Agenda-setting is “the ability to influence the salience of topics on the public agenda” (McCombs and Reynolds 1). Rather than telling the public what to think, mass media curates which issues to think about. As Walter Lippmann would have it, the media furnishes our mental representation of the world. McCombs offers a matrix for the various approaches to agenda-setting studies with one dimension spanning from individual to population level effects, and the other from particular news items to the whole set that comprise the agenda. Breaking the approaches down even further, the units of analysis are the object, which is the public issue at hand, and its attributes, those the cognitive and affective features that characterizes the issue. These attributes can also be conceptualized as the substance and image of an issue, either of which may be the aspect given salience over the other. Although, the trend in contemporary media is to highlight the affective, imagistic aspect, usually at the expense of the substance. Furthermore, issues can be framed by the media and believed by individual to be more or less tangible or obtrusive to their own lives. The consequences of agenda-setting could be opinion and attitude formation. These are further complicated by the influence of priming, in which individuals use easily accessible and salient cognitive information when making judgements. At one level, the banal repetition of issues and the narrative built around them prime evaluations of the issue. At another level, in a more immediate sense, affective tone, images, context, relationship dynamics, and psychological state can prime particular judgments.
Bayton and Richardson (2016) argue that the widespread use of social media as an interactive platform has a distinct agenda-setting function from television. The authors investigate Twitter as one such digital communication technology whereby political information is disseminated and discussed. They argue that Twitter is a broadcast medium, but unlike television the posts are typically view by one’s limited “following,” and sometimes through hashtag queries and @mentions. In one sense, Twitter bares an illusion of interaction, since ultimately many of the @mentions toward high-profile figures generally get ignored. Yet, the authors argue that between hashtags and retweeting, there are significant levels of interaction that take place on the platform (Bayton and Richardson 1923). Furthermore, there is an interaction between different streams of media. On Twitter, the clearest interactions with outside media platforms are URLs that link to external sites. The real-time ability for agendas to shape up on Twitter combined with the various levels of interactivity, lead the authors to conclude that TV is not always the medium which shapes the agenda.
In a line of research similar to agenda-setting theory, scholars have long argued the existence of the hostile media effect. Perloff (2015) defines this as “the tendency for individuals with a strong preexisting attitude on an issue to perceive that ostensibly neutral, even-handed media coverage of the topic is biased against their side and in favor of their antagonists’ point of view” (707). Five moderating factors shape the degree of hostile media effect in individuals: 1) reach (HME typically occurs for high reach messages); 2) involvement with the issue (higher effects for higher involvement); and 3) social identity (group membership implicated in issue raises effects) (Perloff 708-11). Furthermore, four mediating variable have been observed: 1) selective recall of information that contradicts their stance; 2) selective categorization of narrative content about the issue; 3) opposing standards of coverage; and 4) prior beliefs about media bias (Perloff 711).
Works Cited
Boynton, G. R., and Glenn W. Richardson Jr. "Agenda setting in the twenty-first century." New Media & Society 18.9 (2016): 1916-1934.
McCombs, Maxwell, and Amy Reynolds. "How the news shapes our civic agenda." Media effects. Routledge, 2009. 17-32.
Perloff, Richard M. "A three-decade retrospective on the hostile media effect." Mass Communication and Society 18.6 (2015): 701-729.
