Page 23 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

12 McCOMBS AND REYNOLDS

large man-made lake (Cohen, 1975). In Japan, the correspondence between
Tokyo residents’ concerns and the coverage of two major dailies in the
months leading up to the United Nations’ 1992 Rio de Janeiro conference on
global environmental problems reached a peak of .78 just prior to the con-
ference (Mikami, Takeshita, Nakada, & Kawabata, 1994).
Explication of attribute agenda-setting links the theory with the con-
temporaneous concept of framing (McCombs & Bell, 1996; McCombs &
Evatt, 1995; McCombs & Ghanem, 2001). Both framing and attribute
agenda-setting call attention to the perspectives used by communicators
and their audiences to picture topics in the daily news. Recent research
has identified two types of frames: central themes and aspects. McLeod
and Detenber’s (1999) experiment produced a variety of framing effects
with news stories whose central theme was civil protest. In other framing
research, the focus is on the relative salience of numerous aspects of the
topic rather than the dominant attributes defining the central theme of the
news stories. To catalog the variety of attributes of four GOP presidential
candidates, Miller, Andsager, and Reichert (1998) used computerized con-
tent analysis to identify 28 frames defined by words that frequently co-
occurred in 245 press releases and 296 news stories. Their research illus-
trates the convergence of framing and attribute agenda-setting. Although
the study focused exclusively on identification of the frames defining the
attribute agendas of the campaign press releases and news stories, subse-
quent analysis (McCombs, forthcoming) documented substantial agenda-
setting effects of the press releases on the news stories. How the media
frame an issue or political candidate—which attributes are selected either
as the central organizing idea or as the aspects of the topic presented to
the audience—is a powerful agenda-setting role.

WHO SETS THE MEDIA AGENDA?

As evidence accumulated about the agenda-setting influence of the mass
media on the public, scholars in the early 1980s began to ask who set the
media agenda. In this new line of inquiry, researchers began to explore the
various factors that shape the media agenda. The media agenda became
the dependent variable whereas in traditional agenda-setting research,
the media agenda was the independent variable, the key causal factor
shaping the public agenda.
The metaphor of “peeling an onion” is useful for understanding the
relationships between these various factors and the agenda of the mass
media. The concentric layers of the onion represent the numerous influ-
ences that shape the media agenda, which is at the core of the onion. Like
an onion, the influence of an outer layer is, in turn, affected by layers
closer to the core of the onion. A highly detailed elaboration of this