Setting the Agenda. Maxwell McCombs
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the one method that naturally belongs to journalism scholarship. Decades ago, Wayne Danielson of Stanford, North Carolina, and Texas, and Guido Stempel of Ohio University, among others, began to link content with computers and find ways to generalize research samples to large populations. Schramm early on sketched a model of a communicator-to-message-to-audience message direction, with a weaker feedback loop. It was, and remains, a universe to discover.
With content analysis, one could read messages backwards to discern details of audiences and even cultures, but also could look forward more precisely at effects on audiences. Of course, there was the message itself. The agenda-setting work of McCombs and his colleagues connected content analysis with audience effects more exactly than ever before. One could make predictions, the first step in theory building. If we had time and resources, we could trace historically how the voice of a Swedish singer grew from filling auditoriums in towns and cities to filling the imagined air of listeners everywhere, with echoes even today, more than a century later. Agendas leave residues. Agenda setting provides tools as well as concepts. Agenda setting goes forwards and backwards, even as we stand, so to speak, on messages themselves.
Citation analysis of the original article of McCombs and Donald Shaw demonstrates the growth in the concept of agenda setting, along with the resistance to the simple idea it represented – if a cognitive stimulus, then a cognitive response – in a period, the 1950s and 1960s, when attitude change was the dominant paradigm. We remember reading one literature review which detailed this resistance like the lines left by the receding tides on an Atlantic beach, from: (1) there is no message residue, to (2) there is a slight, but artifactual, residue, to (3) there is a residue, but we have long known about it, to (4) there is a message effect but it’s mostly trivial and can be accounted for by other causes. That is, the review hinted, agenda-setting research is not significant, at least to those most interested in attitude change and behaviour. The first paper on agenda setting, based on the 1968 presidential election study in Chapel Hill, was rejected by the Association for Education in Journalism (now AEJMC). It was not published until 1972, slightly revised, in Public Opinion Quarterly.
But agenda-setting research continued, perhaps because of its conceptual simplicity, and by now there are more than 500 articles around the world, numerous books, and thousands of papers. The 1972 McCombs and Shaw article has drawn more than a million hits on Google. There are now different branches of agenda setting, such as attribute agenda setting, intermedia agenda setting, and agenda-melding, among others. With study of agenda-setting levels 2 and 3, one can see how the attributes of media messages are reproduced in the minds of audiences and perhaps wonder what the implications are, as China, among other nations, pulls the strings of traditional and social media content producers. The United States has its first Twitter president, but probably not its last. There is also evidence that audiences mix information from traditional and social media to find a blend that is personally comfortable, not necessarily one that is factually accurate. John Milton’s plea assumes that truth will defeat falsehood, even as we may be slipping into a post-factual society. If so, media still have the power to set agendas with messages based on facts or opinions.
Agenda setting on occasion can be a complex social topic that reaches far beyond news media and audiences. Rita Colistra of West Virginia University has explored the importance of agenda-cutting. Consider that Southern white newspapers did not carry news about African American activities in certain periods of our history, unless African Americans were associated with crime or accidents. Japan has seemingly ignored its aggressor role in the Second World War, while Germany has acknowledged its part in their history books, and history is a major agenda setter. If you are not on the news agenda in contemporary life, you do not exist in civic culture, at least to people who don’t know you personally.
There is an activist side to agenda setting. What if news media created a regular local beat about climate change, or about ending poverty and generating opportunity? Journalists would produce stories regularly. In time, audiences would think more about these topics, although this alone would not guarantee civic action. Agenda setting is the necessary first step in social change. Telling people what to think about is a considerable power. Is that not the job of teachers, parents, religious and political leaders, bosses, and even friends?
Agenda-setting scholarship has sometimes employed sophisticated methods, but the concept of communicator-to-message-to-receivers remains its simple core. This book organizes the literature and field into clear segments in a way that makes the power – and evolution – of this research discipline clear. This version of the book, the third, is different because the book, like the field, has evolved. No one knows research on agenda setting as well as Max McCombs, and now Sebastián Valenzuela. Their portrayal of agenda-setting research is emerging piece by piece, like tracing the numbers on a ‘What Am I?’ page. The third edition of this book is the most complete story yet, a rich contribution to our understanding of the processes involved in agenda setting.
We are pleased to have been contributors to this ongoing stream of communication research for the past half century, along with our students and our students’ students and many others. David Weaver remembers creating the need for orientation construct with Max McCombs in 1973, from studies of social psychology that suggested the importance of relevance and uncertainty in information seeking. It was exciting to see the data from the 1972 Charlotte study fitting the predictions of the NFO model so well, both in terms of media exposure and strength of agenda-setting correlations.
Donald Shaw remembers the afternoon in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, when Max came down the hall with the news that their AEJ paper on agenda setting had been rejected. What to do? One option was to drop the paper into the trash can and move on. After all, common sense had long made clear that news did have an impact. Who needed the precision of agenda setting? Max had a different idea. So, he tells students today that when you get a rejection of a scholarly paper or article, take a closer look at your idea: You may really be on to something.
Donald L. Shaw, University of North Carolina,
David H. Weaver, Indiana University
Preface
Setting the agenda is now a common phrase in discussions of politics and public opinion. This phrase summarizes the continuing dialogue and debate in every community, from local neighbourhoods to the international arena, over what should be at the centre of public attention and action. In most of these dialogues the news media have a significant and sometimes controversial role. Should there be any doubt about this long-standing and widespread role of the news media, note the New York Times’ description of twentieth-century British press baron Lord Beaverbrook as a man ‘who dined with prime ministers and set the nation’s agenda’.1 Or former New York Times executive Max Frankel’s description of his own newspaper:
It is the ‘house organ’ of the smartest, most talented, and most influential Americans at the height of American power. And while its editorial opinions or the views of individual columnists and critics can be despised or dismissed, the paper’s daily package of news cannot. It frames the intellectual and emotional agenda of serious Americans.2
The enormous growth and expansion of these media institutions that are now such a compelling feature of contemporary society was a central aspect of the last one hundred years. To the host of newspapers and magazines spawned in the nineteenth century, the twentieth century added ubiquitous layers of film, radio, television, and cable television. In its closing years came the internet and, in the twenty-first century, a kaleidoscopic mix of new communication technologies – most notably social and mobile media – have continued to blur the traditional boundaries between mediated and interpersonal communication, and between the various media and their content. These new channels redefine ‘mass’ communication and enlarge its agenda-setting role in society. Mass communication once meant the large-scale distribution of identical messages, particularly through newspapers, television, and radio. The new communication channels, such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, are massive, too, in that large proportions of society use them, but the messages flowing through these channels are personalized.
Although