Page 283 - The Handbook of Persuasion and Social Marketing

Public Support for Regulating the Public 259

measured by congressional hearings). Whether there is or is not a direct
link, in all likelihood, depends on the issue. Obviously, if the public does
not care about an issue, then little public pressure exists to prompt legisla-
tive action. Also, an upstream remedy that provides small benefits for
many at the cost of a few is unlikely to see the light of day (Wilson, 1980).

Influencing What the Public Believes

The second goal of media advocacy is to influence how people think
about an issue (Figure 9.1, Link “f”). This is typically labeled as either sec-
ond-level agenda setting or framing. Two different approaches are typically
used to influence how people think about an issue: specific attribute mes-
sages and general issue framing. First, attention may be drawn to specific
attributes about a social issue and away from other attributes (McCombs et
al., 1997; Weaver, 2007). The intention of focusing on specific attributes is
to educate the public about important, persuasive characteristics that can
influence beliefs about an issue. For example, second-level agenda setting
might emphasize the compassionate characteristics of street-level drug us-
ers (e.g., poor, undereducated, children of addicts) in order to shape prefer-
ences for addict reform rather than punishment.
Another approach often used to influence public beliefs about a social
change issue is to focus on a central theme or frame. The frame is used to
organize the information individuals have about an issue or object, giving
it a simple meaning (McCombs, 2005). Rather than focus on specific at-
tributes of the issue, a more general framing is used as a rallying call to
take action. For example, the “truth” campaign focused antismoking ef-
forts on the theme of ending corporate lies and manipulation. The cam-
paign used some specific health attribute messages but did so within the
empowering framing of ending the manipulation and taking control.
These communicated meanings are then intertwined with a person’s exist-
ing attitude toward the social change issue related to the upstream
remedy.
Empirical experiments and survey evidence in the agenda-setting litera-
ture suggest that if individuals are exposed to stimuli (such as mass media)
that emphasize specific issue attributes, they will place more importance
on those attributes. The survey evidence shows correlations between the
attributes reported in the media and the attributes that are most salient to
media consumers (McCombs et al., 1997). In the experiments, subjects
exposed to media stories emphasizing specific issue attributes assigned
greater importance to those items (Rill & Davis, 2008). In the public-
health media advocacy literature, there is a strong belief, based on case