Theretical Review-Agenda Setting Theory
Theoretical Review
Agenda Setting Theory
Introduction
Mass communication plays an important role in society where its purpose to inform the public about current and even past events. Mass communication is defined as the process whereby professional communicators use technological devices to share messages over great distances to influence large audiences. According to Littlejohn & Foss (2005), mass communication is the process whereby media organizations produce and transmit messages to large publics and the process by which those messages are sought, used, understood, and influenced by audiences. Within this process the media, which can be a newspaper, a book and television, takes control of the information that can see or hear.
The media then uses gatekeeping and agenda setting to control public access to news, information, and entertainment. Gatekeeping is a series of checkpoints that the news has to go through before it gets to the public. Through this process many people have to decide whether or not the news is to be seen or heard. Some gatekeepers might include reporters, writers, and editors. After gatekeeping comes agenda setting. According to Dennis McQuail cited in Littlejohn & Foss (2005), media are windows that enable us to see beyond our immediate surroundings, interpreters that help us make sense of experience, platforms or carriers that convey information, interactive communication that includes audience feedback, signposts that provide us with instructions and directions, filter that screen out parts of experience and focus on other, mirrors that reflect ourselves back to us, and barriers that block the truth.
Agenda setting as defined is the process whereby the mass media determine what public think and worry about. Agenda setting started when Walter Lippmann, a journalist first observed this function and write Public Opinion in 1922. Lippmann titled his first chapter as “The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads”. Lippmann was the person who presented the theory that the mass media make our pictures of the world and inform us about the world events. However, he anticipated that the pictures provided by the media were most of the time incomplete and distorted. People can see only reflections of reality but not reality itself in the news media. Lippmann pointed out that the media dominates over the creation of pictures in our head; he believed that the public reacts not to actual events but to the pictures in our head. However, those reflections provide the basis for our perceptions about the world. Therefore the agenda setting process is used to remodel all the events occurring in our environment, into a simpler model before we deal with it. Researchers Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw have then followed this concept.
In 1972, researchers McCombs & Shaw conducted an empirical study to investigate the idea that the news media organizations influence our perceptions of the world. As described in the first chapter of this dissertation two researchers from the University of North Carolina thought whether the topics accepted by the news media to represent the outer world reduced the types of events that people used to think about the world. They also thought whether the public’s perception of reality depended on the topics the news media covered or it was not the case. It was a tremendous beginning of a new mass communications theory, which can be divided into two aspects. The first aspect relates with the transmission of issue or object salience from the media agenda to the public agenda. The second aspect relates with the role of news media in framing those issues and things in the minds of masses (Littlejohn & Foss, 2005).
Agenda setting theory is a theory that attempts to explain the impact of mass media on society. It is about media power to influence society or audience. Agenda-setting describes a very powerful influence of the media. The Agenda setting theory comes from a scientific perspective. This theory does a good job of explaining the behavior of the public. It helps to reinforce class, race, gender, and age in the public. Agenda setting predicts what is going to happen in the future. It is a simple theory that is easy to understand. Agenda setting can be tested and it is a useful theory to everyone that knows about it.
According to McCombs and Shaw, the agenda-setting theory found an appreciative audience among mass communication researchers. They found that the selective exposure hypothesis claimed that people would attend only to the news and views that didn 't threaten their established beliefs. McCombs and Shaw 's agenda-setting hypothesis represented a back-to-the-basics approach to mass communication research.
In this theory it shows that mass media set the agenda for public opinion by highlighting certain issues. In the beginning, it was studying the way political campaigns were covered in the media. Shaw and McCombs found the main effect of news media to be agenda-setting, telling people not what to think, but what to think of. Agenda setting is usually referred to as a function of mass media and not a theory. The theory explains the correspondence between the rate at which media cover a story and the extent that people think that this story is important. Agenda-setting is believed to occur because the press must be selective in reporting the news. News outlets act as gatekeepers to control over the selection of content exercised by media of information and make choices about what to report and what not. What the public know and care at any given time is mostly a product of media-gate keeping.
The common assumption of agenda- setting is that the ability of the media to influence the visibility of events in the public mind has been a part of culture for almost half a century. Therefore the concept of agenda setting in society is for the press to selectively choose what society see or hear in the media.
Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw have brought the importance of agenda setting to people’s attention when they carried out the Chapel Hill, North Carolina study. Their emphasis and goal with this study was that the agenda issues found in the news media and among general public is what sets the media agenda. David Weaver joined McCombs and Shaw in project were they panel studied the 1976 United States presidential election. Within this project the researchers studied the attributes of the agenda, the description of presidential candidates in the news and the agenda attributes in voters’ descriptions of the candidates. Throughout this study the researchers found out that there was a relationship between the media agenda and the public agenda. These studies are for the purpose of looking at the media issues and determining whether these issues are important. Therefore the second level of agenda plays an important role in this study because it decides what parts of the issues are important in regards to the presidential election.
Chapel-Hill-study by McCombs and Shaw in 1972, pointed to a relationship between the salience of topics in television news and among undecided voters. Numerous studies went on to document the effects of media coverage on the perceived salience of topics. Later on, the authors themselves pointed out that agenda-setting is not limited to topics and objects, but also relates to certain attributes of topics, events or persons it is second level of agenda-setting. McCombs (2005) also assume that there is a third level of agenda setting, by which the media transport a positive or negative tenor of important topics and attributes to audiences and readers. In addition, the theory was extended to other cognitive concepts such as priming and framing. Both approaches relate to the fact that the mass media, by selecting and emphasizing, direct the recipients’ attention towards certain topics or objects. Media priming is the process by which selected “mass mediated information make certain knowledge units, which are available in the recipient’s memory, temporarily more easily accessible”, therefore predisposing them for the reception or interpretation of subsequent information. According to the framing concept, the underlining and topical framing of information provokes processes of interpretation and evaluation in the recipient.
Agenda Setting has two levels. As mentioned in Theories of Communication the first level enacts the common subjects that are most important, and the second level decides what parts of the subject are important. This two levels of agenda setting lead path into what is the function of this concept. This concept is process that is divided into three parts according to Rogers and Dearing in their book Agenda Setting Research. The first part of the process is the importance of the issues that are going to be discussed in the media. Second, the issues discussed in the media have an impact over the way the public thinks, this is referred as public agenda. Sometimes, the second level is important as a first level because it frames issues that constitute the public and media agendas. Ultimately the public agenda influences the policy agenda. Furthermore “the media agenda affects the public agenda, and the public agenda affects the policy agenda.” (Littlejohn & Foss, 2005).
The agenda-setting function is a three part-process. There are media agenda, public agenda and policy agenda. First media agenda is about issues discussed in the media. The Media agenda is the set of issues addressed by media sources. Second, public agenda is about issues discussed and personally relevant to the public. The public agenda is which is issues the public consider important. Thirdly, policy agenda is issues that policy makers consider important. In direct version the media agenda affects the public agenda, and the public agenda affects the policy agenda.
Agenda setting plays an important role among media, public and policy makers. These relationships are considered as a focus point in political communication because they inform us about interactions among newspapers, radio and television broadcasts, politicians and the government. Most of the communication researchers remained limited with the investigation of the relationship between the media and the public but they ignored another key element, which are the policy makers. Government officers and bureaucrats, who are ultimate policy makers, are influenced by the media and public agenda. There are very little work on the public agenda setting has been done to empirically connect the policy, media and public agendas. Basically, these fields are intimately connected and the investigation about their interrelationship can provide us a more complete and probably more accurate picture of the political interactions in a society. Some of the media scholars conducted their studies to investigate the relationship between the media, the public and policy makers. Different issues have led to different agenda setting results. Different scholars provided different reasons for this variance. Methodological differences can be one reason. Issue attribute is also an important factor. Therefore, the more obtrusive an issue is, the more likely people experience it directly. In such situations, the media have less potential for effects on public opinion.
This theory predicts that if people are exposed to the same media, they will place importance on the same issues. It explains which media cover a story and the extent that people think that this story is important. Although different people may feel differently about the issue at hand, most people feel the same issues are important. Society as audience that have influenced from media learned the important topic or issues that often emphasized by the media.
