Читать книгу Setting the Agenda - Maxwell McCombs - Страница 10

The American humourist Will Rogers was fond of prefacing his sardonic political observations with the comment, ‘All I know is just what I read in the newspapers.’ This comment is a succinct summary about most of the knowledge and information that each of us possesses about public affairs, because most of the issues and concerns that engage our attention are not amenable to direct personal experience. As Walter Lippmann long ago noted in Public Opinion, ‘The world that we have to deal with politically is out of reach, out of sight, out of mind.’¹ In Will Rogers’ and Walter Lippmann’s day, the daily newspaper was the principal source of information about public affairs. Today we have a vastly expanded panoply of communication channels, but the central point is the same. For nearly all of the concerns on the public agenda, citizens deal with a second-hand reality, a reality that is structured by journalists’ reports about these events and situations, which in turn are amplified, transformed, and commented upon by users across digital and mobile media.

A similar, parsimonious description of our situation vis-à-vis the news media is captured in sociologist Robert Park’s venerable phrase, the ‘signal function’ of the news.² The daily news alerts us to the latest events and changes in the larger environment beyond our immediate experience. But the news media do considerably more than signal the existence of major events and issues. Through their selection and display of the news, journalists focus our attention and influence our perceptions of what are the most important issues of the day. This role of the news media in identifying the key issues and topics of the day and their ability to influence the salience of these issues and topics on the public agenda has come to be called the agenda-setting role of the news media.

News media communicate a host of cues about the relative salience of the topics on their daily agenda. The lead story on page 1 of a newspaper, the placement of a story on a website, the length of a story, even the number of social media interactions garnered by a story – all communicate the salience of topics on the news agenda. The television news agenda has a more limited capacity, so even a mention on the evening television news is a strong signal about the high salience of a topic. Additional cues are provided by its placement in the broadcast and by the amount of time spent on the story. For all the communication media, the repetition of a topic day after day is the most powerful message of all about its importance.

The public uses these salience cues from the media to organize its own agenda and decide which issues are most important. Over time, the issues emphasized in news reports become the issues regarded as most important among the public. The agenda of the news media becomes, to a considerable degree, the agenda of the public. In other words, the news media largely set the public agenda. Establishing this salience among the public, placing an issue, event, public figure, or other major element in the news on the public agenda so that it becomes the focus of public attention and thought – and, possibly, action – is the initial stage in the formation of public opinion.

Discussion of public opinion usually centres on the distribution of opinions: how many are for, how many are against, and how many are undecided. That is why the news media and so many news users are so fascinated with public opinion polls, especially during political campaigns. But, before we consider the distribution of opinions, we need to know which elements are at the centre of public opinion. People have opinions on many things, but only a few really matter to them. The agenda-setting role of the news media is their influence on the salience of an object of attention in the news, such as a controversial topic or a political candidate, an influence on whether a significant number of people regard it as worthwhile to hold an opinion about that object.

While many issues compete for public attention, only a few are successful in doing so, and the news media exert significant influence on our perceptions of what are the most important issues of the day. Within professional news outlets, this is not a deliberate, premeditated influence, as in the expression ‘to have an agenda’. Premeditated attempts at influence are the realm of the partisan media, propaganda, advertising, so-called ‘fake news’ sites, and other forms of communication that seek to persuade.³ Professional news media seek to inform, not persuade. And their agenda-setting role stems not from efforts at persuasion, but rather is an inadvertent influence resulting from the necessity of the news media to select and highlight a few topics in their reports about the most salient news of the moment.

This distinction between the influence of the professional news media on the salience of objects in the news and on specific opinions about these objects is summed up in Bernard Cohen’s observation that the news media may not be successful in telling people what to think, but they are stunningly successful in telling their audiences what to think about.⁴ In other words, the news media can set the agenda for public thought and discussion. Sometimes the news media do more than this. Other times, the news media fail at setting the public agenda. Hence, we will find it necessary in later chapters to expand on Cohen’s cogent observation. But first, let us consider in some detail the initial step in the formation of public opinion, capturing public attention.