C H A P T E R
10
Agenda-Setting Research: Issues,
Attributes, and Inﬂuences
David Weaver
Indiana University
Maxwell McCombs
University of Texas
Donald L. Shaw
University of North Carolina
For the past three decades and now into a fourth, the agenda-setting function of
mass media, ﬁrst explored empirically in the United States in 1968 by McCombs
and Shaw (1972), has been a major focus of mass communication research in the
United States. It has also crossed the Atlantic and Paciﬁc oceans to become more
international in scope. At the same time, it has expanded from a concern with
the salience or prominence of issues to the attributes of issues and candidate
images—a development that moves it closer to studies of “framing” that focus on
how issues and other objects of interest are reported by news media as well as what
is emphasized in such reporting.
There has also been increased interest in the consequences of agenda-setting,
especially for public opinion, in some studies of “priming.” More recently still,
agenda-setting research has begun to take into account a kind of reverse effect
labeled “agenda melding.” This chapter reviews many of these studies, including
some conducted outside the United States, and discusses their relationship to
studies of framing, priming, and public opinion more generally. It concludes with
some recommendations for future research in the agenda-setting tradition.
Most agenda-setting research since McCombs and Shaw’s (1972) study of the
1968 U.S. presidential election has focused on the relationship between the news
media’s ranking of issues (in amount and prominence of coverage) and the public
ranking of the perceived importance of these same issues in various surveys, a type
of research that Dearing and Rogers (1996) have called public agenda setting to distinguish
it from studies that are concerned mainly with the causes or consequences
of changes in the media agenda, which they label media agenda setting (for studies
of the inﬂuences on media agendas) and policy agenda-setting (for studies of the
impact of media agendas on public policy agendas).
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258 WEAVER, McCOMBS, SHAW
The evidence from scores of such public agenda-setting studies is mixed, but
on the whole it tends to support a positive correlation—and often a causal
relationship—between media agendas and public agendas at the aggregate level,
especially for relatively unobtrusive issues that do not directly impact the lives of
the majority of the public, such as foreign policy and government scandal. ( For the
details of this evidence, beginning with the original study during the 1968 presidential
election, see Dearing & Rogers, 1996; McCombs, in press; McCombs, Einsiedel,
& Weaver, 1991; McCombs & Ghanem, 2001; McCombs & Reynolds, 2002; McCombs
& Shaw, 1972; McCombs, Shaw, & Weaver, 1997; Protess & McCombs, 1991; Rogers &
Dearing, 1988; Shaw & McCombs, 1977; Wanta, 1997; Weaver, 1984; Weaver, Graber,
McCombs, & Eyal, 1981).
Most of these studies have been conducted in the United States, with a few notable
exceptions, especially in Germany as noted by Winfried Schulz (1997), who
cites, among others, Brettschneider (1994), Brosius and Kepplinger (1990, 1992a,
1992b, 1995), Eichhorn (1996), Huegel, Degenhardt, and Weiss (1992), Schoenbach
and Semetko (1992), and Wilke (1995). Many of these German studies involve extensive
content analysis and survey data sets over months of time, providing some
of the strongest evidence yet for the inﬂuence of the media agenda on the public
agenda. Because this basic evidence on the agenda-setting role of the mass media
has been thoroughly documented elsewhere, this chapter concentrates on the
more recent developments in agenda-setting theory.
Some scholars of agenda setting have also examined the antecedents of media
agendas to try to answer the question of who or what sets the media agenda
(Semetko, Blumler, Gurevitch, & Weaver, 1991). This type of research has been
called “agenda building” by some U.S. scholars (e.g., Gilberg, Eyal, McCombs,
& Nicholas, 1980; Lang & Lang, 1981; Turk, 1986; Weaver & Elliott, 1985), and
intermedia agenda setting by others, although Dearing and Rogers (1996) prefer
to label it media agenda setting because of its focus on the media agenda as
the dependent variable. This kind of agenda-setting research has been far less
common than the more traditional public agenda-setting studies, but it has not
been conﬁned to U.S. researchers. In Germany, for example, Mathes and Pfetsch
(1991) have studied the role of the alternative press in the agenda-building
process.
More recently, scholars from a number of different countries have tried to link
agenda-setting research with studies of “priming” and “framing” that examine not
only what issues are emphasized by news media, but how these issues are reported
and, in some cases, the effects of this reporting on public opinion as well as public
concerns (McCombs, Shaw, & Weaver, 1997). The focus on the consequences of
agenda setting for public opinion (often labeled “priming”) can be traced back at
least to Weaver, McCombs, and Spellman (1975), who speculated in their 1972–1973
panel study of the effects of Watergate news coverage that the media may do more
than teach which issues are most important—they may also provide “the issues and
topics to use in evaluating certain candidates and parties, not just during political
campaigns, but also in the longer periods between campaigns” (p. 471).
A SECOND LEVEL OF AGENDA-SETTING
Especially in the past decade, there have been more studies conducted outside
the United States—in Britain, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands,
10. AGENDA-SETTING RESEARCH 259
Spain, and Taiwan and in other countries as well. Many of these studies are described
by their authors in a book published during the summer of 1997, Communication
and Democracy, edited by McCombs, Shaw, and Weaver. Not only do
these studies expand the geographical boundaries of agenda-setting research, but
they also extend the focus of attention beyond issues to attributes of issues and
images.
In the majority of studies to date, the unit of analysis on each agenda is an object,
a public issue. But objects have attributes, or characteristics. When the news
media report on public issues or political candidates, they describe these objects.
But due to the limited capacity of the news agenda, journalists can present only
a few aspects of any object in the news. A few attributes are prominent and frequently
mentioned, some are given passing notice, and many others are omitted.
In short, news reports also present an agenda of attributes that vary considerably
in salience. Similarly, when people talk about and think about these objects—public
issues, political candidates, etc.—the attributes ascribed to these objects also vary
considerably in their salience. These agendas of attributes have been called “the
second level” of agenda setting to distinguish them from the ﬁrst level that has traditionally
focused on issues (objects), although the term level implies that attributes
are more speciﬁc than objects, which is not necessarily true. The perspectives and
frames that journalists employ draw attention to certain attributes of the objects
of news coverage, as well as to the objects themselves.
Japan
This distinction between the ﬁrst and second levels of agenda setting is evident
in a number of recent studies, both in the United States and in other countries.
For example, Takeshita and Mikami (1995) examined both levels of agenda setting
in the 1993 general election in Japan. Their content analysis showed that the
main issue of the election was political reform, but the system-related attributes
of this issue were emphasized over the ethics-related attributes, and the same
was true in their survey of the public, suggesting a second-level agenda-setting
effect.
In another study of environmental issues in Japan, Mikami, Takeshita, Nakada,
and Kawabata (1995) also found support for agenda setting at both the ﬁrst
and second levels. From these studies, Takeshita (1997) concluded, “By designating
what aspects of a certain issue to attend to, agenda setting at the subissue
level can inﬂuence the perspective with which people see the issue as a whole”
(p. 23).
Takeshita (1997) also links second-level agenda setting with the concept of framing
(as conceptualized by both sociologists and pyschologists), noting that as a
result of a focus on attribute-agenda setting, “agenda-setting research and framing
research are exploring almost the same problem—that of the reality-deﬁnition function
of the media” (p. 24). And Ogawa (2001), in an experimental study, concluded
that quantitative agenda setting can be inﬂuenced by the quality of the information
about an issue as well as the quantity of such information. In other words,
how an issue is presented can inﬂuence how salient the issue is considered to be.
