Agenda-Setting Function
Of
Maxwell McCombs & Donald Shaw
in
Em Griffin
A First Look at Communication Theory
CLICKER
Prior to a short while ago, how likely
would it have been for you to discuss
something Barak Obama said:
A = VERY LIKELY
B = VERY UNLIKELY
C = MEDIUM LIKELY
CLICKER
Have you discussed anything that
Michelle Obama has said or done?
A = YES
B = NO
CLICKER
• 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
CLICKER
The Agenda-Setting theory is saying
that: journalists are attempting to
influence the audience;
TRUE = A
FALSE = B
CLICKER
Lots of research on the power of the
media shows that the media can have
a direct effect on what people think:
TRUE = A
FALSE = B
CLICKER
Framing is when someone is set up to
look like they committed a crime:
A = TRUE
B = FALSE
Online Newspapers
ABC
MSNBC
Associated Press
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;