Page 257 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 247
those of the papers they read. Thus, they had to relate exposure to the different
newspapers to a measure of agreement with the issue agenda set by the papers.
They interviewed two samples, one of first-time young voters and another of
older voters. For the members of both samples, in addition to finding out what
papers people read and their rank ordering of the importance of six campaign
issues, they ascertained the degree of partisanship, interest in the campaign and
degree of reliance on the press as an election-information source.
The findings were mixed. Generally, the data supported the agendasetting
hypothesis in the case of the older sample, while the results for the younger
sample were in the right direction, though falling short of statistical significance.
That is, readers of the conservative paper put more stress on problems of crime
and America’s role in the world than did readers of the liberal paper, who gave
more weight to Vietnam and corruption in government. Less interested voters
seemed more open to agenda-setting influence than were the more politically
involved ones. Those who were more dependent on the press as an information
source were also more influenced by their paper’s agenda. The authors
concluded that there might be:

two different types of agenda-setting, one a kind of scanning orientation
process common to the less involved voters of all ages, and the second a
kind of purposive justification confined to the older respondents whereby
poorly informed partisans with strong political commitments scan their
newspapers as means of filling in information required by that
commitment. (McLeod, Becker and Byrnes, 1974, p. 161)

Television and attitudes to the Liberal Party in the British
General Election of 1964
Blumler and McQuail (1968) interviewed a sample of Yorkshire voters before
and after the British election campaign of 1964. Their findings were among the
first to call into question the presumed supremacy of the reinforcement doctrine.
Two special features of their study proved crucial. They traced movements in
voters’ attitudes toward the Liberal Party, as well as to the Conservative and
Labour Parties, and they devised a measure of the strength of voters’ motivation
to follow the election on television. Their assumption was that exposure to
campaign messages would have different effects on those who viewed out of
political interest, from those who watched political programmes simply because
they see a lot of television generally and have little else to do at the time.
As in the British 1959 election study that preceded it (Trenaman and McQuail,
1961), the results showed little sign of an impact of campaign exposure on
voters’ attitudes to the Conservative and Labour Parties. The relationship
between television use and changing attitudes toward the Liberal Party, however,
was strikingly different. Overall, attitudes toward the Liberals had improved
during the campaign—on average by about half a point on a +5 to—4 scale.