Page 239 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

228 McLEOD, KOSICKI, McLEOD

More ambiguity surrounds the first agenda-setting proposition that the
media determine the agenda. The news media certainly serve at least as
carriers of the agenda to the public, and clearly selection is involved. Less
certain is how the power to control the agenda is distributed between the
media and sources and how the news agenda is struggled over. Agenda
setting continues to be controversial on theoretical and methodological
terms (Kosicki, 1993).

Priming. A venerable social science concept, priming was applied to
media use in the 1980s (Iyengar & Kinder, 1987; Krosnick & Kinder, 1990).
The key insight is that media use, exposure to a given type of content or
message, activates a concept, which for a period of time increases the prob-
ability that the concept, and thoughts and memories connected with it, will
come to mind again (Berkowitz & Rogers, 1986). As applied to politics,
media priming suggests that focus on a political issue can encourage citi-
zens to develop their overall evaluation of political leaders from their per-
formance on that issue. Early experiments examined priming effects of
television news and found that television news shaped the standards by
which presidential performance is judged (Iyengar & Kinder, 1987). When
primed by stories focusing on national defense, for example, respondents
gave disproportionate weight to judgments of how well they thought the
president had done on that issue in judging his overall performance. This
held across six issues for presidents from each party and for good news as
well as for bad. Additional experiments by the same authors showed prim-
ing influences may extend to vote choices. Additional work has used sur-
vey research and content analysis to examine the rise and fall of evaluative
criteria in the press such as the Gulf War and the economy and evaluations
of President George H. W. Bush (Pan & Kosicki, 1997). Recent work has
shown additional effects of media trust (Miller & Krosnick, 2000) .

Knowledge Gain. Evidence of knowledge gain from news media use
can be found as far back as the Columbia studies. Special forms of politi-
cal communication, debates, and conventions, along with standard news
coverage, convey discernible if modest amounts of information to their
audiences (Gunter, 1987; McLeod, Bybee, & Durall, 1979; Neuman, 1976,
1986; Neuman, Just & Crigler, 1992). Still, citizens remain remarkably
uninformed about public affairs. Despite a threefold increase in the pro-
portion of Americans who have attended college, factual knowledge of
politics has increased only marginally since the 1960s and has actually
declined when education is controlled (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996). Yet,
many voters feel the information they have is enough to make vote deci-
sions by the time of the election (Dautrich & Hartley, 1999). Popkin (1991)
argued that although increments of learning from news are small, they