Читать книгу Setting the Agenda - Maxwell McCombs - Страница 14

To extend the evidence for agenda setting beyond the narrow focus on undecided voters in Chapel Hill and their media sources during the autumn 1968 election, a representative sample of all voters in Charlotte, North Carolina, and their news media were examined three times during the summer and autumn of 1972.¹⁶ Two distinct phases of election-year agenda setting were identified. During the summer and early autumn, the daily newspaper was the prime mover. With its greater capacity – scores of pages compared to half an hour for network television news – the Charlotte Observer influenced the public agenda during the early months. Television news did not. But in the final month of the campaign, there was little evidence of agenda setting by either the local newspaper or the television networks.

In addition to documenting the agenda-setting influence of the local newspaper on the public, these observations across the summer and autumn of that election campaign eliminated the rival hypothesis that the public agenda influenced the newspaper agenda. When there are observations of the media agenda and the public agenda at two or more points over time, it is possible to compare simultaneously the cross-lag correlations measuring the strength of these two competing causal hypotheses. For example, the influence of the newspaper agenda at time one on the public agenda at time two can be compared with the influence of the public agenda at time one on the newspaper agenda at time two. In Charlotte, the agenda-setting hypothesis prevailed.

The agenda of issues during the 1972 presidential campaign included three very personal concerns – the economy, drugs, and bussing to achieve racial integration of the public schools – and four issues that were more remote – the Watergate scandal, US relations with Russia and China, the environment, and Vietnam. The salience of all seven issues among the public was influenced by the pattern of news coverage in the local newspaper.