Agenda-Setting Theory: The Frontier Research Questions

Agenda-Setting Theory: The Frontier Research Ques­

tions  
Maxwell McCombs and Sebastián Valenzuela
The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication
Edited by Kate Kenski and Kathleen Hall Jamieson

Print Publication Date: Aug 2017

Subject: Political Science, Political Methodology, Political Institutions
Online Publication Date: Sep 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199793471.013.48

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter discusses contemporary directions of agenda-setting research. It reviews the

basic concept of agenda setting, the transfer of salience from the media agenda to the
public agenda as a key step in the formation of public opinion, the concept of need for ori­
entation as a determinant of issue salience, the ways people learn the media agenda, at­
tribute agenda setting, and the consequences of agenda setting that result from priming
and attribute priming. Across the theoretical areas found in the agenda-setting tradition,
future studies can contribute to the role of news in media effects by showing how agenda
setting evolves in the new and expanding media landscape as well as continuing to refine
agenda setting’s core concepts.

Keywords: public agenda, media agenda, issue salience, attribute agenda setting, need for orientation, attribute
priming, public opinion, media effects, news

FROM the welter of daily events the news media shine a tightly focused spotlight on a se­
lect few, a role that is central to the formation of public opinion. In Public Opinion, Walter
Lippmann (1922) described this gatekeeping role as the primary bridge between “the
world outside and the pictures in our head.” Four decades later in Chapel Hill, North Car­
olina, during the 1968 US presidential election, McCombs and Shaw (1972) initiated a de­
tailed explication of this idea grounded in a metaphor of public and media agendas. The
media agenda is the pattern of news coverage over a period of days, weeks, months, and
sometimes even years for a set of issues or other topics. In other words, the media agen­
da is a systematic compilation of the issues or topics presented to the public that identi­
fies the degree of emphasis on these topics. Often this is presented in terms of their rank-
order on the media agenda. The public agenda is the priority of these topics among the
public, again frequently presented in terms of their rank-order. One of the most widely
used measures of the public agenda is the venerable Gallup Poll question, “What do you
think is the most important issue facing our country today?”

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Agenda-Setting Theory: The Frontier Research Questions

The seminal Chapel Hill study found a high correlation between the rank-order of the is­
sues in the news coverage of the 1968 presidential campaign and the rank-order of these
same issues among the public. That initial finding has stimulated hundreds of subsequent
studies using panel studies and experiments in addition to cross-sectional designs to doc­
ument the causal assertion of agenda setting that the media agenda influences the public
agenda. This research has examined a wide variety of issues and other topics in both elec­
tion and nonelection settings in every part of the world. Wanta and Ghanem’s (2006)
meta-analysis of this found a mean correlation of +.53 between the media and public
agendas, with a very small variance.

Beyond these comparisons of media attention and public attention to the major topics of
the day, agenda-setting theory has expanded to encompass five distinct areas of (p. 634)
research, ranging from the origins of the media agenda to the consequences of agenda-
setting effects on attitudes and opinions and on behavior (McCombs, 2014). This continu­
ing evolution illustrates the productivity of agenda setting. In their overview of political
communication as it entered the twenty-first century, Doris Graber and James Smith
(2005, 489) stated, “Agenda setting remains the predominant theoretical approach to ana­
lyzing the impact of media messages on audiences.”

Expanding on the basic agenda-setting effects found in Chapel Hill, the 1972 presidential
election study in Charlotte, North Carolina (Shaw and McCombs, 1977) introduced a sec­
ond theoretical area, the psychology of agenda setting, grounded in the concept of need
for orientation (Weaver, 1977). Individual differences in the level of need for orientation
explain both differences in attention to the media agenda and differences in the degree to
which individuals reflect the media agenda. For recent discussions, see Chernov, Valen­
zuela, and McCombs (2011) and Matthes (2006).

The Charlotte study also introduced another theoretical area, the concept of a second lev­
el of effects, attribute agenda setting. In theoretical terms, the Chapel Hill study exam­
ined basic agenda-setting effects, the transfer of object salience from the media to the
public. Object is used here with the same meaning used in social psychology for the term
attitude object. For each object on the media agenda or the public agenda, an agenda of
attributes also can be identified. This agenda is the hierarchy of attributes describing the
object. Just as the rank-order of objects on the media and public agendas can be com­
pared to measure basic agenda-setting effects, the rank-order of attributes on the media
and public agendas can be compared to measure attribute agenda setting (Weaver et al.,
1981; McCombs et al., 2000).

