Agenda-Setting Theory

Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw

Maxwell McCombs• Max McCombs is widely

known among communication scholars, for he has devoted almost four decades to building agenda setting from a successful hypothesis into a robust and popular theory of how news influences the salience of issues.

• He is currently working at University of Texas

Donald Shaw

• Donald Leslie Shaw (born February 11, 1930) is a writer, literary critic and the Brown-Forman Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of Virginia.

• He graduated from the University of Manchester (B.A., M.A.) and the University of Dublin (Ph.D.).

• He currently lives in Italy, spending each academic semester in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Agenda-Setting Theory

→ is the theory that the mass-news media have a large influence on audiences by their choice of what stories to consider newsworthy and how much prominence and space to give them.

→ Agenda-setting theory’s main postulate is salience transfer. Salience transfer is the ability of the mass media to transfer issues of importance from their mass media agendas to public agendas.

The Original Agenda: Not What to Think, but What to Think About

• McCombs and Shaw believe that the “mass media have the ability to transfer the salience of items on their news agendas to the public agenda.“

• “ We judge as important what the media judge as important.”

• Pulitzer Prize-wining author Walter Lippmann claimed that the media act as a mediator between “the world outside and the pictures in our heads.”

• University of Wisconsin political scientist Bernard Cohen said that “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.

A Theory Whose Time Had Come

• People would attend only to news and views that didn’t threaten their established beliefs.

• Agenda-setting theory boasted two attractive features: it reaffirmed the power of the press while still maintaining that individuals were free to choose.

• McComb’s and Shaw’s agenda-setting theory represents a back-to-basics approach to mass communication.

• The theory’s hypothesis is that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the media and the public.

Media Agenda and Public Agenda: A Close Match

• Media Agenda→ is the set of issues addressed by media sources

• Public Agenda→ are issues the public consider important.

• McCombs and Shaw’s measured both the media agenda and public agenda.

• Position and length of story – two main criteria of prominence in measuring the media agenda.

What were the results?• Media Agenda:

→ A composite index of media prominence revealed the following order of importance:

▫ foreign policy▫ law and order▫ fiscal policy▫ public welfare▫ civil rights

• Public Agenda:→ The rank of the five issues was identical to the media

agenda.

What Causes What?

• McCombs and Shaw believed that the hypothesized agenda-setting is responsible for the almost perfect correlation between the media and public ordering of priorities:

MEDIA AGENDA → VOTER’S AGENDA

• But as critics of cultivation theory remind us, correlation is not causation.

VOTER’S AGENDA → MEDIA AGENDA

• McCombs and Shaw’s findings were impressive but equivocal.

• 3 research studies:

1. McCombs and other three researchers systematically surveyed public opinion at three locations across the country.

2. Ray Funkhouser’s historical review study

3. Experiment by Yale researchersShanto IyengarMark PetersDonald Kinder

Who Sets the Agenda for the Agenda Setters?

• News Editors- these key decision makers are undeniably part of a media elite that doesn’t represent a cross section of U.S.

• Political Candidates- considered as the ultimate source of issue salience.

• Public Relations Professionals

Interest aggregations - clusters of people who demand center stage for their one, over-riding concern, whatever it might be.

Who is Most Affected by the Media Agenda?

• McCombs and Shaw understood that “people are not automatons waiting to be programmed by the news media.”

• In their follow-up studies, they used the uses and gratifications approach, which suggests that viewers are selective in the kinds of TV programs they watch.

• They concluded that people who have a willingness to let the media shape their thinking have a high need for orientation – arises from high relevance and uncertainty.

Framing: Transferring the Salience of Attributes

• James Tankard defines media frame as:“ the central organizing idea for news content that supplies a context and suggests what the issue is through the use of selection, emphasis, exclusion, and elaboration.”

• 2 levels of agenda setting: 1. the transfer of salience of an attitude object in

the mass media’s pictures of the world to a prominent place among the pictures in our head.

2. the transfer of salience of a dominant set of attributes that the media associate with an attitude object to the specific features of the image projected on the walls of our minds.

Not Just What to Think About, But How to Think About it

• Attribute frames make compelling arguments for the choices people make after exposure to the news.

• Media outlets are constantly searching for material that they regard as newsworthy. When they find it, they do more than tell their audiences what to think about.

The media may not only tell us what to think about,

they also may tell us how and what to think about it,and perhaps even what to do about it.

Beyond Opinion: The Behavioral Effect of the Media’s Agenda

• Some intriguing findings suggest that media priorities also affect people’s behavior.

• Nowhere is the behavioral effect of the media agenda more apparent than in the business of professional sports.

• McCombs claims “Agenda setting the theory can also be agenda setting the business plan.”

Will new media continue to guide focus, opinions, and behavior?

• The power of agenda setting that McCombs and Shaw describe may be on the wane.

• The media may not have as much power to transfer the salience of issues or attributes as it does now as a result of users’ expanded content choices and control over exposure.

• McCombs has considered agenda setting a theory of limited media effects.

• Framing reopens the possibility of a powerful effects model.

• Gerald Kosicki questions whether framing is relevant to agenda-setting research.

1. McCombs’ restricted definition of framing doesn’t address the mood of emotional connotations of a media story or presentational factors.

2. Although it has a straightforward definition within agenda-setting theory, the popularity of framing as a construct in media studies has led to diverse and perhaps contradictory uses of the term.

Critique: are the effects too limited, the scope too wide?

• Agenda-setting research shows that print and broadcast news prioritize issues.

• Agenda-setting theory reminds us that the news is stories that require interpretation.

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