Setting the Agenda. Maxwell McCombs
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Sebastián Valenzuela
polity
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Copyright © Maxwell McCombs and Sebastián Valenzuela 2021
The right of Maxwell McCombs and Sebastián Valenzuela to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2004 by Polity Press
This edition published in 2021 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3579-8 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3580-4 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McCombs, Maxwell E., author. | Valenzuela, Sebastián, author.
Title: Setting the agenda : the news media and public opinion / Maxwell McCombs and Sebastián Valenzuela.
Description: Third edition. | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “An anticipated third edition of the go-to text on agenda-setting”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020017655 (print) | LCCN 2020017656 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509535798 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509535804 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509535811 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Mass media and public opinion. | Mass media--Social aspects. | Mass media--Political aspects. | Mass media--Influence. | Public opinion.
Classification: LCC P96.P83 M38 2020 (print) | LCC P96.P83 (ebook) | DDC 302.23--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017655
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017656
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Boxes
1.1 Agenda-setting role of the news media
1.2 The power of the news
2.1 Newspaper coverage and public concern about crime
2.2 The Acapulco typology: four perspectives on agenda setting
3.1 First- and second-level agenda setting
3.2 Attribute agenda setting in Spanish local elections
3.3 Compelling arguments: Another path for the transfer of salience between the media agenda and the public agenda
4.1 Matrix of candidate attributes
4.2 Media and public attribute agenda networks
5.1 Need for orientation and agenda-setting effects
5.2 Need for orientation and average level of interest in political information
5.3 Agenda-setting effects for obtrusive and unobtrusive issues (natural history perspective)
5.4 Agenda-setting effects for obtrusive and unobtrusive issues (competition perspective)
6.1 Duration of major issues on the public agenda
6.2 A comparison of attribute agenda-setting effects based on three measures of attribute salience among the public for an environmental issue
7.1 An expanded view of agenda setting
7.2 A metaphorical onion of the media agenda
8.1 Consequences of agenda setting
8.2 Individual behaviour in response to news of plane crashes and skyjackings
8.3 Impact on three behaviours of object salience on the media agenda
9.1 Patterns of social consensus with increasing use of the news media among demographic groups in Spain, Taiwan, and the United States
Foreword: ‘Messages and Residues’
Even as children we know instinctively that a message, such as a cry, generates a response. This comprehensive book makes clear that many messages, especially those from news media, are not random but are ordered by journalists and others in prioritized ways, from most to least important, and that audiences have to read, watch, listen, and learn. Agendas provide priorities, not just information.
In our personal lives we live in real worlds with family and friends and street addresses, jobs, schools, and hospitals, and deserts and mountains. In our civic lives we live in imagined worlds that we learn about from others, including media. These worlds overlap, of course. There is a continuum from touching to visualizing. Information from others, including traditional and social media, providing prioritized agendas. In media the priorities are evident. Newspapers give the biggest headline to the most important topic, a presidential election result, or a tearing tornado. Television leads off with the topic, or even breaks into regular programming with ‘breaking news’. Social media lead off with the topic and stay on that topic, gathering others into the informational web like an expanding spiderweb in the attic.
Agenda setting is often described as the press telling us what to think about rather than what to think. We have long known that media coverage can magnify topics, or even people, as P. T. Barnum in the nineteenth century made an apparently good singer, Jenny Lind, into a world-famous star, the Swedish Nightingale. The power of a message, or an amplified voice one way or the other, has been known for centuries, but agenda-setting scholars have provided specific evidence of the many ways this phenomenon occurs – across time, nationalities, and political systems. Communication scholars Maxwell McCombs and Sebastián Valenzuela have surveyed a vast literature in a single volume in a way that teachers and scholars can use. This is a text and a major book of scholarship.
Agenda-setting scholarship was a long time in coming. Wilbur Schramm of Stanford more or less invented the field of mass communication scholarship seventy years ago with his own writing and collections of key insights about media and mass communication. These collections served as early texts and research guides. Scholars of journalism conducted legal and historical scholarship in the first years (as they still do) and borrowed the methods of sociology and social