The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media MAXWELL E. McCOMBS DONALD L. SHAW In our day, more than ever before, candidates go before the people through the mass media rather than in person.1 The information in the mass media becomes the only contact many have with politics. The pledges, promises, and rhetoric encapsulated in news stories, columns, and editorials constitute much of the information upon which a voting decision has to be made. Most of what people know comes to them "second" or "third" hand from the mass media or from other people.2 Although the evidence that mass media deeply change attitudes in a campaign is far from conclusive,* the evidence is much stronger that voters learn from the immense quantity of information available during each campaign.4 People, of course, vary greatly in their attention to mass media political information. Some, normally the better educated and most politically interested (and those least likely to change political beliefs), actively seek information; but most seem to acquire it, if at all, without much effort. It just comes in. As Berelson succinctly puts it: "On any single subject many 'hear' but few 'listen'." But Berelson also found that those with the greatest mass media exposure are most likely to know where the candidates stand on different issues.5 Trenaman and McQuail found the same thing in a study of the 1959 General Election in England.6 Voters do learn. They apparently learn, furthermore, in direct proportion to the emphasis Reprinted by permission of the publisher from "The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media," I by Maxwell McCombs and Dona!d Shaw, in Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 36 (Summer 1972), ■ pp. 176-87. 127 128 PUBLIC OPINION AND THE POLITICAL PROCESS placed on the campaign issues by the mass media. Specifically focusing on the agenda-setting function of the media, Lang and Lang observe; The mass media force attention to certain issues. They build up public images of political figures. They are constantly presenting objects suggesting what individuals in the mass should think about, know about, have feelings about.7 Perhaps this hypothesized agenda-setting function of the mass media is most succinctly stated by/Cbhen, who noted that the press "may not be successful much of the timWtrrtelling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about."8 While the mass media i may have little influence on the direction or intensity of attitudes, it is hypothesized that the mass media set the agenda for each political campaign, influencing the salience of attitudes toward the political issues. Method To investigate the agenda-setting capacity of the mass media in the 1968_ presidential campaign, this study attempted to match what Chapel Hill voters smfcTwere key issues of the campaign with the actual content of the mass media used by them during the campaign. Respondents were selected randomly from lists of registered voters in five Chapel Hill precincts economically, socially, and racially representative of the community. By restricting this study to one community, numerous other sources of variation—for example, regional differences or variations in media performance—were controlled. Between September 18 and October 6, 100 interviews were completed. To select these 100 respondents a filter question was used to identify those who had not yet definitely decided how to vote—presumably those more i, open or susceptible to campaign information. Only those not yet fully commit-J\ ted to a particular candidate were interviewed. Borrowing from the Trenaman and McQuail strategy, this study asked each respondent to outline the key issues as he saw them, regardless of what the candidates might be saying at the moment.9 Interviewers recorded the answers as exactly as possible. Concurrently with the voter interviews, the mass media serving these voters were collected and content analyzed. A pretest in spring 1968 found that for the Chapel Hill community almost all the mass media political information was provided by the following sources: Durham Morning Herald, Durham Sun, Raleigh News and Observer, Raleigh Times, New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and NBC and CBS evening news broadcasts. The answers of. respondents regarding major problems as they saw them and the news and editorial comment appearing between September 12 and October 6 in the sampled newspapers, magazines, and news broadcasts were coded into 15 categories representing the key issues and other kinds of cam- The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media 129 paign news. Media news content also was jiivided into "major" and "minor" levels to see whether there was any substantial difference in mass" media emphasis across topics.10 For the print media, this major/minor division was in terms of space and position; for television, it was made in terms of position and time allowed. More specifically, major items were defined as follows: 1. Television: Any story 45 seconds or more in length and/or one of the three lead stories. 