mass-communication-theory

296 Section 4 Contemporary Mass Communication Theory
agenda-building
A collective process
in which media,
government,
and the citizenry
reciprocally influence
one another
in areas of public
policy
shown network broadcasts edited to draw attention to a particular problem
assigned greater importance to that problem—greater importance than they
themselves did before the experiment began, and greater importance than did
people assigned to control conditions that emphasized different problems. Our
subjects regarded the target problem as more important for the country, cared
more about it, believed that government should do more about it, reported
stronger feelings about it, and were much more likely to identify it as one of
the country’s most important problems” (Iyengar and Kinder, 1987, p. 112).
• Vividness of presentation: Iyengar and Kinder found that dramatic news
accounts undermined rather than increased television’s agenda-setting power.
Powerfully presented personal accounts (a staple of contemporary television
news) might focus too much attention on the specific situation or individual
rather than on the issue at hand.
• Position of a story: Lead stories had a greater agenda-setting effect. Iyengar
and Kinder offered two possible reasons for this result. First, people paid
more attention to the stories at the beginning of the news, and these were less
likely to fall victim to the inevitable interruptions experienced when viewing at
home. Second, people accepted the news program’s implicit designation of a
lead story as most newsworthy.
• Priming: This is the idea that even the most motivated citizens cannot consider
all that they know when evaluating complex political issues. Instead, people
consider the things that come easily to mind, or as the researchers said, “those
bits and pieces of political memory that are accessible.” You can hear echoes
of information-processing theory here. Iyengar and Kinder’s research (1987)
strongly demonstrated that “through priming [drawing attention to some
aspects of political life at the expense of others] television news [helps] to set
the terms by which political judgments are reached and political choices made”
(p. 114). Writing in a later study, Iyengar (1991) offered this distinction: “While
agenda-setting reflects the impact of news coverage on the perceived importance
of national issues, priming refers to the impact of news coverage on the weight
assigned to specific issues in making political judgments” (p. 133).
Agenda-setting, primarily a micro-level effects perspective, has another interesting
contemporary articulation as a more macro-level theory: agenda-building, “the
often complicated process by which some issues become important in policy making
arenas” (Protess et al., 1991, p. 6). Kurt Lang and Gladys Lang (1983) defined
“agenda-building—a more apt term than agenda-setting—[as] a collective process
in which media, government, and the citizenry reciprocally influence one another”
(pp. 58–59). The Langs provided a useful case study of agenda-building during the
Watergate crisis.
Agenda-building presumes cognitive effects (increases in knowledge), an active
audience (as seen in the Lang and Lang definition), and societal-level effects (as
seen in both definitions). Its basic premise—that media can profoundly affect how
a society (or nation or culture) determines what are its important concerns and
therefore can mobilize its various institutions toward meeting them—has allowed
this line of inquiry, in the words of David Protess and his colleagues (1991), to
“flourish.”
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