In theoretical terms, this is a relationship between the second level of the media
agenda, attribute salience, and the ﬁrst level of the public agenda, object salience.
McCombs (1997) named this relationship “compelling arguments.”
260 WEAVER, McCOMBS, SHAW
Israel
Another scholar who sees links between the construction of social reality and
agenda setting is Anat First of Israel. She suggests that the second level of
agenda setting “can be understood best as a process of reality construction by
individuals who combine elements of news with what they personally observe of
life and events to make a sort of blended reality” (First, 1997, p. 41).
First studied the agenda-setting role of Israeli television news in the social construction
of views about the Israeli–Arab conﬂict during the 1987 uprising by Arabs
in Israel for greater autonomy. She focused on one main issue, the Israeli–Arab
conﬂict (the Intifada), and three main attributes—intensity, complexity, and solvability.
She found that audiences seemed to learn about these aspects of the issue
approximately the way television presented them. Her conclusion is that “one may
not need media exposure to learn of the biggest issues, but one does need media
exposure if one is to understand the ways in which the mass media frame, and the
public learns, about issues” (First, 1997, p. 50).
Italy
Andreina Mandelli has studied the agenda-setting inﬂuence of media coverage on
short-term changes in political values by drawing on survey data and content analyses
conducted during a major scandal (Tangentopoli) in Italian politics (Mandelli,
1996; Semetko & Mandelli, 1997). Her main hypothesis predicted that the news media
had an important role in setting not only the public agenda of political issues, but
also the agenda of public values. Her analysis found that media emphasis and framing
had an important role not only in changing the Italian public’s electoral opinions,
through ﬁrst- and second-level agenda setting, but also in bringing about electoral
dealignment in the country following the 1992 government corruption scandal. Her
study raises the question of whether political values can be considered “attributes”
of a political issue. If not, then perhaps values can be conceptualized as objects in
the same way that issues can.
Taiwan
A second-level agenda-setting study in Taiwan, by King (1997), examined the inﬂuence
of coverage by three major newspapers on voters’ images of the three
candidates for mayor of Taipei in 1994. His agenda of attributes included 12 categories
representing a variety of personal and political attributes. King found that
candidate attributes emphasized by the press became salient features of the images
of the candidates held by voters, at least for the substantive dimension of images
(political ability, experience, leadership, and political style), if not the affective
dimension (favorable or unfavorable ratings of each attribute). For the affective
dimension of images, voters’ characteristics (such as age, partisan identiﬁcation,
education, and ethnicity) were stronger predictors of evaluations than media exposure.
In other words, media inﬂuence was greater on the salience of perceived
attributes of candidates than on how these attributes were evaluated, in line with
many other studies that have found greater cognitive than affective inﬂuence from
news media exposure and attention (Weaver, 1996).
10. AGENDA-SETTING RESEARCH 261
Spain
Both levels of agenda setting also were examined in Spain during the 1995
elections for provincial parliaments and mayors of larger cities (Lopez-Escobar,
Llamas, McCombs, & Lennon, 1998; McCombs, Llamas, Lopez-Escobar, & Rey, 1997).
The traditional, ﬁrst-level hypothesis asserted that the pattern of news coverage
of issues affecting the city of Pamplona would be reﬂected in the public agenda
of issues, and examination of the correlations between agendas of six local issues
revealed signiﬁcant relationships. The correlation of the public agenda with Diario
de Navarra was +0.73; with Diario de Noticias, +0.63; and with local television
news, +0.56.
At the second level, as in the Taiwan study by King, data on the candidates’
images in the voter survey and in the content analysis were organized along two
dimensions—(1) substantive, which included candidates’ ideology and issue positions,
qualiﬁcations and experience, and personal characteristics and personality;
and (2) affective, where candidates were described in positive, negative, or neutral
terms. Taking Lippmann’s idea of the pictures in our heads almost literally for the
substantive dimension, the analyses compared the salience of 15 elements (5 parties
× 3 attributes) in the media coverage with the public’s collective picture of the
candidates. This complex matching of media salience with public salience across
15 elements was a tough test of second-level agenda setting, and the evidence was
mixed.
For the parliamentary candidates, the match between the agenda of the newspapers
and the agenda of attributes held by the public was +0.57 for one paper and
+0.27 for the other. For the mayoral candidates, there was little correspondence
between the two agendas. But for television news, which paid more attention to
the mayoral election, there was a correlation of +0.41 for the mayoral candidate
image agendas, but little association with the public’s images of the parliamentary
candidates. A similar pattern was found for the affective dimension of candidate
images, with the match between the newspaper and public agendas stronger for
parliamentary candidates than for mayoral candidates (+0.66 and +0.86, compared
to +0.34 and +0.44) and the match between the TV agenda and the public agenda
stronger for the mayoral candidates (+0.59) than for the parliamentary candidates
(+0.18).
Another study in Spain in 1996 examined the inﬂuence of the major news
and advertising media on the images of the three candidates for prime minister
(McCombs, Lopez-Escobar, & Llamas, 2000). In this election, the conservative Popular
Party successfully challenged Spain’s 12-year incumbent Socialist prime minister,
and a third major candidate represented a coalition of far-left parties. In line with
the earlier 1995 study in Pamplona, the image attributes of the candidates were analyzed
along both substantive and affective dimensions. But unlike 1995, where
the local candidates for each ofﬁce were aggregated, the 1996 study examined the
second-level agenda-setting process separately for each of the three major candidates.
In a particularly demanding test of agenda-setting effects, this study also
combined the substantive and affective dimensions into a single 15-cell descriptive
matrix (5 substantive categories × 3 affective categories).
The correlations between the voters’ attribute agendas and a local newspaper
were +0.87, +0.82, and +0.60. For El Pais, a national newspaper, the correlations
were +0.84, +0.83, and +0.86 for the three candidates. The median correlation for all
six comparisons between the voters and two local newspapers (3 candidates × 2
262 WEAVER, McCOMBS, SHAW
newspapers) was +0.70. For the six comparisons with two national newspapers
the median correlation was +0.81. For the two national TV news services it
was +0.52. For three comparisons with the political ads on television, the median
was +0.44. Taken together, these correlations, especially those for the newspapers,
offer signiﬁcant support for second-level agenda setting of attributes of candidates.
Germany
In an extensive content analysis and survey study of the 1990 German national
election, Schoenbach and Semetko (1992) found evidence that the framing of an
issue, in addition to frequency of coverage, can inﬂuence the overall salience of
the issue—in other words, that second-level agenda setting can inﬂuence ﬁrstlevel.
Looking at the salience of two major issues in this election (problems in the
former East Germany and the environment), the authors found that interest in and
exposure to television news were associated with increased salience of these issues,
but for the Bild, the national tabloid newspaper, exposure was correlated negatively
with later salience of former East German problems, even though coverage of this
issue increased in the weeks leading up to the survey.
Schoenbach and Semetko (1992) explain this by the actual tone of the coverage—
the affective dimension of second-level agenda setting. During the early period of
the campaign almost all Bild stories on developments in the former GDR (East
Germany) were laced with very optimistic claims and predictions, thus diminishing
the importance of the problems in the former GDR in the eyes of the readers.
The authors conclude that whereas most agenda-setting studies focus only on the
amount and prominence of issue coverage, their study suggests that the tone of
the coverage is also an important factor. If one conceives of “tone” as the increased
salience of certain attributes or aspects (positive in this case) of an issue, then this
is a case of second-level agenda setting inﬂuencing ﬁrst-level.
