In 1963 Bernard Cohen (p. 13) noted that the media “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”. Although the term agenda setting was not coined until several years later, this statement has been widely cited as an important antecedent to the theory. While Cohen’s assertion well describes ‘basic’ or “first-level” agenda-setting theory, “second-“first-level” or “attribute” agenda-setting theory, which emerged later, suggests that in some circumstances the media may not only tell people what to think about, but also influence what they think.
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The formal emergence of agenda-setting theory is routinely traced to the 1968 US presidential campaign when Maxwell McCombs and Don Shaw (1972) launched a research study in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Their aim was to investigate the hypothesis that the mass media set the public agenda of issues for a political campaign by influencing the salience of issues among voters. The term McCombs and Shaw coined for this hypothesized mass media influence was agenda setting. Testing this hypothesis required the comparison of two data sets: a
description of the public agenda, which they ascertained through a random sample of undecided voters; and a content analysis of news sources used by these voters. The study found the degree of importance accorded to issues by voters closely paralleled their prominence in media coverage. Thus, agenda-setting research was born.
Despite the hundreds of empirical studies based on agenda-setting research and the vast attention awarded to the theory since the Chapel Hill Study, McCombs has remained a dominant force behind agenda-setting theorizing up to this day (e.g.
McCombs and Reynolds, 2009, McCombs and Shaw, 1993, McCombs, 2005, McCombs, 2004). Consequently, much of the discussion that follows will rely on work with which he has been involved.
The main idea underpinning basic agenda-setting theory is that by means of the media agenda, which refers to what is covered by media and the relative quantity and prominence of that coverage, the media have a significant influence on
audiences. In contrast to the ambitious claims of magic bullet or hypodermic needle theory that media can directly influence the views of its audience, the more modest claims of agenda-setting theory relate simply to the degree of importance or salience that audiences will attribute to individual issues. According to basic agenda-setting theory, although people with similar media exposure may feel differently about individual issues, most people will agree on which issues are most important and their selection will largely correspond with the issues that have received most media coverage. Not only does agenda-setting theory claim a correspondence between the salience of particular issues in media coverage and the salience of those issues on the public agenda, but it also claims a causal effect whereby the media coverage
significantly influences the degree of salience of issues on the public agenda. In other words, according to agenda-setting theory, the media set the public agenda.
While the field of mass communication research has evolved and developed considerably since the Chapel Hill Study, basic agenda-setting research continues
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and has found new territory in the realm of internet and electronic mass media (e.g.
Roberts et al., 2002).
“Second-level” or “attribute” agenda setting was first described in the 1990s (Ghanem, 1997). It differs from its older sibling in that it suggests that agenda-setting effects not alone focus public attention on particular objects, but also influence the public’s understanding and perspectives in relation to those objects.
The rationale underpinning second-level agenda setting is that each object on the media or public agenda has numerous attributes or characteristics. When the media cover different objects they give more, less or no attention to particular attributes thus influencing how the public think about those issues. For example, whereas basic agenda setting might lead the public to believe that in an election campaign the three political candidates that received most coverage were the most salient, attribute agenda setting posits that the attributes of these candidates that were emphasized in media coverage would lead the public to believe that those attributes were most salient. In other words, public attention is drawn to certain attributes and away from others thus influencing the ways in which issues are perceived. The key difference between basic and attribute agenda setting is that whereas the former is concerned with the salience of objects, attribute agenda setting is concerned with the attributes or characteristics of objects. As described by Takeshita (2005, p. 275), “the original agenda-setting hypothesis asserts that the media are influential in deciding what issues become major themes of public opinion, while the newly developed concept of the second level of agenda setting assumes that the media also have an influence on how people make sense of a given theme”.
Early agenda-setting research paid scant attention to either the cognitive mechanisms responsible for agenda-setting effects or the reasons for individual differences. Latterly, however, agenda-setting scholars have proposed that the cognitive effects are largely explained by the concept of accessibility, which suggests that judgments and attitude formation are directly correlated with the ease with which instances or associations are brought to mind (Tversky and Kahneman 1973 in Scheufele and Tewksbury, 2007). In other words, some pieces of
information are seen as being more accessible in a person’s mind than others, and the degree to which particular pieces of information are accessible is seen as depending on how much and how recently a person has been exposed to them (Kim et al., 2002).
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Individual differences have long been a focus of mass communication interest (Oliver and Krakowiak, 2009) and agenda-setting researchers have long acknowledged that there are significant individual differences in how people respond to the media agenda (McCombs, 2005). In early agenda-setting work issues were categorised as either obtrusive, which referred to issues that individuals encountered personally; or unobtrusive, which referred to issues that individuals encountered only in the news. Broadly, it was suggested that the media had strong effects for
unobtrusive issues and no effects for obtrusive issues (Weaver et al., 1981).
Drawing on work by Weaver (1977 cited in McCombs and Reynolds, 2009, p. 8), McCombs (2005) argued that individual differences could more accurately be explained by the concept of orientation. Orientation is based on the idea of individuals’ curiosity about the world. Need for orientation is defined by the concepts of relevance and uncertainty. Where the relevance of a topic to an
individual is perceived to be low, their need for orientation is also low. The level of uncertainty of individuals about a topic refers to their perceived need for more information about that topic. If their perceived level of uncertainty is low, so too is their need for orientation. Orientation is important in the context of agenda-setting research, because the greater an individual’s need for orientation in the realm of public affairs, the more likely they are to attend to the agenda of the mass media.
