Agenda-setting theory suggests that the communications media, through their ability to identify and publicize issues, play a pivotal role in shaping the problems that attract attention from governments and international organizations, and direct public opinion towards specific issues. The theory suggests that the politician and journalists can shape public opinion through media by determining what issues are given the most attention, and has been widely studied and applied to various forms of media. The way news stories and topics that impact public opinion are presented is influenced by the media. It is predicated on the idea that most individuals only have access to one source of information on most issues: the news media. Since they establish the agenda, they may affect how important some things are seen to be.
The agenda-setting by media is driven by the media's bias on things such as politics, economy and culture, etc. Audiences consider an issue to be more significant the more media attention it receives (media issue saliency). For instance, even if readers do not have strong feelings about immigration, they might believe that it is a pressing problem at the time if there is consistent journalistic coverage of it over the period of a few months.
The theory has two core assumptions. The first is that it is the media that controls the reality. The media does not report the reality but instead filters and shapes it. The second assumption is that it is the media that gives importance or saliency to its topics as the more likely the media focuses on certain issues, the more likely the public perceive such issue as important and therefore demands action.
The agenda-setting theory can be reflected in the awareness model, priorities model, and salience model. The media's agenda-setting influences public agenda which in turn influences policy agenda building. There have been three theorized levels for agenda-setting theory that have developed over time: first-level, second-level, and third-level.
Gatekeeping: In order to explain how agenda setting functions in the real world it is important to focus on the concept of gatekeeping. Before issues are released to the public and gain traction they must be approved through the editorial decision-making process. The role of an editor can vary but often the "editors are the main gatekeepers of media itself. The news media decides 'what' events to broadcast and show through the media 'gates' on the basis of 'newsworthiness'". This process describes when media professionals who work for news organizations decide which issues will receive the most attention and how much traction as well as which perspectives are included and excluded from the coverage. Gatekeeping is what shapes the media from the very begging and influence issues that become the most accessible to the public.
Process
Agenda-setting occurs through a cognitive process known as "accessibility". Accessibility implies that the frequency and prominence of news media coverage significantly influences the accessibility of specific issues within the audience's memory. When respondents are asked what the most important problem facing the country is, they answer with the most accessible news issue in memory, which is typically the issue the news media focused on the most. The agenda-setting effect does not stem from just one or a few messages but instead is due to the collective impact of a very large number of messages, each of which has different content but all of which target the same general issue.
History
Agenda-setting theory was formally developed by Maxwell McCombs and Donald Lewis Shaw in a study on the 1968 US presidential election, "the Chapel Hill study". McCombs and Shaw demonstrated a strong correlation between one hundred Chapel Hill residents' thought on what was the most important election issue and what the local news media reported was the most important issue. By comparing the salience of issues in news content with the public's perceptions, McCombs and Shaw determined the degree to which the media sways public opinion. The theory also suggests that media has a great influence to their audience by instilling what they should think about, instead of what they actually think. That is, if a news item is covered frequently and prominently, the audience will regard the issue as more important.
Donald L. Shaws and Maxwell E. McCombs noted in their 1972 Chapel Hill study that researchers compared voters’ perceptions of the most relevant campaign issues with an analysis on magazines, newspapers and television reports in order to measure the level of attention each media outlet received.
In conclusion McCombs and Shaw found a strong tie between the issues that voters claimed to be most important and the issues that were presented by the media. This suggested that coverage influenced the perceived importance of the political topics distributed by the media.
Early research
The history of study of agenda-setting can be traced to the first chapter of Walter Lippmann's 1922 book, Public Opinion. In that chapter, "The World Outside and the Pictures In Our Heads", Lippmann argues that the mass media are the principal connection between events in the world and the images in the minds of the public. Without using the term "agenda-setting", Walter Lippmann was writing about what we today would call "agenda-setting". According to Lippmann, the public responds not to actual events in the environment but to the pseudo-environment, which is a term referring to "the pictures in our heads."
"For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeing for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it." The media step in and essentially set the agenda, offering simpler models by which people can make sense of the world.
