Page 256 - Culture Society and the Media

246 POLITICAL EFFECTS
priority. Certain other concerns have also occasionally featured in such research,
however, including studies of (a) popular awareness of proposed solutions to the
problems arising in key issue domains; (b) how issues get into media agendas
(say, from voters’ prior concerns, or through politicians’ speeches and
pronouncements, or via professional journalists’ own outlook on society); and
(c) the impact of agenda setting on voting behaviour. This last focus reintroduces
the complexity of the relationship between attitudes and cognitions. If, for
example, immigrants are portrayed in the media as sources of social conflict and
problems for society, white audience attitudes toward them may eventually
become less favourable (Hartmann and Husband, 1974). Or take the case of
American television coverage of the Vietnam war: if in the late 1960s Americans
perceived US armed forces as losing ground in the war, even erstwhile hawks
might have eventually lost their appetite for continuing involvement (Braestrup,
1977). Thus, media portrayals of social reality may ultimately induce attitude
changes towards the various issues portrayed.

SOME EXAMPLES OF RECENT WORK ON POLITICAL
COMMUNICATION EFFECTS

The perspectives described above have so far been presented in terms of
possibilities of media impact. But what evidence have researchers managed to
produce of media effects on the political outlook of audience members? Some
examples of recent studies and findings are outlined below.

Agenda setting during the American Presidential election of
1972

According to agenda-setting theory, an audience member exposed to a given
medium’s agenda will adjust his or her perceptions of the importance of political
issues in a direction corresponding to the amount of attention paid to those issues
in that medium. A problem that may interfere with attempts to test this
hypothesis arises when there are few or no differences between different media
in the issues emphasized by them. In such a case there will be no ‘variance’ to
measure.
During the American Presidential election of 1972, however, McLeod, Becker
and Byrnes (1974) managed to conduct an agenda-setting study in a city
(Madison, Wisconsin) which was served by two rather different newspapers—
one quite conservative in outlook, the other more liberal. A content analysis of
the papers confirmed that their election agendas were indeed different: the more
conservative paper devoted more space to America’s world leadership and to the
theme of combating crime, while the liberal paper paid more attention to the
Vietnam war and the theme of ‘honesty in government’.
The investigators’ task was to devise a procedure which would test whether
the issue priorities of readers of the two papers diverged along lines similar to