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Agenda-Setting Theory
of Maxwell McCombs & Donald Shaw
A First Look at
Communication Theory
10th edition
Em Griffin
Andrew Ledbetter Glenn
Sparks
Copyright © 2019 McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. No reproduction or
distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 2
Agenda-Setting Theory
Level 1: The Media Tell Us What to Think
About
Level 2: The Media Tell Us Which Attributes
of Issues Are Most Important
Level 3: The Media Tell Us Which Issues Go
Together
Beyond Opinion: The Behavioral Effect of the
Media’s Agenda
continued
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 3
Agenda-Setting Theory (continued)
Who Sets the Agenda for the Agendasetters?
Need for Orientation Influences Agendasetting Effects
Melding Agendas into Communities
Ethical Reflection: Christians’ Communitarian
Ethics
Critique: Who Sets the Agenda in the Digital
Era?
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 4
Agenda-Setting Theory: Intro
Personal agenda – The list of issues
most salient to a single person at a
given time.
Public agenda – most important
public issues as measured by public
opinion surveys
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 5
Agenda-Setting Theory: Intro
Media agenda – The list of issues
emphasized by the news media at a
given time.
Agenda-setting – Over time, the media
agenda shapes the public agenda.
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Agenda-Setting Theory: Intro
McComb’s and Shaw, agenda-setting
occurs in three ways/levels:
1. The media tell us which issues to think
about.
2. The media tell us which aspects of those
issues are most important.
3. The media tells us how different issues are
connected to each other.
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 7
Level 1: The Media Tell Us What to
Think About
In early 1967, McComb’s browses the LA
Times and has a hunch that “we judge as
important what the media judge as
important.”
McComb’s and Shaw set out to measure the
media agenda and public agenda with the
1968 U.S. presidential election coverage in
Chapel Hill, NC.
They found the public agenda and media
agenda almost matched perfectly.
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 8
Level 1: The Media Tell Us What to
Think About
McComb’s and Shaw found the public
agenda and media agenda almost matched
perfectly: a strong correlation.
First level of agenda-setting claims that the
media influence which things are salient in
the public agenda, which refers to
causation.
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 9
Level 1 (continued)
The first level of agenda-setting is a cause-andeffect relationship, but the data with the Chapel
Hill study could only show correlations.
Iyengar, Peters, and Kinder from Yale
conducted a tightly controlled experiment and
established cause-and-effect chain of influence
from media agenda to public agenda
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 10
Level 2: The Media Tell Us Which
Attributes Of Issues Are Most Important
The media aren’t very successful
in telling us what to think, but
they are stunningly successful
in telling us what to think about
Framing – making certain attributes more
salient through “selection, emphasis,
exclusion, and elaboration” (Tankard)
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 11
Level 3: The Media Tell Us Which
Issues Go Together
The media communicate issues as
though they are an interconnected web,
with some connections stronger than
others.
If issues are repeatedly linked together,
a person that person might come to see
those issues as intertwined.
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 12
Beyond Opinion: The Behavioral
Effect Of The Media’s Agenda
Most agenda-setting work focuses on
opinion, but recent work focuses on
behavior.
Craig Trumbo found that the amount of
media coverage on the flu during one
week predicted the number of doctor
visits the next week.
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 13
Beyond Opinion (continued)
Researchers found that applications
dropped significantly for University of
Pennsylvania, especially women, after
reports of campus crime and violence.
Others found less ticket purchases and
more insurance after reports of airplane
crashes.
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 14
Who Sets the Agenda for the
Agenda-setters?
Influencers include:
 Other respected news organizations,
including intermedia agenda-setting
when one news source influences the
agenda of another.
 Emerging media
 Partisan media
 Candidates and officeholders
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 15
Who Sets the Agenda
(continued)?
Influencers include (continued):
 Press releases
 Interest aggregators: Clusters of people
who demand center stage for their one
overriding concern; pressure groups.
 Gatekeepers: Editors and other arbiters of
culture who determine what will appear in
the mass media.
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 16
Who Sets the Agenda
(continued)?
Fake news: News articles that are
intentionally and verifiably false and could
mislead readers.
Vargo’s results both confirmed and
challenged the mainstream media’s alarm
about fake news during 2016.
Disturbingly, fake news appeared to exert at
least some influence on the agenda of more
credible news organizations.
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 17
Need for Orientation Influences
Agenda-setting Effects
Need for orientation – A drive to understand
what’s going on in the world, often fueled by
relevance and uncertainty.
Need for orientation is important because if
we don’t have it, we won’t turn to the media in
the first place, and none of the three levels of
agenda-setting will occur.
The media can’t shape our agenda if we
never turn on the TV or visit a news website.
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 18
Melding Agendas Into Communities
McCombs and Shaw suggest we can make
sense of the media landscape if we sort
outlets into two types:
 Vertical media News media that try to
reach broad, diverse audiences.
 Horizontal media News media that try to
appeal to specific interest communities.
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 19
Melding Agendas (continued)
Agendamelding – The social process
by which we meld agendas from various
sources to create pictures of the world
that fit our experiences and
preferences.
The very technology that connects us
can also allow us to separate into our
own isolated agendamelding
communities.
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 20
Ethical Reflections:
Christians’ Communitarian Ethics
Clifford Christians rejects the near-absolute
devotion to the First Amendment that seems
to be the sole ethical commitment of many
journalists
Discovering truth is still possible, if we are
willing to examine nature of our humanity
Human nature is personhood in community
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 21
Ethical Reflections (continued)
Communitarian ethics – moral responsibility
to promote community, mutuality, and
persons-in-relation, who live simultaneously
for others and for themselves
Agape love – unconditional love for others
because they are created in the image of
God
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 22
Critique: Who Sets the Agenda in
the Digital Era?
McCombs and Shaw ascribed
to broadcast and print
journalism’s significant power
to set the public’s political priorities
New dimension of framing
reasserts powerful media effects model
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 23
Critique: Are the Effects Too
Limited, Is The Scope Too Wide?
Agenda-Setting fares well against the
standards for good objective theory:






Explains the data
Predicts future events
Quantitative
Relatively simple
Testable
Practical/useful
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 24
Critique: Are the Effects Too
Limited, Is The Scope Too Wide?
The theory’s greatest challenge was
unforeseen when it originated … the
digital age.
No longer homogenous views and
many different sources.
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 25
Critique: Are the Effects Too
Limited, Is The Scope Too Wide?
McCombs doesn’t think the digital age
changes things all that much.
He treats the social media agenda as
just one more agenda in the mix that
may influence, or be influenced by,
other agendas.
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.
Slide 26
Critique: Are the Effects Too
Limited, Is The Scope Too Wide?
One interesting change that our digital age
has added to the discussion is
Algorithmic gatekeepers: Computer
programs that decide which material appears
in search engines, social media feeds, and
elsewhere on the Internet.
In any case, “Further nuance is now
necessary when discussing agenda setting–
related effects.”
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distribution without the prior written consent of McGraw-Hill Education.