agenda setting theory - Derek Witucki

Media effects scholars have long recognized the role of mass media in establishing culture, norms, and shared conceptions of reality — indeed, these links exist across historical literature far predating the formalized, scientific study of mass media. George Gerbner, in a seminal paper laying the groundwork for what would become the Cultivation approach to mass communication studies, states that mass media messages can be thought of as “the common culture through which communities cultivate shared and public notions about facts, values, and contingencies of human existence” (1969, pp. 137 – 138). Where social perceptions and shared realities overlap with mass media, media effects can be understood through different lines of theoretical inquiry.

Broadly, media priming and framing provide explanations for how media messages activate biased predispositions already existing in an individual. However, these mechanisms, when incorporated within the agenda-setting perspective, can explain other, counter-intuitive effects. Second-level agenda setting provides insight into how media portrayals are able to influence collective perceptions by increasing the “salience” of issues in the minds of audiences (McCombs & Reynolds, 2009, p. 2; Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007, pp. 14 – 15). Alongside these frameworks, two other theories can be used to study the relationships between media effects and social bias, stereotyping, and prejudice. First, group threat theory provides specific mechanisms that media effects researchers can use to connect messages with social group biases and resulting attitude or behavior. Group threat theory explains the ethnocentric responses of dominate social groups, which arise when members of the dominant group perceive threats to either the hierarchical social orders that benefit them or their position within a social order (Skinner & Cheadle, 2016, pp. 545, 551 – 552). For media effects studies, the theory provides control variables (Skinner & Cheadle, 2016, p. 548) that can be used in priming and framing studies. Those studies are able to observe how moderating attributes, like racial identity, interact with other intervening and confounding factors, like internal predispositions and external pressures to respond without prejudice (Skinner & Cheadle, 2016, pp. 544, 546). These additional — and crucial — audience characteristics can be studied through measures devised by Plant and Devine (1998) who used two scales to “disentangle” the complex mesh of internal and external motivations that people have for responding without prejudice (p. 812). Since people can have a variety of reasons to mask or not present their biases, the web of factors must be sorted out before researchers can adequately determine when and how media effect those biases. It’s important, now, to recognize that within the frameworks of agenda setting — and especially of media priming and framing — researchers are looking at the short-term effects of media. While longitudinal studies (which involves repeated observations over time) can be used to examine long-term effects, and control for prior biases (Sparks, Sparks, & Sparks, 2009, pp. 276 – 277), the Cultivation approach may lend itself the most to explaining and modeling the effects of mass media on the worldviews of audiences.

The cultivation approach understands mass media (particularly television) as having small cumulative effects over a long time with significant, even powerful, implications for the collective worldviews and shared notions of reality in an audience. This, at face value, is a wild suggestion for media effects scholars (Morgan, Shanahan, & Signorielli, 2009, p. 37). The theory seems to imply that, regardless of factors like selection and active versus passive use, the media acts as a systemic force in establishing culture. In the face of apparent contradictions, Morgan et al. (2009) instead argue that audience choices and selection do matter, but that between those choices are sets of commonalities which, over time, construct a shared vision of the world. It is this effect, they state, that cultivation studies (2009, p. 37). Cultivation effects are best understood as a dynamic and continuous process of pushing and pulling, and cultivation scholars neither negate the literature from an audience selectivity perspective nor backpedal the powerful claims of the cultivation literature (Jacobs, Hooghe, & de Vroome, 2017, p. 247; Morley, 1997, p. 35; Shanahan, Morgan, & Morgan, 1999, p. 125).

Media effects can be, at once, a study opposed to grand claims of direct and overwhelming sway while also demonstrably connecting changes in the culture at-large with the currents of mass media. This idea is, to say the least, provocative. But the critical literature is clear, media effects must be understood at all levels. In developing these two lines of inquiry, scholars gain access to both the canopy and the undergrowth in the forests of human culture.

