What do you think?
Rate this book
Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion
Setting the Agenda describes the mass media's significant and sometimes controversial role in determining which topics are at the centre of public attention and action. Although Walter Lippman captured the essence of the media's powerful influence early in the last century with his phrase, "the world outside and the pictures in our heads," a detailed, empirical elaboration of this agenda-setting role of the mass media did not begin until the final quarter of the 20th century. In this comprehensive book, Maxwell McCombs, one of the founding fathers of agenda-setting tradition of research, synthesizes the hundreds of scientific studies carried out on this central role of the mass media in the shaping of public opinion. Across the world, the mass media strongly influences what the pictures of public affairs "in our heads" are about. The mass media also influences the very details of those pictures. In addition to describing this media influence on what we think about and how we think about it, Setting the Agenda also discusses the sources of these media agendas, the psychological explanation for their impact on the public agenda, and the subsequent consequences for attitudes, opinions and behaviour.
198 pages, Hardcover
First published November 10, 2004
9 people are currently reading
115 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 2, 2014
Journalist say that they hold a mirror up to society. They present the news of the day and then it is up to their readers to interpret and understand that news in whatever why they choose. This is the assertion of a disinterested media – not uninterested, you understand, that would be a contradiction in terms – but disinterested, by which they basically mean fearlessly independent and objective. Something I read recently (sorry, I can’t remember where now) said that this is an odd thing to claim for any profession, because surely journalists are drawn to their profession for reasons other than objectivity – you know, like the fact they enjoy writing, or they want to espoused the truth or expose powerful interests, to defend democracy and to look after the little guy or something else equally high-minded. It seems laughable that they would go into the profession because they believe it to be the best place to exercise their ‘even-handedness’ – it would be like choosing to be a train driver because you are particularly punctual. Still, myths provide powerful narratives and as such they have a kind of momentum that rolls over such objections.
The problem is that this view of the media gives an impression that all the media is, is reflection, and I think this is the wrong impression entirely. Particularly since there are an awful lot of things that happen in the world and there is also simply no way the media could reasonably report all of it. A large part of what the media does, then, is to select what is fit to print – that is, what is worth knowing about. And if it does this sorting and editing, then clearly the media must be considered on the most basic level to have ‘set the agenda’. The question then is, to what extent does the media actually decide what gets talked about and to what extent does that then decide what is and what is not ‘on the agenda’? Are we merely pawns moved into position by the media? As with most extreme positions, I think that idea is hard to sustain.
This book reports on decades of research into the extent to which the media actually set the news agenda and the conditions that apply when they are able to do this successfully, and when this is less likely to be successful.
What is it exactly that we mean by ‘agenda’? I guess most of us would say that the media have set the agenda if they run some articles or bulletins on a particularly topic and it becomes something of interest to the public. But how would you gauge that? And that is where the decades of research comes in. People have been monitoring news items so as to do a content analysis on various media. Polling also does much the same in figuring out what are the main issues facing society as decided by the public. What is hardly surprising is that there is a correlation between the kinds of things the media find interesting and the kinds of things the public finds interesting. Now, another book I read recently had done some impressive statistical analysis and claimed that it is the public that sets the agenda The People's News: Media, Politics, and the Demands of Capitalism. They claimed that it is not in the media’s interests to let this be too widely known, but since the media makes its money by selling audiences, they are forced to provide content that audiences want or it wont have anything to sell. This means that the media is obsessive about tracking what people are thinking and mirroring it back to them. Clearly, there is some truth in this - another book I read recently gives the, perhaps apocryphal, account of a newspaper finding out what the top search items are for Google that day and then instructing journalists to include those items in the first paragraph of their news items.
All the same, I think that view of the public leading the media is unlikely. The problem is that there seems to be too many things that the public don’t know about until they appear in the media and so the causal pathway seems to have to go from the media to the public. That doesn’t mean that there is no feedback or that the media don’t pay attention to that feedback – but it does mean that to the extent that news is ‘new’ (a key idea supporting Luhmann’s ideas on the media) it is hard to know how the public could initiate ‘new’ content. That, surely, must have to come from the media.
And, when this has been tracked by the research reported here, there appears to be about an 8 week time lag between something being on the media agenda before it appears on the public agenda.
