mass-communication-theory

priming
In agenda-setting,
the idea that
media draw
attention to some
aspects of political
life at the
expense of others
Chapter 10 Media and Society: The Role of Media in the Social World 295
During September and October of the 1968 presidential election, these
researchers interviewed one hundred registered voters who had not yet committed
to either candidate (presumably these people would be more open to media messages).
By asking each respondent “to outline the key issues as he [sic] saw them,
regardless of what the candidates might be saying at the moment,” they were able
to identify and rank by importance just what these people thought were the crucial
issues facing them. They then compared these results with a ranking of the time
and space accorded to various issues produced by a content analysis of the television
news, newspapers, newsmagazines, and editorial pages available to voters in
the area where the study was conducted. The results? “The media appear to have
exerted a considerable impact on voters’ judgments of what they considered the
major issues of the campaign…. The correlation between the major item emphasis
on the main campaign issues carried by the media and voters’ independent judgmentsofwhatweretheimportantissueswas
.967,” they wrote. “In short, the
data suggest a very strong relationship between the emphasis placed on different
campaign issues by the media … and the judgments of voters as to the salience and
importance of various campaign topics” (McCombs and Shaw, 1972, pp. 180–181).
This important and straightforward study highlights both the strengths and
limitations of agenda-setting as a theory of media effects. It clearly establishes that
there is an important relationship between media reports and people’s ranking of
public issues. On the negative side, we can see that the logic of agenda-setting
seems well suited for the question of news and campaigns, but what about other
kinds of content and other kinds of effects? More important, though, is the question
of the actual nature of the relationship between news and its audience. Maybe
the public sets the media’s agenda and then the media reinforce it. The McCombs
and Shaw analysis, like most early agenda-setting research, implies a direction of
influence from media to audience—that is, it implies causality. But the argument
that the media are simply responding to their audiences can be easily made. Few
journalists have not uttered at least once in their careers, “We only give the people
what they want.” McCombs (1981) himself acknowledged these limitations.
It is important not to judge the utility of the agenda-setting approach based on
the earliest studies. Although these had many limitations, they have inspired other
research that is providing intriguing if still controversial results. For example,
Shanto Iyengar and Donald Kinder attempted to overcome some of the problems
of earlier work in a series of experiments published in 1987. Because of the unanswered
questions about causality, they lamented, “agenda-setting may be an apt
metaphor, but it is no theory. The lack of a theory of media effects has significantly
impeded our understanding of how democracy works” (Iyengar and Kinder, 1987,
p. 3). To develop such a theory, they offered a testable “agenda-setting hypothesis:
Those problems that receive prominent attention on the national news become the
problems the viewing public regards as the nation’s most important” (1987, p. 16).
Their series of experiments examined agenda-setting, the vividness of news reports,
the positioning of stories, and what they called priming.
• Agenda-setting: Iyengar and Kinder demonstrated causality. They wrote:
“Americans’ view of their society and nation are powerfully shaped by the
stories that appear on the evening news. We found that people who were
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