United States
Another case of this relationship, but in the opposite direction, was discovered in
Texas from 1992 to 1994 by Ghanem (1996, 1997). During that time, the percentage
of respondents to the Texas Poll who named crime as the most important problem
facing the country went from 2% to more than one third, an unusually high level
for any poll asking about the most important problem (MIP). Ironically, during that
same time period when public concern over crime rose to such high levels, crime
statistics indicated that the rate of crime was actually declining. Crime coverage in
the news was a likely source of rising public concern, and comparisons found that
the pattern of crime coverage in Texas newspapers was reﬂected in subsequent
public concern. Across 2.5 years the match between the pattern of crime coverage
and the trend in public concern was +0.70 (Ghanem, 1996; Ghanem & Evatt, 1995).
More interesting than this, however, was the match between the frequency of
crime stories in the newspaper that framed crime as a threat to the average person
and the overall salience of the crime issue (+0.78), and likewise for those stories
where the crime occurred locally or in the state of Texas (+0.73). Whereas stories
of distant gang ﬁghts and murder in New York City were not especially worrisome to
Texans, stories about local crime, robberies of ordinary persons in broad daylight,
and random shootings were of high concern to them—a clear example of framing
10. AGENDA-SETTING RESEARCH 263
(second-level agenda setting) increasing the overall salience of crime (ﬁrst-level
agenda setting).
FRAMING
Tankard, Hendrickson, Silberman, Bliss, and Ghanem (1991, p. 3) have described a
media frame as “the central organizing idea for news content that supplies a context
and suggests what the issue is through the use of selection, emphasis, exclusion
and elaboration.” Entman (1993) argues that “to frame is to select some aspects of a
perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way
as to promote a particular problem deﬁnition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation
and/or treatment recommendation for the item described” (p. 52, original italics).
McCombs (1997) has suggested that in the language of the second level of agenda
setting, “framing is the selection of a restricted number of thematically related
attributes for inclusion on the media agenda when a particular object is discussed”
(p. 6). He argues that there are many other agendas of attributes besides aspects
of issues and traits of political candidates, and a good theoretical map is needed to
bring some order to the vastly different kinds of frames discussed in various studies.
This he sees as a major challenge and opportunity for agenda-setting theory in its
exploration of the second level.
Not all scholars agree that second-level agenda setting is equivalent to framing,
at least not to more abstract, or macro-level, framing. Gamson (1992) has conceived
of framing in terms of a “signature matrix” that includes various condensing symbols
(catch phrases, taglines, exemplars, metaphors, depictions, visual images)
and reasoning devices (causes and consequences, appeals to principles or moral
claims). Some would argue that second-level agenda setting is more similar to the
ﬁrst part of this matrix than to the second, because it is easier to think of condensing
symbols as attributes of a given object but more difﬁcult to think of reasoning
devices as attributes.
Of course, it depends on how framing is deﬁned. A study, by de Vreese, Peter, and
Semetko (2001), concerns the framing in news about the introduction of the Euro
monetary unit. This study deﬁnes frames in terms of amount of conﬂict over the
introduction of the Euro and the economic consequences of adopting it in various
countries. Amount of conﬂict seems to ﬁt the dictionary deﬁnition of an attribute
(an inherent characteristic or quality), whereas economic consequences seem to
go beyond what would usually be considered an attribute, although they could be
considered a related aspect of the issue.
Another study, by Callaghan and Schnell (2001), deals with how the news media
framed elite policy discourse concerning the issue of gun control. These scholars
deﬁned frames as stated or implied arguments. Examples included “Guns deter
crime,” “Guns don’t kill, people do,” and “There is a constitutional right to bear
arms.” These arguments, or frames, seem to go beyond the commonly held deﬁnition
of attribute because they are more than just characteristics or qualities of
the issue. They could be considered aspects of presentation of the issue, however,
if not attributes of the issue itself.
In addition to debates over what constitutes an attribute, Scheufele (2000) argues
that the theoretical premises of agenda setting and framing are different—
that agenda setting (and priming) relies on the theory of attitude accessibility
by increasing the salience of issues and thus the ease with which they can be
264 WEAVER, McCOMBS, SHAW
retrieved from memory when making political judgments, whereas framing is based
on prospect theory that assumes that subtle changes in the description of a situation
invoke interpretive schemas that inﬂuence the interpretation of incoming information
rather than making certain aspects of the issue more salient. As Scheufele
(2000) notes, however, “What remains unanswered is the question of whether the
framing of an issue—regardless of its perceived salience—might have a signiﬁcant
effect on evaluations of political actors that goes above and beyond priming”
(p. 313). He recommends future empirical research on this subject, and we concur
that such research is needed.
Nevertheless, there are similarities between second-level agenda setting and
framing, even if they are not identical processes. Both are more concerned with
how issues or other objects (people, groups, organizations, countries, etc.) are depicted
in the media than with which issues or objects are most (or least) frequently
covered. Both focus on the most salient or prominent aspects or themes or descriptions
of the objects of interest. Both are concerned with ways of thinking rather
than objects of thinking and with the details of the pictures in our heads rather
than the broader subjects.
One primary difference between the two approaches, in addition to those mentioned
above, is that second-level agenda-setting research has been more concerned
with the relationship between media and audience ways of thinking than
has framing research, which has concentrated on how the media cover and present
various subjects.
PRIMING
As mentioned earlier, a number of scholars have become interested in the effects
of media agenda setting on public opinion and government policy. The focus on
the consequences of agenda setting for public opinion (often labeled “priming”)
can be traced back at least to Weaver et al. (1975, p. 471), who speculated, in their
study of the effects of Watergate news coverage, that the media may suggest which
issues to use in evaluating political actors but who did not use the term “priming”
to describe this process.
Their speculation was supported a decade later when Iyengar and Kinder (1987),
in controlled ﬁeld experiments, linked television agenda-setting effects to evaluations
of the U.S. president in a demonstration of what some cognitive psychologists
have called “priming”—making certain issues or attributes more salient and more
likely to be accessed in forming opinions. Weaver (1991) also found that increased
concern over the federal budget deﬁcit was linked to increased knowledge of the
possible causes and solutions of this problem, stronger and more polarized opinions
about it, and more likelihood of engaging in some form of political behavior
regarding the issue, even after controlling for various demographic and media use
measures. As Willnat (1997, p. 53) points out, the theoretical explanations for these
correlations, especially between agenda setting and behavior, have not been well
developed, but the alliance of priming and agenda setting has strengthened the
theoretical base of agenda-setting effects by providing “a better understanding of
how the mass media not only tell us ‘what to think about’ but also ‘what to think’
(Cohen 1963).”
There have been at least two information-processing models developed to explain
priming. One, by Higgins and King (1981), suggests that the energy or action
10. AGENDA-SETTING RESEARCH 265
potential of a mental category is increased whenever the category is activated by
exposure to related concepts or ideas. Another, by Wyer and Srull (1986, 1989),
assumes information is stored so that the more recently acquired and used information
is placed back at the top of the “storage bin,” making it more accessible in
memory. Regardless of the actual process, the central idea of priming is that people
routinely draw on information that is most salient, or accessible, when making a
judgment or expressing an opinion. Because agenda-setting is concerned mainly
with the salience of issues and attributes, there is an obvious link with priming.
Iyengar and Simon (1993) argue that priming is really an extension of agenda-setting
in affecting the criteria by which political leaders are judged.
