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Setting the agenda is now a common phrase in discussions of politics and public opinion. This phrase summarizes the continuing dialogue and debate in every community, from local neighbourhoods to the international arena, over what should be at the centre of public attention and action. In most of these dialogues the news media have a significant and sometimes controversial role. Should there be any doubt about this long-standing and widespread role of the news media, note the New York Times’ description of twentieth-century British press baron Lord Beaverbrook as a man ‘who dined with prime ministers and set the nation’s agenda’.¹ Or former New York Times executive Max Frankel’s description of his own newspaper:

It is the ‘house organ’ of the smartest, most talented, and most influential Americans at the height of American power. And while its editorial opinions or the views of individual columnists and critics can be despised or dismissed, the paper’s daily package of news cannot. It frames the intellectual and emotional agenda of serious Americans.²

The enormous growth and expansion of these media institutions that are now such a compelling feature of contemporary society was a central aspect of the last one hundred years. To the host of newspapers and magazines spawned in the nineteenth century, the twentieth century added ubiquitous layers of film, radio, television, and cable television. In its closing years came the internet and, in the twenty-first century, a kaleidoscopic mix of new communication technologies – most notably social and mobile media – have continued to blur the traditional boundaries between mediated and interpersonal communication, and between the various media and their content. These new channels redefine ‘mass’ communication and enlarge its agenda-setting role in society. Mass communication once meant the large-scale distribution of identical messages, particularly through newspapers, television, and radio. The new communication channels, such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, are massive, too, in that large proportions of society use them, but the messages flowing through these channels are personalized.

Although everyone talks about the impact of these emerging technologies in the current media landscape, the enormous social influence of communication was already apparent decades before Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook. In The Making of the President, 1972, American journalist Theodore White described the power of the news media to set the agenda of public attention as ‘an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties, and mandarins’.³ In the years since White’s cogent observation, social scientists across the world have elaborated the ability of the news media and an expanding panoply of communication channels to influence many aspects of our political, social, and cultural agendas.

One of the most prominent and best-documented intellectual maps of this influence is the theory of the agenda-setting role of the communication media, which is the subject of this book. Theories seldom emerge full-blown. They typically begin with a succinct insight and are subsequently elaborated and explicated over many years by various explorers and surveyors of their intellectual terrain. This has been the case for agenda-setting theory. From a parsimonious hypothesis about the effects of the news media on the public’s attention to social and political issues during election campaigns, agenda setting has expanded to include propositions about the psychological process for these effects, the influences that shape communication agendas, the impact of specific elements in their messages, and a variety of consequences of this agenda-setting process. Expanding beyond the traditional news media, agenda-setting theory has become a detailed map of the effects of the flow of information about public affairs through a growing plethora of communication channels.

The immediate origins of this idea began with a casual observation about the play of news stories on the front page of the Los Angeles Times one day in early 1967. There were three big stories that day: internationally, the unexpected shift from Labour to Conservative in the British county council elections; nationally, a budding scandal in Washington; and locally, the firing of the Los Angeles metropolitan area director of a large federally funded programme that was a keystone in President Johnson’s national ‘War on Poverty’. Not surprisingly, the Los Angeles Times put the local story in the lead position on page 1 and relegated the other two stories to less prominent positions on the front page. Any one of these stories – in the absence of the other two – easily would have been the page 1 lead, a situation that led to a speculative conversation over drinks among several young UCLA faculty members at their Friday afternoon ‘junior faculty meeting’ in the lobby of the Century Plaza Hotel. Is the impact of an event diminished when a news story receives less prominent play, we wondered? Those speculations grounded in a scattered variety of ideas and empirical findings about the influence of the media on the public were the seeds for the theory of agenda setting.

The formal explication of the idea of agenda setting began with my move that autumn to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I met Donald Shaw and began what is now a fifty-year plus friendship and professional partnership. Our initial attempt at formal research on this idea built literally on those speculations in Los Angeles about the play of news stories. We attempted to construct an experiment based on actual newspapers that played the same story in radically different ways. The Charlotte Observer was a widely respected newspaper in North Carolina, which produced a series of editions during the day, early ones for points distant from Charlotte, the final edition for the city itself. One result of these multiple editions was that some stories would begin the day prominently played on the front page and then move down in prominence in subsequent editions, sometimes moving entirely off the front page. Our original plan was to use these differences from edition to edition as the basis of an experiment. However, the shifts in news play from day to day proved too erratic – in terms both of the subjects of the stories and in the way that their play in the newspaper changed – for any systematic comparison of their impact upon the public’s perceptions.

Despite this setback, the theoretical idea was intriguing, and we decided to try another methodological tack, a small survey of undecided voters during the 1968 US presidential election in tandem with a systematic content analysis of how the news media used by these voters played the major issues of the election. Undecided voters were selected for study on the assumption that, among the public at large, this group, who were interested in the election but undecided about their vote, would be the most open to media influence. This was the Chapel Hill study, now known as the origin of agenda-setting theory.⁴

A fundamental contribution of the Chapel Hill study was the term itself, ‘agenda setting’, which gave this concept of media influence immediate currency among scholars. The late Steve Chaffee recalled that, when I saw him at the 1968 annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and told him about our study of agenda setting, the term was new and unfamiliar but he immediately understood the focus of our research.