Attributes of an object have both a substantive and an affective dimension. Substantive

attributes are the cognitive elements of messages that describe the denotative character­
istics of an object. Examples of the substantive attributes of a political candidate are qual­
ifications and issue positions. For issues, substantive attributes include subareas—for ex­
ample, unemployment and budget deficits as attributes of the economic problem. The af­
fective dimension is the positive, neutral, or negative tone in the descriptions of an
object’s substantive attributes.

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Agenda-Setting Theory: The Frontier Research Questions

In recent years a fourth theoretical area has emerged, investigations into the conse­
quences of both first- and second-level agenda-setting effects for attitudes and opinions
and behavior. This chapter focuses on the major contemporary research questions in all
four of these areas. A fifth area of agenda-setting theory, which is discussed by David
Weaver in this volume, concerns the origins of the media agenda. This area links agenda
setting to another field of mass communication research, the sociology of news.

This continuing evolution of agenda setting across these five theoretical areas is charac­
terized by two trends:

• A centrifugal trend of research in the expanding media landscape and in domains be­
yond the original focus on public affairs.
• A centripetal trend of research further explicating agenda setting’s core concepts.

(p. 635) Basic Agenda Setting

The expanding media landscape has prompted considerable research on online newspa­
pers, interactive Internet sites, and the ever-growing panoply of social media. In many in­
stances, the key questions of this new research replicate those of earlier decades when
daily newspapers and television were the dominant news channels: “Do these media influ­
ence the public agenda?” and “Which of these channels is the more powerful agenda set­
ter?” Although studies pursuing these questions have accumulated for more than a
decade, a more comprehensive answer about basic agenda-setting effects in the new me­
dia landscape arguably can be provided by asking the first question in broader terms and
downplaying the latter question about the relative strength of various channels. Decades
of previous research on the comparative influence of newspapers and television provide
useful guidance here. Despite dozens of studies, the relative impact of newspapers and
television remains “on the one hand, on the other.” About half of the time, there is no dif­
ference. For the remainder, the split is roughly two-thirds showing stronger newspaper
effects and one-third demonstrating stronger TV effects.

Rather than attempting to tease out the relative impact of discrete media channels, a
gestalt approach in recent empirical work demonstrates that agenda-setting effects
among members of the public frequently are the cumulative result of the numerous chan­
nels that define most people’s news environment. Stromback and Kiousis’s (2010) study
of the 2006 Swedish national election illustrates this perspective. Using a three-wave
panel survey, they explicitly compared the impact of overall political news consumption
versus media-specific news consumption on issue salience across nine different media
channels (newspapers vs. television vs. radio) and media types (commercial media vs.
public service media and elite newspapers vs. tabloid newspapers). Their results show
that attention to political news exerts a strong influence on issue salience, and attention
to political news matters more than attention to different newspapers or to specific news
shows on television and radio.

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Agenda-Setting Theory: The Frontier Research Questions

These findings fit a wide range of previous research. There is compelling evidence dating
from Chapel Hill about the high degree of convergence between the agendas of different
news media. Across the world, the norms of journalism exert a powerful pressure toward
similarity in telling the news of the day (King, 1997; McCombs, Lopez-Escobar, and Lla­
mas, 2000; Jonsson and Stromback, 2007).

Boczkowski (2010) not only found a high level of homogeneity in the news agendas of the
major print and online newspapers in Buenos Aires, but also noted the increasing similar­
ity of these news agendas from 1995 to 2005. He attributes this to the facilitation of jour­
nalists’ long-standing habit of monitoring the competition by the plethora of news now
available on the Internet and television.