The other idea I like here is that there are remarkably fewer key agenda items in the media than might otherwise seem to ought to be the case. And this is even more so for the public agenda. It all comes down to that idea in psychology that our working memories are able to hold about seven things – plus or minus two. But when this has been applied to our attention on key agenda items in the public sphere, it turns out we are much more likely to be on the ‘seven minus two’ end of the spectrum.
The question then becomes whether the media is responsible for putting things onto the agenda or whether things end up on the agenda because they are issues in the real world and all the media is doing is reflecting that on to us.
There is some lovely research reported that makes it clear that the media has much more control over what gets on the agenda than we might otherwise like to think. As was made clear before, a content analysis can be done on what the media decides to report on and then opinion polls can gauge what the public are interested in. But how do you know that certain issues haven’t just become important and therefore that the media isn't just reflecting that reality? Well, some issues are also measured in other ways that ought to give an indication of how ‘relevant’ they ought to be to society if that was the case and these too can be measure over time.
And that is exactly what is done in this book. Comparisons are made between, say, crime statistics or oil prices and also media reports and public opinion. What is found is that despite, say, crime statistics remaining static over a given period of time (or even falling), media reports may go up and this will impact on people’s perception of the crime rate. The point being that the crime rate could be insanely high, but because you never see any crime, you wouldn’t know. Conversely, crime could be falling like a stone – as it more or less has been for ages – and because every time you turn on the TV you see or hear of another mugging or murder or gang or whatever, you’ll think the rate of crime is going up. There is a lovely quote here from a journalist that says if he was left alone with some police files for an hour he’d come out with a crime wave.
What is particularly interesting, though, is that this kind of manipulation only works for certain topics. That is, things we don’t really have direct experience of. For example, if a news agency wanted to push the line that inflation was completely out of all proportion and causing havoc, few people would be likely to believe that. This is because we all buy stuff, and if inflation was out of hand, well, we would notice.
But let’s say a news agency, I don’t know, say named after a small, but wild type of dog-like animal – wanted to convince the world that the US deficit had increased during the term of the current President. The problem is that other than from media reports, most people don’t really have any direct connection with the government’s deficit. Which part of your daily life experience changes when the deficit goes up or down? The deficit could be in free-fall, but the media has much more leeway to make it sound like it is going through the roof, because, well, how would you know?
This is really interesting, because some of the early research that was done into tracking how the media influenced public opinion did what seemed like a brilliant thing. It got a series of people who were swing voters and followed them to see how they finally made their decisions on who to vote for. Now, that sounds really clever. The problem is that all of the things that make this clever also make it likely to confirm the media’s role in setting the agenda. What you have with swing voters is a group of people who are highly focused on politics and secondly in need of information with which to make their decision. Where else, other than the media, are they likely to get that information? So, when the media start reporting on candidates, the swing voters are much more likely to be influenced by how the media frames these candidates than other people might. Media influence is confirmed. What is also interesting here is that the media tends to be much more interested in the horse race of election processes – rather than policies content per se. Yet another way in which our democracy is poorly served by the media.
The lesson from this book, for me, anyway, is that the media have a series of normative ways of approaching news gathering. These influence what they are likely to view as 'news' and what they are likely to reject – many of these decisions are made by looking over their shoulders at what other journalists are up to. The public has a very limited attention span, but often it has other means of verifying whether issues are relevant to them or not. However, on some issues the public’s ability to verify the relevance of the topic is much more limited. Here the public must rely on ‘experts’.
The media also gets to filter what is news and what is not news. There is no real need for a conspiracy here – it is very unlikely that news media are going to get too excited about anything that does not meet with the news publishers’ overall interests. As such, if there are 50 things that could be newsworthy on a particular day and if there is only space for 10 of these to be published, then self-interest will normalise the media's selection of the 10 least likely to be outside what the media organisation wants itself.
Some people hope that the internet (with its virtually infinite capacity) and bots that allow you to essentially choose your own adventure when it comes to getting news based on your interests, will mean that the ability of media to set agendas will quickly become a thing of the past. However, this really would be a very positive reading of the current data. Media tends toward homogenisation of content, and that is unlikely to change in a world that increasingly has fewer journalists and more spin doctors http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/....