As Willnat (1997) notes, the strongest empirical support for media priming comes
from experimental studies, but there have been some demonstrations of this effect
under more natural conditions. Krosnick and Kinder (1990), for example, examined
the priming effect of media coverage of the Iran–Contra scandal on perceptions of
President Reagan in October 1986 using survey data from the 1986 National Election
Study (NES), which was being conducted at the time. They compared two groups of
respondents—one interviewed before the Attorney General announced that funds
obtained by the U.S. government from the secret sale of weapons to Iran had been
improperly diverted to the Contras (a group attempting to overthrow the Sandinista
government in Nicaragua) and the other interviewed after this revelation. The ﬁndings
from the NES survey indicated that respondents in the postdisclosure group
gave foreign policy more weight in their evaluations of President Reagan’s overall
performance than the predisclosure group did.
A later study, by Iyengar and Simon (1993), used NES surveys from 1988, 1990,
and 1991 to assess the effect of public beliefs about foreign policy on evaluations of
Presidents George Bush and Ronald Reagan. In 1990 and 1991, the effect of foreign
policy performance was more important than economic performance in respondents’
assessments of President Bush, but the reverse was true in 1988 for President
Reagan. This change in evaluation standards was attributed to news coverage
of U.S. foreign policy.
In a very different political setting, Willnat and Zhu (1996) found that public
opinion about Hong Kong’s last British governor was strongly inﬂuenced by news
coverage of his proposals to broaden public participation in the election of the
Legislative Council. Using 52 consecutive weekly polls from the fall of 1992 when
the governor made his initial policy speech, Willnat and Zhu found that public
opinion about his overall performance was signiﬁcantly primed by the pattern of
news coverage in Hong Kong’s three leading newspapers.
Wanta and Chang (1999), in a survey of Oregon residents during the early months
of the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, found that frequent newspaper readers were
more likely to describe President Clinton in terms of public issues than in terms
of the scandal, and these readers were more likely to have positive opinions about
Clinton’s overall job performance. Among those for whom involvement in the scandal
was the most salient attribute, opinions about President Clinton were more
negative, suggesting a second-level agenda-setting priming effect.
Holian (2000), in an analysis of the 1981–1996 time period, from the ﬁrst term
of President Reagan through the ﬁrst term of President Clinton, found support for
his hypothesis that when the president successfully sets the national issue agenda,
his public approval level increases, independent of economic factors. He analyzed
the relationship over time among the agendas of The New York Times, The Public
Papers of the President, and presidential approval ratings, controlling for economic
266 WEAVER, McCOMBS, SHAW
measures. He found that the president can focus public attention on issues on
which his party is credible but tends to follow media reporting on issues on which
the opposition party holds the advantage.
Not all scholars agree that priming is a consequence of agenda setting, however.
Price and Tewksbury (1995) have argued that both agenda setting and priming rely
on the same cognitive process (the increased accessibility of mental constructs in
long-term memory due to media exposure) and that “agenda setting—commonly
thought to be a kind of basic media effect upon which priming depends—is
actually but one particular variant of priming, which is itself a far more general
effect” (pp. 7–8). Scheufele (2000) also argues that both agenda setting and priming
are based on the assumption of attitude accessibility and a memory-based model of
information processing, but he draws a distinction between salience (or accessibility)
and perceived importance of issues, even though most agenda-setting studies
have treated these concepts as identical. Unlike Price and Tewksbury, Scheufele
has not argued that agenda setting is a variant of priming.
It seems to us that increased salience of issues (and attributes of issues) is likely
to precede opinion formation and judgment (or at least changes in opinions and
judgments) and, therefore, that agenda setting is not “one particular variant of
priming” but, rather, a separate process that should be distinguished from opinion
formation. There seems to be much practical and theoretical value to making a
distinction between increased salience of an issue (usually measured as perceived
importance) and the opinions that one has regarding the issue.
Whether there is also practical and theoretical value in distinguishing between
salience and perceived importance is not as clear to us at this time. This may
turn out to be a distinction without a real difference, at least as far as agendasetting
and priming are concerned. Even Scheufele (2000) seems to use these terms
synonymously when he writes that mass media “have the power to increase levels
of importance assigned to issues by audience members. They increase the salience
of issues or the ease with which these considerations can be retrieved from memory
if individuals have to make political judgments about political actors” (p. 309). The
evidence that Scheufele (1999) cites for a distinction between perceived importance
and salience (accessibility), from Nelson, Clawson, and Oxley (1997), pertains only
to framing effects, not to agenda-setting or priming. Clearly more research is needed
to test whether this distinction is important for these other media effects.
BEHAVIOR
There is also evidence that media agenda-setting can affect behavior. Extensive
news coverage of crime and violence, including a murder and rapes, on the University
of Pennsylvania campus contributed to a signiﬁcant drop in applications by
potential ﬁrst-year students, predominantly women, according to the university’s
dean of admissions (Philadelphia Inquirer, 1996). This decline occurred when other
comparable universities experienced an increase in applications during the same
period.
News about airplane crashes and skyjackings offers another example of a link
between media agendas and risk avoidance behavior (McCombs & Shaw, 1974).
This study predicted that news about crashes in which 10 or more persons died
or news about skyjackers’ control of an airborne plane would increase the salience
of the dangers of ﬂying. A comparison of high-salience weeks (those where there
10. AGENDA-SETTING RESEARCH 267
were fatal crashes or skyjackings) with low-salience weeks for 5 years revealed that
ticket sales dipped in high-salience weeks and that ﬂight insurance sales increased.
Roberts (1992) found further evidence of a link between agenda setting and
behavior in a study of the 1990 election for governor of Texas. Issue salience was a
signiﬁcant predictor of actual votes in this election, with 70% of the respondents’
actual reported votes for governor correctly predicted by the level of issue concern
over time, controlling for demographics and media reliance and attention.
In one of the most dramatic revelations of the behavioral inﬂuence of media news
emphasis, Blood and Phillips (1997) carried out a time-series analysis of New York
Times headlines from June 1980 to December 1993 and found that rising numbers of
unfavorable economic headlines had an adverse effect on subsequent leading economic
indicators (average weekly hours for manufacturing, average weekly initial
claims for unemployment, new orders of consumer goods and materials, vendor
performance, contracts and orders for plant and equipment, building permits, etc.)
rather than vice versa. Blood and Phillips (1997) wrote that their ﬁndings “suggest
that the amount and tone of economic news exerted a powerful inﬂuence on the
economic environment and further, that the economic news agenda was generally
not being set by prevailing economic conditions” (p. 107).
In a study exploring cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral consequences of
agenda setting, Weaver (1991) found that public concern about a major issue of
the late 1980s (the U.S. federal budget deﬁcit) was linked with actual behavior,
such as writing a letter, attending a meeting, voting, or signing a petition, even after
controlling for various demographic and media use measures.
POLICY
Another possible consequence of agenda setting is its impact on public policy,
which has generally been studied more often by political scientists than by communication
scholars. As Dearing and Rogers (1986) note, policy agenda setting
has been of somewhat less interest to communication scholars than has media or
public agenda setting because policy agenda setting involves collective political
behavior as well as communication behavior and is more complex. Nevertheless,
some communication scholars have explored the impact of media agenda setting
on policy agendas.
David Pritchard (1986), for example, found that prosecutors in Milwaukee were
more likely to plea bargain homicide cases that did not receive much newspaper
coverage compared with those that got prominent coverage and thus were
higher on the newspaper agenda. Paul Janensch (1982), while executive editor of
The Louisville (Kentucky) Courier-Journal and Times, reviewed legislation passed
by the Kentucky General Assembly in its 1982 session and concluded that even
though major newspaper coverage does not guarantee legislative action, “I also
think nursing-home reform would have been plowed under had it not been for
The Courier-Journal’s exposure of deplorable conditions in some of the homes.”