The agenda-setting as a theory that the mass-news media have a large influence on audiences by their choice of what stories to consider newsworthy and how much prominence and space to give them, agenda-setting theory’s central axiom is salience transfer, or the ability of the mass media to transfer importance of items on their mass agendas to the public agendas. It is the main important things to making agenda setting. Agenda setting theory’s main postulate is salience transfer. McCombs and Shaw believe that the mass media have the ability to transfer the salience of items on their news agendas to the public agenda. Salience transfer is the ability of the news media to transfer issues of importance from their news media agendas to public agendas. This ability to influence the salience of topics on the public agenda has come to be called the agenda setting role of the news media. McCombs and Shaw in their uses and gratifications approach have selective viewers that most affected to the media agenda. The high need orientation arises from high relevance and uncertainty that people who have a willingness to let media shape their thinking. They will think the news from media is important, if the media has selected it on some issues as coverage to viewers.
There are three key elements sets the agenda for the agenda setters which is major sources who provide information for news stories, other news organizations, and journalisms norms and traditions. The major sources include elected leaders like national or local leaders, political campaigns, organizations, interest groups, public information officers, and public relations professionals. Then, other news organizations refer to how news organizations feed off of each other, borrowing stories from one another or at times paying for them. Journalism scanning the environment and looking for characteristics like human interest to ensure a story is newsworthy which is a major part of the norms and traditions of journalism.
In agenda setting there are framing in media which is happened by personal attributes of public figures the media select to describe. Agenda setting is much powerful media function because it have effect on people think about some issues, how and what to think of the issues and what to do about the issues been coverage by the media. Then, people behavioral effect of the media’s agenda happened when people have influenced from media coverage. Agenda setting can make high effects to the related issues that most common. It has organizing power because it helps organize existing knowledge of media effects examples air planes crash makes lower ticket sales but increases purchases of trip insurance. Some of the studies about agenda setting effects have suggested that the ideal time frame for measuring the media effects on public agenda is between two and five months (Winter & Eyal, 1981). Winter and Eyal state that media emphasis in the month prior to the interview period is the most important time period for media agenda to leave largest impact on the public. The issues which are of importance to the media at the time of the interview period will be having some importance for the public because the public follows the media’s agenda. The media not only influence public attention on a particular topic rather they also influence our understanding and perspective on the topics in the news. It also supports the basic assumption of the agenda setting theory that media not only tell what to think about but also tell how to think about. The items that define the agenda are objects. The objects are the things on which the attention of the media and the public are focused. However, these objects have numerous attributes. The attributes are those characteristics and qualities that describe the object. For each object there also is an agenda of attributes because when the media and the public think and talk about an object, some attributes are emphasized, others are given less attention, and many receive no attention at all. This agenda of attributes is another aspect of the agenda-setting role of the news media (McCombs, 1999).
Media portray the image of the political leaders, election candidates and government officials. The image can be portrayed either in a positive or negative way. This is one aspect of the attribute agenda setting. During the 1996 general election in Spain, the images of the three major party leaders by voters in Navarra city showed considerable correspondence with the media’s presentation of these party leaders (McCombs, 2000).
There is a question who affects the media agenda but it is a complex and difficult question. Basically, media agendas result from pressures both within media organizations and from outside sources. It can be established by some combination of internal programming, editorial and managerial decisions, and external influences from nonmedia sources such as socially influential individuals, government officials and commercial sponsors.
According to Littlejohn & Foss (2005), the power of media in establishing a public agenda depends in part on their relations with power centers. Then, if the media have close relationships with the elite class in society therefore, that class will probably affect the media agenda and the public agenda in turn. Many critical theorists believe that media can be and usually are an instrument of the dominant ideology in society, and when this happens, that dominant ideology will permeate the public agenda.
There are four types of power relations between the media and outside sources. The first is a high-power source and high-power media. A positive symbiotic relationship will make great power over the public agenda it is like a good relationships with the press. The second is a high-power source and low-power media. It is like a privilege because the external source will co-operation with media and use them to accomplish its own ends if it have high-power source. The third type of relation is a lower-power source and high-power media. The media organizations will be largely responsible for their own agenda. This will happens when the media marginalize certain news sources. Then, the fourth type of relation is where both media and external sources are low in power that make public agenda probably be established by the events themselves rather than the media or the leaders.
Definitions of Concepts
Wanta (1997) reported that agenda-setting influence for television news appears to have more immediate effects on public opinion, while the duration of effects via print media are longer. In explaining some of the rationales for varying impact due to different media channels, he notes that the expectation for stronger broadcast effects rests largely on the idea that the multiple sensory cues present in television news should result in greater salience transfer than that in print. On the contrary, he explains that the control of pacing that print offers suggests that newspapers should yield stronger agenda-setting impact. Finally, he discusses the possibility that no differences should exist because news agendas tend to be quite similar across media channels. In such a case, overall political news consumption would be a stronger predictor of agenda-setting effects than specific news media consumption.
Agenda-setting theory is the theory that explains how media sets the agenda for the public. This definition has been changed over the years to mean the media tells us “not what to think, but what to think about” (Griffin, 2003). Another definition, according to McCombs, is “the transfer of salience from one agenda to another”.
According to Littlejohn & Foss (2005), agenda setting occurs because the press must be selective in reporting the news. News outlets, as gatekeepers of information, make choices about what to report and how to report it. What the public knows about the state of affairs at any given time is largely a product of media gatekeeping. Then, how a person votes is determined mainly by what issues the individual believes to be important. For this reason some researchers have come to believe that the issues reported during a candidate’s term in office may have more effect on the election than the campaign itself.
Then, based on the agenda-setting hypothesis (first-level agenda setting), the media influence public opinion by emphasizing certain issues over others. The amount of media attention, or the media salience, devoted to certain issues increases their accessibility and consequently influences the degree of public concern for these issues (Dearing & Rogers, 1996; McCombs, 2004; McCombs & Shaw, 1972) cited in Sheafer (2007).
Agenda setting has systematically sought to document the effects of mass media on the audience’s cognitions. By virtue of creating a shared, national pseudo-environment, mass media fulfill the important function of building a public consensus on the important issues of the day (Lippmann, 1949; McCombs, 1997; McCombs, 2004). As one of the more enduring and most researched theories in mass communication and political communication agenda setting has matured as a theory to include a second-level agenda setting component which is attribute agenda setting, a psychological component to explain\ individual-level agenda setting effects that need for orientation, an emphasis on how the media’s agenda is shaped, and an explanation for the shared news agenda among different media that is intermedia agenda setting.
All agenda-setting research focuses on the transfer of salience from one agenda to another. Most research on media agenda-setting effects focus on the correlation between issues on the media agenda and issues on the public agenda, and can be characterized as content-based agenda-setting studies. Thus, these studies do not really measure attention to different media, which is the focus of attention-based agenda-setting studies (Ghanem & Wanta, 2001; Kiousis, McDevitt, & Wu, 2005; Wanta 1997;Weaver, 1991). Agenda-setting research initially emphasized how mass media, policy makers, and the public interact and infl uence one another to affect issue salience. More recently, this paradigm also has considered how candidate images are constructed and prioritized in public opinion, expanding the original agenda-setting model to include multiple objects and their attributes in the news. A shared quality of all these investigations has been their common convergence on people’s cognitions. Less attention has been devoted to the attitudinal consequences of agenda setting and primarily is limited to probing how the salience of public issues influences attitudes toward political figures (Kiousis &McCombs, 2003).
Agenda setting is also a process of social learning. People learn about the importance of issues in society through the amount of news media coverage, they receive. The theory of agenda setting assumes that the people learn about and prioritize the information they receive from the news in proportion to the amount of attention that information is given in media content. For instance, Benton and Frazier (1976) found that agenda setting not only shapes the salience of issues but also the salience of proposed solutions to those issues and the rationales behind those solutions. If media attention results in social learning, this further suggests that people also should hold stronger attitudes as news attention intensifies. Traditional or also known as first-level agenda-setting theory emphasizes how mass media, elites, and the public interact and influence one another to affect issue salience. Traditional agenda-setting effects point to the visibility and perceived importance of a problem or an issue due to its visibility or salience in the media. As Bernard Cohen noted in his seminal work The Press and Foreign Policy, 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” (Cohen 1963, Dursun 2005). Cues repeated day after day effectively communicate the importance of each topic (McCombs 2000, p. 1). The more coverage an issue receives, the more concern individuals have with the issue. In other words, individuals learn how concerned they should be through the amount of coverage the issue receives (Wanta 1997, McCombs 2000).
