Theorists: McCombs and Shaw

The media tell us:

• What to think about
• How to think about it

Agenda Setting undergoes two processes:

• The first process (agenda setting) transfers the salience of items on their news agenda to our agenda.
• The second process (framing) transfers the salience of selected attributes to prominence among the pictures in our minds.

The Agenda-Setting Theory says the media (mainly the news media) aren’t always successful at telling us what to think, but they are quite successful at telling us what to think about.

The first study: Chapel Hill – studied an election. They found that the media’s agenda was the same as the voters agenda (because the correlation was high). But because the correlation was high, it could have easily meant that the media was providing what the voters wanted. Nevertheless, it was later proven to be a cause-effect relationship. The media agenda is the cause while the public agenda is the delayed effect (audience picks up media’s agenda a few weeks late).

Those with a high need for orientation are most vulnerable to agenda setting—when there is something of high relevance (does the story matter to me?) and high uncertainty (lack of knowledge).

Primary agenda setters (also called gatekeepers): The media elite consists of 8 people from the New York Times, Washington Post, Time magazine, Newsweek, ABC, NBC, and CBS. When one of them reports something, the others begin to report it as well.
They are all middle-aged white men who attend the same conferences and parties. – special interest groups
75% of stories do not make the news.