Janensch noted that even though the newspaper’s investigative series seemed to
affect legislation regarding nursing homes, auto titles, and county jails, major coverage
of Louisville’s dirty air and lack of vehicle emission standards did not have
any impact on state government policies.
David Protess and his colleagues at Northwestern University (1991) studied the
impact of several investigative journalism reports on policy makers’ perceptions
268 WEAVER, McCOMBS, SHAW
of the importance of various problems and found that each of the media investigations
they studied inﬂuenced public policy making in various ways. The reports
on rape made legislative changes an immediate priority and stimulated community
hearings. The police brutality TV broadcasts produced fundamental revisions
of regulations regarding police misconduct. The dialysis series led to a state and
federal debate over the regulation of clinics and the reuse of dialyzers. On the
other hand, the series on problems of toxic waste disposal at the University of
Chicago did not have much impact on the agenda of policy makers but did result
in swift actions being taken by the University to remedy the problem. The
home health care investigation prompted the U.S. Senate to hold immediate hearings
that raised signiﬁcant questions, but no bills were introduced to address the
problem.
In short, these studies suggest that media agendas can have substantial impact
on the priorities and behavior of government policy makers, especially if an issue
is nonrecurring and unambiguous, but they also suggest that the inﬂuence is
sometimes from policy maker to media, rather than vice versa, and that journalists
and policy makers often cooperate with each other to raise the salience of various
issues and problems without ﬁrst involving public opinion. As Protess et al. (1991)
put it, “We ﬁnd that policy-making agendas are catalyzed by the formal transactions
between journalists and ofﬁcials more than by the direct inﬂuence of the public or
interest groups” (p. 246).
A more recent time-series analysis of the effects of news coverage on policy attention
and actions by Itzhak Yanovitsky (2001) found that the increased volume of
drunk driving-related policy actions (annual amount of federal spending for curbing
drunk driving and adoption of anti-drunk driving laws by all states and the
District of Columbia) was largely driven by increased attention to the problem by
The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press (AP) between
1981 and 1984. From 1985 onward, media attention waned, but policy actions continued
to increase but at a decreasing rate. Yanovitsky (2001, p. 25) concluded that
“intensive periods of media attention to issues are instrumental in attracting policy
attention to problems that are low on policy-makers’ agenda (cf. Baumgartner
& Jones, 1993) and creating a sense of urgency among policy-makers to generate
immediate, short-term solutions to public problems.”
But he also found that as media attention declined, policy preferences gradually
shifted from ad hoc solutions to long-term solutions such as investments in education
and prevention programs. And he suggested that enthusiastic, one-sided treatment
of the issue resulted in rapid policy change, especially when policy makers
themselves were already favorably disposed to the media framing of the problem
and the solutions advocated in the media.
INFLUENCES ON THE MEDIA AGENDA
Another area of agenda-setting research that seems to be gaining in popularity is
the study of inﬂuences on news media agendas, a type of research Dearing and
Rogers (1996) have termed media agenda setting and others have called “agenda
building” (Gilberg et al., 1980; Lang & Lang, 1981; Weaver & Elliott, 1985). This type
of research includes studies of various kinds of inﬂuences on media agendas, such
as news sources, public relations efforts, and other media. It also calls into question
the active agenda-setting role of the media assumed by many public agenda-setting
10. AGENDA-SETTING RESEARCH 269
studies. If the media are merely passing on agendas set by other inﬂuential actors
and institutions in society, is it accurate to think of the media as the agenda setters?
One model for thinking about the relationship between other agendas and the
mass media agenda is an onion. The concentric layers of the onion can represent
the numerous inﬂuences on the media agenda (McCombs, in press). This metaphor
also illustrates the sequential nature of this process, with the inﬂuence of an outer
layer being, in turn, affected by layers closer to the core of the onion. Pamela
Shoemaker and Stephen Reese (1996), in their book, Mediating the Message, have
proposed ﬁve layers of the onion that range from the prevailing societal ideology
to the psychology of the individual journalist. Some of the intermediate layers
representing the inﬂuence of news organizations and professional norms (media
routines) of journalism constitute the sociology of news research literature studied
by Warren Breed (1955b), Gaye Tuchman (1976), and Herbert Gans (1980), among
others.
For this chapter, we consider only three major inﬂuences on the media agenda:
(1) inﬂuential news sources such as the U.S. president, routine public relations
activities, and political campaigns; (2) other media (intermedia agenda setting);
and (3) the social norms and traditions of journalism.
News Sources—Presidents and PR
The single most inﬂuential news source in the United States is the president. Virtually
everything that a president does is considered newsworthy. One measure of
the president’s agenda is his annual State of the Union address. Required by the U.S.
Constitution, for more than a century this yearly report was a written document
submitted to Congress. But in the late 20th century the annual address became a
major media event broadcast live nationally by the television networks as it was
delivered to a joint evening session of the House of Representatives and the Senate.
The format of this address in recent times—a listing of issues that the president
wants the Congress to address—makes it a convenient measure of the president’s
priorities, or agenda. This ranking of issues can be compared with the media agenda
before and after the address to get a sense of whether the president is setting
the media agenda, or responding to it, or both. A comparison of President Jimmy
Carter’s 1978 State of the Union address with the agendas of the The New York Times,
The Washington Post, and the three national TV networks by Gilberg et al. (1980)
found no signiﬁcant impact of this address on the subsequent month’s coverage of
his eight priority issues. But there was evidence that the media coverage of these
issues during the month prior to the address had inﬂuenced President Carter’s
agenda.
Another study of a very different president, Richard Nixon, by McCombs, Gilbert,
and Eyal (1982), found that the agenda of 15 issues in Nixon’s 1970 State of the Union
address did predict the subsequent month’s news coverage in The New York Times,
The Washington Post, and two of the three national TV networks. There was no
evidence that the prior media agenda inﬂuenced Nixon’s agenda. Additional replications
based on President Reagan’s 1982 and 1985 State of the Union addresses
by Wayne Wanta and colleagues (Wanta, Stephenson, Turk, & McCombs, 1989)
yielded mixed evidence about the relationship between the news media agenda
and the president’s agenda, suggesting that the U.S. president is sometimes able to
270 WEAVER, McCOMBS, SHAW
inﬂuence the subsequent media agenda and sometimes follows earlier media and
public agendas.
In a time-series analysis of The New York Times and The Public Papers of the
President from 1981 to 1996, spanning the ﬁrst and second Reagan terms, the single
term of George Bush, and the ﬁrst term of Bill Clinton, Holian (2000) found that in
most instances, Republican presidents set the media agenda on Republican issues
such as taxing and spending, government regulation, and crime punishment. But
Republican presidents Reagan and Bush tended to follow the media emphasis on
the Democratic issues of Social Security/Medicare, education, and gender equality.
In other words, Reagan and Bush tended to discuss these traditionally Democratic
issues publicly when others, either the media or their political opponents, placed
them on the media agenda. Democrat president Clinton, on the other hand, inﬂuenced
newspaper coverage of issues related to Social Security and Medicare.
Thus, there is evidence from Holian’s study that the U.S. president is more likely to
inﬂuence the media agenda for issues traditionally “owned” by his political party.
