What, how, to what effect: the first conceptualization of media effectsĭuring the 1968 presidential campaign, scholars McCombs and Shaw set out to investigate the relationship between mass media and the public’s perceptions of “important” voting issues. In the later elaborations, agenda setting emerged as multifaceted explanatory mechanism, which takes into account the representation and content of the media coverage as well as the corresponding audience attitudes about these issues. The more media coverage a topic receives, the more salient it becomes, and the more audience attention is funnelled toward it.Īgenda setting has evolved over time from a “issue salience” theory to a more complex proposition with overlaps with priming/framing theory. Specifically, people find most important those issues covered by the media most often.
Of these, the more salient are more likely to be processed and accepted as important. Although, individual autonomy is important, like uses and gratifications theory suggests, we often pick and choose what issues to explore and evaluate from the pool of “important” issues determined by the media. Agenda setting theory proposes the premise that exposure is not enough media content needs to be made salient (significant) to the user before being processed and accepted.Īgenda setting changed the attention from what to “ how” media effects work at institutional and macro-social level. Little attention was paid to the mechanisms by which exposure was achieved in the first place. More exposure was thought to lead to greater effects. Does the old fashioned newsroom still matter? Image via Wikipedia This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam MateiĪgenda setting theory was proposed in the early 1970s by Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw to correct the popular perception that media effects are immediate reflections of media consumption.