Agenda Setting and Science

In 1963, Bernard Cohen observed that the news media may not tell people what to think, but they do tell them what to think about. This observation was the germ of the idea of agenda setting. Agenda setting proposes that the media agenda is related to the public agenda at any given time and, moreover, that the relationship is causal: The news media cause people to rank issues more importantly on their own agenda of issues that are important to them. Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw first tested this theory with voters in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. They found that news media agendas (measured using content analysis of major news outlets) were highly correlated with the public agenda (using surveys of undecided voters in the 1968 election). Since then, dozens of studies have confirmed, amplified, and extended the theory, which is still one of the major theories of media effects.

Agenda setting came as part of a response to the then dominant view that the mass media had limited effects in terms of shaping public opinion. Agenda setting, along with theories such as cultivation and spiral of silence, found ways to demonstrate various types of media effects without claiming that the media had the very powerful effects claimed in some of the first observations that were made about media in the early part of the 20th century. As such, these newer theories offer middle-ground explanations of media effects.

Agenda setting was first tested with simple correlations between news agendas and public agendas. Later tests sought to show causality, and a variety of ways of testing agenda setting have emerged. Some look at agendas in the aggregate and compare those to aggregated public agendas. Others look at agenda setting at the microlevel, testing whether individuals' agendas are correlated to news agendas. Others look at issue salience over time, comparing the ups and downs of issue coverage to series data about public opinion to establish possible causal relationships. Finally, some studies use experimental methods, especially to determine whether exposure to particular news stories influences individual response to issue questions. Often these studies are pursuing questions of framing or priming, which some theorists connect with agenda-setting theory.

The vast majority of agenda-setting studies have been conducted on political issues; many fewer deal with science or technology. However, one observation from agenda setting is highly relevant to science and the environment. Agenda setting proposes that unobtrusive issues (those that are not readily apparent to us from personal experience) will be more susceptible to agenda-setting effects, because we are more reliant on the media to determine whether those issues are important.

Because science, technology, and the environment are often unobtrusive issues, media coverage of these issues may be especially important to draw public attention to them. Some examples show this importance of this effect. Researchers have shown that public attention to environmental issues is related to news coverage of those issues, consistent with an agenda-setting effect. Moreover, media attention to those issues is often seen to be cyclical. In 1972, Anthony Downs proposed an explanation for this, arguing that environmental issues would at first seem dramatically dangerous and thus receive attention. However, he argued that the public would eventually realize the cost of solving environmental problems, and would then turn their attention elsewhere. While some scholars have disputed the details of his theory, cyclical patterns of attention have been demonstrated by several researchers, spanning the period from the 1960s to today.

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