An overarching theme in these findings is that we swim in a vast sea of news and informa­
tion, a gestalt of mass media channels in which the whole is much greater than the sum
of its parts. Evidence regarding the interrelated nature of our mass (p. 636) communica­
tion experience dates from the earliest days of our field. In their benchmark 1940 Erie
County study, Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet (1944) found substantial overlap in
people’s use of various mass media. Decades later, during the 1996 Spanish national elec­
tion, McCombs, Lopez-Escobar, and Llamas (2000) found a high degree of similarity be­
tween the strength of people’s agreement with their primary news source’s agenda and
their agreement with the agenda of that source’s principal competitor. For example,
among voters who identified Diario de Navarra as their primary news source, the agenda-
setting correlation was +.62. Their level of agreement with the competing local newspa­
per was +.57. Across eighteen comparisons, the median difference in the correlations is .
09.

Moving to the present, media use patterns among different generations do diverge some­
what because of the Internet. As a consequence, some have predicted the end of the
agenda-setting role of the media (Chaffee and Metzger, 2001). However, drawing upon
statewide surveys in North Carolina and Louisiana, Coleman and McCombs (2007)
compared agenda-setting effects among the generations and found little difference. Par­
ticularly compelling is the comparison in Louisiana of the issue agendas of high and low
Internet users to the issue agenda of the state’s major newspapers. There is a difference,
but hardly a substantial one. For low Internet users the correlation with newspaper agen­
das is +.90. For high Internet users, the correlation is +.70.

There are powerful and influential newspapers, broadcast stations, and websites. Howev­
er, the gestalt of media voices is integral to our social fabric. The collective influence of
the mass media also has the potential for expanding Shaw and Martin’s (1992) seminal
exploration of the role that news exposure has in citizens’ consensus regarding the most
important issues of the day. Their statewide study in North Carolina documented that
both increased use of newspapers and increased use of TV news resulted in greater
agreement in the issue agendas of various demographic subgroups. Most commonly, de­
mographics are used to identify differences among subgroups. However, Shaw and Mar­
tin demonstrated that the issue agendas of various demographic subgroups—for example,

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Agenda-Setting Theory: The Frontier Research Questions

younger persons vs. older persons—became more similar with increasing use of newspa­
pers and television. This consensus-building role of the mass media regarding the most
important issues of the day has been replicated in settings as culturally and politically di­
verse as Spain and Taiwan (Lopez-Escobar, Llamas, and McCombs, 1998; Chiang, 1995).

Higgins (2009) further explicated this role of the news media in terms of second-level
agenda setting. Focusing on the European Union’s reaction to the attacks of September
11, 2001, in the United States, she examined how exposure to both national and transna­
tional media in these fifteen countries increased the cohesion among various demograph­
ic subgroups’ attribute agendas for the issue of terrorism and their attribute agendas for
the Muslim community in Europe. Use of national television was very strongly related to
increased consensus regarding the attributes of terrorism and Muslims. Use of national
newspapers also was linked with increased consensus for both of these agendas, but not
as strongly as use of TV. The strength of transnational television was very similar to the
national press. Other media showed far less impact. (p. 637) Although borders still matter,
especially for newspapers, the increasing availability of electronic transnational media
may translate into increased influence as well. And what will be the collective impact of
this expanding gestalt of news media?

Psychological Determinants of Issue Salience

Within the centripetal trend in agenda-setting research, a central question refers to the
processes by which the media influence the public. Need for orientation remains the most
studied individual-level factor for attributing differences in the strength of agenda-setting
effects, and its central concept of relevance is at the forefront of research on the psychol­
ogy of agenda setting. Evatt and Ghanem (2001) identified two substantive aspects of this
concept, social relevance and personal relevance, and an affective aspect, emotional rele­
vance. People can recognize that an issue may be important for society even if it is not
important for them. Emotions, in turn, can increase the relevance of an issue even if it is
not personally or socially relevant. These findings are consistent with statewide Texas
polls in 1992 and 1996 exploring why respondents named a particular issue when an­
swering the MIP question (McCombs, 1999). In this case, a stable set of five motivations
emerged: self-interest and avocation—similar to Evatt and Ghanem’s personal salience;
civic duty and peer influence—resembling the social aspect of relevance; and emotional
arousal—the same affective dimension identified by Evatt and Ghanem.