Relationships Among Concept
The determinants of the agenda setting theory is an important question of debate among the scholars of Mass Communication. Different scholars presented their views in different ways. Agenda setting theory have many influenced in politic, economy, education, science and social life. Basically, the determinants of the agenda setting effects of media are the factors that play their role in setting the public agenda. Different determinants produce different agenda setting results in different situations. Following are the most agreed determinants of the agenda setting effects. First, media exposure in earlier it was considered that media credibility and reliance on the media are the most important determinants of the agenda setting effects. But Wanta & Ghanem (2006) described that exposure was a stronger determinant than media credibility or media reliance, which were unrelated, in a study of Hispanic cable news. Second, obtrusiveness is refers to the extent that the public has experience with the policy issue. The more unobtrusive an issue, the more the individual may rely on media exposure for orientation. In a research study conducted by Zucker (1978), it was found that salience transfer was maximum for unobtrusive issues. Third, need for orientation. Need for orientation is a function of individual interest in the policy topic combined with issue uncertainty. Weaver (1977) and others found that some persons have greater need for policy orientation and thus are more affected by salience transfer than others. Kiousis and McCombs (2003) conducted a research study in the US to investigate the relationship between agenda setting and attitude strength. It was suggested by the learning model that message dissemination would represent media salience, audience cognition would represent perceived public salience, and audience affect would represent perceived public attitude strength. According to the results of the study strong correlations were found between the amount of attention that the news media pay to political figures and both the public salience and the strength of public attitudes toward these persons. Although all the relationships were found strong, the correlations between media and public salience generally were weaker. Communication scholars have found empirical linkages between agenda setting and attitude strength (Kiousis & McCombs, 2004). The version of the traditional hierarchy of effects theory (discussed earlier) offered by Valente et al. (1998) is valuable for this explanation because it includes multiple sequences among the variables.
The media agenda is the independent variable of main interest in agenda-setting studies focusing on the relationship between the news media and public opinion. Information regarding what issues and topics that were on this agenda is of considerable importance for the formulation of hypotheses concerning the effects of the news media on public opinion.
Few studies have been conducted on traditional mass media’s agenda setting ability in citizen-controlled Internet spaces. Lee et al. (2005) found higher correlations in support of newspaper influence on online bulletin board conversations in South Korea. Roberts, Wanta, and Dzwo (2002) found that U.S. online media were successfully able to set the agenda for U.S. electronic bulletin board users for three issues with a time-lag influence varying between 1 to 7 days. In one of the few studies to test mutual influence between traditional media and the independent political blogosphere, Cornfield et al. (2005) found a correlation of .78 for traditional media-to-blog influence as opposed to a correlation of .68 for blog-to-traditional media influence. Issue characteristics have been shown to play a strong role in mediating the traditional media’s issue agenda setting effect. Prior research has shown that media’s agenda setting impact is stronger with unobtrusive issues or issues that the audience has less direct, personalized experience with in real-world contexts (Zucker, 1978; Winter, Eyal, & Rogers, 1982; Smith, 1987; Weaver et al., 1981). The media’s ability to influence the audience’s agenda with issues is also related to the nature of the issue: Abstract issues are more difficult to transfer to the audience than concrete issues (Yagade & Dozier, 1990). The media are also better able to set the agenda in relation to more dramatic and conflict-laden events (MacKuen &Coombs, 1981; Wanta & Hu, 1993) and with shorter time-frame issues (Downs, 1972; Zucker, 1978). When assessing the agenda setting influence between traditional mass media and the independent political blogosphere, issue transfer is more feasible with issues that can support buzz and partisan framing within the highly partisan U.S. political blogosphere (Meraz, 2008; Cornfield et al., 2005).
Critique
Mass communication is a media that bring such as news, information to society. Media is a strong and power channel to influence people. Unfortunately, there are also limitations in agenda setting theory that was a theory in mass communication and media effect.
The media have the capability to influence some individuals, but not everyone. In their study, McCombs and Shaw did not include the voters that were committed to a candidate in their research. This tells that some individuals have their own opinion on the situation and are not influenced by media. This is because people may not be as ideal as the theory assumes. People may pay only casual and intermittent attention to public affairs and remain ignorant of the details. Sometimes, people only focusing on what they interest and leave other information because it not get their attention and interest. People that have made up their minds the agenda effect are weakened to them. Therefore, media cannot create or conceal problems, they can only alter the awareness, priorities and salience people attach to a set of problems. Research has largely been inconclusive in establishing a causal relationship between public salience and media coverage
In limitations, such as news media users may not be as ideal as the theory assumes. It is because sometimes people may not be well-informed, deeply engaged in public affairs, thoughtful and skeptical. Instead, they may pay only casual and intermittent attention to public affairs and remain ignorant of the details. According to the advocates of the limited effects, the limited power of the media may be due to their short attention period always running from one crisis to another hence diluting their attention on the slower workings of democracy. Another weakness of the media mentioned is its tendency to highlight the most amazing, prominent and sometimes sensitive stories, while these stories tend to take place at the end of the policy-making process, and not at the beginning..
Another limitation is that there is limited research in the realm of non-traditional forms of news media such as social media and blogs and also its agenda setting role. Although blogs and other forms of Computer Mediated Communication appear to be quickly gaining ground against traditional news media outlets, more research still needs to be done. What is plainly visible is that to survive, traditional newsrooms have embraced newsroom blogs as an alternative vehicle for news delivery and there still continues to be a socio-economic gap although likely a small one between those who use used non-traditional forms of news media and those who do not.
Individuals capable of coming to their own conclusion and base their opinion and believes. Today world, it is a rule that news media are supposed to be unbiased. Some individuals may be well informed and intelligent about a particular issue. This being the fact, the media would not be capable of changing their concrete opinion.
The discipline is a big factor in whether one will be influenced by media or not. They will know the difference from right and wrong. Since media tends to publish a lot of negative material, therefore they should not be influenced by it. It would be interesting to learn how much discipline an individual, that has been influenced by media and committed a crime or been unethical, received before performing their action.
Implications in Interest
Interpersonal communication has also a key role in the process of agenda setting. A number of research studies have been taken place to find the relationship between interpersonal communication and agenda setting. Interpersonal communication may increase salience by playing an essential role when people want to make sense of new topics reported by the media. It means that talking to others about topics found in the media may make those issues more important for people when they do not understand the issue. Then, interpersonal discussions filtered or reduced media influence, whereas others reported that they enhanced media effects.
According to several 2008 reports, blogging continues to attract writers and readers. This form of Web content creation has matured beyond public personal journaling to support citizen journalism or journalism produced by independent bloggers unaffiliated with professional newsrooms. The popularity of blogs is in part fueled by its interactive format: The blog tool is popularly believed to be a vehicle of democracy because it fosters decentralized citizen control as opposed to hierarchical, elite control. This inversion of elite control is the social outcome of a more interactive format. Blogs are popularly viewed as a form of social media, or media that is architected by design to readily support participation, peer-to-peer conversation, collaboration, and community. Social media tools such as blogs enable Web content creators to circumvent the high transaction costs that once characterized usage of earlier media technologies (Meraz, 2009).
Then because of today the world has become a global village due to the rapid growth of internet. This new paradigm has affected almost each and every aspect of our lives. Theories and concepts have also been influenced by the new of technology. The increasing trend of the use of blogs and to some extent less reliance on the traditional media has also affected the theory of agenda setting. Chaffee and Metzger’s (2001) predicted that “the key problem for agenda-setting theory will change from what issues the media tell people to think about to what issues people tell the media they want to think about”. The previous researches on the agenda setting theory have explored issue salience by focusing on audience recall and public opinion but the web logs invite researchers to consider hyperlinks as behavioral indicators of an issue’s perceived importance. Today, the rapid growth of the Internet has dramatically decentralized the communication power of the traditional media. The web blogs are the most recent demonstration of this trend. Simultaneously, traditional media have adopted the potential of the web. Newspaper stories and audiovisual broadcasts are no longer temporary and disposable things. Today, they are archived, indexed, abstracted and fully capable of receiving links.
Then, Web blogs are considered to be situated somewhere between the traditional journalism and the general masses or public. Blood (2003) describes web blogs as participatory media forms that engage in something slightly different than journalism. Whatever term is used, it is clear that many web blog authors ask questions about current events and read stories against one another. Although the author’s personal voice is the foundation of every web blog (Lennon, 2003), hyperlinks to external information are also vital to this form of journalism. The historical intellectual foundations of the field of mass communication may provide some signals about the role of blogs. Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) suggested in one of their old study that media influence could be conceptualized as a two-step flow in which opinion leaders play their role between journalists and the general public. Two researchers of the mass communication field Brosius and Weimman (1996) linked the two-step flow to agenda setting research, arguing that agenda setting is a process in which influential individuals. This is an excellent description of journalistically-focused web log authors. Web blogs are considered as a part of a broader trend toward the decentralization of communication power of media. Amateur journalism is going to be mature with the passage of time. Web blogs have demonstrated their ability to affect the flow of information between traditional media and audiences. From the agenda setting point of view, the most important thing about web blogs is the way in which they bridge different components of our public life.
