Maxwell McCombs

A Look at Agenda-setting: past, present and future

Ten US presidential elections ago in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the agenda of issues that a small group of undecided voters regarded as the most important ones of the day was compared with the ne...

Media Salience and the Process of Framing: Coverage of the Columbine School Shootings:

This study examines how the media can build a news events salience by emphasizing different aspects of the event during its life span. A two-dimensional measurement scheme is proposed as a systematic way of examining media frames. This scheme yields cross-issue generalizability that liberates framing research from issue-specific boundaries. A content analysis examining the coverage of the Columbine school shootings in the New York Times documents the use of multiple frames on the time and space dimensions, visualizes framing as a process over time, and identifies certain frame-changing patterns in the coverage of this highly salient news event.

Agenda setting and political advertising: Origins of the news agenda

The number of potential sources shaping the medias agenda is large, ranging from external sources in government and the private sector to the idiosyncrasies of individual journalists. The focus in this study is intermedia agenda setting. Commonly defined in terms of the influence that the news agendas of different news organizations have on each other, the concept of intermedia agenda setting is expanded to include another key element of mass communication: advertising. Advertising agendas occasionally have been examined as an influence on the public agenda, an alternative test of the basic, agenda‐setting hypothesis. Here, however, the advertising agenda established by political candidates through their television political commercials is added to the model of the agenda‐setting process to answer more fully the question, who sets the medias agenda? The study examines the direction of influence or intermedia convergence of issue agendas during the 1990 Texas gubernatorial campaign. Content analysis was ...

CAPACITY, DIVERSITY, AND VOLATILITY OF THE PUBLIC AGENDA TRENDS FROM 1954 TO 1994

This study examined three intertwined hypotheses about long-term trends in the American publics issue agenda: increases in (1) agenda capacity, (2) agenda diversity, and (3) issue volatility. These hypotheses were tested with aggregate time series data covering 40 years of Gallup Poll Most Important Problem questions. The first two hypotheses also were replicated with cross-sectional data at the individual level consisting of 15,000 cases from three different years stretching across 4 de- cades. While no significant linear increase in the carrying capac- ity is found, our results provide unambiguously strong evidence for an increase in both agenda diversity and issue volatility. These findings about the public agenda are consistent with the proffered explanation that the volatility of contemporary public opinion is the result of a collision between two opposing forces, the expansive influence of education on awareness of public is- sues and the constraint imposed by the public agendas limited capacity. Early in the history of agenda-setting research, it was noted (Shaw and McCombs 1977) that the public agenda typically included no more than five to seven issues at any one time. For many years, this simply was regarded as an empirical generalization, another instance of Millers (1956) magic number seven, plus or minus two. Recently this constraint on the size of the public agenda has received closer theoreti-

Explorers and Surveyors: Expanding Strategies for Agenda-Setting Research

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.

Agenda setting function of mass media

Public relations practitioners have long attempted to persuade publics through mass media campaigns. Social scientists, likewise, have searched for the most persuasive mix of messages and media. Most of this research, however, indicates that the media seldom change attitudes and behavior, and that persuasion is, therefore, an unrealistic objective for a media campaign. Led by Maxwell McCombs, the author of this article, communication researchers have discovered a logical and more realistic effect of media: While the media do not tell people what to think, they tell people what to think about. That is, the media determine which issues—and which organizations—will be put on the public agenda for discussion. In this article, McCombs summarizes research on agenda-setting and then discusses its implications for public relations.

THE IMPACT OF INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING ON PUBLIC OPINION AND POLICYMAKING TARGETING TOXIC WASTE

This article reports the fourth in a continuing series of case studies that explore the impact of news media investigative journalism on the general public, policymakers, and public pol- icy. The media disclosures in this field experiment had limited effects on the general public but were influential in changing the attitudes of policymakers. The study describes how changes in public policymaking resulted from collaboration between journal- ists and government officials. The authors develop a model that is a beginning step toward specifying the conditions under which media investigations influence public attitudes and agendas. This article reports the fourth in a series of field experiments that test the agenda-setting hypothesis (McCombs and Shaw, 1972) for news

What the Public Expects of Local News: Views on Public and Traditional Journalism

A survey found the public does not strongly endorse traditional journalism norms of watchdog and rapid reporting. Furthermore, when opinions of survey respondents and journalists were compared, survey respondents were significantly more likely to say providing a community forum, a public journalism principle, was extremely important. African Americans, Hispanics, women, and adults with less education and income strongly endorsed the public journalism principle of offering solutions to problems. A factor analysis of thirteen public and traditional journalism roles and characteristics revealed four dimensions of journalism as perceived by the public: good neighbor, watchdog, unbiased and accurate, and fast.

The Young and Agenda-less? Exploring Age-related Differences in Agenda Setting on the Youngest Generation, Baby Boomers, and the Civic Generation

This study examined agenda-setting differences between those aged 18 to 34 and two older generations. Using two surveys with statewide random samples and content analyses for each, it found that the agenda of issues important to young adults was correlated with the medias issue agenda (rho= .80 and .90). For the heaviest Internet users, who were more likely to be in the two youngest age groups, the correlation was .70. Although the youngest generation used traditional media such as newspapers and television significantly less frequently than older generations, and used the Internet significantly more often, this differential media use did not eliminate the agenda-setting influence.

News Story Descriptions and the Public's Opinions of Political Candidates

Combining a telephone survey of a probability sample of residents in the Austin, Texas, metropolitan area and a content analysis of the local daily newspaper, this study replicates and extends prior research on attribute agenda setting with an emphasis on the attribute priming consequences of agenda-setting effects for opinions about candidates in the 2002 Texas gubernatorial and U.S. senatorial elections. Correlation and regression analyses support the central proposition of attribute agenda setting and indicate that attributes positively or negatively covered in the news are related to opinions about each candidate. Attributes receiving extensive media attention were more likely to affect attitudinal judgments for heavy newspaper readers than for light newspaper readers.