While the distinction between personal and national importance makes intuitive sense
and is consistent with research on the dimensions of attitude strength (Miller and Peter­
son, 2004), emotional salience deserves further consideration. There is a long tradition in
Western thought that downplays affect and emotion while highlighting the benefits of rea­
son and cognition. However, neuroscientists have long contended that affective and cog­
nitive processes are closely intertwined (Gray, 1990). In agenda setting, Miller’s (2007)
experiments found that some emotional responses to the news mediated agenda-setting
effects, specifically when news stories about the issue of crime resulted in participants

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feeling sad or afraid. Other emotional responses, such as anger, pride, hope, and happi­
ness, did not result in a greater salience of crime. Her finding that fear is a key mediator
of agenda-setting effects is in line with affective intelligence theory (Marcus, Neuman,
and MacKuen, 2000), which posits that anxiety activates greater attention to incoming in­
formation. However, the role of emotions is not circumscribed to triggering relevance.
Coleman and Wu (2010) identified a significant, positive relationship between the tele­
vised images of the 2004 US presidential candidates and the public’s negative emotional
responses to George W. Bush and John Kerry. Emotions can be both a regulator and an
outcome of agenda setting. This complex set of findings is suggestive of the fruitful venue
for research that emotions bring to agenda-setting research.

Another source of the public’s salience judgments is values, people’s core beliefs
(p. 638)

about what are desirable and undesirable end-states of human life (Schwartz, 1992). Us­
ing a content analysis of newspapers, a panel survey, and a laboratory experiment, Valen­
zuela (2011) found that agenda-setting effects were stronger when the topics in the news
agenda matched individuals’ values. Based on Inglehart’s (1977) theory of values, he
found that individuals with materialist values exhibited larger agenda-setting effects for
materialist issues such as the economy and crime than for postmaterialist issues such as
the environment and political reform, whereas postmaterialist individuals exhibited larg­
er agenda-setting effects for postmaterialist issues than for materialist issues. These re­
sults replicated across both aggregate- and individual-level analysis, providing strong
support for the values-issues consistency hypothesis.

These different sources of relevance make it readily apparent that agenda-setting effects
are not adequately explained by accessibility—the notion that issues become salient pure­
ly as a consequence of the frequency and recentness with which they are portrayed in the
news—as argued by some scholars (Scheufele and Tewksbury, 2007). If this were the
case, the effects of need for orientation, emotions, and values would be insignificant. Fur­
thermore, empirical studies specifically addressing the role of accessibility in media ef­
fects, including agenda setting, priming, and framing, consistently have shown that the
public reflects much more than just the most frequent or recent issues in the media agen­
da (Miller and Krosnick, 2000; Nelson, Clawson, and Oxley, 1997). Mutz (1998) also noted
that responses to the MIP question tap more than just cognitive availability of issues; they
reveal an affective judgment as well. Arguing that accessibility is the basis of agenda set­
ting amounts to arguing that all easily accessible media information is considered impor­
tant, something that is not supported by the available evidence.

Learning the Media Agenda

A necessary condition for news’ agenda-setting effects is exposure, either directly
through media use or indirectly through communication about topics in the news within
individuals’ social networks. In either case, the traditional assumption is that people are
actively exposed to public affairs. However, incidental exposure is an alternative route to
acquiring the media agenda: learning passively without any significant involvement and

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intent to learn. This is a long-standing notion within educational psychology (e.g.,

McLaughlin, 1965), but only recently explored in political communication (Baum, 2002;
Prior, 2007).

According to Frensch (1998), one of the routes for incidental learning is ubiquity. Individ­
uals learn something about a particular object, person, or situation because it is om­
nipresent. As previously noted, the high degree of redundancy across media agendas in­
creases the likelihood that the public will learn the media agenda even at low levels of
news exposure. An empirical demonstration of incidental learning within the agenda-set­
ting tradition is presented by Lee (2009), who found that participants instructed to
(p. 639) pay only minimal attention to news stories (ten seconds or less) about the environ­

ment had significantly higher scores on the perceived importance of that issue than other
participants who paid no attention whatsoever to these stories.

Another indirect way to learn the media agenda is provided by interpersonal and comput­
er-mediated communication about news. Initial studies in the 1970s generally found that
interpersonal discussion mediated the media’s influence on issue salience (McLeod, Beck­
er, and Byrnes, 1974; Shaw, 1976). Subsequent research, however, found that personal
communications offset the media agenda setting (Atwater, Salwen, and Anderson, 1985;
Lasorsa and Wanta, 1990). Most likely, the effects of citizen-to-citizen communication on
agenda setting are contingent upon the content of the communication. When citizens’ dis­
cussions deal with issues covered by the media, they should enhance the media’s agenda-
setting influence. When they deal with issues that receive little coverage, they should
dampen the media’s agenda-setting influence by providing alternative issue considera­
tions (Wanta and Wu, 1992).