Following Lippmann's 1922 book, Bernard Cohen observed (in 1963) that the press "may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about. The world will look different to different people," Cohen continues, "depending on the map that is drawn for them by writers, editors, and publishers of the paper they read."
As early as the 1960s, Cohen had expressed the idea that later led to formalization of agenda-setting theory by McCombs and Shaw. The stories with the strongest agenda setting influence tend to be those that involve conflict, terrorism, crime and drug issues within the United States. Those that do not include or involve the United States and politics associate negatively with public opinion.
Although Maxwell McCombs already had some interest in the field, he was exposed to Cohen's work while serving as a faculty member at UCLA, and it was Cohen's work that heavily influenced him, and later Donald Shaw. The concept of agenda setting was launched by McCombs and Shaw during the 1968 presidential election in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. They examined Lippmann's idea of construction of the pictures in our heads by comparing the issues on the media agenda with key issues on the undecided voters' agenda. They found evidence of agenda setting by identifying that salience of the news agenda is highly correlated to that of the voters' agenda. McCombs and Shaw were the first to provide the field of communication with empirical evidence that demonstrated the power of mass media and its influence on the public agenda. The empirical evidence also earned this theory its credibility amongst other social scientific theories.
G. Ray Funkhouser performed a study highly similar to McCombs and Shaw's around the same time the authors were formalizing the theory. McCombs, Shaw, and Funkhouser presented their findings at the same academic conference. Funkhouser's article was published later than McCombs and Shaw's, and Funkhouser does not receive as much credit as McCombs and Shaw for discovering agenda setting. According to Everett Rogers, there are two main reasons for this. First, Funkhouser did not formally name the theory. Second, Funkhouser did not pursue his research much past the initial article. Rogers also suggests that Funkhouser was geographically isolated at Stanford, cut off from interested researchers, whereas McCombs and Shaw had got other people interested in agenda-setting research.
Development
By comparing and developing the salience of issues in news content with the public's perceptions of the most important election issue, McCombs and Shaw were able to determine the degree to which the media determines public opinion. Since the 1968 "Chapel Hill" study, published in a 1972 edition of Public Opinion Quarterly, more than 400 studies have been published on the agenda-setting function of the mass media, and the theory continues to be regarded as relevant.
Three models of agenda-setting
Three models describe the agenda-setting process:
Awareness mode Priorities model Salience model
The research on the effect of agenda-setting compares the salience of issues in news content with the public perceptions of the most important issue. Then it analyses the extent of influence by guidance of the media. There are three models proposed by Max McCombs: the awareness model, the priorities model and the salience model. Most investigations are centered on these three models.
Awareness model The awareness model proposes that an issue is on an individual's agenda because they have seen it in the media. If the media does not report on an issue or topic, then it will most likely not be thought about by an individual. For example, if the media reports on Topic X, an individual is more likely to be aware of Topic X over Topic Y.
Priorities model The priorities model explicitly describes where priorities lie. The issues the media prioritizes will likely be prioritized by individuals as well. For example, if the media reports on Topic X, an individual will care about Topic X and its updates (even if Topic Y is more pressing, it is not being reported on).
Salience model The salience model lies somewhere in between the awareness model and the priorities model. In this model, individuals' agendas do not exactly reflect the media's agendas. However, some issues or topics that are consistently presented in the media will appear at the top of individuals' agendas. For example, if the media reports on Topic X, an individual will care about Topic X to a lesser extent than the media cares.
Most research on agenda-setting are based on the following:
the press and the media do not reflect reality; they filter and shape it; media concentration on a few issues and subjects leads the public to perceive those issues as more important than other issues.
Three types of agenda-setting: Policy-makers, media and audience
Research shows that the media agenda, audience agenda and policy agenda influence the agenda setting as described in the following section. Rogers and Dearing describe how following types of agenda setting (dependent variable in research) are influenced by other factors: "Policy agenda-setting" or "Political agenda setting" "Media agenda-setting" or "Agenda building" "Public/Audience agenda-setting"