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Chapter 21: Agenda Setting Theory
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
Chapter 21: Agenda Setting Theory
Chapter Outline
I. Introduction
• Agenda Setting Theory explains that media set the agenda for the public.
o They tell people what is important by the number of times a story is reported.
o If they do not report on a story, they indicate what stories are unimportant.
• Media sources also tell the public what is important by what features of a story they
emphasize and which they do not.
• Scholars have had various ideas about how influential the media are in people’s lives.
o In the early days of mass media, people were seen as helpless victims of the powerful
mass media.
o This notion was eventually discredited and replaced by what is called a limited
effects model of the mass media which acknowledge that media influence people, but
they also assert that media’s influence is minimized or limited by certain aspects of
II. History of Agenda Setting Research
• The history of agenda setting research can be conceptualized in two stages: pretheoretical
conceptualization and the establishment of the theory.
A. Pretheoretical Conceptualizing
audience, and the policymakers in the United States.
• The first person to contribute to this line of thought according to James Dearing and
Everett Rogers was Robert E. Park.
o Park noted that editors are gatekeepers because they have the power to “kill”
stories and to promote other stories that are submitted to them by correspondents,
reporters, and news agencies.
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Chapter 21: Agenda Setting Theory
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
o This statement related to the later developments in Agenda Setting Theory
because Park distinguished between issues that become public and those that do
not come to the public’s attention.
• Walter Lippmann was a pioneer of the pretheoretical stage.
o According to Lippmann, the events that happen in the world are brought to people
by the mass media and the way these events are reported shape how people
structure the images of these events in their minds.
• In 1948, Harold D. Lasswell, a political scientist at the University of Chicago,
contributed an important chapter to an anthology about communication that had far-
reaching implications for Agenda Setting Theory.
• Lasswell talked about two important functions of mass media: surveillance and
correlation.
• Surveillance is the process of newspeople scanning the information that is in the
environment and deciding which of the many events that are occurring deserve attention
• Correlation is the way media direct one’s attention to certain issues through
communicating them to the public and policymakers.
B. Establishing the Theory of Agenda Setting
• McCombs and Shaw were interested to test the hypothesis, derived from the ideas of
scholars like Lasswell, Park, and Lippmann, that the mass media create an agenda
through their selection of what to include in the news, and this agenda influences public
perception of what is important.
• McCombs and Shaw hypothesized a causal relationship between the media and the
public agendas, which stated that the media agenda would, over time, become the
agenda for the public.
o To test their hypothesis, they interviewed 100 undecided voters during the three
weeks just prior to the presidential election in November of 1968.
a survey question: “What are you most concerned about these days? That is,
regardless of what politicians say, what are the two or three main things that you
think the government should concentrate on doing something about?”
o They ranked the issues based on the frequency with which they were mentioned
and found five main issues—foreign policy, law and order, fiscal policy, public
welfare, and civil rights.
o McCombs and Shaw found an almost perfect correlation (1967) between the rank
order of the five issues on the media agenda as measured by their content analysis
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Chapter 21: Agenda Setting Theory
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
of the media coverage of the election campaign, and the five issues on the public
agenda as determined by their survey of the 100 undecided voters.
III. Assumptions of Agenda Setting Theory
• Agenda Setting Theory rests on three basic assumptions.
o The media establish an agenda and in so doing are not simply reflecting reality but
public’s agenda, and these together influence the policymakers’ agenda.
o The public and policymakers have the possibility to influence the media’s agenda as
well.
IV. Two Levels of Agenda Setting
• The original conception of the theory identified only the first level of agenda setting.
o The first level focuses on the list of important issues that comprises the agenda as
decided by some entity such as the media.
o A second level, sometimes called attribute agenda setting, was added to the theory
that focuses on which parts of those issues are most important.
how consumers can interpret them.
• Framing could be accomplished in various ways.
o In newspapers things like the size of headlines, photographs included with the story,
a story’s overall length and placement allow the editors to frame its importance and
highlight the aspects of it that are deemed most important.
o On television, the visuals accompanying the story add to the ability of newspeople to
frame a story.
