Nhung Nguyen

Key scholars

Agenda-setting

• Max McCombs

• Donald Shaw

Priming

• Shanto Iyengar

• Mark Peters

• Donald Kinder

Seminal reading(s)

• Lippmann, W (1922). Public opinion. New York: Harcourt.
• McCombs, M., & SHAW, D. L. (1972). “Agenda-setting function of mass media”.

Public Opinion Quarterly, 36(2), 176-187.

• WEAVER, D. H., GRABER, D. A., MCCOMBS, M., & EYAL, C. H. (1981). Media

agenda-setting in a presidential election: Issues, images, and interest. New York, NY: Praeger.

• McCombs, M; Reynolds, A (2002). “News influence on our pictures of the world”. Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research.
• Dearing, J; Rogers, E (1988). “Agenda-setting research: Where has it been, where is it going?”. Communication Yearbook. 11: 555–594.
•  Rogers, E; Dearing, J (1988). “Agenda-setting research: Where has it been, where is it going?”. Communication Yearbook. 11: 555–594.
•  McCombs, M (2005). “A look at agenda-setting: Past, present and future”. Journalism Studies. 6 (4): 543–557. doi:10.1080/14616700500250438. S2CID 16806434.
•  Pan, Z. & Kosicki, G.M. (1997). Priming and Media Impact on the Evaluations of the President’s Performance. Communication Research.
•  Ferguson & Dyck (2012). “Paradigm change in aggression research: The time has come to retire the General Aggression Model” (PDF). Aggression and Violent Behavior. 17: 220–228. doi:10.1016/j.avb.2012.02.007. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-09-27.
•  Severin & Tankard, 1997
•  Iyengar, Peters, and Kinder (1982). “Experimental Demonstrations of the “Not-So-Minimal” Consequences of Television News Programs”. The American Political Science Review. 76 (4): 848–858. doi:10.2307/1962976.
•  Alger, D.E. (1989). The Media and Politics. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Key concepts

• Awareness model
• Priorities model
• Salience model
• Accessibility

Main premises

1. AGENDA SETTING

The main premise of agenda-setting is that what the media focuses on is inherently important, and therefore readers and the electorate at large believes whatever the media focuses on is important simply because the media focused on it. There are multiple levels of this theory, beginning in the 1970s and being built upon over the decades as the media becomes more nuanced. It might have been put most succinctly in the origin of this theory like this: 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.” Below are a handful of different nuances of the theory that continues to expand:

• “Policy agenda-setting” or “Political agenda setting”: this model of study focuses on how the elite policy makers’ agendas are influenced by other factors, i.e. policy makers’ agenda is treated as the dependent variable.
• “Media agenda-setting” or “Agenda building”: this model of study focuses on how the media’s agenda is influenced by other factors, i.e. media’s agenda is treated as the dependent variable.
• “Public/Audience agenda-setting”, this model of study, which is also the traditional hypothesis, focuses on how the audience or public’s agenda is influenced by other factors such as personal, religious, and cultural values, i.e. public agenda is treated as the dependent variable.

First-level agenda-setting

Agenda-setting describes the “ability (of the news media) to influence the importance placed on the topics of the public agenda”.  Agenda-setting is the creation of public awareness and concern of salient issues by the news media.  The study of agenda-setting describes the way media attempts to influence viewers, and establish a hierarchy of news prevalence.  Nations with more political power receive higher media exposure.  The agenda-setting by the media is driven by the media’s bias on things such as politics, economy and culture, etc.

Second-level agenda-setting: attribute agenda setting

After first-level agenda-setting effects were established, researchers began to explore a “second-level” of agenda setting that examines the influence of attribute salience, or the properties, qualities, and characteristics that describe objects or people in the news and the tone of those attributes.”

The second level of agenda setting was suggested after research confirmed the effects of the theory. As agenda-setting theory was being developed, scholars pointed out many attributes that describe the object. Each of the objects on an agenda has a lot of attributes containing cognitive components such as information that describes characteristics of the object, and an affective component including tones (positive, negative, neutral) of the characteristics on agenda.

Third-level agenda-setting: network agenda setting model

The most recent agenda-setting studies explore “the extent to which the news media can transfer the salience of relationships among a set of elements to the public”. That is, researchers assume that the media can not only influence the salience of certain topics in public agenda, but they can also influence how the public relate these topics to one another.

Network Agenda Setting Model refers to the third-level agenda-setting. This model shows that “the news media can bundle sets of objects or attributes and make these bundles of elements salient in the public’s mind simultaneously”. In other words, elements in people’s mind are not linear as traditional approaches indicate; instead, they are interconnected with each other to make a network-like structure in one’s mind; and if the news media always mention two elements together, the audience will “perceive these two elements as interconnected”.

2. PRIMING EFFECT

Media effects refer to how mass media affects its audience in decision making. Priming is considered as the predecessor of agenda setting, one of the theories of media effects.  Priming has its base in cognitive psychology which relates to the associative network model of human memory. This concept details how one thought may generate associated thoughts.

Priming is a phenomenon whereby exposure to one stimulus influences a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention.

Priming is a concept through which the media effects among the people are enhanced by providing a basic perception human minds take decisions based on the preconceptions that are already been stored in our memory. The memories are stored as a form of nodes and they are interconnected effectively and mostly act as a frame of reference to the decisions that we make. Priming enables the audience to evaluate the situation and to conclude how effective the media have been in order to make a decision by providing a frame of reference. Thus the media creates an influence among people to make judgement or a decision.

Priming has been particularly evaluated during the elections and while choosing the right candidate. Particularly when it comes to politics where people lack the knowledge concerning political matters, they base their decisions on the information from the media which actually influences their decision making on whom to elect.

Common methods

• Survey
• Experiment
• Self-report
• Machine learning
• Content analysis

Limitations

• Assuming that audience is passive, however they are actually  not
• Resources to accurately find a trend among a large population

Developments

• A person’s opinion could be disseminated through various online channels and could synthesize public opinion that influences news coverage. Their study suggests ‘reversed agenda effects’, meaning that public agenda could set media agenda. Maxwell McCombs also mentioned “reverse agenda-setting” in his recent textbook as a situation where public concern sets the media agenda.
• The most recent example right now could be the media’s focus on Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s refusal to answer questions about “court packing.” The focus on the dodge by Biden and his VP candidate Kamala Harris by the media seems to bring more attention to it by the electorate as something that is important and needs to be focused on. In other words, focusing on it and creating its importance. 

Typical research questions

• How often do the news/protagonists appear on news media?
• How do they influence the agenda of the public?
• How does prime influence the cognition and information literacy of the audience?
• How does prime trigger the process of information U & G?

*This is the series of theories from KU’s Jour801 Course- Communication Theories