Agenda Setting

Agenda setting is a theory of mass communication effects which holds that news media, through the editorial selection process, transmit to the public the salience of political objects, which affects the relative importance of these objects to the public. According to agenda-setting theory, the news media may not tell the public what to think (for example, what position to take on a political issue or what candidate to support in an election), but they tell the public what to think about (for example, what issues are important or what candidates are viable).

One of the primary services the news media provide to their audiences is their surveillance of the environment to determine what events are occurring in the world that the press believes their audiences should know. Journalists use professional norms called news values, such as proximity, timeliness, conflict, celebrity and human interest, to decide what is newsworthy. News media also prioritize the news, such as giving a banner headline on the newspaper's front page or the lead position on a newscast to signal importance. Agenda-setting theory conceptualizes this ordering of political objects by the news media as the “media agenda.” The news media's selection and presentation of news provides an indexing function that helps readers decide where to place their attention. Through this exercise of editorial judgment, newspapers and newscasts make political objects stand out in relief from others. The media agenda directs the public's attention to certain political objects. In this way, the news media change the salience of political issues, persons, or topics. News media tell the public what is important. Agenda-setting theory conceptualizes this ordering of [Page 13]political objects by the public as the “public agenda.” Agenda-setting theory holds that as the media agenda changes, the public agenda follows. The news media set the public agenda.

Since the news media's ability to cover events is limited by time and space, only a few issues muscle their way onto the media agenda, shoving aside other issues. Further, because the public's ability to attend to concerns is limited, only a few issues grab the public's attention at any one time. Agenda setting is based on the media's limited ability to cover issues and the public's limited ability to attend to them.

Agenda setting originally focused on the transfer of the salience of political issues from the news media to the public. The earliest agenda-setting studies took place in the context of U.S. presidential election campaigns. They studied how shifts in the occurrence of newspaper and television news stories devoted to campaign issues changed during the course of the race. They compared these changes in the media issue agenda to subsequent changes in voters' concerns. The studies also expanded to investigate the agenda-setting influence of other forms of political communication beyond the dominant mainstream media, including alternative news media and political Web logs. Research also encompassed other political objects, including persons, such as election candidates, and the attributes of objects, such as characteristics of election candidates. Attributes are those characteristics of an object which complete the picture of that object. Attributes can vary widely in scope, from a candidate's age to a candidate's foreign policy experience. The agenda setting of attributes of objects, as opposed to the agenda setting of objects, is also known as “second-level agenda setting.” The studies also turned to agenda setting in other types of elections, in non-election times, in other countries, including Argentina, Germany, Japan, and Spain, and in other contexts. Not surprisingly, agenda setting does not occur in the presence of either a closed electoral system, one in which selection of political leaders and policies is patently undemocratic, or a closed media system, one in which the news is strongly government controlled.

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