Setting the Agenda. Maxwell McCombs

extend agenda-setting theory beyond political communication. But, first, we will add further detail to our theoretical map of the causal influence that the media agenda has on the public agenda.

Notes

1 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1922), p. 29. 2 Robert Park, ‘News as a form of knowledge’, American Journal of Sociology, 45 (1940): 667–86. 3 Propaganda, however, can have agenda-setting effects. For instance, there is some evidence that ‘fake news’ websites – sites that deliberatively spread misperceptions and fabricated content – influenced the agenda of fact-based media during the 2016 US presidential election; see Chris J. Vargo, Lei Guo, and Michelle A. Amazeen, ‘The agenda-setting power of fake news: a big data analysis of the online media landscape from 2014 to 2016’, New Media and Society, 20 (2018): 2028–49. 4 Bernard Cohen, The Press and Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 13. 5 Lippmann, Public Opinion, p. 3. 6 Ibid., p. 4. 7 Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, The People’s Choice (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1944). 8 Joseph Klapper, The Effects of Mass Communication (New York: Free Press, 1960), p. 8. 9 See, for instance, Robert E. Park, ‘The city: suggestions for investigation of human behavior in the urban environment’, in Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, eds., The City (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1925), pp. 1–46; Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton, ‘Mass communication, popular taste and organized social action’, in Guy E. Swanson, Theodore M. Newcomb, and Eugene L. Hartley, eds., Readings in Social Psychology (rev. edn) (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 1952), pp. 74–85.10 Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw, ‘The agenda setting function of mass media’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 36 (1972): 176–87.11 Yeojin Kim, Youngju Kim, and Shuhua Zhou, ‘Theoretical and methodological trends of agenda-setting theory: a thematic analysis of the last four decades of research’, Agenda Setting Journal, 1 (2017): 5–22.12 Stanley Presser, ‘Substance and method in Public Opinion Quarterly, 1937–2010’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 75 (2011): 839–45. Details in Table 2 (p. 843). For additional background on citations to the Chapel Hill study, see W. Russell Neuman and Lauren Guggenheim, ‘The evolution of media effects theory: a six-stage model of cumulative research’, Communication Theory, 21 (2011): 169–96. For details, see p. 180.13 W. Lance Bennett and Shanto Iyengar, ‘A new era of minimal effects? The changing foundations of political communication’, Journal of Communication, 58 (2008): 707–31. Quote from p. 708.14 Yunjuan Luo, Hansel Burley, Alexander Moe, and Mingxiao Sui, ‘A meta-analysis of news media’s public agenda-setting effects, 1972–2015’, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 96 (2019): 150–72.15 Stephen A. Rains, Timothy R. Levine, and Rene Weber, ‘Sixty years of quantitative communication research summarized: lessons from 149 meta-analyses’, Annals of the International Communication Association, 42 (2018): 105–24.16 Donald Shaw and Maxwell McCombs, eds., The Emergence of American Political Issues (St Paul, MN: West, 1977).17 David H. Weaver, Doris A. Graber, Maxwell E. McCombs, and Chaim H. Eyal, Media Agenda Setting in a Presidential Election: Issues, Images and Interest (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981).18 James Winter and Chaim Eyal, ‘Agenda setting for the civil rights issue’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 45 (1981): 376–83.19 Stuart N. Soroka, ‘Media, public opinion, and foreign policy’, Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 8 (2003): 27–48.20 Hans-Bernd Brosius and Hans Mathias Kepplinger, ‘The agenda setting function of television news: static and dynamic views’, Communication Research, 17 (1990): 183–211.21 Adam Shehata, ‘Unemployment on the agenda: a panel study of agenda setting effects during the 2006 Swedish national election campaign’, Journal of Communication, 60 (2010): 182–203.22 Kim Smith, ‘Newspaper coverage and public concern about community issues’, Journalism Monographs, 101 (1987).23 Maria José Canel, Juan Pablo Llamas, and Federico Rey, ‘El primer nivel del efecto agenda setting en la información local: los “problemas más importantes” de la ciudad de Pamplona’ [‘The first level agenda setting effect on local information: the “most important problems” of the city of Pamplona’], Comunicación y Sociedad, 9, 1 and 2 (1996): 17–38.24 Toshio Takeshita, ‘Agenda setting effects of the press in a Japanese local