Agenda Setting Theory

COMM 4350

Michelle Maraffio

Agenda Setting theory was first introduced in 1972 by college professors, Maxwell

McCombs and Donald Shaw. When they surveyed voters from North Carolina in the 1968

Presidential election, they discovered that the issues the mass media reported as the most

important were the issues that the voters felt were the most paramount. Essentially, the theory

asserts that mass media sets the agenda by framing the issues to get their audience to think

about them.

There are two main assumptions in this theory. The first one is that mass media has the

power to curate or “frame” what the public sees. A good example of how the media might use

this power is to report on a scandalous story on the front page, instead of a more current event

that affects a large group of people. For example, we have seen the riots and vandalism stories

getting more airtime in the past few days, than the number of Covid 19 cases. Both are

important and happening simultaneously, but one “appears” to be taking precedence in the

media.

The second belief the theory makes is that the more spotlight a story receives, the more

important it is to the audience. The article states, "the press may not be successful much of the

time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to

think about." (McCombs, 1972, p. 177) One could potentially draw a correlation to the lack of

media attention that Covid 19 has received in recent days to the increase of positive cases.

The article describes the various approaches that examined mass media agenda setting,

with newspapers, television, and magazines as the primary sources of their information. They

explain that each system has different characteristics. They explain that newspapers came daily

and utilized a lot of space. Television was also daily, but it was limited on time. While News
magazines come weekly and the news may be old by the time it gets to the consumer. Each of

these variables affected the consumer in different ways.

The article also suggests that oftentimes news media held a point of view and even

biases that could be potentially influential. The article states, “They felt this was especially

relevant in the realm of politics. In short, the political world is reproduced imperfectly by

individual news media. Yet the evidence in this study that voters tend to share the media's

composite definition of what is important strongly suggests an agenda-setting function of the

mass media.”

While the public, the media and politics all have agenda setting intentions, this theory

helps us to understand how to interpret influence through comparison. The theory gets more

complicated when more variables, or modes of information are introduced. However, one could

argue that if you only watch or listen to NPR or Fox news in this current era, you may be

strongly influenced by your media source.