Читать книгу Setting the Agenda - Maxwell McCombs - Страница 20

All our examples of the agenda-setting influence of the news media examined to this point have been grounded in presidential elections or national portraits of public opinion. But there are also agenda-setting effects on local public issues. We begin with the long-term public opinion trends in an American city, trends that are analysed for the aggregate agenda, as well as separately for the eight individual issues on that agenda.²² When the trends in public opinion from 1974 through 1981 in Louisville were compared to the news coverage of the Louisville Times, the overall correlation between the public agenda and the news agenda was +0.65. Further analysis examined the ebb and flow of concern across these eight years for each of the eight issues. Significant agenda-setting effects were found for the top four issues on the news agenda: education, crime, the local environment, and local economic development.

Despite their influence on many issues, the news media are not all-powerful dictators of public opinion. The issues ranking fifth and sixth on the Louisville Times’ agenda – public recreation and health care, respectively – are examples of reverse agenda setting, a situation where public concern sets the media agenda. The lack of media omnipotence is also detailed in two other instances. Public concern about local government was independent of the trends in news coverage, despite the fact that local government is one of the traditional staples of daily newspaper coverage. Perhaps heavy continuing coverage of local government – or any other topic, for that matter – becomes a blur of white noise rather than a stream of information. Not only was public concern about local government immune to any agenda-setting influence of the press, the trend in news coverage was also immune to any reverse agenda setting, even though local government ranked sixth on the public agenda during those years.