Literature reviewed

Gerbner, G. (1969). Toward “Cultural Indicators”: The Analysis of Mass Mediated Public Message Systems. AV Communication Review, 17(2), 137 – 148. Retrieved from JSTOR.
Jacobs, L., Hooghe, M., & de Vroome, T. (2017). Television and anti-immigrant sentiments: the mediating role of fear of crime and perceived ethnic diversity. European Societies, 19(3), 243 – 267. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2017.1290264
McCombs, M., & Reynolds, A. (2009). How the news shapes our civic agenda. In J. Bryant & M. B. Oliver (Eds.), Media effects: advances in theory and research (3rd ed, pp. 1 – 16). New York: Routledge.
Morgan, M., Shanahan, J., & Signorielli, N. (2009). Growing up with television: Cultivation processes. In J. Bryant & M. B. Oliver (Eds.), Media effects: advances in theory and research (3rd ed, pp. 34 – 49). New York: Routledge.
Morley, D. (1997). Theoretical Orthodoxies: Textualism, Constructivism and the “New Ethnography” in Cultural Studies. In M. Ferguson & P. Golding (Eds.), Cultural Studies in Question. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uh/detail.action?docID=456734
Plant, E. A., & Devine, P. G. (1998). Internal and external motivation to respond without prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(3), 811 – 832. https://doi.org/10/b7kztv
Scheufele, D. A., & Tewksbury, D. (2007). Framing, Agenda Setting, and Priming: The Evolution of Three Media Effects Models. Journal of Communication, 57(1), 9 – 20. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0021-9916.2007.00326.x
Shanahan, J., Morgan, M., & Morgan, M. (1999). Television and its Viewers: Cultivation Theory and Research. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uh/detail.action?docID=202000
Skinner, A. L., & Cheadle, J. E. (2016). The “Obama Effect”? Priming Contemporary Racial Milestones Increases Implicit Racial Bias among Whites. Social Cognition, 34(6), 544 – 558. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2016.34.6.544
Sparks, G. G., Sparks, C. W., & Sparks, E. A. (2009). Media Violence. In J. Bryant & M. B. Oliver (Eds.), Media effects: advances in theory and research (3rd ed, pp. 269 – 286). New York: Routledge.

The political effects of media are studied the most through combinations of priming, framing, and agenda setting. These terms assume definitions with nuanced-yet-significant differences across the media effects literature, both changing over time and through differing uses when combined with other models and frameworks (as discussed throughout Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007; and mentioned in Rosko-Ewoldsen, Rosko-Ewoldsen, & Carpentier, 2009, p. 79).

Priming is a term originating from psychological theories of memory. Sometimes borrowing from a water pump metaphor — like the hydraulic model, that the priming effect makes certain information more accessible at the cost of making competing information less so (Rosko-Ewoldsen et al., 2009, p. 77) — in recent literature it has become more apt to understand priming effects as those preparing certain information or concepts for easier accessibility (Kim, 2005, via Rosko-Ewoldsen et al., 2009, p. 77) rather than as having a negative effect over competing information. Priming is a useful, powerful means of understanding our responses to mass media, but the effect itself is inherently short-lived (Rosko-Ewoldsen et al., 2009, pp. 74, 80). The priming effect, which is based in a network model of memory, results when the prior activation of a concept permits the same and related concepts to be more accessible for subsequent recall (Rosko-Ewoldsen et al., 2009, pp. 74 – 74; Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007, pp. 11, 15). (In addition to accessibility, Rosko-Ewoldsen et al. note that Price and Tewksbury’s model of political priming also “incorporate[s] the applicability of information” as a moderator of the effect [2009, p. 82].) Together with framing, priming allows communication researchers to explain the impact of news content on the subjective interpretations that individuals take from news coverage, as well as providing an explanatory mechanism for occasions when those interpretations differ from what an individual’s prior beliefs and political leanings would otherwise predict.

