Setting the Agenda. Maxwell McCombs
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the competition by the plethora of news now available on the internet and television.59 Among the public, strong agenda-setting effects result from civic osmosis, the continuous exposure to a vast sea of information from many channels of communication.60 Applying network analysis to Nielsen data on TV and internet use from March 2009 collected from over 1,000 homes, James Webster and Thomas Ksiazek noted:
We find extremely high levels of audience duplication across 236 media outlets, suggesting overlapping patterns of public attention rather than isolated groups of audience loyalists.61
For most people, this exposure ranges from habitual and deliberate attention to some news channels to incidental exposure to other news channels in the course of daily life. In tandem with the homogeneity of these news channels, the outcome is a high degree of consensus among the public about the major issues of the day.
3. To what extent are there specific channel effects vs. the collective impact of a communication gestalt?
Long-standing interest in the effects of media has frequently been accompanied by a fascination with the relative power of the various communication channels to achieve those effects. Agenda setting has been no exception. Once people understand the basic idea of agenda setting, they are quick to ask which medium is more powerful in setting the public agenda. In the latter half of the twentieth century, attention was directed particularly at comparisons between newspapers and television. Now the panoply of social media has been added. The best answer to this question is: ‘It depends.’ Whether all these channels speak as a chorus, with little difference among them, or whether one or two channels clearly surpass the others in impact, varies considerably from one situation to another. Even where differences do exist, most of the channels contribute to these agenda-setting effects. We swim in a vast sea of news and information, a gestalt of communication channels, where the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts.
However, in the examination of media effects over the years, there has been a tendency to emphasize individual media more than the media collectively. This is particularly salient in the literature on media effects and political polarization, a body of work that has been studied in the agenda-setting literature under the rubric of ‘attribute agenda setting’. For instance, a study conducted in the context of the US elections of 2012 found that the affective attributes (e.g. morality, leadership, caring, intelligence, and honesty) of the candidates emphasized by a partisan channel (Fox News) produced a different agenda-setting process when compared to more neutral networks (CNN and NBC).62 This line of research confirms that people are influenced by the media they choose to use, such that polarization and the ensuing audience fragmentation does not weaken the existence of individual-level media effects.
In contrast, the concept of civic osmosis emphasizes this collective role of the media. And the proliferation of new media adds a rich variety of dynamic channels to this communication gestalt. Increasingly, we swim in a sea of diversity, and we need to understand the currents in this sea, both those that enhance communication and those that pollute the sea. Above all, we need to understand the sea as a whole, how it changes and shifts over time, and how it impacts the public agenda. There is abundant empirical evidence about the absorption of news and information from this communication gestalt that dates from the earliest days of our field to the present. In the benchmark 1940 Erie County study, Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues found substantial overlap in people’s use of the various mass media:
People highly exposed to one medium of communication also tend to be highly exposed to other media. There are relatively few who are highly exposed to one medium and little exposed to the other.63
Although, in response to survey questions, people can name a particular news medium as their primary source – the newspaper that they read most mornings, the radio or TV news that they tune to with some regularity – people are far from immune to the larger news environment. In the 1996 Spanish national election, there was considerable similarity between people’s level of agreement with their primary medium’s agenda in comparison to their level of agreement with the agenda of the primary medium’s principal competitor.64 For example, among voters who identified Diario de Navarra as their primary news source, the agenda-setting correlation was +0.62. Their level of agreement with the competing local newspaper was +0.57. Across eighteen comparisons, the median difference in the correlations is only 0.09.
Returning to the previous comparisons between agenda-setting effects of daily newspapers among contemporary generations:
despite evidence that the youngest generation is not exposed to traditional media as frequently as the older generations, and does use the Internet significantly more, there is little support for the intuitive idea that diversity of media will lead to the end of a common public agenda as we have known it. Rather, different media use among the young did not seem to influence the agenda-setting effect much at all.65
During the 2006 Swedish national election, Jesper Stromback and Spiro Kiousis measured the impact of daily news use across nine major news media – a mix of newspapers, television, and radio – and found that:
attention to political news exerts a significant and rather strong influence on perceived issue salience and that attention to political news matters more than attention to various specific news shows on television and in radio, or to different newspapers.66
This finding does not deny that there are powerful and influential newspapers, broadcast stations, and websites. However, zooming out for a broader look, it is the vast gestalt of communication voices that defines our social fabric. Often, the major effects of communication result from the collective impact of the media and a continuous process of civic osmosis. An important aspect of civic osmosis is the sheer number of news channels available to the public. At the individual level, the number of different problems mentioned by respondents when asked to name the most important problems facing the local community or the nation is significantly related to the number of media voices in the community.67
Summing up
This is far from all the accumulated evidence that the news media exercise an agenda-setting influence on the public, but it is a wide-ranging sample of that evidence. The examples presented here describe agenda-setting effects by a wide array of media on numerous national and local issues, during elections and more quiescent political times, in a variety of national and local settings in the United States, Britain, Spain, Germany, Japan, and Argentina, from 1968 to the present. Recent research also has documented the agenda-setting effects of entertainment media, such as Oprah Winfrey’s daytime TV show.68
There are, of course, several other significant influences that shape individual attitudes and public opinion. How we feel about a particular issue may be rooted in our personal experience, the general culture or our exposure to the media.69 Trends in public opinion are shaped over time by new generations, external events, and the communication media.70 Nonetheless, the general proposition supported by this accumulation of evidence about agenda-setting effects is that journalists do significantly influence their audience’s picture of the world.
For the most part, this agenda-setting influence is an inadvertent by-product of the media’s necessity to focus on a few topics in the news each day. And a tight focus on a handful of issues by numerous media conveys a strong message to the audience about what are the most important topics of the moment. Agenda setting directs our attention to the early formative stages of public opinion, when issues emerge and first engage public attention, a situation that confronts journalists with a strong ethical responsibility to select carefully the issues on their agenda.
In theoretical terms, this chapter’s examples of agenda setting illustrate the transmission of issue salience from the media agenda to the public agenda. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, agenda setting as a theory about the transmission of salience is not limited to the influence of the media agenda on the public agenda, or even to an agenda of public issues. There are many agendas in contemporary society. Beyond the various agendas that define