Читать книгу Setting the Agenda - Maxwell McCombs - Страница 13

A year after publication of the Chapel Hill study, Theodore White’s last instalment of The Making of the President series details the agenda-setting influence of the news media in the excerpt shown in Box 1.2. Since the modest beginnings in Chapel Hill during the 1968 presidential election, more than 500 separate scientific works on agenda setting have accumulated, spanning all six continents, including political and non-political settings, across a variety of media, and dozens of issues.¹¹ In 2011, the 75th anniversary celebration of Public Opinion Quarterly noted that the Chapel Hill study was the most cited article ever published in the journal.¹² By March 2020, this article alone had over 12,000 citations in Google Scholar. Some authors even speak of the ‘agenda-setting juggernaut’¹³ to highlight the popularity of the agenda-setting concept when studying the influence of journalists and the news they produce. And it may well be the only theory in journalism studies to have a scholarly journal entirely devoted to it, The Agenda-Setting Journal.

Despite reams of published research, the basic idea of the theory has remained straightforward: Agenda setting refers to the process by which the elements (e.g. issues, public figures, companies, or government institutions) that are deemed relevant by the news media as well as the attributes used to describe these elements often become relevant to public opinion, too. Importantly, the basic agenda-setting hypothesis has been widely documented. The latest meta-analysis – a technique that pools in a statistically meaningful way the results of separate studies – found an average correlation of +0.49 between the media and public agendas.¹⁴ To put this number in perspective, consider that the mean effect estimate for human communication phenomena is +0.21.¹⁵ This robust collection of evidence also documents the time-order and causal links between the media and public agendas in finer detail. Here is a sampling of that evidence.