Another important news source inﬂuence on the media agenda is the corps of
public information ofﬁcers and other public relations practitioners. They subsidize
the efforts of news organizations to cover the news by providing substantial
amounts of information, frequently in the form of press or video releases. In one
of the earlier studies of this process, Leon Sigal (1973) found that nearly half of
the front-page news stories in The New York Times and The Washington Post from
1949 to 1969 were based on press releases, press conferences, and other information
subsidies. Considering that both newspapers are major organizations with
large staffs and impressive resources, their substantial reliance on public relations
sources underscores the key role that information subsidies play in the formation
of all media agendas.
The reporting of public health issues, such as AIDS, also reﬂects information
subsidies provided by scientists and other expert news sources. Everett Rogers
and his colleagues (Rogers, Dearing, & Chang, 1991) studied the news coverage
of AIDS in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and
the three TV network evening newscasts from June 1981 through December 1988.
They found different stages of coverage, with the second stage from 1983 to 1985
depending mainly on scientiﬁc sources. Of the 606 news stories about AIDS in
this period, 40% were based on scientiﬁc sources. In later periods, prominent personalities
and government sources, as well as polls, were more inﬂuential news
sources.
At the state level, Judy Turk (1986) found that news coverage of six state government
agencies in Louisiana’s major daily newspapers also was based substantially
on information provided by those agencies’ public information ofﬁcers. Slightly
more than half of the information subsidies provided by these ofﬁcers, mostly written
news releases but sometimes personal conversations, appeared in subsequent
news stories. During an 8-week period the correlation between the agenda of the of
the information ofﬁcers and the agenda of the news stories using their information
was +0.84; for all news stories on those government agencies it was +0.57. Interviews
probing the reasons for this inﬂuence of information subsidies revealed the
central role of journalistic norms and traditions, especially perceptions of news-
worthiness.
At the local (city) level, David Weaver and Swanzy Elliott (1985) analyzed a year’s
worth of city council minutes and coverage of the council in the local newspaper.
They found a strong overall correlation (+0.84) between the agenda of the council
10. AGENDA-SETTING RESEARCH 271
and that of the local newspaper, suggesting that the local paper closely reﬂected
the priorities of the city council, although for some issues the newspaper ranking of
issues deviated considerably from the council ranking, especially those concerning
arts and entertainment, utilities, animal protection, and awards. When asked about
these discrepancies, the reporter covering the council for that year said that he
consciously “boiled down” the subjects of education, animal protection, honors
and awards, and historical events because they were not controversial and did not
lend themselves to a good story. As with Judy Turk’s study in Louisiana, this local
study reinforces the importance of journalistic norms and traditions, especially
ideas about newsworthiness, in shaping the media agenda.
News Sources—Campaigns
Political campaigns are also an important inﬂuence on media agendas, at least
in countries that hold regular elections. Even though the ultimate goal is to win
elections, increasingly campaigns also try to control the media agenda in hopes of
inﬂuencing the public agenda (Jamieson & Campbell 1992). Part of the media agenda
is under the direct control of political campaigns. Huge amounts of money are
spent on political advertising, especially on television ads, to convey candidates’
agendas and images, but campaigns also exert major efforts to inﬂuence news
media agendas because these agendas are less obviously self-serving and thought
to be more credible to the public than are political ads.
A comparative analysis of the 1983 British general election and the 1984 U.S. presidential
election found that politicians in Britain had considerably more inﬂuence
on the news agenda than their counterparts in the United States (Semetko et al.,
1991). U.S. journalists had considerably more discretion to shape the campaign
news agenda than did British journalists. Extensive comparisons of the Conservative,
Labor, and Alliance parties’ agendas of 16 subjects with coverage of those
subjects by the BBC, ITV, and ﬁve newspapers (both broadsheets and tabloids)
found a median correlation of +0.62 (with a range of +0.37 to +0.84), compared to
a median correlation of +0.22 (with a range of +0.03 to +0.37) in the U.S. comparisons
of Democrat and Republican agendas of 11 subjects with two newspapers’
and the three national TV networks’ agendas.
This striking difference between the inﬂuence of the U.S. and that of the British
campaigns on the media agendas was due, in large part, to signiﬁcant cultural differences
in American and British journalists’ orientations toward politicians and election
campaigns. American election news coverage weighed election news against
the newsworthiness of all other stories of the day, whereas the British journalists
considered election campaigns as inherently important and deserving of coverage.
British journalists were also more ready to use party-initiated material, whereas U.S.
journalists were concerned that the political campaigns not be allowed to dictate
the media agenda and that candidates not be given any “free publicity ride.”
A study of agenda setting in the 1992 U.S. presidential election by Russell Dalton
and his colleagues (Dalton, Beck, Huckfeldt, & Koetzle, 1998) found high correlations
among candidate platform, media-initiated, and public agendas, but a subsequent
analysis using partial correlations by McCombs (in press) showed that when
the media agenda is viewed as intervening between the candidate and the public
agendas, the original correlation of +0.78 drops to +0.33, suggesting that there is
272 WEAVER, McCOMBS, SHAW
still considerable discretion on the part of the media to set the public agenda in a
presidential election.
A comparison of television news coverage of the New Hampshire presidential
primary in 1996 with the topics of the candidates’ speeches during this ﬁrst primary
election found only a moderate degree of correlation (+0.40) between the
two, supporting the earlier ﬁnding from 1984 that U.S. journalists are reluctant to
let political candidates set the media agenda (Lichter & Smith, 1996). While the
overwhelming majority of the candidates’ speeches included comments on public
issues, less than a third of the TV news reports even mentioned issues.
A more recent comparison of the agendas of the summer 2000 national convention
acceptance speeches of U.S. presidential candidates Al Gore and George
W. Bush with the agendas of the coverage of these speeches in ﬁve newspapers
found an average correlation of +0.48 for Bush and +0.31 for Gore, suggesting that
even in the reporting of major candidate speeches, the U.S. newspaper journalists
were not willing to let the candidates dictate the news agenda (Mentzer, 2001). On
the other hand, the consistency of the agendas of the speech coverage of the ﬁve
newspapers (USA Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Boston Globe,
and Los Angeles Times) was considerably higher, with an average correlation of
0.56 for Gore’s speech and 0.68 for Bush’s, suggesting that journalistic views of
newsworthiness were an important inﬂuence on the newspaper story agendas.
At the state level in the United States, Marilyn Roberts and Maxwell McCombs
(1994) found that in the 1990 Texas gubernatorial election, the candidates’ advertising
agenda exerted signiﬁcant inﬂuence on the campaign agendas of the local
newspaper and the local television stations even after other factors were taken
into account. This analysis also found that the newspaper agenda inﬂuenced the
television news agenda, rather than vice versa.
Intermedia Agenda Setting
Another part of the answer to the question, “Who sets the media’s agenda?” can be
found by looking over time at how the changes in one medium’s agenda precede or
follow changes in another’s. In the U.S. setting, for example, there is considerable
anecdotal and some empirical evidence about the agenda-setting inﬂuence of The
New York Times on other news media (Danielian & Reese, 1989; McCombs et al.,
1991; Reese & Danielian, 1989), as well as the inﬂuence of wire service news on
the gatekeeping decisions of Ohio newspaper and television wire editors (Whitney
& Becker, 1982). One of the ﬁrst scholars to analyze this process was sociologist
Warren Breed (1955a), who wrote about newspaper opinion leaders and the process
of standardization of newspaper content.