Taking a more nuanced approach, recent studies have been successful at integrating
agenda-setting processes with communication processes within individuals’ social net­
works (Weimann and Brosius, 1994; Yang and Stone, 2003). From this perspective, the is­
sue agenda diffuses first from the news media to media users, and then from these to
non-media users via personal communication, a process akin to the classic two-step flow
of communication (Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955). For instance, in a field experiment in Ger­
many, Vu and Gehrau (2010) published an article about a new issue in a community maga­
zine and two days later observed the agenda-setting processes and interpersonal commu­
nication triggered by it. They found a cascading effect: the article sparked conversations
about the issue, and these conversations in turn increased the salience of the issue, even
among those who had not read the article. Most notably, talking about the issue fully me­
diated the effects of reading the article on judgments of issue salience.

Although the transfer of salience from the media agenda to the public agenda can occur
through a variety of means in addition to direct, motivated exposure to media messages,
some observers—as noted earlier—have posited that agenda setting and other media ef­
fects are diluted in today’s expanded media environment (e.g., Williams and Delli Carpini,
2004). On the one hand, some predict that with interactivity and the Web 2.0, “the key
problem for agenda-setting theory will change from what issues the media tell people to

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think about to what issues people tell the media they want to think about” (Chaffee and
Metzger, 2001, 375). On the other hand, there is the possibility that with higher media
choice, selective exposure will become more prevalent: “People uninterested in politics
can avoid news programming altogether by tuning into ESPN or the Food Network. And
for political junkies, the sheer multiplicity of news sources demands they exercise discre­
tionary or selective exposure to political information” (Bennett and Iyengar, 2008, 716).
However, the evidence to date does not support these arguments. At least at the first lev­
el of agenda setting, blogs and other social media applications still echo the agenda of the
traditional media (Asur et al., 2011; Meraz, 2009; Wallsten, 2007). Although more parti­
san television networks (think FOX News and MSNBC) cater to audiences that share their
ideological stance, their agenda of issues is not that different (p. 640) from that of more
centrists networks (Stroud, 2006). Certainly these are not definitive answers, and re­
searchers will need to constantly reassess the merits of media influence in a changing
media landscape.

Attribute Agenda Setting

The first and second levels of agenda setting—object salience and attribute salience—are
linked by the concept of compelling arguments that identifies situations in which one or
two specific characteristics of an object on the media agenda resonate so strongly with
the public that these attributes alone, rather than the full array of attributes on the media
agenda, increase the salience of the object. Ghanem (1996) found that not only did crime
coverage in the news generate high levels of public concern about crime as the most im­
portant problem facing the country, but an attribute of these crime stories—their psycho­
logical distance, operationally defined by drive-by shootings and local crime—influenced
the salience of crime on the public agenda just as strongly as the overall level of crime
coverage. In other words, the attribute of psychological distance was a compelling argu­
ment for the salience of crime as a major public issue.

Other studies of compelling arguments have documented the impact of negative tone in
the news on the salience of the economy in Israel (Sheafer, 2007); the impact of positive
and negative attributes of issues in 2004 Kerry political ads (but not Bush ads) on the
salience of these issues on the public agenda (Golan et al., 2007); and across five US
presidential elections, the impact of a specific candidate attribute in the news, moral
quality, on the public salience of the candidates (Kiousis, 2005).

Although these studies illustrate that specific attributes on the media agenda can influ­
ence object salience on the public agenda, we do not have any systematic theoretical
knowledge of which attributes function as compelling arguments. This focus on specific
elements of media messages suggests renewed theoretical attention to message elements
in the spirit of Hovland, Janis, and Kelly (1953) and renewed efforts to build what Macco­
by (1963) termed a scientific rhetoric.