I’m not saying, and this book isn’t saying, that you have no ability to avoid being manipulated by media agendas. I found out today, for instance, who Jennifer Lawrence is, which, I guess, proves her previous fully-clothed attempts to become a meme in my world have been somewhat less than successful. But to avoid being manipulated you need to know how the media works – and a big part of what you are most likely to be manipulated by is information you can’t know about in ways other than what the media tells you. You need to try to find other ways of getting information other than through the media alone – at least from the major ‘filter’ media. This is because many of these outlets are looking over their shoulders and copying the agendas being run by other outlets, it is actually in their interests to do so. So, you get to see a segment on raising crime on the TV news, then an article on the same topic in the paper, then your local radio has a piece about a bank robbery – and so in seeing three items in quick succession on crime from three sources, you are convinced crime is getting out of hand. Finding ways to check the relevance of individual news items before we generalise into crime waves is both hard but also essential. Pity really.
The problem is that this view of the media gives an impression that all the media is, is reflection, and I think this is the wrong impression entirely. Particularly since there are an awful lot of things that happen in the world and there is also simply no way the media could reasonably report all of it. A large part of what the media does, then, is to select what is fit to print – that is, what is worth knowing about. And if it does this sorting and editing, then clearly the media must be considered on the most basic level to have ‘set the agenda’. The question then is, to what extent does the media actually decide what gets talked about and to what extent does that then decide what is and what is not ‘on the agenda’? Are we merely pawns moved into position by the media? As with most extreme positions, I think that idea is hard to sustain.
This book reports on decades of research into the extent to which the media actually set the news agenda and the conditions that apply when they are able to do this successfully, and when this is less likely to be successful.
What is it exactly that we mean by ‘agenda’? I guess most of us would say that the media have set the agenda if they run some articles or bulletins on a particularly topic and it becomes something of interest to the public. But how would you gauge that? And that is where the decades of research comes in. People have been monitoring news items so as to do a content analysis on various media. Polling also does much the same in figuring out what are the main issues facing society as decided by the public. What is hardly surprising is that there is a correlation between the kinds of things the media find interesting and the kinds of things the public finds interesting. Now, another book I read recently had done some impressive statistical analysis and claimed that it is the public that sets the agenda The People's News: Media, Politics, and the Demands of Capitalism. They claimed that it is not in the media’s interests to let this be too widely known, but since the media makes its money by selling audiences, they are forced to provide content that audiences want or it wont have anything to sell. This means that the media is obsessive about tracking what people are thinking and mirroring it back to them. Clearly, there is some truth in this - another book I read recently gives the, perhaps apocryphal, account of a newspaper finding out what the top search items are for Google that day and then instructing journalists to include those items in the first paragraph of their news items.
All the same, I think that view of the public leading the media is unlikely. The problem is that there seems to be too many things that the public don’t know about until they appear in the media and so the causal pathway seems to have to go from the media to the public. That doesn’t mean that there is no feedback or that the media don’t pay attention to that feedback – but it does mean that to the extent that news is ‘new’ (a key idea supporting Luhmann’s ideas on the media) it is hard to know how the public could initiate ‘new’ content. That, surely, must have to come from the media.
And, when this has been tracked by the research reported here, there appears to be about an 8 week time lag between something being on the media agenda before it appears on the public agenda.
The other idea I like here is that there are remarkably fewer key agenda items in the media than might otherwise seem to ought to be the case. And this is even more so for the public agenda. It all comes down to that idea in psychology that our working memories are able to hold about seven things – plus or minus two. But when this has been applied to our attention on key agenda items in the public sphere, it turns out we are much more likely to be on the ‘seven minus two’ end of the spectrum.
The question then becomes whether the media is responsible for putting things onto the agenda or whether things end up on the agenda because they are issues in the real world and all the media is doing is reflecting that on to us.
There is some lovely research reported that makes it clear that the media has much more control over what gets on the agenda than we might otherwise like to think. As was made clear before, a content analysis can be done on what the media decides to report on and then opinion polls can gauge what the public are interested in. But how do you know that certain issues haven’t just become important and therefore that the media isn't just reflecting that reality? Well, some issues are also measured in other ways that ought to give an indication of how ‘relevant’ they ought to be to society if that was the case and these too can be measure over time.