2. Newspapers: Any story which appeared as the lead on the front page or on any page under a three-column headline in which at least one-third of the story (a minimum of five paragraphs) was devoted to political news coverage. 3. News Magazines: Any story more than one column or any item which appeared in the lead at the beginning of the news section of the magazine. ' 4. Editorial Page Coverage of Newspapers and Magazines: Any item in the lead editorial position (the top left corner of the editorial page) plus all items in which one-third (at least five paragraphs) of an editorial or columnist comment was devoted to political campaign coverage. Minor items are those stories which are political in nature and included in the study but which are smaller in terms of space, time, or display than major items. Findings Our analysis of the over-all major item emphasis of the selected mass media on different topics and candidates during the campaign . . . indicates that a considerable amount of campaign news was not devoted to discussion h of the major political issues but rather to analysis of the campaign itself. This may give pause to those who think of campaign news as being primarily about the issues. Thirty-five percent of the major news coverage of Wallace was composed of this analysis ("Has he a chance to win or not?"). For Humphrey and Nixon the figures were, respectively, 30 percent and 25 percent. ... Table 1 focuses on the relative emphasis of each party on the issues, as reflected.in the mass media. The table shows that Humphr^ey/Muskie emphasized foreign policy far more than did Nixon/Agnew or Wallace/Lemay. In the case of the "law and order" issue, however, over half the Wallace/ Lemay news was about this, while less than one-fourth of the Humphrey/ Muskie news concentrated upon this topic. With Nixon/Agnew it was almost a third—just behind the Republican emphasis on foreign policy. Humphrey of course spent considerable time justifying (or commenting upon) the Vietname War; Nixon did not choose (or have) to do this. The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media 131 S < E i ^5 3 C o o a. o Pi •a a: 22 o 2 2 8 £* tu O oo ^ \£) ''I ^1 00 — O 5 u i d a. Pi 3t Hi a « 1 m on o 1" \0 — — « >o ^ g 2 v£) _< rj- OO 9 CO 2 '2 d <*} (S •-" — —* 5*1 « St r- J5 - 1 3 g H 1 The media appear to have exerted a considerable impact on voters' judgments of what they considered the major issues of (the campaign (even though the questionnaire specifically asked them to make judgments without regard to what politicians might be saying at the moment). The correlation between the major item emphasis on the main campaign issues carried by the media and-voters' independent judgments of what were the important issues was ) +.967. Between minor item emphasis on the main campaign issues and voters' '^jutfgments, the correlation was +.979. In short, the data suggest a very strong relationship between the emphasis placed on different campaign issues by the media (reflecting to a considerable degree the emphasis by candidates) and the judgments of voters as to the salience and importance of various campaign topics. < But while the three presidential candidates placed widely different empha-! sis upon different issues, the judgments of the voters seem to reflect the composite of the mass media coverage. This suggests that voters pay some attention to all the political news regardless of whether it is from, or about, any particular favored candidate. Because the tables we have seen reflect the composite of all the respondents, it is possible that individual differences, reflected in party preferences and in a predisposition to look mainly at material favorable to one's own party, are lost by lumping all the voters together in the analysis. Therefore, answers of respondents who indicated a preference (but not commitment) for one of the candidates during the September-October period studied (45 of the respondents; the others were undecided) were analyzed separately. Table 2 shows the results of this analysis for four selected media. The table shows the frequency of important issues cited by respondents who favored Humphrey, Nixon, or Wallace correlated (a) with the frequency of all the major and minor issues carried by the media and (b) with the frequency of the major and minor issues oriented to each party (stories with a particular party or candidate as a primary referent) carried by each of the four media. For example, the correlation is .89 between what Democrats see as the important issues and the New York Times's emphasis on the issues in all its major news items. The correlation is .79 between the Democrats' emphasis on the issues and the emphasis of the New York Times as reflected only in items about the Democratic candidates. If one expected voters to pay more attention to the major and minor issues oriented to their own party—that is, to read or view selectively—the correlations between the voters and news/opinion about their own party should be strongest. This would be evidence of selective perception.11 If, on the other hand, the voters attend reasonably well to all the news, regardless of which candidate or party issue is stressed, the correlations between the voter and total media content would be strongest. This would be evidence of the agenda-setting function. The crucial question is which set of correlation is stronger. 