Agenda Setting
Theory developed by Maxwell
McCombs and Donald Shaw in
the late 1960s
• McCombs and Shaw argued that the
“Mass media have the ability to transfer
the salience of items on their news
agendas to the public agenda.” As they
put it :
“We judge as important what the media
judge as important.”
Agenda Setting
This idea was not entirely new and can be
traced back to the work of the Walter
Lippman who claimed that the media act as
mediators between “the world outside and
the pictures in our head”
Agenda Setting
Political scientist Bernard Cohen observed
“The press may not be successful much of
the time in telling people what to think, but
it is stunningly successful in telling them
what to think about.”
Agenda Setting
• As a theory agenda setting represented a
shift from the limited effects paradigm that
was dominant at the time because it
questioned Lazarsfeld’s Selective
Exposure thesis which argued the media
merely reinforced or amplified exisiting
beliefs
Agenda Setting
• McCombs and Shaw’s study defined
media agenda by studying coverage of
issues in nine print and broadcast sources.
• They used position and length of story as
main criteria of prominence in print media
and placement in first three stories or a
discussion over 45 seconds for broadcast
Agenda setting
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Issues prominent in the media were:
Foreign policy
Law and Order
Fiscal Policy
Public Welfare
Civil Rights
Agenda Setting
• To determine public’s agenda they asked
voters to identify what they considered to
be the top issues in the 1968 campaign
between Nixon and Humphrey
• They compared aggregate data from
voters with media content and found that
the issues and the ranking of the issues
was nearly identical on both lists.
Agenda Setting
McCombs and Shaw hypothesized that
Media agenda
Voter’s agenda
But could it be ?
Media agenda
Voter’s agenda
How can this hypothesis be proved ?
Agenda Setting
Using a correlational time analysis found
that public’s concerns trailed the media’s
agenda
Further support for the agenda-setting thesis
was provided by an experiment run by
Yale researchers Iyengar, peters and
Kinder
Agenda Setting
• Showed newscasts to three groups of New
Haven residents for four days and had
them fill out a questionnaire
• Each group saw a different version of the
newscast with a daily focus on national
defense/inflation/environment
• Result was the upward movement of those
issues on the people’s lists of concerns
Agenda Setting
Who sets the agenda for the media ?
• Intermedia effect
• Events
• Public relations professionals
• Interest aggregations
Agenda Setting
Who is most likely to be affected
by the agenda-setting function of
the media ?
Agenda Setting
• McCombs and Shaw have argued that the
people who have a willingness to let the
media shape their thinking have :
• A high need for orientation or index of
curiosity stemming from high relevance
and uncertaintly
Framing
By the mid-1990s, agenda-setting theory
evolved and scholars began to argue that
the media do influence the way we think
as a result of a specific process known as
framing.
Framing
• What is framing ?
• According to James Tankard, a media
frame is
• “ The central organizing idea for news
content that supplies a context and
suggests what the issue is through a use
of selection, emphasis, exclusion and
elaboration.”
• "News frames are almost entirely implicit
and taken for granted. They do not appear
to either journalists or audiences as social
constructions but as primary attributes of
events that reporters are merely reflecting.
• News frames make the world look natural.
They determine what is selected, what is
excluded, what is emphasized. In short,
news presents a packaged world."
Entman’s Analysis of Framing of
of KAL 007 and Iran Air 655
• Similarly complex and tragic events, yet
framing differs dramatically
• Differences in quantity of coverage
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KAL 007 (51 pages in Time and Newsweek)/
NY Times (286 stories and WaPo 169 stories)
Iran Air 655 (20 pages in Time and Newsweek)/
NY Times (102 stories and WaPo 82 stories)
Entman’s Analysis
• Significant differences in images and
language in treatment of KAL 007 and Iran
Air 655.
• KAL Covers—Shooting to Kill and Murder in the Air
• Iran Air—Why it Happened? And What went wrong?
• Differences in coverage of victims
• Attribution of responsibility
• Use of moral vs. technical frame
Examples of Framing
Rats Bite Infant
An infant left sleeping in his crib was bitten
repeatedly by rats while his 16-year-old
mother went to cash her welfare check. A
neighbor responded to the cries of the
infant and brought the child to St. Joseph's
Hospital where he was treated and
released into his mother's custody.
Examples of Framing
Rat Bites Rising in City's "Zone of Death“
Rats bit eight-month-old Michael Burns five times
yesterday as he napped in his crib. Burns is the
latest victim of a rat epidemic plaguing inner-city
neighborhoods labeled the "Zone of Death."
Health officials say infant mortality rates in these
neighborhoods approach those in many third
world countries. A Public Health Department
spokesman explained that federal and state
cutbacks forced short staffing at rat control and
housing inspection programs.
Examples of Framing
Rats Bite Infant: Landlord, tenants
dispute blame
• An eight-month-old Milwaukee boy was treated
and released from St. Joseph's Hospital
yesterday after being bitten by rats while he was
sleeping in his crib. Tenants said that repeated
requests for exterminations had been ignored by
the landlord, Henry Brown. . Brown claimed that
the problem lay with the tenants' improper
disposal of garbage.
Framing the War in Afghanistan
• Freedom v. Terror (overall package)
• Core frame—Issue is will we allow evil to prevail
and destroy civilization and rule the world
• Humanitarian Intervention (overall package)
• Core frame—Issue is will the U.S. help the
people of Afghanistan
• Quagmire (overall package)
• Core frame—Issue is will we get stuck in another
expensive war ?