Since Donald Shaw was trained in history, you might expect us to have exact records on the creation of the term ‘agenda setting’ – the ‘One Tuesday afternoon in early August …’ kind of sentence – but, ironically, neither Donald nor I recalls exactly when we came up with that name. We did not mention ‘agenda setting’ in our 1967 application to the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) for the small grant used in partial support of the research, but our 1969 report to the NAB on the results of the Chapel Hill study uses the term as if it had been around forever. Sometime during 1968 the name ‘agenda setting’ appeared,⁵ and Steve Chaffee undoubtedly was one of the first ‘referees’ to acknowledge its utility – perhaps the very first outside the immediate Chapel Hill circle involved in the project. Further corroboration is provided by the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which shows that 1968 was the first year in which the phrase ‘agenda setting’ was used systematically. Chapter 1 presents the details of the Chapel Hill study as well as some of the key intellectual antecedents of this idea.

To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, with the success of the 1968 Chapel Hill investigation, the game clearly was afoot. There were promising leads in hand for the solution to at least a portion of the mystery about the precise effects of the media upon public opinion. Subsequently, many detectives began to pursue these clues about how public attention and perception are influenced by the media and how various characteristics of the media, their content, and their audiences mediate these effects. Much like the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, whose cases fill nine lengthy volumes, a wide variety of links in this vast intellectual web has been chronicled. However, because the marketplace of ideas in communication research is very much one of laissez-faire, elaboration of the agenda-setting role of the communication media has not always proceeded in an orderly or systematic fashion. There have been many detectives working on many cases in a variety of geographical and cultural settings, adding a bit of evidence here and another bit there over the years. New theoretical concepts explicating the idea of agenda setting emerged in one part of this intellectual web, then in another.

For many years, the primary emphasis was an agenda of public issues. Especially in its popular manifestation of polls in the news media, public opinion is frequently regarded in these terms. Agenda-setting theory evolved from a description and explanation of the influence that the news media have on public opinion about the issues of the day. An open-ended question used by the Gallup Poll since the 1930s, ‘What is the most important problem facing this country today?’, is frequently used for this research because polls based on this question document the hundreds of issues that have engaged the attention of the public and pollsters over the decades.⁶ Perhaps for the first time in modern history, in 2020 this Most Important Problem (or MIP) question yielded the exact same response in all polls across the world: the coronavirus crisis.

Moving beyond an agenda of issues, agenda-setting theory has encompassed public opinion about political candidates and other public figures, specifically the images that the public holds of these individuals and the contributions of the media to those public images. This larger agenda of topics – public figures as well as public issues – marks an important theoretical expansion from the beginning of the communication process, what topics the media and public are paying attention to and regard as important, to subsequent stages, how the media and public perceive and understand the details of these topics. In turn, these stages are the opening gambit for mapping the consequences of the media’s agenda-setting role for attitudes, opinions, and behaviour.

And, in recent decades, investigation of agenda-setting effects and their consequences have expanded beyond the domain of public affairs to explore settings as diverse as sports, religion, and business. All of these media effects upon the public are presented in this volume, not just theoretically, but in terms of the empirical evidence on these effects worldwide.

In contrast to the piecemeal historical evolution of our knowledge about agenda setting since the seminal 1968 Chapel Hill study, the chapters of this book strive for an orderly and systematic presentation of what we have learned over those years, an attempt to integrate the vast diversity of this evidence – diverse in its historical and geographical settings, mix of media and topics, and research methods. Presenting this integrated picture – in the words of John Pavlik, a Gray’s Anatomy of agenda-setting theory⁷ – is the central purpose of the book. Much of the evidence forming this picture is from an American setting because the ‘founding fathers’ of agenda setting, Donald Shaw, David Weaver,⁸ and myself, are American academics, and the majority of the empirical research until recently has been conducted in the United States. However, the reader will encounter considerable evidence from Western Europe, East Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. One of the great strengths of agenda-setting theory is this geographical and cultural diversity in the evidence replicating the major aspects of this influence on society.

Beyond the immense gratitude to my best friends and long-time research partners, Donald Shaw and David Weaver, this book owes a great debt to the host of scholars worldwide who created the accumulated literature that is catalogued here. Prominent among these scholars is a leading Latin American scholar, Sebastián Valenzuela, who joins me as the co-author of this third edition. An associate professor in the School of Communications at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago, Sebastián brings an important international voice to Setting the Agenda. He continues the significant contributions to agenda setting made by University of Texas at Austin scholars over the past three decades.

The theory of agenda setting is a complex intellectual map still in the process of evolving. Although the emphasis in this book is on an empirically grounded media-centric map of what we now know about the role of the media in the formation of public opinion, there also is discussion in the later chapters of the larger context in which this media influence occurs. This agenda-setting role of the media has been a rich lode for scholars to mine for more than fifty years, and yet much of its wealth remains untapped. However, even the existing theoretical map already identifies exciting new areas to explore, and the flux in our contemporary public communication system has created a plethora of new opportunities for elaborating the map presented here.

Even within the original domain of public opinion, there is more to consider than just the descriptions and explanations of how the media influence our views of public affairs. For journalists this phenomenon that we now talk about as the agenda-setting role of the news media is an awesome, overarching ethical question about what agenda the media are advancing. ‘What the public needs to know’ is a recurring phrase in the rhetorical repertoire of professional journalism. Does the media agenda really represent what the public needs to know?⁹ In a moment of doubt, the executive producer of ABC News’ Nightline once asked: ‘Who are we to think we should set an agenda for the nation? What made us any smarter than the next guy?’¹⁰ To a considerable degree, journalism is grounded in the tradition of storytelling. However, good journalism is more than just telling a good story. It is about telling stories that contain significant civic utility.¹¹ The agenda-setting role of the media links journalism and its tradition of storytelling to the arena of public opinion, a relationship with considerable consequences for society. And the expanding media landscape and evolution of journalism and political communication presents significant questions about the formation of public opinion.

Maxwell McCombs

Austin, Texas, March 2020