Page 13 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

2 McCOMBS AND REYNOLDS

Elmo Roper to conduct seven rounds of interviews with voters in Erie
County, Ohio (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1944). Those surveys and
many subsequent investigations in other settings over the next 20 years
found little evidence of major mass communication effects on attitudes
and opinions. Many scholars have argued that the reason little evidence
was found is because these early studies focused on the news media and
mass communication’s ability to persuade voters and change their atti-
tudes. Traditional journalism and its notion of objectivity would suggest
that the media are trying to inform, not persuade. These studies did sup-
port that notion, demonstrating that people acquired information from
the mass media, even if they didn’t change their opinions.
A limited-effects model for mass communication emerged from these
early election studies. Summarized in the law of minimal consequences
(Klapper, 1960), this notion ran counter to the ideas that Walter Lippmann
(1922), the intellectual father of agenda-setting, proposed back in the early
1920s. Lippmann’s opening chapter in Public Opinion, which is titled “The
World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads,” summarized the agenda-
setting idea even though he did not use that phrase. His thesis was that
the news media, our windows to the vast world beyond our direct experi-
ence, determine our cognitive maps of that world. Public opinion, argued
Lippmann, responds not to the environment, but to the pseudoenviron-
ment constructed by the news media.
After decades of exploring the cognitive, long-term implications of
daily journalism, researchers have discovered that media audiences not
only learn factual information from exposure to news, but that people
also learn about the importance of topics in the news based on how the
news media emphasize those topics. This shift in perspective away from
the law of minimal consequences took hold in the 1960s. During the 1968
presidential campaign, McCombs and Shaw (1972) launched the first
study that would support Lippmann’s notion that the information pro-
vided by the news media plays a key role in the construction of our pic-
tures of reality. Their central hypothesis was that the mass media set the
agenda of issues for a political campaign by influencing the salience of
issues among voters. Those issues emphasized in the news come to be
regarded over time as important by members of the public. McCombs and
Shaw called this influence agenda-setting.
To test this hypothesis that the media agenda can set the public agenda,
McCombs and Shaw conducted a survey among a sample of randomly
selected undecided voters in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In the survey,
these undecided voters were asked what they thought were the key issues
of the day, regardless of what the candidates might say. The issues named
in the survey were ranked according to the percentage of voters naming
each one to yield a description of the public agenda.