132 PUBLIC OPINION AND THE POLITICAL PROCESS TABLE 2. Intel-correlations of Major and Minor Issue Emphasis by Selected Media with Voter Issue Emphasis Major Items Minor Items Selected Media All News News Own Party All News News Own Party New York Times Voters (D) Voters (R) Voters (W) Durham Morning Herald Voters (D) . Voters (R) Voters (W) CBS Voters (D) Voters (R) Voters (W) NBC Voters (D) Voters (R) Voters (W) .89 .79 .97 .85 .80 .40 .88 .98 .89 .25 .78 -.53 .84 . .74 .95 .83 .59 .88 .84 .69 .82 .76 .79 .00 .83 .83 .81 .71 .50 .00 .57 .40 .78 .80 .86 .76 .57 .76 .64 .73 .27 .13 .66 .63 .84 .21 .48 -.33 In general, Table 2 shows that voters who were not firmly committed early in the campaign attended well to all the news. For major news items, correlations were more often higher between voter judgments of important issues and the issues reflected in all the news (including of course news about their favored candidate/party) than were voter judgments of issues reflected in news only about their candidate/party. For minor news items, again voters" more often correlated highest with the emphasis reflected in all the news than with the emphasis reflected in news about a favored candiate. Considering both major and minor item coverage, 18 of 24 possible comparisons show voters more in agreement with all the news rather than with news only about their own party/candidate perference. This finding is better explained by the agenda-setting function of the mass media than by selective perception. Although the data reported in Table 2 generally show high agreement between voter and media evaluations of what the important issues were in 1968, the correlations are not uniform across the various media and all groups of voters. The variations across media are more clearly reflected in Table 3, which includes all survey respondents, not just those predisposed toward a candidate at the time of the survey. There also is a high degree of consensus among the news media about the significant issues of the campaign, but again there is not perfect agreement. Considering the news media as mediators between voters and the actual political arena, we might interpret the correla- The AKcnda-Setting Function of Mass Media 133 tions in Table 4 as reliability coefficients, indicating the extent of agreement among the news media about what the important political events are. To the extent that the coefficients are less than perfect, the pseudo-environment reflected in the mass media is less than a perfect representation of the actual 1968 campaign. TABLE 3. Correlations of Voter Emphasis on Issues with Media Coverage -1- Major Items Minor Items Major Items Minor Items Newsweek Time New York Times Raleigh Times Raleigh News and Observer .30 .30 .96 .80 .91 .53 .78 .97 .73 .93 Durham Durham Morning NBC CBS Sun Herald News News .82 .94 .89 .63 .96 .93 .91 .81 Two sets of factors, at least, reduce consensus among the news media. First, the basic characteristics of newspapers, television, and newsmagazines differ. Newspapers appear daily and have lots of space. Television is daily but has a severe time constraint. Newsmagazines appear weekly; news therefore cannot be as "timely." Table 4 shows that the highest correlations tend to be among like media; the lowest correlations, between different media. Second, news media do have a point of view, sometimes extreme biases. However, the high correlations in Table 4 (especially among like media) suggest consensus on news values, especially on major news items. Although there is no explicit, commonly agreed-upon definition of news, there is a professional norm regarding major news stories from day to day. These major-story norms doubtless are greatly influenced today by widespread use of the major wire services—especially by newspapers and television—for much political information.12 But as we move from major events of the campaign, upon which nearly everyone agrees, there is more room for individual interpretation, reflected in the lower correlations for minor item agreement among media shown in Table 4. Since a newspaper, for example, uses only about 15 percent of the material available on any given day, there is considerable latitude for selection among minor items. In short, the political world is reproduced imperfectly by individual news media. Yet the evidence in this study that voters tend to share the media's composite definition of what is important strongly suggests an agenda-setting function of the mass media. 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