Page 255 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 245

Table 1: TV owners’ reasons (per cent) for watching party election broadcasts:

following table, which comes from Blumler and McQuail’s (1968) study of the
1964 British General Election.
In addition, a number of recent studies of mass communication content have
produced evidence of ‘patterning and consistency in the media version of the
world’ (McQuail, 1977, p. 81). The argument here is that the mass media, on the
whole, present a consonant view of certain portions of social reality (e.g. in
reporting of race relations, industrial relations, deviance, etc.), thus rendering one
view dominant, and encouraging audience members to accept it as if ‘obvious’
or ‘natural’.
The crucial conceptual distinction that has arisen from these reflections is
between attitudes and cognitions. As Becker, McCombs and McLeod (1975)
have defined these terms: ‘Attitudes are summary evaluations of objects by
individuals’; ‘cognitions are stored information about these objects held by
individuals’. They recognize that evaluations may be based on cognitions and
that their interrelations may be complex, but they suppose that cognitions can be
measured independently of attitudes and can be assessed ‘against some external
objective criterion of communicated information’. Hence, the shift in research
focus towards a greater stress on how the mass media project definitions of the
situations that political actors must cope with, than on attitudes toward those
actors themselves.
Probably the most representative example of this approach can be found in
attempts to study the so-called ‘agenda-setting function’ of the mass media.
These aim to explore what it means to have a media system that determines
which issues, among a whole series of possibilities, are presented to the public for
attention. The central concern of agenda-setting research is to test the hypothesis
of a ‘strong positive relationship between the emphases of mass media coverage
and the salience of these topics in the minds of individuals in the audience’
(Becker, McLeod and McCombs, 1975, p. 38). What is more, the relationships
involved are assumed to be causal. As Shaw and McCombs (1977) have put it in
a book entirely devoted to this type of research: ‘increased salience of a topic or
issue in the mass media influences…the salience of that topic or issue among the
public’ (p. 12). As such formulations imply, the bulk of agenda-setting studies
have focused on ‘issues’—their prominence and frequency of display in media
portrayals in comparison with their place in audience members’ orders of