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The larger point illustrated by the concept of compelling arguments is the ability of the
news media to transfer the relationships presented within the media agenda to the public
agenda. The concept of compelling arguments holds that news media can bundle an ob­
ject with an attribute and make them salient in the public’s mind simultaneously. Howev­
er, in most research to date, the elements investigated are disaggregated objects or at­
tributes ordered according to their frequency of occurrence. In terms of Lippmann’s “pic­
tures in our heads,” a further question is: Are the news media able to transfer the
salience of an integrated picture?

Some psychologists and philosophers hold that people’s mental representations operate
pictorially, diagrammatically or cartographically (Armstrong, 1973; Barsalou, 1998; Brad­
don-Mitchell and Jackson, 2007; Cummins, 1996). In other words, audiences map out ob­
jects and attributes in their heads as network-like pictures according to their (p. 641) in­
terrelationships. This expands the traditional view that the public’s perception of media
agendas works logically according to their importance. From this “pictorialist” perspec­
tive, the news media transfer the salience of relationships between a set of attributes to
the public.

In a pilot study to test this hypothesis, Guo and McCombs (2011) conducted network
analyses on data sets initially collected by Kim and McCombs (2007). Studying candidates
for Texas governor and US senator, Kim and McCombs found strong attribute-agenda-set­
ting effects in analyses of each candidate separately, for both positive and negative attrib­
utes separately and combined, and for all four candidates, both positive and negative at­
tributes separately and combined.

Reanalyzing these data, Guo and McCombs (2011) found significant network-agenda-set­
ting effects consistent with the attribute-agenda-setting ones in the original study. For ex­
ample, the overall correlation between the media and public attribute agendas in Kim and
McCombs (+.65) corresponds with the correlation (+.67) between the media and public
network agendas in Guo and McCombs. However, the details of the interrelationships in
the network analysis provide a much richer picture of attribute agenda setting and sug­
gest a wide range of new research regarding the impact of media agendas on the pictures
in our heads.

Research on the concept of compelling arguments and on integrated attribute agendas

reflects the trend of further explicating the core concepts of agenda-setting theory. This
avenue is further illustrated by Son and Weaver’s (2006) expansion of the media agenda,
which takes into account the context in which the news media present the candidates and
their affective attributes to the public. Focusing on the 2000 US presidential election,
these authors investigated which news sources of candidate salience and which news
sources of candidate affective attribute salience predicted changes in public opinion
about each of the candidates, either immediately or cumulatively. The effects of both the
first and second levels of agenda setting on the standings of the candidates in national
public opinion polls were primarily cumulative rather than immediate, and different news
sources had very different effects on them. For candidate salience, the reporters’ analysis

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and polls had strong cumulative effects on the poll standings. For candidate attribute
salience, statements by both the candidate himself and by members of the competing par­
ty had strong cumulative effects on the poll standings. Other news sources had little or no
impact.

Son and Weaver’s expanded perspective on attribute agenda setting suggests integrating
object and issue salience with journalistic elements, such as sources, that characterize
news stories. Their perspective also suggests the potential value of applying network
analysis to these richer views of the media agenda.

Consequences of Agenda Setting

The transfer of salience of objects and their attributes from the media agenda to the pub­
lic agenda is consequential for individuals’ attitudes, including both their direction and
(p. 642) strength, and for behavior. The most widely investigated attitudinal effect of agen­

da setting is media priming, the influence of the news media on the criteria used by citi­
zens to evaluate political figures, governments, and political parties (Iyengar and Kinder,
1987). Asked their opinions about political topics such as performance of the president,
most citizens do not engage in comprehensive analysis of their total store of information.
Rather, individuals use information emphasized by the news media. The more the media
cover a particular issue—prime that issue—the more people will rely on what they know
about it to make political judgments. Ultimately, media priming may lead people to vote
differently, providing a strong connection between agenda setting and behavioral effects.

Since Dietram Scheufele and Shanto Iyengar’s chapter discusses media priming, here we
concentrate on two other areas. First, researchers have identified attribute priming ef­
fects where the increased salience among the public of specific attributes emphasized in
news coverage influences the weights people assign to those attributes in their evalua­
tions of attitude objects. This process is usually a consequence of the valence of particu­
larly salient attributes—that is, positive or negative attributes as perceived by the public.
Sheafer (2007) referred to this influence as affective attribute priming and found signifi­
cant evidence for this effect across five Israeli elections. Specifically, the more negative
the news coverage of the Israeli economy, the lower were the evaluations of the general
performance of the incumbent political party. Not only did news prime the economy as a
standard for judging incumbent party performance, but the affective tone of that cover­
age also influenced the direction of the evaluations.