Social network analysis is an interdisciplinary theory of structural relations that focuses on the relationships and linkages between individuals. Wasserman and Faust (1997) cited in Meraz, 2009 define social network analysis as the study of ‘‘relationships among social entities, and on the patterns and implications of these relationships.’’ Emphasis is placed on the interdependence of actors and their actions, the relational ties between actors, the network structure of ties between and among individuals, and the conceptualization of network structure along social, political, and economic dimensions. This study takes the approach that social network theory can be used to explain the boundaries of potential source influence and the potential power of agenda setters within specified social networks.
Social network analysis also is focused on uncovering the patterning of people 's interaction. Network analysis is based on the intuitive notion that these patterns are important features of the lives of the individuals who display them. Network analysts believe that how an individual lives depends in large part on how that individual is tied into the larger web of social connections. Many believe, moreover, that the success or failure of societies and organizations often depends on the patterning of their internal structure.
In America, Some 21% of online adults used social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace in the months leading up to the November, 2010 elections to connect to the campaign or the election itself, and 2% of online adults did so using Twitter. That works out to a total of 22% of adult internet users who engaged with the political campaign on Twitter or social networking sites (Smith, 2011). This shows that people today been influenced by new media like blog and social networking that can create agenda setting in their life. The main reason survey respondents gave for following political groups on social networking sites or Twitter is that doing so helps them feel more personally connected to the candidates or groups they follow. Only relatively few of the respondents say that they follow political groups through social media because the information is more reliable than what they can get from traditional news organizations. The particular importance to this study is the subfacet of social network theory called homophily theory or ‘‘birds of a feather flock together’’ theory. The powerful tendency that individuals have to network along homogeneous lines is driven by shared beliefs, interests, and social status (Lazersfeld & Merton, 1954; McPhearson et al., 2001; Meraz, 2009).Within the independent U.S. political blogosphere, several studies have found segmentation along partisan lines in diverse environments (Meraz, 2009). This study seeks to examine homophily through the specific lens of status homophily. This study contemplates the following “to what extent do elite traditional media newsrooms extend their elite bias by choosing to link to other professional newsroom organizations as opposed to amateur, citizen media”. This kind of study sought to examine whether traditional mass media entities remain dominant as source influencers in the independent political blogosphere It is argued that blogs can restore the balance of power between the average citizen and traditional media entities (Armstrong & Moulitsas Zuniga, 2006; Reynolds, 2006; Dursun, 2005). This study sought palpable evidence for such power shifts through assessing source influence in the construction of news reports.
Conclusions
This theory of agenda setting has many useful uses in society. First of all it gives the media power to establish what news we see or hear and what part of the news is important to see or hear. This concept of agenda setting in Littlejohn’s book is explained as the idea of issue salience as a media effect is intriguing and important. Therefore agenda setting is used for many purposes to establish the media agenda and to retrieve the opinion of the public. Also agenda setting is very important in the political aspect because the public agenda influences the policy agenda which means that candidates will try to focus on issues that the public wants to hear about. In conclusion the agenda setting theory has many beneficial uses in our society and it is part of our communication.
It has an explanatory power because it explains why most people prioritize the same issues as important. It also has predictive power because it predicts that if people are exposed to the same media, they will feel the same issues are important. Its meta-theoretical assumptions are balanced on the scientific side and it lays groundwork for further research. Furthermore, it has organizing power because it helps organize existing knowledge of media effects.
The agenda setting theory as media 's ability to influence what the public thinks about and their feelings on a particular situation by using framing and priming. Framing is when the media bring to attention some aspects of reality while ignoring others, which could lead to the viewers having different reactions. Priming is when the media put much emphasis on a certain issue to increase the importance of it and bring up old memories about the issue. According to Theodore White, a political analysis, the media is capable of setting the agenda of a public discussion. He says that, "It determines what people will talk and think about”.
According to McCombs, the presence, or absence, of agenda-setting effects by the news media can be explained by our need for orientation. Humans naturally have a need to understand the environment surrounding them. The degree of need for orientation varies greatly from one individual to another. For some, there is a high need for orientation. For others there is little or no need at all. It is defined by two components: relevance and uncertainty. If a topic is perceived as irrelevant, the need for orientation is low and vice versa.
The amount of media attention that a particular topic receives has a correlation to its perceived importance in society. However, an item of perceived importance on the public’s agenda does not necessarily always find its way into the media’s agenda. Among salient issues examined in a study by Tan and Weaver, the public was successful in moving only one issue onto the news agenda after three years’ of effort to gain media attention. Essentially, the media can set the agenda for the public far easier than the public can set the agenda for the media.
In sum, agenda setting has many effects in society. People always look and been influenced by media. Unfortunately it has limitations to people that not have or using media in their life. By using technology, media also can have their audiences. It is like traditional media to influence people with newsworthy. Today, with new technology such as web blogs and social networking people connected in easiest way. Therefore, creating interest to some focusing subject will lead people to the main concept of agenda setting. This will be conducted in easier and fast in media today because people today have connected to social network without barriers in age, gender or intellectual knowledge.
References
Dursun, O. (2005). News Coverage of the Enlargement of the European Union and Public Opinion: A Case Study of Agenda-Setting Effects in the United Kingdom. Austin:USA.
Griffin, E. M. (2003). A First Look at Communication Theory (5th ed). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill.
Littlejohn, S. W. & Foss, K. A. (2005). Theories of Human Communication (8th ed). United States: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.
Kiousis, S., & McCombs, M. (2003). Agenda Setting Study: Agenda Setting effects and strength. Agenda Setting Article, MT Journal Nr. 142.
Sheafer, T. (2007). How to Evaluate It: The Role of Story-Evaluative Tone in Agenda Setting and Priming. Journal of Communication. (57), 21–39.
Stromback, J., & Kiousis, S. (2010). A New Look at Agenda-Setting Effects: Comparing the predictive power of overall political news consumption and specific news media consumption across different media channels and media types. Journal of Communication. (60), 271–292.
Sanchez, M. (2002). Agenda Setting. Retrieved from zimmer.csufresno.edu/~johnca/spch100/7-4-agenda.htm
Smith, A (27 January 2011). 22% of online Americans used social networking or Twitter for politics in 2010 campaign. Pew Research Center: Washington. Retrieved from http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Politics-and-social-media.aspx
Meraz, S. (2009). Is There an Elite Hold? Traditional Media to Social Media Agenda Setting Influence in Blog Networks. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. (14), 682-707. Wanta, Wayne. (1997). The Public and the National Agenda: How People Learn About Important Issues. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
References: Dursun, O. (2005). News Coverage of the Enlargement of the European Union and Public Opinion: A Case Study of Agenda-Setting Effects in the United Kingdom. Austin:USA. Griffin, E. M. (2003). A First Look at Communication Theory (5th ed). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill. Littlejohn, S. W. & Foss, K. A. (2005). Theories of Human Communication (8th ed). United States: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning. Kiousis, S., & McCombs, M. (2003). Agenda Setting Study: Agenda Setting effects and strength. Agenda Setting Article, MT Journal Nr. 142. Sheafer, T. (2007). How to Evaluate It: The Role of Story-Evaluative Tone in Agenda Setting and Priming. Journal of Communication. (57), 21–39. Stromback, J., & Kiousis, S. (2010). A New Look at Agenda-Setting Effects: Comparing the predictive power of overall political news consumption and specific news media consumption across different media channels and media types. Journal of Communication. (60), 271–292. Sanchez, M. (2002). Agenda Setting. Retrieved from zimmer.csufresno.edu/~johnca/spch100/7-4-agenda.htm Smith, A (27 January 2011). 22% of online Americans used social networking or Twitter for politics in 2010 campaign. Pew Research Center: Washington. Retrieved from http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Politics-and-social-media.aspx Meraz, S. (2009). Is There an Elite Hold? Traditional Media to Social Media Agenda Setting Influence in Blog Networks. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. (14), 682-707. Wanta, Wayne. (1997). The Public and the National Agenda: How People Learn About Important Issues. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Agenda Setting Theory
Introduction
Mass communication plays an important role in society where its purpose to inform the public about current and even past events. Mass communication is defined as the process whereby professional communicators use technological devices to share messages over great distances to influence large audiences. According to Littlejohn & Foss (2005), mass communication is the process whereby media organizations produce and transmit messages to large publics and the process by which those messages are sought, used, understood, and influenced by audiences. Within this process the media, which can be a newspaper, a book and television, takes control of the information that can see or hear.
