Cover; Dedication; Title page; Copyright page; Boxes; Preface; 1: Influencing Public Opinion; Our pictures of the world; Contemporary empirical evidence; The accumulated evidence; Cause and effect; A new communication landscape; Summing up; 2: Reality and the News; Idiosyncratic pictures; Perspectives on agenda-setting effects; Content versus exposure; Agenda-setting in past centuries; Summing up; 3: The Pictures in our Heads; Pictures of political candidates; Candidate images in national elections; Candidate images in local elections; Media influence on candidate images; Attributes of issues
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This essay by a pioneer scholar in the field broadly summarizes the collective body of findings from hundreds of agenda-setting studies of the past 20 years and suggests fruitful research lines for the future. McCombs finds that, as with pealing a sweet onion, there are layers of research, each with its distinct tantalizing aroma of conclusions. Journalism practitioners, scholars, students and scholars from political science and other disciplines have contributed many perspectives within the context of a variety of data-gathering techniques and subjects. Broadly speaking, he finds that scholars tend to be those who carefully survey and mark ground that has already been discovered but only loosely explored and those who are tempted to move beyond the boundaries of the known. As the circle of research activity enlarges, we know much. But there is more that we do not know, and that is more exciting.
Influencing Public Opinion -- Reality and the News -- The Pictures in our Heads -- Networks of Issues and Attributes -- Why Agenda Setting Occurs -- How Agenda Setting Works -- Shaping the Media Agenda -- Consequences of Agenda Setting -- Communication and Society.
Abstract In choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom staff, and broadcasters play an important part in shaping political reality. Readers learn not only about a given issue, but also how much importance to attach to that issue from the amount of information in a news story and its position. In reflecting what candidates are saying during a campaign, the mass media may well determine the important issues – that is, the media may set the "agenda" of the campaign.
The present study revisits the relationship between the civic duty to keep informed and news media use in the new media environment, then discovers that the civic duty to keep informed functions as an intervening variable between education and news media use. Of particular theoretical interest is that the civic duty to keep informed was found to be a consequence of education and a determinant of use of new news media, specifically cable news and national news on the Internet, news media that did not exist when the civic duty to keep informed was first measured using a Guttman scale more than twenty years ago. The civic duty to keep informed was also found to have the same strong monotonic relationship to traditional sources of news, newspapers, and network television, as was found in numerous settings more than twenty years ago. Moreover, one new relationship emerged here that was not found in earlier years, a clear relationship between a civic duty to keep informed and use of local TV news. The demographic patterns found in the new media environment among citizens in this southwestern metropolitan area—strong monotonic, or near monotonic, links between the civic duty to keep informed and education, income, and age—replicate the patterns found in earlier years. For education and income, the patterns are very similar. For age, the pattern is even stronger than in previous years.
