I THE PUBLIC AGENDA
Each generation writes its own history of the world. This is not because of any pernicious desire to cast aside the worldview of their fathers and mothers or even to rewrite history more to their liking! Although these motives may not be totally absent, each generation creates a history differing in significant details from previous versions principally because they came of age under a new set of circumstances. Think of the differences between the college graduates of 1950 and those of 1975. One came of age during the economic prosperity of the quiescent Eisenhower years. The other came of age during the turbulent Vietnam era. Your generation will experience and create yet a different history. The experiences that bind the members of a generation, but separate them from others, do more than define immediate perspectives about public issues and politics. They also color historical perspectives about who Americans are and what kind of country we were and should be. The richness and variation of these experiences among individuals as well as between generations is captured in psychologist Kurt Lewin’s concept of the lifespace, one of the key ideas in his book, A Dynamic Theory of Personality.
An individual’s lifespace is the map or picture of the significant elements in his or her life. It is those persons, places, and events that are significant to the individual’s behavior. The famous New Yorker magazine cover illustrating the New Yorker’s view of the United States or the souvenir maps depicting the Texan’s view of the nation are caricatured versions of the lifespaces of New Yorkers and Texans. In terms of everyday reality, 45th Street does loom larger to a New York resident than does Nebraska or Kansas. To a Texan all the other states do seem like small clusters around a gigantic Lone Star state. Journalist Walter Lippmann expressed this same idea through his contrast of the environment and the pseudo-environment. Our behavior, he noted, is a response to the pseudo-environment, the world that is pictured in our mind.
There is a different set of pictures in the heads of each generation as a result of their direct personal experiences and their accumulated repertoire of historical and contemporary information. In more general terms, this has been called the construction of social reality. Individuals construct their own set of pictures from their direct personal experience, what they read in books, magazines and newspapers, and what they see on television and in movies. Through the transmission of traditional culture, the creation of contemporary culture, and the interpretation of public affairs, mass communication plays a major role in the construction of the pictures in our heads.
In recent decades scholars of mass communication have discovered that journalists’ day-by-day judgments on the selection and display of news stories influence the public’s perceptions of what the important issues of the day are. This influence of the news media on the perceived salience of key political issues is called the agenda-setting role of mass communication. The creation of these perceived saliences in the minds of the mass communication audience is a by-product of journalistic practice, shaped by the need to select and highlight a small number of topics each day. What journalists consider to be “newsworthy” provides efficient cues about the relative importance of the welter of issues in our time. Newspapers clearly communicate salience through page placement, headline size, and the amount of space alloted to a topic. Television news formats contain similar cues about the salience of issues.
The concept of agenda-setting is an assertion that the audience learns what issues are important from the priorities of the news media and incorporates a similar set of weights in their own personal agendas. Agenda-setting is a relational concept specifying a positive connection between the emphases of the news media and the perceived importance of these topics to the news audience. Establishing these saliences among the public, placing an issue or topic on the public agenda so that it becomes the focus of public attention, thought, and discussion is the first stage in the formation of public opinion. Consideration of public opinion usually focuses on the distribution of opinions pro and con after an issue is before the public. Agenda-setting directs our attention to an earlier stage in the public opinion process, the stage at which an issue emerges.
It is important to note that these cues created by the news media influence people’s pictures of the world, not their feelings about these issues. Heavy news coverage on the topic of abortion is likely to increase the salience of this issue on the public agenda. This news coverage will not necessarily determine whether individuals advocate freedom of choice or pro-life.
Early concern with the effects of mass communication concentrated on people’s attitudes and opinions. The benchmark Eire County and Elmira studies, which examined the impact of the mass media on voters in the 1940 and 1948 presidential elections, found little empirical evidence of any mass media influence. In fact, the contrary evidence was so pervasive that Joseph Klapper’s classic, The Effects of Mass Communication, proclaimed the law of minimal consequences. But agenda-setting shifts the focus of attention away from immediate effects on attitudes and opinions to longer term effects on cognitions. Agenda-setting is about the transfer of saliences, the movement of issues from the media agenda to the public agenda.
Contrasting earlier concerns about the effects of mass communication on attitudes and opinion with the effects pertinent to agenda-setting, Bernard Cohen remarked in The Press and Foreign Policy that
the press is significantly more than a purveyor of information and opinion. It 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, (p. 13)
This idea of agenda-setting has been articulated for well over a half century. Note that the opening chapter of Walter Lippmann’s classic, Public Opinion, is titled “The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads.” But it was only in 1968 that Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw first put this idea to empirical test. Most of the readings in this anthology represent the outpouring of research that has followed that first empirical foray 20 years ago.
In one of these readings, Ray Funkhouser analyses the key issues around which American public opinion coalesced during the turbulent 1960s. He examines the basic agenda-setting hypothesis across an entire decade, in contrast with the original McCombs and Shaw study that examined a brief moment among undecided voters during the 1968 presidential election. Together the pair of studies provide a microview and a macroview of the agenda-setting role of the news media.
Other selections in this introductory section on the public agenda provide context and perspective. Anthony Downs describes the stages in the natural history of each issue appearing on the public agenda. Together these four readings provide a broad introduction to the public agenda and its relationship to the daily coverage of public issues in the news media.
But a comprehensive portrait of public opinion and the agenda-setting role of the news media requires attention to a number of other questions. How does this process work? What factors inhibit or enhance this influence of the press on the public? Looking more broadly at the press and public opinion, what are the consequences of agenda-setting? Does extensive media coverage and a concerned public lead to action by government officials? Going the other way, so to speak, how is the media agenda created? Or, as it is sometimes put, who sets the media agenda? With only the capacity to cover a few issues at any moment, what influences determine the focus of news coverage? Answers to these questions—and many others that will occur to you—begin to construct a comprehensive portrait of the role played by the news media, public opinion and policymakers in the natural history of contemporary American public issues.