The media then uses gatekeeping and agenda setting to control public access to news, information, and entertainment. Gatekeeping is a series of checkpoints that the news has to go through before it gets to the public. Through this process many people have to decide whether or not the news is to be seen or heard. Some gatekeepers might include reporters, writers, and editors. After gatekeeping comes agenda setting. According to Dennis McQuail cited in Littlejohn & Foss (2005), media are windows that enable us to see beyond our immediate surroundings, interpreters that help us make sense of experience, platforms or carriers that convey information, interactive communication that includes audience feedback, signposts that provide us with instructions and directions, filter that screen out parts of experience and focus on other, mirrors that reflect ourselves back to us, and barriers that block the truth.
Agenda setting as defined is the process whereby the mass media determine what public think and worry about. Agenda setting started when Walter Lippmann, a journalist first observed this function and write Public Opinion in 1922. Lippmann titled his first chapter as “The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads”. Lippmann was the person who presented the theory that the mass media make our pictures of the world and inform us about the world events. However, he anticipated that the pictures provided by the media were most of the time incomplete and distorted. People can see only reflections of reality but not reality itself in the news media. Lippmann pointed out that the media dominates over the creation of pictures in our head; he believed that the public reacts not to actual events but to the pictures in our head. However, those reflections provide the basis for our perceptions about the world. Therefore the agenda setting process is used to remodel all the events occurring in our environment, into a simpler model before we deal with it. Researchers Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw have then followed this concept.
In 1972, researchers McCombs & Shaw conducted an empirical study to investigate the idea that the news media organizations influence our perceptions of the world. As described in the first chapter of this dissertation two researchers from the University of North Carolina thought whether the topics accepted by the news media to represent the outer world reduced the types of events that people used to think about the world. They also thought whether the public’s perception of reality depended on the topics the news media covered or it was not the case. It was a tremendous beginning of a new mass communications theory, which can be divided into two aspects. The first aspect relates with the transmission of issue or object salience from the media agenda to the public agenda. The second aspect relates with the role of news media in framing those issues and things in the minds of masses (Littlejohn & Foss, 2005).
Agenda setting theory is a theory that attempts to explain the impact of mass media on society. It is about media power to influence society or audience. Agenda-setting describes a very powerful influence of the media. The Agenda setting theory comes from a scientific perspective. This theory does a good job of explaining the behavior of the public. It helps to reinforce class, race, gender, and age in the public. Agenda setting predicts what is going to happen in the future. It is a simple theory that is easy to understand. Agenda setting can be tested and it is a useful theory to everyone that knows about it.
According to McCombs and Shaw, the agenda-setting theory found an appreciative audience among mass communication researchers. They found that the selective exposure hypothesis claimed that people would attend only to the news and views that didn 't threaten their established beliefs. McCombs and Shaw 's agenda-setting hypothesis represented a back-to-the-basics approach to mass communication research.
In this theory it shows that mass media set the agenda for public opinion by highlighting certain issues. In the beginning, it was studying the way political campaigns were covered in the media. Shaw and McCombs found the main effect of news media to be agenda-setting, telling people not what to think, but what to think of. Agenda setting is usually referred to as a function of mass media and not a theory. The theory explains the correspondence between the rate at which media cover a story and the extent that people think that this story is important. Agenda-setting is believed to occur because the press must be selective in reporting the news. News outlets act as gatekeepers to control over the selection of content exercised by media of information and make choices about what to report and what not. What the public know and care at any given time is mostly a product of media-gate keeping.
The common assumption of agenda- setting is that the ability of the media to influence the visibility of events in the public mind has been a part of culture for almost half a century. Therefore the concept of agenda setting in society is for the press to selectively choose what society see or hear in the media.
Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw have brought the importance of agenda setting to people’s attention when they carried out the Chapel Hill, North Carolina study. Their emphasis and goal with this study was that the agenda issues found in the news media and among general public is what sets the media agenda. David Weaver joined McCombs and Shaw in project were they panel studied the 1976 United States presidential election. Within this project the researchers studied the attributes of the agenda, the description of presidential candidates in the news and the agenda attributes in voters’ descriptions of the candidates. Throughout this study the researchers found out that there was a relationship between the media agenda and the public agenda. These studies are for the purpose of looking at the media issues and determining whether these issues are important. Therefore the second level of agenda plays an important role in this study because it decides what parts of the issues are important in regards to the presidential election.
Chapel-Hill-study by McCombs and Shaw in 1972, pointed to a relationship between the salience of topics in television news and among undecided voters. Numerous studies went on to document the effects of media coverage on the perceived salience of topics. Later on, the authors themselves pointed out that agenda-setting is not limited to topics and objects, but also relates to certain attributes of topics, events or persons it is second level of agenda-setting. McCombs (2005) also assume that there is a third level of agenda setting, by which the media transport a positive or negative tenor of important topics and attributes to audiences and readers. In addition, the theory was extended to other cognitive concepts such as priming and framing. Both approaches relate to the fact that the mass media, by selecting and emphasizing, direct the recipients’ attention towards certain topics or objects. Media priming is the process by which selected “mass mediated information make certain knowledge units, which are available in the recipient’s memory, temporarily more easily accessible”, therefore predisposing them for the reception or interpretation of subsequent information. According to the framing concept, the underlining and topical framing of information provokes processes of interpretation and evaluation in the recipient.
Agenda Setting has two levels. As mentioned in Theories of Communication the first level enacts the common subjects that are most important, and the second level decides what parts of the subject are important. This two levels of agenda setting lead path into what is the function of this concept. This concept is process that is divided into three parts according to Rogers and Dearing in their book Agenda Setting Research. The first part of the process is the importance of the issues that are going to be discussed in the media. Second, the issues discussed in the media have an impact over the way the public thinks, this is referred as public agenda. Sometimes, the second level is important as a first level because it frames issues that constitute the public and media agendas. Ultimately the public agenda influences the policy agenda. Furthermore “the media agenda affects the public agenda, and the public agenda affects the policy agenda.” (Littlejohn & Foss, 2005).
The agenda-setting function is a three part-process. There are media agenda, public agenda and policy agenda. First media agenda is about issues discussed in the media. The Media agenda is the set of issues addressed by media sources. Second, public agenda is about issues discussed and personally relevant to the public. The public agenda is which is issues the public consider important. Thirdly, policy agenda is issues that policy makers consider important. In direct version the media agenda affects the public agenda, and the public agenda affects the policy agenda.
Agenda setting plays an important role among media, public and policy makers. These relationships are considered as a focus point in political communication because they inform us about interactions among newspapers, radio and television broadcasts, politicians and the government. Most of the communication researchers remained limited with the investigation of the relationship between the media and the public but they ignored another key element, which are the policy makers. Government officers and bureaucrats, who are ultimate policy makers, are influenced by the media and public agenda. There are very little work on the public agenda setting has been done to empirically connect the policy, media and public agendas. Basically, these fields are intimately connected and the investigation about their interrelationship can provide us a more complete and probably more accurate picture of the political interactions in a society. Some of the media scholars conducted their studies to investigate the relationship between the media, the public and policy makers. Different issues have led to different agenda setting results. Different scholars provided different reasons for this variance. Methodological differences can be one reason. Issue attribute is also an important factor. Therefore, the more obtrusive an issue is, the more likely people experience it directly. In such situations, the media have less potential for effects on public opinion.
This theory predicts that if people are exposed to the same media, they will place importance on the same issues. It explains which media cover a story and the extent that people think that this story is important. Although different people may feel differently about the issue at hand, most people feel the same issues are important. Society as audience that have influenced from media learned the important topic or issues that often emphasized by the media.
