galtung and Ruge, 1965; Harcup and O’Neill, 2001), which makes it difficult for an issue to stay in the news form long as “newer” events push themselves into the news cycle. Downs’s model is not completely at odds with the scholarship of news values. The media is more likely to cover a story already in the news, which may prolong the media “shelf life” of an existing story. Downs also argued that only issues capable of being vividly dramatised were capable of going through the issue attention cycle; these kinds of stories are also favoured by the news media. However, the principle drive of the media is for novelty: “The media responds to breaking news, to new things, to change” (May and Pitts, 2000, p. 24).
The attention cycle model has been found to be an inadequate explanation for the patterns of media coverage of environmental issues such as climate change. However, as Holt and Barkmeyer suggest, the model is useful as a starting point for research into the media “career” of certain issues. Nisbet and Huge use it as a general basis for their theory of mediated issue development (discussed in more detail below). Although it has been criticised for a lack of nuance, Downs’s attention cycle has proved a valuable tool for media analysts.