Framing, as a general word, is to establish boundaries. It is to separate in from out, to provide selective focus, or to emphasize details at the expense of removing others. As a term in Media Effects, framing carries a similar meaning. It describes how media, even when working with the same sets of facts, can give audiences different interpretations of the events and stories based on how those stories are told to audiences (such as the effects observed in Skinner & Cheadle, 2016). Yet, media frames are also necessary devices to filter and relate complex topics (Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007, p. 12). Where priming investigates effects within the mind of an individual audience member, framing explores content messages themselves and their broader, long-term effects (McLeod, Kosicki, & McLeod, 2009, p. 230), meaning that it can explore both the macrolevel effects of frame-building and the microlevel effects of an individual’s mental schema (Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007, pp. 11 – 12). Further still, framing and priming models are able to be used together to explain combinations of applicability and accessibility effects (McLeod et al., 2009, p. 230).

Agenda-setting is the idea that the media, and their content producers, have a role in establishing the social, civic, and political topics discussed by and on the minds of media audiences. It does this by measuring “salience,” the importance and relevance of information and concepts in the minds of audiences (McCombs & Reynolds, 2009, p. 7; McLeod et al., 2009, p. 230). Like framing and priming, it provides a powerful means for understanding and describing the political effects of media, especially of the news media. Scheufele and Tewksbury (2007) further classify it, alongside priming, as a memory-based theory grounded in the accessibility of mental constructs (p. 15). The agenda setting perspective, unlike framing and priming, originates in ideas from 1922 and is based on a strong effects understanding of the media (McCombs & Reynolds, 2009, p. 2) where Walter Lippmann, an early researcher of mass communication, sought to “examine how in the individual person the limited messages from outside, formed into a pattern of stereotypes, are identified with his own interests as he feels and conceives them” (Lippmann, 1922, p. 30). Decades later, these ideas were revived by McCombs and Shaw (1972, via McCombs & Reynolds, 2009, p. 2) and have since grown a considerable (as defined by McCombs & Reynolds, 2009, pp. 2 – 3) body of evidence across heterogenous groups.

However, agenda setting (on its own) can be criticized as being overly “simplistic” and “broad” (Funkhouser, 1973a, 1973b, via Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007, p. 15). Once bolstered with framing and priming, the new framework becomes more nuanced (Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007, pp. 14 – 15). Currently, agenda setting uses four perspectives to describe and understand effects which cover those at individual versus population levels and those effects across single agenda items and aggregate sets of agenda items (McCombs & Reynolds, 2009, p. 5). It is further classified into levels, first and second level agenda setting, which permits addressing distinctions between subjects and attributes (Hill & Watson, 2015). The range of these perspectives permit the framework a versatility lacking in framing and priming alone, as well as lacking in earlier agenda setting hypotheses.

Literature reviewed

Hill, A., & Watson, J. (2015). Agenda-setting. In Dictionary of Media and Communication Studies. Retrieved from http://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/dictmedia/agenda_setting/0
Lippmann, W. (1922). Public opinion. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b5232744
McCombs, M., & Reynolds, A. (2009). How the news shapes our civic agenda. In J. Bryant & M. B. Oliver (Eds.), Media effects: advances in theory and research (3rd ed, pp. 1 – 16). New York: Routledge.
McLeod, D. M., Kosicki, G. M., & McLeod, J. M. (2009). Political Communication Effects. In J. Bryant & M. B. Oliver (Eds.), Media effects: advances in theory and research (3rd ed, pp. 228 – 251). New York: Routledge.
Rosko-Ewoldsen, D. R., Rosko-Ewoldsen, B., & Carpentier, F. D. (2009). Media Priming: An updated synthesis. In J. Bryant & M. B. Oliver (Eds.), Media effects: advances in theory and research (3rd ed, pp. 74 – 93). New York: Routledge.
Scheufele, D. A., & Tewksbury, D. (2007). Framing, Agenda Setting, and Priming: The Evolution of Three Media Effects Models. Journal of Communication, 57(1), 9 – 20. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0021-9916.2007.00326.x
Skinner, A. L., & Cheadle, J. E. (2016). The “Obama Effect”? Priming Contemporary Racial Milestones Increases Implicit Racial Bias among Whites. Social Cognition, 34(6), 544 – 558. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2016.34.6.544

Tag: agenda setting theory

The Interleaved Approaches to Political Media Effects

Literature reviewed