Читать книгу Setting the Agenda - Maxwell McCombs - Страница 26

With the transformation of the communication landscape in recent decades – first cable television and subsequently satellite television among the traditional mass media and now the proliferation of websites and personalized social media – some observers have predicted the diminution, if not the disappearance, of agenda-setting effects on the scale that we have observed them over the past half century.⁵¹ The argument is that the myriad content choices brought upon by interactive media has increased the competition for people’s attention, thus challenging the place of traditional news in people’s media diet.⁵² Despite the popularity of this possibility, the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence to date suggests that the agenda-setting role of the media endures. To paraphrase Mark Twain’s famous cable to the Associated Press, reports of agenda setting’s death are greatly exaggerated.

An extensive longitudinal analysis of the agenda-setting effects of the New York Times’ coverage on the public’s responses to the Gallup Poll’s ‘most important problem facing the country’ from 1956 to 2004 found variations in the strength of these effects, but no discernible trend over time.⁵³ This finding was replicated in a more recent time-series analysis based on media content and public opinion data collected in Sweden between 1992 and 2014. In it, the authors analysed both aggregate and individual-level agenda-setting effects on public opinion concerning twelve different political issues. Their results show that the traditional news media were as influential as an agenda setter in 2014 – an era of high-choice media – as in 1992 – an era of low choice.⁵⁴ Similarly, a longitudinal analysis⁵⁵ of broadcast television’s agenda-setting power conducted in Chile between 2001 and 2016 found that the correlation between media and public agendas averaged +0.75. Furthermore, there was no downward linear trend – if in 2001 the correlation hovered at +0.90, by 2016 it was still at a strong +0.80.

Another way of tracking variation in agenda-setting effects due to the proliferation of digital channels is through cohort analysis, in which different generations of individuals are compared in their susceptibility to the media agenda. Although media-use patterns among different generations do diverge in the new communication environment, state-wide surveys in North Carolina and Louisiana found little difference in agenda-setting effects among the younger, middle, and older generations.⁵⁶ Greater attention to the internet and much less attention to traditional media among young adults had little impact on the magnitude of agenda-setting effects. Particularly compelling is the comparison in Louisiana of the issue agendas of low and high internet users to the issue agenda of the state’s major newspapers. For low internet users the correlation with the newspaper agenda is +0.90. For high internet users, the correlation is +0.70.

Likewise, comparisons between the issue agendas of the New York Times and the younger, middle, and older generations across the election years in the US from 1976 to 2004 found no inflection points associated with these events in the long-term trends.⁵⁷ The overall pattern is one of strong agenda-setting effects across the years and no large differences among the generations despite variations in their media-use patterns. For the younger generation, the median correlation is +0.77 across these decades with a range of +0.55 to +0.93. For the 35 to 54-year-olds, the median is +0.79 with a range of +0.66 to +0.93. Among those 55-and-older, the median value is +0.77 with a range of +0.61 to +0.93.

Furthermore, the meta-analysis discussed earlier⁵⁸ showed that year of publication of the study was not a significant predictor of the strength of the agenda-setting effect, which suggests that the influence of traditional news media – which are the most studied media in the articles used in the meta-analysis – remains as strong as it used to be.

Both the strength of agenda-setting effects in past decades and their continuing strength in contemporary settings result from long-standing patterns of behaviour in the media and among the public. The high degree of homogeneity among media agendas found in the original Chapel Hill investigation continues in contemporary settings. Pablo Boczkowski not only found a high level of homogeneity among the news agendas of the major print and online newspapers in Buenos Aires, but also noted the increasing similarity of these news agendas from 1995 to 2005, a trend that he attributes to the facilitation of journalists’ long-standing habit of monitoring the competition by the plethora of news now available on the internet and television.⁵⁹ Among the public, strong agenda-setting effects result from civic osmosis, the continuous exposure to a vast sea of information from many channels of communication.⁶⁰ Applying network analysis to Nielsen data on TV and internet use from March 2009 collected from over 1,000 homes, James Webster and Thomas Ksiazek noted:

We find extremely high levels of audience duplication across 236 media outlets, suggesting overlapping patterns of public attention rather than isolated groups of audience loyalists.⁶¹

For most people, this exposure ranges from habitual and deliberate attention to some news channels to incidental exposure to other news channels in the course of daily life. In tandem with the homogeneity of these news channels, the outcome is a high degree of consensus among the public about the major issues of the day.