Page 18 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

1. NEWS INFLUENCE ON OUR PICTURES OF THE WORLD 7

nal Chapel Hill study took this perspective. For the media agenda, the
salience of the issues was determined by the total number of news articles
about each issue, whereas the public agenda was determined by the per-
centage of voters who thought the government should do something
about each issue. This competition perspective examines an array of issues
competing for positions on the agenda.
A second perspective is similar to the early agenda-setting studies with
their focus on the entire agenda of items, but shifts its attention to the
agenda of each individual. When individuals are asked to rank order a
series of issues, there is little evidence of any correspondence at all
between those individual rankings and the rank order of those same
issues in the news media. This automaton perspective is an unflattering
view of human behavior. For agenda-setting to occur, there must be indi-
viduals who are susceptible to being programmed by the mass media. An
individual seldom reproduces to any significant degree the entire agenda
of the media.
A third perspective narrows the focus to a single item on the agenda
but, like the competition perspective, uses aggregate measures to estab-
lish salience. Commonly, the measures are the total number of news sto-
ries about the item and the percentage of the public citing an issue as the
most important problem facing the country. This perspective is named
natural history because the focus typically is on the degree of correspon-
dence between the media agenda and the public agenda in the rise and
fall of a single item over time. Winter and Eyal’s (1981) study of the civil
rights issue over a 23-year period is an example of this perspective.
Finally, a fourth perspective, cognitive portrait, like the automaton per-
spective, focuses on the individual, but narrows its observations to the
salience of a single agenda item. This perspective is illustrated by the
experimental studies of agenda-setting in which the salience of a single
issue for an individual is measured before and after viewing news pro-
grams where the amount of exposure to various issues is controlled.
The existence of these varied perspectives on the agenda-setting phe-
nomenon, especially an abundance of evidence based on the competition
and natural history perspectives, strengthens the degree of confidence
about this media effect. The competition perspective provides useful,
comprehensive descriptions of the rich, ever-changing mix of mass media
content and public opinion at particular points in time. This perspective
strives to describe the world as it is. The natural history perspective pro-
vides useful descriptions of a single issue, but at the expense of the larger
social context. Despite this, knowledge about the dynamics of a single
issue over an extended time period is useful for understanding how the
process of agenda-setting works. The cognitive portrait perspective also