McCombs (2004) has identified a wide range of studies that all provide evidence for the validity of the concept of orientation in agenda-setting research. Matthes (2006) is also currently associated with refinements to the concept of orientation in the context of agenda-setting research.
As already noted, agenda-setting theory asserts that the salience of objects or their attributes in media coverage will influence the salience of the same objects or attributes on the public agenda. Salience is most commonly defined in terms of attention and prominence. Attention generally refers to the number of news stories concerned with a particular object or attributes of an object and can be
operationalised by simple counts of articles; and prominence refers to the relative importance of the coverage and can be operationally defined by features including page placement and length of article (McCombs, 2005).
So far this discussion has referred to corroborating evidence for basic and attribute agenda-setting effects without discussing individual studies or meta-analyses. While the Chapel Hill Study was notable for its innovation and for
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demonstrating that the issues that received most media coverage also featured most prominently in the public agenda, it failed to demonstrate a causal link between the media agenda and the public agenda and allowed for the possibility that the media were responding to the public agenda rather than influencing it. A series of laboratory-based experiments conducted during the 1980s by Iyengar and Kinder (1987), however, found that people’s perceptions of what the most important issues were matched the issues that had been emphasized on a selection of news
programmes that they had watched. In other words, these experiments (and many others that followed) demonstrated causality. The sheer number of individual agenda-setting studies conducted since the 1970s has facilitated recent meta-analyses. In a 2006 meta-analysis of 90 basic agenda setting studies Wanta and Ghanem (2006, p. 46) identified significant agenda-setting effects for studies involving a variety of methodologies demonstrating “how wide ranging the agenda-setting influence of the news media is”. McCombs (2004, p. 19) too has provided an overview of the accumulated evidence from studies into the effects of agenda setting and concluded not only that the news media “can exercise an agenda-setting influence on the public”, but also that journalists and media content “do significantly influence their audience’s picture of the world”.
4.3.2 Priming
While Weaver’s concept of “orientation” provided a theoretical explanation for the agenda-setting process that took into account individual differences, it did not deal with how a person’s prior knowledge or beliefs might influence the effects of agenda setting. Priming emerged to fill this gap and was named after the process whereby liquid is added to a pump to enable it to work on its own. According to Willnat (1997, p. 53), priming is “built on the assumption that the frequency, prominence, or feature of a stimulus activates previously learnt cognitive structures and influences interpretations of an ambiguous stimulus”. Although priming has been traced to a 1975 study by Weaver, McCombs and Spellman (1975 cited in Weaver, 2007) that speculated that the media may suggest which issues to use in evaluating political actors, the first use of the term priming in the context of media research was by Iyengar and Kinder (1987) who conducted controlled field
experiments that linked television agenda-setting effects to evaluations of the U.S.
president. In laying out the terrain for the new field of media priming research
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Iyengar and Kinder (p. 63) argued that “by calling attention to some matters while ignoring others, television news influences the standards by which governments, policies and candidates for public office are judged”. Although priming research has been predominantly applied in studies analysing the effects of news coverage on audience perceptions of political figures, it has also been applied in other contexts – e.g. racial stereotyping (Dalisay and Tan, 2009).
As in the case of agenda setting, priming theorists have suggested
explanations for the cognitive processes underlying priming. According to Iyengar and Kinder (1987 p. 114), “priming presumes that when evaluating complex political phenomenon, people do not take into account all that they know – they cannot, even if they are motivated to do so. Instead, they consider what comes to mind, those bits and pieces of political memory that are accessible” Priming,
therefore, appears similar to agenda-setting in that both are memory-based models of information processing that assume that people form attitudes based on the issues that are most accessible in their minds.
The exact relationship between agenda setting and priming is disputed (see, for example, Willnat, 1997, Scheufele and Tewksbury, 2007). The most common view is to see priming as a consequence or extension of agenda setting as once an issue has been primed or made salient it will play a larger role in evaluations of leaders and issues (Edy and Meirick, 2007, Valenzuela, 2009). Agenda setting has, however, also been described as a variant of priming (Price & Tewksbury 1995 in Willnat, 1997) and as unrelated to priming (Kosicki, 1993).
A meta-analysis of the empirical media priming literature was conducted in 2007 (Roskos-Ewoldsen et al.). It revealed that media priming has received very little attention compared to agenda setting with only 48 published articles
representing 63 studies having been identified by the authors. In addition, the authors found very little focus on the mechanisms and processes underlying media priming. Questions such as whether the same processes were responsible for reported priming effects in vastly different domains (e.g. media violence and political news) had not been adequately researched in the views of the authors. In addition, the authors concluded that more research was needed to answer questions including whether media primes fade with time and whether more intense media primes result in stronger priming effects. The conclusion of the meta-analysis was that although the combined data strongly suggested that the media could act as a
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prime and that this was occurring, future research was needed to ascertain the precise characteristics of media priming and focus on the development of theoretical
explanations of the phenomenon.