Setting the Agenda. Maxwell McCombs
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among the public?
For most of the 1990s and 2000s, attention to the agenda-setting effects of online media centred on how news websites, blogs, bulletin boards, candidate websites, and search engines influenced – or were influenced by – traditional media, a phenomenon commonly referred to as ‘intermedia agenda setting’. In general, the evidence showed a two-way relationship between mainstream media and online media, where both agendas mutually reinforced each other.40 With the arrival of social media platforms and new partisan outlets in the mid 2000s, these initial findings about the reciprocity of issue agendas largely replicated.41
In comparison to intermedia agenda-setting, fewer studies have documented the effect of online media agendas on the public agenda. Nevertheless, an initial overview of this research found strong support to the basic agenda-setting hypothesis.42 For example, an analysis of candidate websites during the 2010 US Senate election found they were successful at influencing the salience of seven issues among Indianapolis voters.43 Turning to online news media, the increased salience for an array of national issues among viewers of CNN online and for foreign affairs among participants in an experiment who viewed the New York Times online were noted above.44 In South Korea, two alternative online news services, OhmyNews and PRESSian influenced the salience among the public of the deaths of two schoolgirls by a US military vehicle, an issue that resulted in massive anti-US protests.45 The homogeneity of issue agendas between online and traditional media certainly contributes to the strong influence of digital channels on the public’s priorities, a topic that we will discuss shortly.46
With the rise of social media over the last decades, researchers have focused on the role played by platforms such as Facebook and Twitter on influencing the public agenda. A study conducted in Spain examined whether news consumption through Facebook was associated with having an individualized agenda that diverged from the aggregated public agenda of most important problems.47 By combining survey and web-tracking data, the authors found that the more an individual uses Facebook as a gateway for news, the less likely she will mention the top two issues in the public agenda, which at the time were unemployment and corruption. While statistically significant, the effect was small. Specifically, those who did not use Facebook for news had a 47 per cent probability of mentioning unemployment or corruption as the most important issues. This probability decreased to 35 per cent for the average Facebook user. Nevertheless, when compared to the total list of important issues mentioned by survey respondents, the influence of Facebook was not statistically significant.
Another study48 analysed the reciprocal influence of tweets sent over two years by 36 news media and different random samples of users in the United States. First, the correlation in issue attention between media outlets and the different groups of users (namely, ‘attentive’ public, general public, Democratic supporters, and Republican supporters) varied from +0.55 to +0.79. These correlations suggest moderate to strong relationships between issues agendas. Second, and most importantly, the time-series analyses allowed to establish whether these correlations stem from the ability of the media to set the public agenda on Twitter, or, conversely, resulted from public discussions influencing the subsequent news agenda. The results were rather consistent:
Notably, in each case, the power of shifts in media attention to predict subsequent shifts in attention among all audiences is greater than the reverse, confirming that media outlets play a crucial role in leading political attention.49
In general, then, the available studies confirm that the transfer of salience from the media agenda to the public agenda takes place not only with traditional news outlets, but also with new interactive, digital platforms.50 That is, when people use media, the potential of that media’s content to set the agenda of public concerns remains.
2. Has the proliferation of online media diminished the agenda-setting impact of the traditional media?
With the transformation of the communication landscape in recent decades – first cable television and subsequently satellite television among the traditional mass media and now the proliferation of websites and personalized social media – some observers have predicted the diminution, if not the disappearance, of agenda-setting effects on the scale that we have observed them over the past half century.51 The argument is that the myriad content choices brought upon by interactive media has increased the competition for people’s attention, thus challenging the place of traditional news in people’s media diet.52 Despite the popularity of this possibility, the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence to date suggests that the agenda-setting role of the media endures. To paraphrase Mark Twain’s famous cable to the Associated Press, reports of agenda setting’s death are greatly exaggerated.
An extensive longitudinal analysis of the agenda-setting effects of the New York Times’ coverage on the public’s responses to the Gallup Poll’s ‘most important problem facing the country’ from 1956 to 2004 found variations in the strength of these effects, but no discernible trend over time.53 This finding was replicated in a more recent time-series analysis based on media content and public opinion data collected in Sweden between 1992 and 2014. In it, the authors analysed both aggregate and individual-level agenda-setting effects on public opinion concerning twelve different political issues. Their results show that the traditional news media were as influential as an agenda setter in 2014 – an era of high-choice media – as in 1992 – an era of low choice.54 Similarly, a longitudinal analysis55 of broadcast television’s agenda-setting power conducted in Chile between 2001 and 2016 found that the correlation between media and public agendas averaged +0.75. Furthermore, there was no downward linear trend – if in 2001 the correlation hovered at +0.90, by 2016 it was still at a strong +0.80.
Another way of tracking variation in agenda-setting effects due to the proliferation of digital channels is through cohort analysis, in which different generations of individuals are compared in their susceptibility to the media agenda. Although media-use patterns among different generations do diverge in the new communication environment, state-wide surveys in North Carolina and Louisiana found little difference in agenda-setting effects among the younger, middle, and older generations.56 Greater attention to the internet and much less attention to traditional media among young adults had little impact on the magnitude of agenda-setting effects. Particularly compelling is the comparison in Louisiana of the issue agendas of low and high internet users to the issue agenda of the state’s major newspapers. For low internet users the correlation with the newspaper agenda is +0.90. For high internet users, the correlation is +0.70.
Likewise, comparisons between the issue agendas of the New York Times and the younger, middle, and older generations across the election years in the US from 1976 to 2004 found no inflection points associated with these events in the long-term trends.57 The overall pattern is one of strong agenda-setting effects across the years and no large differences among the generations despite variations in their media-use patterns. For the younger generation, the median correlation is +0.77 across these decades with a range of +0.55 to +0.93. For the 35 to 54-year-olds, the median is +0.79 with a range of +0.66 to +0.93. Among those 55-and-older, the median value is +0.77 with a range of +0.61 to +0.93.
Furthermore, the meta-analysis discussed earlier58 showed that year of publication of the study was not a significant predictor of the strength of the agenda-setting effect, which suggests that the influence of traditional news media – which are the most studied media in the articles used in the meta-analysis – remains as strong as it used to be.
Both the strength of agenda-setting effects in past decades and their continuing strength in contemporary settings result from long-standing patterns of behaviour in the media and among the public. The high degree of homogeneity among media agendas found in the original Chapel Hill investigation continues in contemporary settings. Pablo Boczkowski not only found a high level of homogeneity among the news agendas of the major print and online newspapers in Buenos Aires, but also noted the increasing similarity of these news agendas from 1995 to 2005, a trend that he attributes to the facilitation of journalists’