10 The Agenda-setting Function of Mass Media
Maxwell E.McCombs and Donald L.Shaw
In “Public Opinion Quarterly”, 1972, 2
In choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom staff, and broadcasters play an important part in shaping political reality. Readers learn not only about a given issue, but also how much importance to attach to that issue from the amount of information in a news story and its position. In re-flecting what candidates are saying during a campaign, the mass media may well determine the important issues—that is, the media may set the \of the campaign.
In our day, more than ever before, candidates go before the people through the mass media rather than in person. The information in the mass media becomes the only contact many have with politics. The pledges, promises, and rhetoric encapsulated in news stories, columns, and editorials constitute much of the information upon which a voting decision has to be made. Most of what people know comes to them \from the mass media or from other people.
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Although the evidence that mass media deeply change attitudes in a campaign is far from conclusive, the evidence is much stronger that voters learn from the immense quantity of information available during each campaign. People, of course, vary greatly in their attention to mass media political information. Some, normally the better educated and most politically interested (and those least likely to change political beliefs), actively seek information; but most seem to acquire it, if at all, without much effort. It just comes in. As Berelson succinctly puts it: \but few 'listen'.\media exposure are most likely to know where the candidates stand on different issues. Trenaman and McQuail found the same thing in a study of the 1959 General Election in England. Voters do learn.
They apparently learn, furthermore, in direct proportion to the emphasis placed on the campaign issues by the mass media. Specifically focusing on the agenda-setting function of the media, Lang and Lang observe:
The mass media force attention to certain issues. They build up public images of political figures. They are constantly presenting objects suggesting what individuals in the mass should think about, know about, have feelings about.
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Perhaps this hypothesized agenda-setting function of the mass media is most succinctly stated by Cohen, who noted that the press \successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.\ While the mass media may have little influence on the direction or intensity of attitudes, it is hypothesized that the mass media set the agenda for each political campaign, influencing the salience of attitudes toward the political issues.
METHOD
To investigate the agenda-setting capacity of the mass media in the 1968 presidential campaign, this study attempted to match what Chapel Hill voters said were key issues of the campaign with the actual content of the mass media used by them during the campaign. Respondents were selected randomly from lists of registered voters in five Chapel Hill precincts economically, socially, and racially representative of the community. By restricting this study to one community, numerous other sources of variation—for example, regional differences or variations in media performance—were controlled.
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Between September 18 and October 6, 100 interviews were completed. To select these 100 respondents a filter question was used to identify those who had not yet definitely decided how to vote—presumably those most open or susceptible to campaign information. Only those not yet fully committed to a particular candidate were interviewed. Borrowing from the Trenaman and McQuail strategy, this study asked each respondent to outline the key issues as he saw them, regardless of what the candidates might be saying at the moment. Interviewers recorded the answers as exactly as possible.
Concurrently with the voter interviews, the mass media serving these voters were collected and content analyzed. A pretest in spring 1968 found that for the Chapel Hill community almost all the mass media political information was provided by the following sources: Durham Morning Herald, Durham Sun, Raleigh News and Observer, Raleigh Times, New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and NBC and CBS evening news broadcasts.
The answers of respondents, .regarding major problems as they saw them and the news and editorial comment appearing between September 12 and October 6 in the sampled newspapers, magazines, and news broadcasts were coded into 15 categories representing the key issues and other kinds of campaign news. Media news content also was divided into \
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\media emphasis across topics. For the print media, this major/minor division was in terms of space and position; for television, it was made in terms of position and time allowed. More specifically, major items were defined as follows:
1. Television: Any story 45 seconds or more in length and/or one of the three lead stories.
2. Newspapers: Any story which appeared as the lead on the front page or on any page under a three-column headline in which at least one-third of the story (a minimum of five paragraphs) was devoted to political news coverage.
3. News Magazines: Any story more than one column or any item which appeared in the lead at the beginning of the news section of the magazine.
4. Editorial Page Coverage of Newspapers and Magazines: Any item in the lead editorial position (the top left corner of the editorial page) plus all items in which one-third (at least five paragraphs) of an editorial or columnist comment was devoted to political campaign coverage.
Minor items are those stories which are political in nature and included in the study but which are smaller in terms of space, time, or display than major items.
FINDINGS
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In short, the political world is reproduced imperfectly by individual news media. Yet the evidence in this study that voters tend to share the
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