In a book about the reporting of the 1972 U.S. presidential election, Timothy
Crouse (1973) made the phrase “pack journalism” famous when he wrote about
how Johnny Apple of The New York Times set the agenda for the other journalists
covering the Iowa caucuses: “He would sit down and write a lead, and they would
go write leads. Then he’d change his lead when more results came in, and they’d
all change theirs accordingly” (p. 85). Although Crouse referred to this as “pack
journalism,” it could also be thought of as a case of intermedia agenda setting.
A more recent example of large-scale intermedia agenda setting comes from
a study of the reporting of the issue of global warming from 1985 to 1992 by
Craig Trumbo (1995). He found that as the news coverage of this issue steadily
10. AGENDA-SETTING RESEARCH 273
accelerated toward its peak in 1989, ﬁve major newspapers—including The New
York Times, The Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal—signiﬁcantly inﬂuenced
the agenda of the three national television networks. A signiﬁcant intermedia
agenda-setting role also was played by science publications regularly scanned by
media science writers and editors.
The major wire services, such as the Associated Press, also have an important
intermedia agenda-setting inﬂuence. A study of how 24 Iowa daily newspapers used
the AP wire found that even though each newspaper used only a small number of
the available wire stories, the patterns of coverage reﬂected essentially the same
proportion for each category of news as the total AP ﬁle (Gold & Simmons, 1965).
Likewise, a reanalysis of one of the early studies of gatekeeping (White, 1950) by
a wire service editor called “Mr. Gates” found a substantial correlation (+0.64) between
the combined agenda of the wire services he used and Mr. Gates’s selections
for his newspaper (McCombs & Shaw, 1976). A reanalysis of a follow-up study of
Mr. Gates 17 years later, when he used only a single wire service (Snider, 1967),
found a correlation of +0.80 between the wire agenda and his news agenda.
An experimental study by Charles Whitney and Lee Becker (1982) also found a
substantial agenda-setting inﬂuence of wire service news on experienced newspaper
and television wire editors, with a correlation of +0.62 between the proportions
of news stories in a large wire service ﬁle and the smaller sample selected by the
editors. But in a control condition, where there were an equal number of stories in
each news category, there was no common pattern of selection, either in comparison
with the wire service or among the editors themselves.
Intermedia agenda setting is not limited to the United States. Using data from
the 1995 election study in Navarra discussed earlier, Esteban Lopez-Escobar and
his colleagues (Lopez-Escobar, Llamas, McCombs, & Lennon, 1998) also examined
patterns of intermedia inﬂuence among the two local Pamplona newspapers and
Telenavarra, the regional newscast produced by the national public television service.
They found correlations of +0.66 and +0.70 between the newspapers and the
subsequent television news agenda. Political ads were examined in the newspapers
and on television. The researchers found strong evidence (+0.99) for the inﬂuence
of newspaper advertising on television news descriptions of the candidates, in
keeping with Roberts and McCombs’s (1994) U.S. ﬁnding that campaign advertising
agendas can inﬂuence news coverage. But the Spanish study also found evidence
that the descriptions of the candidates in TV advertising shifted in response to
TV news descriptions (+0.78).
And, ﬁnally, in Germany, Mathes and Pfetsch (1991) studied the role of the alternative
press in the agenda-building process and found that some issues spilled
over from the alternative press into the established newspapers in “a multistep
ﬂow of communication within the media system” (p. 51). The liberal newspaper,
Die Zeit, was the ﬁrst established newspaper to cover a counterissue (boycotting
the 1983 German census, resisting German government plans for a new ID card),
followed by other liberal daily newspapers. Shortly after the liberal papers covered
the issue, the pressure to discuss it became so strong that even the conservative
media were forced to cover it, Mathes and Pfetsch concluded. As they put it, “Thus,
the media agenda was built up in a process similar to a chain reaction. At the end
of the agenda-building process, a counter-culture issue became a general, public
issue” (Mathes & Pfetsch, 1991, p. 53).
The authors also found what could be called a “second-level” agenda-building
effect—that the spillover effect from the alternative to the established media was
274 WEAVER, McCOMBS, SHAW
not limited to the topic or issue of coverage because “the established media on
the left of the political spectrum adopted the frame of reference for presenting the
issues from the alternative media” (Mathes & Pfetsch, 1991, p. 53), although this was
not true for the conservative media. And they found this agenda-building process
also inﬂuencing the policy agenda because the political elites and institutions could
no longer ignore the issues that had received so much coverage in the established
media.
The outcome of this intermedia agenda setting is a highly redundant news
agenda, at least within a single country or culture. Across countries there may
be considerable variation, as Jochen Peter and Claes de Vreese (2003) found in
comparing television news programs and public surveys across ﬁve countries
(Denmark, France, Germany, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom). Some of
these differences are due to different cultures and norms of politics and journalism,
as Barbara Pfetsch (2001) pointed out in a recent comparative analysis of political
communication cultures in Germany and the United States. Her study of political
communicators and journalists in the United States and Germany as key actors in
media agenda setting found more emphasis in the United States on the norms of
objectivity, balanced content, diversity, and conﬂicts of interest and less emphasis
on ethically impeccable behavior, openness, and honesty.
She also found the perceived relationship between political spokespersons
and journalists to be more conﬂictual and less harmonious in the United States
than in Germany, leading to a conclusion that in the U.S. professional journalistic
norms govern interaction between political actors and journalists, whereas in
Germany political norms are more important. These different norms and interactions
can result in quite different political agendas, as the comparative study of
British and U.S. election agendas by Holli Semetko and her colleagues (1991) has
shown.
AGENDA MELDING
One of the newest approaches to agenda-setting research has been called “agenda
melding” by Donald Shaw and his colleagues (Shaw, McCombs, Weaver, & Hamm,
1999). This approach centers on the receivers of media messages—various
publics—and their motivations for adopting agendas and afﬁliating with other persons.
It reverses the traditional arrow from media to public in much the same way
that uses and gratiﬁcations research asks “what people do with media” rather than
“what media do to people” (Blumler & Katz, 1974; Rosengren, Wenner, & Palmgreen,
1985).
Agenda melding argues that there is a strong impulse to afﬁliate with others in
groups as one leaves the original family setting and that one often joins these groups
via other people and various media. This motivation to meld with various groups
is explained by a theory of social dissonance that draws on psychologist Leon
Festinger’s (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance. Thus agenda melding is a theoretical
elaboration of the concept of “need for orientation” (Weaver, 1977) that seeks
to explain why some individuals are more interested in certain issues (and agendas)
than others through a combination of perceived relevance and uncertainty. Agenda
melding offers an explanation for why some persons might ﬁnd some agendas more
relevant than others—a felt need to afﬁliate with certain groups—and predicts that
those who desire to join a group or community, but who have little information
10. AGENDA-SETTING RESEARCH 275
about it, will be the most likely to seek information about its agenda from other
persons or from various media such as newspapers and magazines. An increase in
this information-seeking behavior is predicted to lead, over time, to both level 1
and level 2 agenda setting.
The theoretical foundation of agenda melding (social dissonance) draws upon
several previous approaches. In addition to cognitive dissonance, it builds upon
“disequilibration” (the seeking or avoiding of information that signiﬁcantly alters
views; Chaffee & McDevitt, 1996), Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s (1984) spiral of silence,
and Abraham Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy of needs. Shaw et al. (1999) argue
that individuals seek afﬁliation with groups for many reasons, and those who join
a group match their own priorities to those of the group even if they do not always
agree with the dominant position of the group regarding the various issues.
Whereas agenda-setting research has concentrated, for the most part, on what
people learn from the media, agenda melding incorporates media agenda setting
as part of a larger ongoing social learning process from various media, including
other persons.
