Page 14 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

1. NEWS INFLUENCE ON OUR PICTURES OF THE WORLD 3

Concurrent with this survey of voters, the nine major news sources
used by these voters—five local and national newspapers, two television
networks, and two newsmagazines—were collected and content ana-
lyzed. The rank order of issues on the media agenda was determined by
the number of news stories devoted to each issue. The high degree of cor-
respondence between these two agendas of political and social issues
established a central link in what has become a substantial chain of evi-
dence for an agenda-setting role of the press.
Seeking additional support for Lippmann’s perspective and their con-
cept, McCombs and Shaw juxtaposed agenda-setting and the concept of
selective perception, which often had been cited as the explanation for
minimal media effects. This perspective assumes that individuals mini-
mize their exposure to nonsupportive information and maximize their
exposure to supportive information. If the correlation between the voters’
agenda and the total news agenda were the highest, it would be evidence
of agenda-setting. If the correlation with the voters’ preferred party’s
agenda in the news coverage were higher, it would be evidence of selec-
tive perception. The vast majority of the Chapel Hill evidence favored an
agenda-setting effect.

ACCUMULATED EVIDENCE

Since the Chapel Hill study, more than 350 empirical studies have been
conducted on the agenda-setting influence of the news media (Dearing &
Rogers, 1996). The accumulated evidence about the agenda-setting influ-
ence of the news media on the general public comes from many different
geographic and historical settings worldwide and covers numerous types
of news media and a wide variety of public issues. The evidence also pro-
vides greater detail about the time-order and causal links between the
media and public agendas.
Shaw and McCombs’ (1977) follow-up to the Chapel Hill study exam-
ined a representative sample of all voters in Charlotte, North Carolina,
during the summer and fall of the 1972 presidential election and found
that the salience of all seven issues on the public agenda was influenced
by the pattern of news coverage in the Charlotte Observer and network
television news.
During the 1976 presidential election, voters in three very different set-
tings—Lebanon, New Hampshire; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Evanston,
Illinois—were interviewed nine times between February and December
(Weaver, Graber, McCombs, & Eyal, 1981). Simultaneously, election cover-
age by the three national networks and local newspapers in the three
cities were content analyzed. In all three communities, the agenda-setting