Page 17 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

6 McCOMBS AND REYNOLDS

general proposition supported by this accumulation of evidence on
agenda-setting is that journalists’ daily decisions do significantly influ-
ence their audience’s picture of the world.
Many events and stories compete for journalists’ attention. Because the
news media have neither the capacity to gather all information nor the
capacity to inform the audience about every single occurrence, they rely
on a traditional set of professional norms to guide their daily sampling of
the environment. The result is a limited view of the larger environment,
something like the highly limited view of the outside world available
through a small window.
Three portraits of public opinion—the major issues of the 1960s, the
drug issue in the 1980s, and crime in the 1990s—tell us a great deal about
the discretion of journalists and the discrepancies that are sometimes
found in mass media portrayals of reality. In Funkhouser’s (1973) study of
public opinion trends during the 1960s, there was no correlation at all
between the trends in news coverage of major issues and the reality of
these issues. But there was a substantial correlation ( .78) between the
patterns of news coverage and the public’s perception of what were the
most important issues. In the 1980s, there was an increasing trend in news
coverage of drugs at a time when there was no change at all in the reality
of the drug problem (Reese & Danielian, 1989). And, in the 1990s, there
was an increase in the news coverage of crime at a time when there was a
decreasing trend in the reality of crime (Ghanem, 1996).

THE ACAPULCO TYPOLOGY

Explorations of agenda-setting effects around the world have observed
this mass communication phenomenon from a variety of perspectives. A
four-part typology describing these perspectives is frequently referred to
as the Acapulco typology because McCombs initially presented it in Aca-
pulco, Mexico, at the invitation of International Communication Associa-
tion president Everett Rogers. The Acapulco typology contains two
dichotomous dimensions. The first dimension distinguishes between two
ways of looking at agendas. The focus of attention can be on the entire set
of items that define the agenda, or the focus of attention can be narrowed
to a single, particular item on the agenda. The second dimension distin-
guishes between two ways of measuring the salience of items on the
agenda, either aggregate measures describing an entire group or popula-
tion or measures that describe individual responses.
One perspective includes the entire agenda and uses aggregate mea-
sures of the population to establish the salience of these items. The origi-