The implications of this learning process for community building are not entirely
clear, but it seems likely that new media, especially the Internet, allow people to
join many smaller groups that more exactly ﬁt their interests, which can in turn
lead to the fragmentation of larger groups. The Virtual Community, by Rheingold
(1993), has found that some people are linked in communities that exist only in
space. One pertinent example of such a community could be mass communication
scholars who comprise an “invisible college,” residing all over the globe and only
occasionally meeting in the same geographic place. In the past, media agenda setting
has been found to be an integrating force, with those frequently exposed to
newspapers and television news more likely to agree on a common set of issues
as important than those not frequently exposed, regardless of most demographics
(Lopez-Escobar, Llamas, & McCombs, 1998; Shaw & Martin, 1992). As individuals
are increasingly free to choose their own agendas via the Internet, and as fewer
people pay regular attention to newspapers and TV news, this traditional function
of media agenda setting seems likely to decline.
CONCLUSIONS
This review of agenda-setting studies conducted in Britain, Germany, Israel, Italy,
Japan, Spain, Taiwan, and the United States illustrates not only an expansion of
this research geographically, but also an expansion of scope from ﬁrst-level agenda
setting (what issues the media emphasize and the public cares about) to secondlevel
(how issues and political actors are reported and perceived). A count of the
number of research articles indexed in Communication Abstracts using the concept
of agenda setting shows an increase from 36 in the ﬁrst half of the 1980s to 75 in the
ﬁrst half of the 1990s, with a drop to 54 in the second half of the 1990s. At the same
time, the number of articles mentioning framing increased dramatically, from only
3 in the ﬁrst half of the 1990s to 30 in the second half, suggesting a surge of interest
in this concept.
There is also considerable concern now with priming and other consequences
of agenda setting, as well as how the media agenda at both levels is determined
and why some individuals are more or less interested in adopting various agendas.
276 WEAVER, McCOMBS, SHAW
This chapter has argued for a distinction between second-level agenda setting
and framing, even though there are a number of similarities between the two. It
has also argued that there may be little value in making a distinction between the
salience and the perceived importance of issues in studies of agenda setting and
priming. It has tried to shed some new light on the consequences of agenda setting
for public opinion and behavior, as well as for public policy, and on the factors
that shape media agendas. And it has brieﬂy reviewed the new concept of agenda
melding and the theory of social dissonance as proposed by Donald Shaw and
his colleagues to try to explain why some people are more or less likely to adopt
different agendas.
Some would argue that this expansion of the concept of agenda setting obscures
its original meaning and unnecessarily intrudes into other realms of mass communication
research, such as framing, priming, the construction of meaning, policy
making, gatekeeping, and other approaches. We regard this expansion as a natural
outcome of the elaboration of a theoretical approach over time, which should be
a goal of theory building in any ﬁeld. This does not mean that the agenda-setting
approach should replace other theoretical approaches, but there does seem to be
value in pointing out the areas of overlap between various theoretical perspectives
and moving on to a greater synthesis.
As McCombs (1997) has written,
One of the strengths of agenda-setting theory that has prompted its continuing
growth over the years is its compatibility and complementarity with a variety
of other social science concepts and theories. . . . Incorporated concepts
include gatekeeping and status conferral. Conceptual complements include
the spiral of silence and cultivation analysis. Explication of a second level of
agenda setting, an agenda of ideas about the topics in the news, links agenda
setting with a major contemporary concept, framing. (p. 5).
In addition, the theoretical foundations of agenda melding draw upon cognitive
dissonance, disequilibration, and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Thinking about communication in terms of the salience of objects and attributes
is, of course, only one way of understanding its complexities, but over the past three
decades it has proven to be a useful approach that seems to hold out more promise
for integrating the ﬁeld than most others. Clearly more research is needed to clarify
the similarities and differences between second-level agenda setting and framing,
between the salience and the perceived importance of issues and attributes, and
the conditions under which media agendas are likely to inﬂuence not only public,
but also policy makers’ agendas.
Whether this research should be conducted solely at the psychological, or even
biological, level (in the case of information processing) is questionable. Agendasetting
can be conceptualized as a societal-level process as well as an individuallevel
one. Harold Lasswell (1948) argued more than 50 years ago that mass communication
has three broad social roles—surveillance of the larger environment,
facilitation of consensus among the segments of society, and transmission of the
social culture. Clearly, media agendas are an important source of surveillance of
the larger environment that is often outside the direct personal experience of most
people. But there is also evidence that media agenda setting has signiﬁcant implications
for societal consensus and transmission of social culture.
10. AGENDA-SETTING RESEARCH 277
As mentioned earlier, Donald Shaw and Shannon Martin (1992) found evidence
of a media role in building consensus among different groups in society in the North
Carolina Poll. Their comparison of the issue agendas of men and women who read
a daily newspaper infrequently yielded a correlation of +0.55. For those who read
a newspaper occasionally, it increased to +0.80, and for those who read frequently,
the agendas were identical (+1.0 correlation). Similar patterns of increased agreement
about the most important issues facing the nation as a result of more frequent
exposure to news media were found in comparisons of young and old and Blacks and
Whites, for both newspapers and television news. This consensus-building function
of newspapers and television news has also been found in Spain (Lopez-Escobar,
Llamas, & McCombs, 1998) and in Taiwan (Chiang, 1995).
Further evidence of this function was found by Jian-Hua Zhu and William Boroson
(1997) in their study of 35 Gallup surveys containing a question about the
most important problem facing the nation between 1977 and 1986. They divided
the answers to this question by differing educational and income levels to check
on possible differences in issue priorities among these groups. They found that
the differences between the groups were much smaller than the differences over
time. And in comparing the agendas of the different groups with the number
of TV news stories about these issues, they concluded (p. 82) that “the media
agenda-setting effects are not manifested in creating different levels of salience
among individuals, but are evident at driving the salience of all individuals up
and down over time.”
Although these comparisons of demographic groups are useful in documenting
a consensus-building role of media agenda setting, further research on this media
role should compare groups deﬁned by other lifestyle and psychographic measures
to test the limits of this process. Demographics are very broad-brush measures of
today’s segments of society.
Finally, the transmission of culture is also related to the agenda-setting process.
One can conceive of an agenda of beliefs or values concerning democratic governance
that is more important than agendas of speciﬁc issues and attributes. For
example, in the United States, where government is not high on the personal agenda
of most citizens, one of the most signiﬁcant agenda-setting roles of mass media may
be to stimulate interest in elections and voting. During the 1976 presidential election,
in a nine-wave panel study of voters, David Weaver and his colleagues (1981)
found that exposure to television news in the late spring stimulated political interest
in the summer and fall months leading up to the November election.
Other examples of the transmission of culture include media portrayals of the
past, with differing levels of emphasis on certain selected events and speciﬁc aspects
of these events (Wilke, 1995). These media include popular books and school
textbooks as well as ﬁlms and the news media. Schools are also an important
agenda setter for collective memories, emphasizing certain aspects of a society’s
past.
In short, there are many different agendas in society and many different agenda
setters, including family and friends, schools, and the media. Not all agenda-setting
processes should be analyzed at the psychological level. Some must be studied at
the societal or cultural level to gain a richer understanding of how these processes
occur and the forces that shape them. Regardless of level of analysis, however, it
seems clear from the studies reviewed here that the various communication media
are among the most important agenda setters of 21st-century societies, whether or
not they seek this role.
278 WEAVER, McCOMBS, SHAW
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