The agenda-setting as a theory that the mass-news media have a large influence on audiences by their choice of what stories to consider newsworthy and how much prominence and space to give them, agenda-setting theory’s central axiom is salience transfer, or the ability of the mass media to transfer importance of items on their mass agendas to the public agendas. It is the main important things to making agenda setting. Agenda setting theory’s main postulate is salience transfer. McCombs and Shaw believe that the mass media have the ability to transfer the salience of items on their news agendas to the public agenda. Salience transfer is the ability of the news media to transfer issues of importance from their news media agendas to public agendas. This ability to influence the salience of topics on the public agenda has come to be called the agenda setting role of the news media. McCombs and Shaw in their uses and gratifications approach have selective viewers that most affected to the media agenda. The high need orientation arises from high relevance and uncertainty that people who have a willingness to let media shape their thinking. They will think the news from media is important, if the media has selected it on some issues as coverage to viewers.
There are three key elements sets the agenda for the agenda setters which is major sources who provide information for news stories, other news organizations, and journalisms norms and traditions. The major sources include elected leaders like national or local leaders, political campaigns, organizations, interest groups, public information officers, and public relations professionals. Then, other news organizations refer to how news organizations feed off of each other, borrowing stories from one another or at times paying for them. Journalism scanning the environment and looking for characteristics like human interest to ensure a story is newsworthy which is a major part of the norms and traditions of journalism.
In agenda setting there are framing in media which is happened by personal attributes of public figures the media select to describe. Agenda setting is much powerful media function because it have effect on people think about some issues, how and what to think of the issues and what to do about the issues been coverage by the media. Then, people behavioral effect of the media’s agenda happened when people have influenced from media coverage. Agenda setting can make high effects to the related issues that most common. It has organizing power because it helps organize existing knowledge of media effects examples air planes crash makes lower ticket sales but increases purchases of trip insurance. Some of the studies about agenda setting effects have suggested that the ideal time frame for measuring the media effects on public agenda is between two and five months (Winter & Eyal, 1981). Winter and Eyal state that media emphasis in the month prior to the interview period is the most important time period for media agenda to leave largest impact on the public. The issues which are of importance to the media at the time of the interview period will be having some importance for the public because the public follows the media’s agenda. The media not only influence public attention on a particular topic rather they also influence our understanding and perspective on the topics in the news. It also supports the basic assumption of the agenda setting theory that media not only tell what to think about but also tell how to think about. The items that define the agenda are objects. The objects are the things on which the attention of the media and the public are focused. However, these objects have numerous attributes. The attributes are those characteristics and qualities that describe the object. For each object there also is an agenda of attributes because when the media and the public think and talk about an object, some attributes are emphasized, others are given less attention, and many receive no attention at all. This agenda of attributes is another aspect of the agenda-setting role of the news media (McCombs, 1999).
Media portray the image of the political leaders, election candidates and government officials. The image can be portrayed either in a positive or negative way. This is one aspect of the attribute agenda setting. During the 1996 general election in Spain, the images of the three major party leaders by voters in Navarra city showed considerable correspondence with the media’s presentation of these party leaders (McCombs, 2000).
There is a question who affects the media agenda but it is a complex and difficult question. Basically, media agendas result from pressures both within media organizations and from outside sources. It can be established by some combination of internal programming, editorial and managerial decisions, and external influences from nonmedia sources such as socially influential individuals, government officials and commercial sponsors.
According to Littlejohn & Foss (2005), the power of media in establishing a public agenda depends in part on their relations with power centers. Then, if the media have close relationships with the elite class in society therefore, that class will probably affect the media agenda and the public agenda in turn. Many critical theorists believe that media can be and usually are an instrument of the dominant ideology in society, and when this happens, that dominant ideology will permeate the public agenda.
There are four types of power relations between the media and outside sources. The first is a high-power source and high-power media. A positive symbiotic relationship will make great power over the public agenda it is like a good relationships with the press. The second is a high-power source and low-power media. It is like a privilege because the external source will co-operation with media and use them to accomplish its own ends if it have high-power source. The third type of relation is a lower-power source and high-power media. The media organizations will be largely responsible for their own agenda. This will happens when the media marginalize certain news sources. Then, the fourth type of relation is where both media and external sources are low in power that make public agenda probably be established by the events themselves rather than the media or the leaders.
Definitions of Concepts
Wanta (1997) reported that agenda-setting influence for television news appears to have more immediate effects on public opinion, while the duration of effects via print media are longer. In explaining some of the rationales for varying impact due to different media channels, he notes that the expectation for stronger broadcast effects rests largely on the idea that the multiple sensory cues present in television news should result in greater salience transfer than that in print. On the contrary, he explains that the control of pacing that print offers suggests that newspapers should yield stronger agenda-setting impact. Finally, he discusses the possibility that no differences should exist because news agendas tend to be quite similar across media channels. In such a case, overall political news consumption would be a stronger predictor of agenda-setting effects than specific news media consumption.
Agenda-setting theory is the theory that explains how media sets the agenda for the public. This definition has been changed over the years to mean the media tells us “not what to think, but what to think about” (Griffin, 2003). Another definition, according to McCombs, is “the transfer of salience from one agenda to another”.
According to Littlejohn & Foss (2005), agenda setting occurs because the press must be selective in reporting the news. News outlets, as gatekeepers of information, make choices about what to report and how to report it. What the public knows about the state of affairs at any given time is largely a product of media gatekeeping. Then, how a person votes is determined mainly by what issues the individual believes to be important. For this reason some researchers have come to believe that the issues reported during a candidate’s term in office may have more effect on the election than the campaign itself.
Then, based on the agenda-setting hypothesis (first-level agenda setting), the media influence public opinion by emphasizing certain issues over others. The amount of media attention, or the media salience, devoted to certain issues increases their accessibility and consequently influences the degree of public concern for these issues (Dearing & Rogers, 1996; McCombs, 2004; McCombs & Shaw, 1972) cited in Sheafer (2007).
Agenda setting has systematically sought to document the effects of mass media on the audience’s cognitions. By virtue of creating a shared, national pseudo-environment, mass media fulfill the important function of building a public consensus on the important issues of the day (Lippmann, 1949; McCombs, 1997; McCombs, 2004). As one of the more enduring and most researched theories in mass communication and political communication agenda setting has matured as a theory to include a second-level agenda setting component which is attribute agenda setting, a psychological component to explain\ individual-level agenda setting effects that need for orientation, an emphasis on how the media’s agenda is shaped, and an explanation for the shared news agenda among different media that is intermedia agenda setting.
All agenda-setting research focuses on the transfer of salience from one agenda to another. Most research on media agenda-setting effects focus on the correlation between issues on the media agenda and issues on the public agenda, and can be characterized as content-based agenda-setting studies. Thus, these studies do not really measure attention to different media, which is the focus of attention-based agenda-setting studies (Ghanem & Wanta, 2001; Kiousis, McDevitt, & Wu, 2005; Wanta 1997;Weaver, 1991). Agenda-setting research initially emphasized how mass media, policy makers, and the public interact and infl uence one another to affect issue salience. More recently, this paradigm also has considered how candidate images are constructed and prioritized in public opinion, expanding the original agenda-setting model to include multiple objects and their attributes in the news. A shared quality of all these investigations has been their common convergence on people’s cognitions. Less attention has been devoted to the attitudinal consequences of agenda setting and primarily is limited to probing how the salience of public issues influences attitudes toward political figures (Kiousis &McCombs, 2003).
Agenda setting is also a process of social learning. People learn about the importance of issues in society through the amount of news media coverage, they receive. The theory of agenda setting assumes that the people learn about and prioritize the information they receive from the news in proportion to the amount of attention that information is given in media content. For instance, Benton and Frazier (1976) found that agenda setting not only shapes the salience of issues but also the salience of proposed solutions to those issues and the rationales behind those solutions. If media attention results in social learning, this further suggests that people also should hold stronger attitudes as news attention intensifies. Traditional or also known as first-level agenda-setting theory emphasizes how mass media, elites, and the public interact and influence one another to affect issue salience. Traditional agenda-setting effects point to the visibility and perceived importance of a problem or an issue due to its visibility or salience in the media. As Bernard Cohen noted in his seminal work The Press and Foreign Policy, 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” (Cohen 1963, Dursun 2005). Cues repeated day after day effectively communicate the importance of each topic (McCombs 2000, p. 1). The more coverage an issue receives, the more concern individuals have with the issue. In other words, individuals learn how concerned they should be through the amount of coverage the issue receives (Wanta 1997, McCombs 2000).