A second aspect of the priming literature that is important for agenda setting asks which
members of the public are more susceptible to media influence. At question is how com­
petent citizens are at making political decisions. If priming effects occur because people
are politically naïve, then the news media have a worrying power over citizens, as it
would indicate that individuals’ preferences are fully malleable by the media and political
elites. If, on the other hand, priming occurs among more politically sophisticated citizens,
then media influence could be the result of a rather deliberative process by which people
actively filter news content. To date, the research results have been inconsistent. Some
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studies have found that higher knowledge facilitates priming, but higher interest and
higher exposure reduce it (Krosnick and Brannon, 1993), while other studies have found
that neither attentiveness nor general political knowledge is related to priming (Vander­
brug, Semetko, and Valkenburg, 2007). To reconcile these conflicting results, Valenzuela
(2009) proposed that media priming varies across levels of political involvement. Priming
should be strongest for citizens with moderate levels of involvement, who are interested
enough in public affairs to follow the news, but lack the ideological strength to reject me­
dia cues. Using a content analysis of press coverage and a panel survey from the 2006
Canadian election, he found that, as predicted, priming was highest for citizens with
medium levels of knowledge and discussion frequency and lowest for citizens at either ex­
treme of these involvement measures. Compared to pessimistic and optimistic accounts of
(p. 643) citizen competence, these findings present a more nuanced perspective on indi­

viduals’ ability to filter and process news.

In addition to agenda-setting effects on the direction of opinions, there is mounting evi­

dence about the role of the media agenda in shaping the strength of people’s attitudes to­
ward political figures and other objects in the news. According to McGuire’s (1989)
hierarchy of effects model, cognitive effects—the public’s awareness of objects on the
agenda—precede having opinions about those objects. Nevertheless, Kiousis and Mc­
Combs (2004) identified a different causal chain of effects. Using survey data from the
1996 US presidential election, they found that media salience of a political figure first in­
fluenced having an opinion about that person, which subsequently affected the salience of
that person in people’s minds. This study suggests that agenda setting relates not only to
opinion formation, but also to opinion strength.

Conclusion
When connecting to the world outside our family, neighborhood, and workplace, we deal
with a secondhand reality created by journalists and media organizations. However, due
to time and space constraints, the mass media focus their attention on a few topics that
are deemed newsworthy. Over time, those aspects of public affairs that are prominent in
the media usually become prominent in public opinion. This ability to influence which is­
sues, persons, and topics are perceived as the most important of the day was the first
conceptualization of the agenda-setting role of the media, one that dates back to the 1968
Chapel Hill study. Over the last four decades, agenda setting has expanded into five dif­
ferent facets, from the origins of the media agenda to the consequences of agenda setting
on attitudes and behavior.

In our review we have identified several engaging research questions across various as­
pects of agenda-setting theory, including the expanding media landscape, the psychologi­
cal origins of issue relevance, and the transfer of a network of attributes of media objects
from the media to the public. Looking to the future, creative scholars will refine the core
ideas of agenda setting, expand the theory in new arenas, and produce new knowledge
regarding the media’s role in society.

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Agenda-Setting Theory: The Frontier Research Questions

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Maxwell McCombs

Maxwell McCombs (Ph.D., Stanford University) is Professor Emeritus in the School of

Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. His research continues to explicate
the theoretical structure of agenda setting and its social impact in the expanded pub­
lic affairs settings of the new media landscape. His continuing work on agenda set­
ting recently was awarded the 2011 Helen Dinerman Award jointly with Donald Shaw
by the World Association for Public Opinion Research.

Sebastián Valenzuela

Sebastián Valenzuela (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is Assistant Professor of

Communications at Catholic University of Chile. He conducts research on political
communication and digital media, and his work has been published or is forthcoming
in Communication Research, Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer-Mediat­
ed Communication and International Journal of Public Opinion Research. Previously,
he was a Fulbright scholar and a journalist for Chile’s main daily, El Mercurio.

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