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From 1954 to 1976, a 23-year span encompassing half a dozen presidential elections and all the years in between, the salience of the civil rights issue in the United States rose and fell with great regularity in response to news coverage.¹⁸ The percentage of Americans naming civil rights as ‘the most important problem’ facing the country ranged from 0 to 52 per cent in the twenty-seven Gallup polls conducted during those three decades. When this continuously shifting salience of civil rights on the public agenda was compared with the news coverage on the front page of the New York Times for the month preceding each of the twenty-seven polls, the result was a robust correlation of +0.71. Even when the influence of news coverage in earlier months is removed, the correlation remains +0.71. This is especially compelling evidence of the media’s agenda-setting role. Also note that the salience of the civil rights issue among the public primarily reflects the preceding month of news coverage, a relatively short-term response to the media agenda. Because the media agendas examined over this 23-year period were prior in time to the public agenda, this evidence on time-order further supports agenda-setting’s causal assertion that the public agenda results, to a considerable degree, form the media agenda.