election’, Studies of Broadcasting, 29 (1993): 193–216.25 Federico Rey Lennon, Los Diarios Nacionales y la Campaña Electoral: Argentina, 1997 Elecciones [The national press and the electoral campaign: Argentina, the 1997 elections] (Buenos Aires: Freedom Forum and Universidad Austral, 1998).26 Alicia Casermeiro de Pereson, Los medios en las elecciones: la agenda setting en la ciudad de Buenos Aires [The media in the elections: Agenda setting in the city of Buenos Aires] (Buenos Aires, Argentina, EDUCA, 2003).27 Howard Eaton Jr, ‘Agenda setting with bi-weekly data on content of three national media’, Journalism Quarterly, 66 (1989): 942–8.28 McCombs and Shaw, ‘The agenda setting function of mass media.’29 Shaw and McCombs, The Emergence of American Political Issues.30 Weaver, Graber, McCombs and Eyal, Media Agenda Setting in a Presidential Election.31 Winter and Eyal, ‘Agenda setting for the civil rights issue.’32 Eaton, ‘Agenda setting with bi-weekly data on content of three national media.’33 Brosius and Kepplinger, ‘The agenda setting function of television news.’34 Smith, ‘Newspaper coverage and public concern about community issues.’35 Shanto Iyengar and Donald R. Kinder, News That Matters: Television and American Opinion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).36 Scott L. Althaus and David Tewksbury, ‘Agenda setting and the “new” news: patterns of issue importance among readers of the paper and online versions of the New York Times’, Communication Research, 29 (2002): 180–207. Quote is on p. 199.37 Michael Conway and J. R. Patterson, ‘Today’s top story? An agenda setting and recall experiment involving television and Internet news’, Southwestern Mass Communication Journal, 24 (2008): 31–48.38 Gary King, Benjamin Schneer, and Ariel White, ‘How the news media activate public expression and influence national agendas’, Science, 358 (2017): 776–80.39 Matthew Gentzkow, ‘Small media, big impact: Randomizing news stories reveals broad public impacts’, Science, 358 (2017): 726–7. Quote is on p. 727.40 Mike Gruszczynski and Michael W. Wagner, ‘Information flow in the 21st century: the dynamics of agenda-uptake’, Mass Communication and Society, 20 (2017): 378–402; Sharon Meraz, ‘Using time series analysis to measure intermedia agenda-setting influence in traditional media and political blog networks’, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 88 (2011): 176–94; Kevin Wallsten ‘Agenda setting and the blogosphere: An analysis of the relationship between mainstream media and political blogs’, Review of Policy Research, 24 (2007): 567–87.41 For particular case studies, see Jacob Groshek and Megan Clough Groshek, ‘Agenda-trending: reciprocity and the predictive capacity of social networking sites in intermedia agenda-setting across topics over time’, Media and Communication, 1, 1, 2013: 15–27; Raymond A. Harder, Julie Sevenans, and Peter Van Aelst, ‘Intermedia agenda setting in the social media age: How traditional players dominate the news agenda in election times’, International Journal of Press/Politics, 22, 3 (2017): 275–93; Ingrid Rogstad, ‘Is Twitter just rehashing? Intermedia agenda setting between Twitter and mainstream media’, Journal of Information Technology and Politics, 13, 2 (2016): 142–58; Ben Sayre, Leticia Bode, Dhavan Shah, Dave Wilcox, and Chirag Shah, ‘Agenda setting in a digital age: tracking attention to California Proposition 8 in social media, online news and conventional news,’’, Policy and Internet, 2, 2 (2010): 7–32; Kathleen Searles and Glen Smith, ‘Who’s the boss? Setting the agenda in a fragmented media environment,’’, International Journal of Communication, 10 (2016): 2074–95; Sebastián Valenzuela, Soledad Puente, and Pablo M. Flores, ‘Comparing disaster news on Twitter and television: An intermedia agenda setting perspective’, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 61 (2017): 615–37; Chris J. Vargo and Lei Guo, ‘Networks, big data, and intermedia agenda setting: an analysis of traditional, partisan, and emerging online US news’, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 94 (2017): 1031–55.42 Hai Tran, ‘Online agenda setting: a new frontier for theory development’, in Agenda Setting in a 2.0 World, ed. Thomas J. Johnson (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 205–29.43 Jason Martin, ‘Agenda setting, elections and the impact of information technology’, in Agenda Setting in a 2.0 World, ed. Thomas J. Johnson (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 28–52.44 Conway and Patterson, ‘Today’s top story?’; Althaus and Tewksbury, ‘Agenda setting and the “new” news.’45 Yonghoi Song, ‘Internet news media and issue development: a case study on the roles of independent online news services as agenda-builders for