A First Look At COMMUNICATION THEORY Sixth Edition

1. Slide 1 A First Look AtCOMMUNICATION THEORYSixth Edition McGraw-Hill

2. Slide 2 28 Agenda-Setting Theoryof Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw Chapter Content • The Original Agenda: What Not to Think But What to Think About • A Theory Whose Time Had Come • Media Agenda and Public Agenda: A Close Match • What Causes What? • Who Sets the Agenda for the Agenda Setters? • Who is Most Affected by the Media Agenda? • Framing: Transferring the Salience of Attributes • Not Just What to Think About, But How to Think About It • Beyond Opinion—The Behavioral Effect of the Media’s Agenda • Critique: Are the Effects Too Limited, The Scope Too Wide?

3. Slide 3 The Original Agenda: Not What to Think, But What to Think About • “Mass media have the ability to transfer the salience of items on their news agendas to the public agenda.” (McCombs and Shaw) • They aren’t suggesting that broadcast and print personnel make a deliberate attempt to influence listener, viewer, or reader opinion on the issues. • But McCombs and Shaw say that we look to news professionals for cues on where to focus our attention. “We judge as important what the media judge as important.”

4. Slide 4 A Theory Whose Time Had Come • McCombs and Shaw’s agenda-setting hypothesis represented a back-to-the-basics approach to mass communication research. • The hypothesis predicts a cause-and-effect relationship between media content and voter perception. • The theory rises or falls on its ability to show a match between the media’s agenda and the public’s agenda later on. • Their analysis of the 1968 race for president between Nixon and Humphrey set the pattern for later agenda-setting research.

5. Slide 5 Media Agenda and Public Agenda: A Close Match • McCombs and Shaw’s first task was to measure the media agenda. • They determined that Chapel Hill residents relied on a mix of nine print and broadcast sources for political news. • They established position and length of story as the two main criteria of prominence. • The researchers focused on substantive issues and discarded news items about campaign strategy, position in the polls, and the personalities of the candidates.

6. Slide 6 Media Agenda and Public Agenda: A Close Match • A composite index of media prominence revealed the following order of importance: foreign policy, law and order, fiscal policy, public welfare, and civil rights. • In order to measure the public’s agenda, they asked Chapel Hill voters to outline what each one considered the key issue of the campaign, regardless of what the candidates might be saying. • The rank of the five issues on both lists was nearly identical.

7. Slide 7 What Causes What? • The hypothesized agenda-setting function of the media is responsible for the almost perfect correlation they found between the media and public ordering of priorities. • By themselves, McCombs and Shaw’s findings were impressive, but equivocal. • A true test of the agenda-setting hypothesis must be able to show that public priorities lag behind the media agenda.

8. Slide 8 What Causes What? • A tightly-controlled experiment run by Yale researchers established a cause-and-effect chain of influence from the media agenda to the public agenda. • Viewers who saw the media agendas that focused on pollution and defense elevated those issues on their own lists of concerns—definite confirmation of a cause-and-effect relationship between the media agenda and the public agenda.

9. Slide 9 Who Sets the Agenda for the Agenda Setters? • One view regards a handful of news editors as the guardians, or “gate-keepers,” of political dialogue. • An alternative view regards the candidates themselves as the ultimate source of issue salience. • Current thinking on news selection focuses on the crucial role of public relations professionals working for government agencies, corporations, and interest groups.

10. Slide 10 Who Sets the Agenda for the Agenda Setters? • Interest aggregations are becoming increasingly adept at creating news that must be reported. • On rare occasions, news events are so compelling that editors have no choice but to feature them for extended periods of time.

11. Slide 11 Who Sets the Agenda for the Agenda Setters? • Even in their original Chapel Hill study, McCombs and Shaw understood that “people are not automatons waiting to be programmed by the news media.” • Need for orientation arises from high relevance and uncertainty.

12. Slide 12 Framing: Transferring the Salience of Attributes • The media aren’t very successful in telling us what to think, but they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about. • They do, in fact, influence the way we think. The specific process McCombs cites is one that many media scholars discuss—framing. • Media Frame: “The central organizing idea for news content that supplies a context and suggest what the issue is through the use of selection, emphasis, exclusion, and elaboration.” (James Tankard)

13. Slide 13 Not Just What to Think About, But How to Think About It • Is there evidence that the process of framing as defined by agenda-setting theorists actually alters the pictures in the minds of people when they read the newspaper or tune in to broadcast news? • Framing is not an option. Reporters inevitably frame a story by the personal attributes of public figures they select to describe. • “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.” (McCombs and Shaw)

14. Slide 14 Beyond Opinion—The Behavioral Effect of the Media’s Agenda • Most of the 350 empirical studies on agenda setting have measured the effect of media agendas on public opinion. But a few intriguing findings suggest that media priorities also affect people’s behavior. • Although this has yet to be tested, Shaw and McCombs have suggested an important agenda-melding function of the media that significantly affects the way people identify with groups and join them.

15. Slide 15 Beyond Opinion—The Behavioral Effect of the Media’s Agenda • The agenda-melding hypothesis suggests that the mass media expand our knowledge of agenda options and that they can also help us find other people who share them.

16. Slide 16 Critique: Are the Effects Too Limited, The Scope Too Wide? • McCombs and Shaw ascribed to broadcast and print journalism the significant power to set the public’s political priorities. • The new dimension of framing reopens the possibility of a powerful media effects model. • Their definition of framing doesn’t include the emotional connotation of key terms used in ongoing public debate of issues such as abortion. • The definition also seems to exclude presentational factors such as a broadcaster’s raised eyebrow while saying one of these phrases.

17. Slide 17 Critique: Are the Effects Too Limited, The Scope Too Wide? • In contrast, the popularity of framing as an interpretive construct in media studies has resulted in diverse and ambiguous meanings. • Whether or not we accept a restricted definition of framing, the agenda-setting function of the mass media has earned a firm place in media-effects literature.