• Researchers expanded the notion of framing to include affect, and also talked about a
related process: priming, a cognitive process whereby what the media present temporarily,
at least, influences what people think about afterwards in processing additional
information.
V. Three-Part Process of Agenda Setting
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Chapter 21: Agenda Setting Theory
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
• The agenda setting process consists of three parts: setting the media agenda, setting the
public agenda, and setting the policy agenda.
o The media agenda refers to the priority of issues to be discussed in mediated
sources.
o The public agenda is the result of the media agenda interacting with what the public
thinks.
o The public agenda interacts with what is considered important by policymakers to
create the policy agenda.
• If an audience member does not believe a media source is credible, he or she will likely
dismiss the agenda promoted on that source.
• Conflicting information also complicates the tenets of Agenda Setting.
• Relevance is defined as a motivation to seek orientation on an issue from the media due to
the perception of personal importance that the issue holds for someone.
• Uncertainty refers to how much information people think they have about an issue.
VI. Expansions and Refinements to Agenda Setting Theory
• McCombs and Shaw’s hypothesis, that the media agenda impacts the public’s agenda, was
founded on the image of a rather passive audience.
• In the Uses and Gratifications approach, the audience is pictured as a group of active
seekers, employing media for specific uses, and to satisfy particular gratifications.
• Further research (Weaver, Graber, McCombs, and Eyal, 1981) expanded Agenda Setting
Theory beyond the public issues that McCombs and Shaw had begun exploring in 1972.
• Recent research added the question: Who sets the media agenda?
• Steven Littlejohn and Karen Foss (2011) suggest that there are four types of power
• Researchers have examined what they call intermedia influence, on the agenda setting
process and have noted that news organizations affect one another’s agendas.
• McCombs and Bell mention several studies of cases where journalists followed one
another in reporting about specific issues. They refer to this agenda influence as pack
journalism.
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Chapter 21: Agenda Setting Theory
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
VII. Integration, Critique, and Closing
• Agenda Setting Theory is a venerable theory of mass communication; it has a history
spanning back to the beginning of the twentieth century, and it is still being employed
today in studies of media and public communication.
• It is clearly a theory that has been understood using an empirical approach, making it
aligned with quantitative methods.
A. Scope
• Some researchers have critiqued the scope of Agenda Setting Theory.
problem with Agenda Setting.
B. Utility
• With regard to utility, some questions have been raised about whether the theory
remains useful given the new media environment.
• Some studies have been conducted to test this question and the results have been
somewhat mixed.
framework when people have so much more freedom in their media choices.
C. Heurism
• With respect to heurism, Agenda Setting Theory certainly has been successful.
• It has supported hundreds of studies since 1972, and these studies have been situated in
a wide variety of fields and topics.
• Agenda Setting research examining new media, traditional media, political issues, and
responses to visual stimuli among other issues, attest to the robust, heuristic quality of
this theory.
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Chapter 21: Agenda Setting Theory
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
Classroom Activities
1. A “Reel” Look at Agenda Setting
Objective: To get a basic understanding of the main assumptions, history, and applications
of the theory
Materials: Smartphones or video cameras and the ability to project a YouTube video to the
class
Directions:
a. Show the students the following video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byD5C_CUe8U.
b. Discuss the video presentation of the theory. Discuss any errors students made in
presenting the theory, and talk about their choices for presenting the information.
c. Place the students into groups of three to five, and have them plan a script to
introduce agenda setting—its history, assumptions, and main applications—to an
presented the most important aspects of the theory.
2. What Are We Thinking (About)?
Objective: To enable the class to participate in a mini research project and to test the basic
tenet of Agenda Setting Theory
Materials: Recent local newspapers or videos of recent local newscasts
Directions:
c. Bring the two groups together, and compare their lists.
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Chapter 21: Agenda Setting Theory
West, Introducing Communication Theory, 6e
d. Discuss how Agenda Setting Theory explains (or fails to explain) the results. In the
discussion, bring in the concepts of salience, media credibility, relevancy, and