And that is exactly what is done in this book. Comparisons are made between, say, crime statistics or oil prices and also media reports and public opinion. What is found is that despite, say, crime statistics remaining static over a given period of time (or even falling), media reports may go up and this will impact on people’s perception of the crime rate. The point being that the crime rate could be insanely high, but because you never see any crime, you wouldn’t know. Conversely, crime could be falling like a stone – as it more or less has been for ages – and because every time you turn on the TV you see or hear of another mugging or murder or gang or whatever, you’ll think the rate of crime is going up. There is a lovely quote here from a journalist that says if he was left alone with some police files for an hour he’d come out with a crime wave.
What is particularly interesting, though, is that this kind of manipulation only works for certain topics. That is, things we don’t really have direct experience of. For example, if a news agency wanted to push the line that inflation was completely out of all proportion and causing havoc, few people would be likely to believe that. This is because we all buy stuff, and if inflation was out of hand, well, we would notice.
But let’s say a news agency, I don’t know, say named after a small, but wild type of dog-like animal – wanted to convince the world that the US deficit had increased during the term of the current President. The problem is that other than from media reports, most people don’t really have any direct connection with the government’s deficit. Which part of your daily life experience changes when the deficit goes up or down? The deficit could be in free-fall, but the media has much more leeway to make it sound like it is going through the roof, because, well, how would you know?
This is really interesting, because some of the early research that was done into tracking how the media influenced public opinion did what seemed like a brilliant thing. It got a series of people who were swing voters and followed them to see how they finally made their decisions on who to vote for. Now, that sounds really clever. The problem is that all of the things that make this clever also make it likely to confirm the media’s role in setting the agenda. What you have with swing voters is a group of people who are highly focused on politics and secondly in need of information with which to make their decision. Where else, other than the media, are they likely to get that information? So, when the media start reporting on candidates, the swing voters are much more likely to be influenced by how the media frames these candidates than other people might. Media influence is confirmed. What is also interesting here is that the media tends to be much more interested in the horse race of election processes – rather than policies content per se. Yet another way in which our democracy is poorly served by the media.
The lesson from this book, for me, anyway, is that the media have a series of normative ways of approaching news gathering. These influence what they are likely to view as 'news' and what they are likely to reject – many of these decisions are made by looking over their shoulders at what other journalists are up to. The public has a very limited attention span, but often it has other means of verifying whether issues are relevant to them or not. However, on some issues the public’s ability to verify the relevance of the topic is much more limited. Here the public must rely on ‘experts’.
The media also gets to filter what is news and what is not news. There is no real need for a conspiracy here – it is very unlikely that news media are going to get too excited about anything that does not meet with the news publishers’ overall interests. As such, if there are 50 things that could be newsworthy on a particular day and if there is only space for 10 of these to be published, then self-interest will normalise the media's selection of the 10 least likely to be outside what the media organisation wants itself.
Some people hope that the internet (with its virtually infinite capacity) and bots that allow you to essentially choose your own adventure when it comes to getting news based on your interests, will mean that the ability of media to set agendas will quickly become a thing of the past. However, this really would be a very positive reading of the current data. Media tends toward homogenisation of content, and that is unlikely to change in a world that increasingly has fewer journalists and more spin doctors http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/....
I’m not saying, and this book isn’t saying, that you have no ability to avoid being manipulated by media agendas. I found out today, for instance, who Jennifer Lawrence is, which, I guess, proves her previous fully-clothed attempts to become a meme in my world have been somewhat less than successful. But to avoid being manipulated you need to know how the media works – and a big part of what you are most likely to be manipulated by is information you can’t know about in ways other than what the media tells you. You need to try to find other ways of getting information other than through the media alone – at least from the major ‘filter’ media. This is because many of these outlets are looking over their shoulders and copying the agendas being run by other outlets, it is actually in their interests to do so. So, you get to see a segment on raising crime on the TV news, then an article on the same topic in the paper, then your local radio has a piece about a bank robbery – and so in seeing three items in quick succession on crime from three sources, you are convinced crime is getting out of hand. Finding ways to check the relevance of individual news items before we generalise into crime waves is both hard but also essential. Pity really.