Relationships Among Concept
The determinants of the agenda setting theory is an important question of debate among the scholars of Mass Communication. Different scholars presented their views in different ways. Agenda setting theory have many influenced in politic, economy, education, science and social life. Basically, the determinants of the agenda setting effects of media are the factors that play their role in setting the public agenda. Different determinants produce different agenda setting results in different situations. Following are the most agreed determinants of the agenda setting effects. First, media exposure in earlier it was considered that media credibility and reliance on the media are the most important determinants of the agenda setting effects. But Wanta & Ghanem (2006) described that exposure was a stronger determinant than media credibility or media reliance, which were unrelated, in a study of Hispanic cable news. Second, obtrusiveness is refers to the extent that the public has experience with the policy issue. The more unobtrusive an issue, the more the individual may rely on media exposure for orientation. In a research study conducted by Zucker (1978), it was found that salience transfer was maximum for unobtrusive issues. Third, need for orientation. Need for orientation is a function of individual interest in the policy topic combined with issue uncertainty. Weaver (1977) and others found that some persons have greater need for policy orientation and thus are more affected by salience transfer than others. Kiousis and McCombs (2003) conducted a research study in the US to investigate the relationship between agenda setting and attitude strength. It was suggested by the learning model that message dissemination would represent media salience, audience cognition would represent perceived public salience, and audience affect would represent perceived public attitude strength. According to the results of the study strong correlations were found between the amount of attention that the news media pay to political figures and both the public salience and the strength of public attitudes toward these persons. Although all the relationships were found strong, the correlations between media and public salience generally were weaker. Communication scholars have found empirical linkages between agenda setting and attitude strength (Kiousis & McCombs, 2004). The version of the traditional hierarchy of effects theory (discussed earlier) offered by Valente et al. (1998) is valuable for this explanation because it includes multiple sequences among the variables.
The media agenda is the independent variable of main interest in agenda-setting studies focusing on the relationship between the news media and public opinion. Information regarding what issues and topics that were on this agenda is of considerable importance for the formulation of hypotheses concerning the effects of the news media on public opinion.
Few studies have been conducted on traditional mass media’s agenda setting ability in citizen-controlled Internet spaces. Lee et al. (2005) found higher correlations in support of newspaper influence on online bulletin board conversations in South Korea. Roberts, Wanta, and Dzwo (2002) found that U.S. online media were successfully able to set the agenda for U.S. electronic bulletin board users for three issues with a time-lag influence varying between 1 to 7 days. In one of the few studies to test mutual influence between traditional media and the independent political blogosphere, Cornfield et al. (2005) found a correlation of .78 for traditional media-to-blog influence as opposed to a correlation of .68 for blog-to-traditional media influence. Issue characteristics have been shown to play a strong role in mediating the traditional media’s issue agenda setting effect. Prior research has shown that media’s agenda setting impact is stronger with unobtrusive issues or issues that the audience has less direct, personalized experience with in real-world contexts (Zucker, 1978; Winter, Eyal, & Rogers, 1982; Smith, 1987; Weaver et al., 1981). The media’s ability to influence the audience’s agenda with issues is also related to the nature of the issue: Abstract issues are more difficult to transfer to the audience than concrete issues (Yagade & Dozier, 1990). The media are also better able to set the agenda in relation to more dramatic and conflict-laden events (MacKuen &Coombs, 1981; Wanta & Hu, 1993) and with shorter time-frame issues (Downs, 1972; Zucker, 1978). When assessing the agenda setting influence between traditional mass media and the independent political blogosphere, issue transfer is more feasible with issues that can support buzz and partisan framing within the highly partisan U.S. political blogosphere (Meraz, 2008; Cornfield et al., 2005).
Critique
Mass communication is a media that bring such as news, information to society. Media is a strong and power channel to influence people. Unfortunately, there are also limitations in agenda setting theory that was a theory in mass communication and media effect.
The media have the capability to influence some individuals, but not everyone. In their study, McCombs and Shaw did not include the voters that were committed to a candidate in their research. This tells that some individuals have their own opinion on the situation and are not influenced by media. This is because people may not be as ideal as the theory assumes. People may pay only casual and intermittent attention to public affairs and remain ignorant of the details. Sometimes, people only focusing on what they interest and leave other information because it not get their attention and interest. People that have made up their minds the agenda effect are weakened to them. Therefore, media cannot create or conceal problems, they can only alter the awareness, priorities and salience people attach to a set of problems. Research has largely been inconclusive in establishing a causal relationship between public salience and media coverage
In limitations, such as news media users may not be as ideal as the theory assumes. It is because sometimes people may not be well-informed, deeply engaged in public affairs, thoughtful and skeptical. Instead, they may pay only casual and intermittent attention to public affairs and remain ignorant of the details. According to the advocates of the limited effects, the limited power of the media may be due to their short attention period always running from one crisis to another hence diluting their attention on the slower workings of democracy. Another weakness of the media mentioned is its tendency to highlight the most amazing, prominent and sometimes sensitive stories, while these stories tend to take place at the end of the policy-making process, and not at the beginning..
Another limitation is that there is limited research in the realm of non-traditional forms of news media such as social media and blogs and also its agenda setting role. Although blogs and other forms of Computer Mediated Communication appear to be quickly gaining ground against traditional news media outlets, more research still needs to be done. What is plainly visible is that to survive, traditional newsrooms have embraced newsroom blogs as an alternative vehicle for news delivery and there still continues to be a socio-economic gap although likely a small one between those who use used non-traditional forms of news media and those who do not.
Individuals capable of coming to their own conclusion and base their opinion and believes. Today world, it is a rule that news media are supposed to be unbiased. Some individuals may be well informed and intelligent about a particular issue. This being the fact, the media would not be capable of changing their concrete opinion.
The discipline is a big factor in whether one will be influenced by media or not. They will know the difference from right and wrong. Since media tends to publish a lot of negative material, therefore they should not be influenced by it. It would be interesting to learn how much discipline an individual, that has been influenced by media and committed a crime or been unethical, received before performing their action.
Implications in Interest
Interpersonal communication has also a key role in the process of agenda setting. A number of research studies have been taken place to find the relationship between interpersonal communication and agenda setting. Interpersonal communication may increase salience by playing an essential role when people want to make sense of new topics reported by the media. It means that talking to others about topics found in the media may make those issues more important for people when they do not understand the issue. Then, interpersonal discussions filtered or reduced media influence, whereas others reported that they enhanced media effects.
According to several 2008 reports, blogging continues to attract writers and readers. This form of Web content creation has matured beyond public personal journaling to support citizen journalism or journalism produced by independent bloggers unaffiliated with professional newsrooms. The popularity of blogs is in part fueled by its interactive format: The blog tool is popularly believed to be a vehicle of democracy because it fosters decentralized citizen control as opposed to hierarchical, elite control. This inversion of elite control is the social outcome of a more interactive format. Blogs are popularly viewed as a form of social media, or media that is architected by design to readily support participation, peer-to-peer conversation, collaboration, and community. Social media tools such as blogs enable Web content creators to circumvent the high transaction costs that once characterized usage of earlier media technologies (Meraz, 2009).
Then because of today the world has become a global village due to the rapid growth of internet. This new paradigm has affected almost each and every aspect of our lives. Theories and concepts have also been influenced by the new of technology. The increasing trend of the use of blogs and to some extent less reliance on the traditional media has also affected the theory of agenda setting. Chaffee and Metzger’s (2001) predicted that “the key problem for agenda-setting theory will change from what issues the media tell people to think about to what issues people tell the media they want to think about”. The previous researches on the agenda setting theory have explored issue salience by focusing on audience recall and public opinion but the web logs invite researchers to consider hyperlinks as behavioral indicators of an issue’s perceived importance. Today, the rapid growth of the Internet has dramatically decentralized the communication power of the traditional media. The web blogs are the most recent demonstration of this trend. Simultaneously, traditional media have adopted the potential of the web. Newspaper stories and audiovisual broadcasts are no longer temporary and disposable things. Today, they are archived, indexed, abstracted and fully capable of receiving links.
Then, Web blogs are considered to be situated somewhere between the traditional journalism and the general masses or public. Blood (2003) describes web blogs as participatory media forms that engage in something slightly different than journalism. Whatever term is used, it is clear that many web blog authors ask questions about current events and read stories against one another. Although the author’s personal voice is the foundation of every web blog (Lennon, 2003), hyperlinks to external information are also vital to this form of journalism. The historical intellectual foundations of the field of mass communication may provide some signals about the role of blogs. Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) suggested in one of their old study that media influence could be conceptualized as a two-step flow in which opinion leaders play their role between journalists and the general public. Two researchers of the mass communication field Brosius and Weimman (1996) linked the two-step flow to agenda setting research, arguing that agenda setting is a process in which influential individuals. This is an excellent description of journalistically-focused web log authors. Web blogs are considered as a part of a broader trend toward the decentralization of communication power of media. Amateur journalism is going to be mature with the passage of time. Web blogs have demonstrated their ability to affect the flow of information between traditional media and audiences. From the agenda setting point of view, the most important thing about web blogs is the way in which they bridge different components of our public life.
Social network analysis is an interdisciplinary theory of structural relations that focuses on the relationships and linkages between individuals. Wasserman and Faust (1997) cited in Meraz, 2009 define social network analysis as the study of ‘‘relationships among social entities, and on the patterns and implications of these relationships.’’ Emphasis is placed on the interdependence of actors and their actions, the relational ties between actors, the network structure of ties between and among individuals, and the conceptualization of network structure along social, political, and economic dimensions. This study takes the approach that social network theory can be used to explain the boundaries of potential source influence and the potential power of agenda setters within specified social networks.
Social network analysis also is focused on uncovering the patterning of people 's interaction. Network analysis is based on the intuitive notion that these patterns are important features of the lives of the individuals who display them. Network analysts believe that how an individual lives depends in large part on how that individual is tied into the larger web of social connections. Many believe, moreover, that the success or failure of societies and organizations often depends on the patterning of their internal structure.
In America, Some 21% of online adults used social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace in the months leading up to the November, 2010 elections to connect to the campaign or the election itself, and 2% of online adults did so using Twitter. That works out to a total of 22% of adult internet users who engaged with the political campaign on Twitter or social networking sites (Smith, 2011). This shows that people today been influenced by new media like blog and social networking that can create agenda setting in their life. The main reason survey respondents gave for following political groups on social networking sites or Twitter is that doing so helps them feel more personally connected to the candidates or groups they follow. Only relatively few of the respondents say that they follow political groups through social media because the information is more reliable than what they can get from traditional news organizations. The particular importance to this study is the subfacet of social network theory called homophily theory or ‘‘birds of a feather flock together’’ theory. The powerful tendency that individuals have to network along homogeneous lines is driven by shared beliefs, interests, and social status (Lazersfeld & Merton, 1954; McPhearson et al., 2001; Meraz, 2009).Within the independent U.S. political blogosphere, several studies have found segmentation along partisan lines in diverse environments (Meraz, 2009). This study seeks to examine homophily through the specific lens of status homophily. This study contemplates the following “to what extent do elite traditional media newsrooms extend their elite bias by choosing to link to other professional newsroom organizations as opposed to amateur, citizen media”. This kind of study sought to examine whether traditional mass media entities remain dominant as source influencers in the independent political blogosphere It is argued that blogs can restore the balance of power between the average citizen and traditional media entities (Armstrong & Moulitsas Zuniga, 2006; Reynolds, 2006; Dursun, 2005). This study sought palpable evidence for such power shifts through assessing source influence in the construction of news reports.
Conclusions
This theory of agenda setting has many useful uses in society. First of all it gives the media power to establish what news we see or hear and what part of the news is important to see or hear. This concept of agenda setting in Littlejohn’s book is explained as the idea of issue salience as a media effect is intriguing and important. Therefore agenda setting is used for many purposes to establish the media agenda and to retrieve the opinion of the public. Also agenda setting is very important in the political aspect because the public agenda influences the policy agenda which means that candidates will try to focus on issues that the public wants to hear about. In conclusion the agenda setting theory has many beneficial uses in our society and it is part of our communication.
It has an explanatory power because it explains why most people prioritize the same issues as important. It also has predictive power because it predicts that if people are exposed to the same media, they will feel the same issues are important. Its meta-theoretical assumptions are balanced on the scientific side and it lays groundwork for further research. Furthermore, it has organizing power because it helps organize existing knowledge of media effects.
The agenda setting theory as media 's ability to influence what the public thinks about and their feelings on a particular situation by using framing and priming. Framing is when the media bring to attention some aspects of reality while ignoring others, which could lead to the viewers having different reactions. Priming is when the media put much emphasis on a certain issue to increase the importance of it and bring up old memories about the issue. According to Theodore White, a political analysis, the media is capable of setting the agenda of a public discussion. He says that, "It determines what people will talk and think about”.
According to McCombs, the presence, or absence, of agenda-setting effects by the news media can be explained by our need for orientation. Humans naturally have a need to understand the environment surrounding them. The degree of need for orientation varies greatly from one individual to another. For some, there is a high need for orientation. For others there is little or no need at all. It is defined by two components: relevance and uncertainty. If a topic is perceived as irrelevant, the need for orientation is low and vice versa.
The amount of media attention that a particular topic receives has a correlation to its perceived importance in society. However, an item of perceived importance on the public’s agenda does not necessarily always find its way into the media’s agenda. Among salient issues examined in a study by Tan and Weaver, the public was successful in moving only one issue onto the news agenda after three years’ of effort to gain media attention. Essentially, the media can set the agenda for the public far easier than the public can set the agenda for the media.
In sum, agenda setting has many effects in society. People always look and been influenced by media. Unfortunately it has limitations to people that not have or using media in their life. By using technology, media also can have their audiences. It is like traditional media to influence people with newsworthy. Today, with new technology such as web blogs and social networking people connected in easiest way. Therefore, creating interest to some focusing subject will lead people to the main concept of agenda setting. This will be conducted in easier and fast in media today because people today have connected to social network without barriers in age, gender or intellectual knowledge.
References
Dursun, O. (2005). News Coverage of the Enlargement of the European Union and Public Opinion: A Case Study of Agenda-Setting Effects in the United Kingdom. Austin:USA.
Griffin, E. M. (2003). A First Look at Communication Theory (5th ed). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill.
Littlejohn, S. W. & Foss, K. A. (2005). Theories of Human Communication (8th ed). United States: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.
Kiousis, S., & McCombs, M. (2003). Agenda Setting Study: Agenda Setting effects and strength. Agenda Setting Article, MT Journal Nr. 142.
Sheafer, T. (2007). How to Evaluate It: The Role of Story-Evaluative Tone in Agenda Setting and Priming. Journal of Communication. (57), 21–39.
Stromback, J., & Kiousis, S. (2010). A New Look at Agenda-Setting Effects: Comparing the predictive power of overall political news consumption and specific news media consumption across different media channels and media types. Journal of Communication. (60), 271–292.
Sanchez, M. (2002). Agenda Setting. Retrieved from zimmer.csufresno.edu/~johnca/spch100/7-4-agenda.htm
Smith, A (27 January 2011). 22% of online Americans used social networking or Twitter for politics in 2010 campaign. Pew Research Center: Washington. Retrieved from http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Politics-and-social-media.aspx
Meraz, S. (2009). Is There an Elite Hold? Traditional Media to Social Media Agenda Setting Influence in Blog Networks. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. (14), 682-707. Wanta, Wayne. (1997). The Public and the National Agenda: How People Learn About Important Issues. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
References: Dursun, O. (2005). News Coverage of the Enlargement of the European Union and Public Opinion: A Case Study of Agenda-Setting Effects in the United Kingdom. Austin:USA. Griffin, E. M. (2003). A First Look at Communication Theory (5th ed). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill. Littlejohn, S. W. & Foss, K. A. (2005). Theories of Human Communication (8th ed). United States: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning. Kiousis, S., & McCombs, M. (2003). Agenda Setting Study: Agenda Setting effects and strength. Agenda Setting Article, MT Journal Nr. 142. Sheafer, T. (2007). How to Evaluate It: The Role of Story-Evaluative Tone in Agenda Setting and Priming. Journal of Communication. (57), 21–39. Stromback, J., & Kiousis, S. (2010). A New Look at Agenda-Setting Effects: Comparing the predictive power of overall political news consumption and specific news media consumption across different media channels and media types. Journal of Communication. (60), 271–292. Sanchez, M. (2002). Agenda Setting. Retrieved from zimmer.csufresno.edu/~johnca/spch100/7-4-agenda.htm Smith, A (27 January 2011). 22% of online Americans used social networking or Twitter for politics in 2010 campaign. Pew Research Center: Washington. Retrieved from http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Politics-and-social-media.aspx Meraz, S. (2009). Is There an Elite Hold? Traditional Media to Social Media Agenda Setting Influence in Blog Networks. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. (14), 682-707. Wanta, Wayne. (1997). The Public and the National Agenda: How People Learn About Important Issues. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
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