Agenda Setting

Concepts

Popularized in the mass communication and public opinion literature, agenda setting has for many years been nearly synonymous with studying public issues in a public opinion context. In the study of public opinion, agenda setting refers to a type of media effect that occurs when the priorities of the media come to be the priorities of the public. Broadly speaking, the agenda-setting process has three parts:

• 1.
  Public agenda setting examines the link between issues portrayed in the mass media and the issue priorities of the public.
• 2.
  Policy agenda setting studies are those examining the activities of public officials or legislatures, and sometimes the link between them and media content.
• 3.
  Media agenda setting examines the antecedents of media content that relate to issue definition, selection, and emphasis. This can typically include the individual and organizational factors that influence decision making in newsrooms and media organizations generally.

Agenda setting deals fundamentally with the importance or salience of public issues as measured in the popular public opinion polls. Issues are denned similarly to what the polls measure—the economy, trust in government, the environment, and so on—and this ensures comparability to the polling data. The innovation of conceptualizing all the complexity and controversy of a public issue in an abstract manner makes it possible to study issues over long periods of time. But it also tends to produce studies that are quite removed from the very things that made the issues controversial and interesting. Removing details also removes most conflict from the issue. What is left is really just the topic or shell of the issue, with very little content.

Most of the early agenda-setting research focused on the correspondence of aggregate media data and aggregated public opinion data. The rank-order correlations among the two sets of agendas measured the agenda-setting effect. This trend continues to the present day. While it is important to try to understand the connections between media and social priorities, agenda-setting research as it is presently constituted does not do a very good job of explaining how social priorities are really determined. This is so because most agenda-setting research focuses on media as the prime mover in the process and not on the factors that influence the production of media content. Real-world cues are for the most part absent from most agenda-setting studies. Fortunately, new techniques in the analysis of survey data can help revitalize this research tradition. For example, it is becoming easier now to add the respondent's geographical location to survey data. Once one knows the respondent's location, it is possible to append a variety of corresponding contextual or community-level data such as local unemployment rates, taxation levels, housing prices, neighborhood crime rates, and so on. Such contextual data analyzed along with public opinion data using multi-level modeling can help make agenda-setting studies more realistic and inclusive of real-world variables that affect public opinion. Local information about media markets and newspaper circulation areas can also be used in the same way. The key point is that it is important in analysis of agenda-setting effects to make certain that media attention to the problem—and not background conditions—is the real cause.

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