Key Concepts in Journalism Studies

Agenda Setting

Contributors: By: Bob Franklin, Martin Hamer, Mark Hanna, Marie Kinsey & John E.
Richardson
Book Title: Key Concepts in Journalism Studies
Chapter Title: "Agenda Setting"
Pub. Date: 2005
Access Date: March 12, 2017
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: London
Print ISBN: 9780761944829
Online ISBN: 9781446215821
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781446215821.n9
Print page: 13
2005 SAGE Publications Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
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Bob Franklin, Martin Hamer, Mark Hanna, Marie Kinsey and John E. Richardson 2005

Agenda Setting
The basic premise of agenda-setting theory is that the way in which news media report
particular issues influences and helps to shape public awareness and debate (McCombs and
Shaw, 1972). In much the same way that a committee agenda ranks items to reflect their
significance, with the least consequential matters receiving only scant attention or not being
discussed at all, media agendas reflect a process of selection (prioritizing) with certain issues
enjoying sustained and prominent coverage in news reports while others are relatively
marginalized or ignored (Weaver et al., 1981 McCombs et al., 1997). In this sense, agenda-
setting theory has clear affinities with news framing and media effects. But in agenda
setting, the influence claimed for the media is less certain than in some theorizing of media
effects and eschews implications of propaganda. In a classic formulation of agenda setting,
the suggestion is that while the media do not tell us what to think, they may tell us what to
think about. Agenda setting, however, does not posit a simple uni-directional model in which
news media set the priorities for public debate, but suggests that typically a number of
contesting agendas vie for prominence. Extensive research on agenda setting during election
periods, for example, has illustrated the distinctive agendas which politicians and journalists
bring to the electoral process, characterized as a battle between the earnest and the
determined (Blumler et al., 1989). Similarly, a study of local press coverage of the 2001
general election in West Yorkshire illustrated the extent to which journalists and political
parties (both committed to an electoral agenda which emphasized local issues, such as local
schools, local services and local candidates) were starkly at odds with newspaper readers
whose election agendas were overwhelmingly informed by national concerns such as Europe
and taxation (Franklin and Richardson, 2002).

Further Reading
Blumler, J. G., Gurevitch, M. and Nossiter, T. (1989) Earnest Versus the Determined, in
Crewe, I. and Harrop, M. (eds) Political Communications: The General Election Campaign of
1987. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 15775.
Franklin, B. and Richardson, J. (2002) A Journalist's Duty? Continuity and Change in Local
Newspapers Coverage of Recent UK General Elections, Journalism Studies, (2002) 3(1): 35
52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14616700120107329
McCombs, M. and Shaw, D. (1972) The Agenda-setting Function of the Mass Media, Public
Opinion Quarterly, 36: 17687. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/267990

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