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This is far from all the accumulated evidence that the news media exercise an agenda-setting influence on the public, but it is a wide-ranging sample of that evidence. The examples presented here describe agenda-setting effects by a wide array of media on numerous national and local issues, during elections and more quiescent political times, in a variety of national and local settings in the United States, Britain, Spain, Germany, Japan, and Argentina, from 1968 to the present. Recent research also has documented the agenda-setting effects of entertainment media, such as Oprah Winfrey’s daytime TV show.⁶⁸

There are, of course, several other significant influences that shape individual attitudes and public opinion. How we feel about a particular issue may be rooted in our personal experience, the general culture or our exposure to the media.⁶⁹ Trends in public opinion are shaped over time by new generations, external events, and the communication media.⁷⁰ Nonetheless, the general proposition supported by this accumulation of evidence about agenda-setting effects is that journalists do significantly influence their audience’s picture of the world.

For the most part, this agenda-setting influence is an inadvertent by-product of the media’s necessity to focus on a few topics in the news each day. And a tight focus on a handful of issues by numerous media conveys a strong message to the audience about what are the most important topics of the moment. Agenda setting directs our attention to the early formative stages of public opinion, when issues emerge and first engage public attention, a situation that confronts journalists with a strong ethical responsibility to select carefully the issues on their agenda.

In theoretical terms, this chapter’s examples of agenda setting illustrate the transmission of issue salience from the media agenda to the public agenda. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, agenda setting as a theory about the transmission of salience is not limited to the influence of the media agenda on the public agenda, or even to an agenda of public issues. There are many agendas in contemporary society. Beyond the various agendas that define the context in which public opinion takes shape, this idea about the transmission of salience has been applied to a variety of other settings. Chapter 8 discusses some of these new, broader applications, that extend agenda-setting theory beyond political communication. But, first, we will add further detail to our theoretical map of the causal influence that the media agenda has on the public agenda.