February 9, 2023
V podstate učebnica vyšla prvýkrát ešte v roku 2004, čiže nenájdete v nej nastoľovanie agendy vo veku sociálnych sietí, influncerov, veku postpravdy, „alternatívnych“ médií a platených trollov. Už ale naznačuje napríklad to, že čitateľ novín má obvykle viac času na zoznámenie sa s novinovou agendou ako divák TV (mimochodom autor skúma najmä noviny a TV, dnes by sa zrejme čudoval nad „skenovaním“ titulkov bez čítania s porozumením). Sú tu popísané základy teórie agenda-setting, vrátane terminológie a príklady javu, kedy sa agenda preniesla/prenáša z médií do verejnej mienky. Inak povedané, ako témy, rámce, agenda od názorových vodcov, PR oddelení firiem a PR agentúr prenikajú do médií a z mediálnej agendy zasa do verejnej a osobnej agendy.
May 28, 2014
A Surgeon's Guide to Dissecting the American Mind
Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion, is just what it states. Before we looked at Public Relations via Edward Bernays and Walter Lippman, to name just two, we knew it as Propaganda.
Politics, which differs from Government, figures prominently in this book. For obvious reasons swaying public opinion is vital in lining up populations in groups and directing their behavior rather than being directed.
It is difficult to stay objective about mass manipulation since it implies secrecy and misdirection.
But, that's the world we live in and the less people think for themselves the more they want to be led.
Enter agenda setting.
Lippman is used fairly often in describing how important it is to place images in the people's minds. The more lurid the better, for they've got sticking power. They describe how in 1968 political victories are won not in issues 1/3, but in 'information' on the candidates and their strategy. In other words, the media was able to insert itself between candidate and public by creating 'stories' about the how the candidate 'felt' and what his intentions were.
And we know what sides the media usually will take, but that's part of the problem left out.
While the study of expanded agenda setting in schools and religion is mentioned, the exploration of that alone would take volumes, and most certainly exist.
The reason I did give it 5 stars isn't because I agree with these tactics, but that the public needs to be aware of how advanced and precise the use of public relations has become. The images in our minds have been placed there patiently and carefully.
On a positive side, Cognitive Mapping provide everyone a similar lay of the land. It enables right and left to leverage the general vision of the people, (or lack thereof). Either way, the battle for hearts and minds that began in earnest a hundred years ago has progressed further than any other field of medicine.
Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion, is just what it states. Before we looked at Public Relations via Edward Bernays and Walter Lippman, to name just two, we knew it as Propaganda.
Politics, which differs from Government, figures prominently in this book. For obvious reasons swaying public opinion is vital in lining up populations in groups and directing their behavior rather than being directed.
It is difficult to stay objective about mass manipulation since it implies secrecy and misdirection.
But, that's the world we live in and the less people think for themselves the more they want to be led.
Enter agenda setting.
Lippman is used fairly often in describing how important it is to place images in the people's minds. The more lurid the better, for they've got sticking power. They describe how in 1968 political victories are won not in issues 1/3, but in 'information' on the candidates and their strategy. In other words, the media was able to insert itself between candidate and public by creating 'stories' about the how the candidate 'felt' and what his intentions were.
And we know what sides the media usually will take, but that's part of the problem left out.
While the study of expanded agenda setting in schools and religion is mentioned, the exploration of that alone would take volumes, and most certainly exist.
The reason I did give it 5 stars isn't because I agree with these tactics, but that the public needs to be aware of how advanced and precise the use of public relations has become. The images in our minds have been placed there patiently and carefully.
On a positive side, Cognitive Mapping provide everyone a similar lay of the land. It enables right and left to leverage the general vision of the people, (or lack thereof). Either way, the battle for hearts and minds that began in earnest a hundred years ago has progressed further than any other field of medicine.
February 16, 2021
Great information which handily updates the position of the two course books in my Public Policy class. The only reason for 3 stars vs 5 stars is that the book is not indexed. This made it very troublesome to use as a resource in a recent assignment.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews