Aff ective
the attributes of each object. Just as there is an
agenda of public issues, political candidates, or
some other set of objects, there is also an agenda
of attributes for each object. Both the selection
by journalists of objects for attention and the
selection of attributes for detailing the pictures
of these objects are powerful agenda-setting
roles.’
Th e authors point out that ‘although object and
attribute salience are conceptually distinct, they
are integral and simultaneously present aspects
of the agenda-setting process’. In their research
into public attitudes to candidates at the 1996
election in Spain, the following attributes of the
major contenders were measured: the ideology/
issues position of rival candidates, biographical
details, perceived qualifi cations and integrity.
Th e function of mass media as agenda-setters
has, to a degree, been diluted by internet
rivals, in particular the advent of the blogo-
sphere. Zizi Papacharissi in her chapter, ‘Th e
citizen is the message: alternative modes of civic
engagement’ in the book she edited, Journalism
and Citizenship: New Agendas in Communica-
tion (Routledge, 2009), writes: ‘For monitorial
citizens, blogs present the space where what is
defi ned as public, can be challenged, and where
hierarchies of issues determined by power elites
can be revised, and agendas re-aligned ... A
post on a blog, a video log in YouTube, even the
practice of following a blog represents public
expressions of private dissent, albeit mild, with
a mainstream media agenda determined by
elite power constellations.’ See demotic turn;
facebook; journalism: citizen journal-
ism; mccombs and shaw’s agenda-setting
model of media effects, 1976; prototyping
concept; rogers and dearing’s agenda-
setting model, 1987; twitter; youtube.
Agenda-setting research A key area of
research into the relationship between mass
communication and audience consumption of
media, agenda-setting research generally takes
two forms. James W. Dearing and Everett M.
Rogers in Agenda-Setting (Sage, 1996) explain
that research has traditionally taken a hierarchi-
cal form; this they describe as ‘one-point-in-time
correlation comparisons of media content
with aggregated responses by the public to
survey questions about issue salience’, that is,
their perceived importance. More recently the
research approach has been through longitudinal
studies. Such investigations ‘include over-time
participant observation in media organizations’
as well as the analysis of quantitative variables
such as real world indicators.Aff ective See cognitive (and affective).
Agenda-setting Term used to describe the way
the media set the order of importance of current
issues, especially in the reportage of news.
Closely linked with the process of gatekeeping,
agenda-setting defi nes the context of transmis-
sion, establishes the terms of reference and
determines the limits of debate. In broadcast-
ing the agenda is more assertive than in news-
papers where the reader can ignore the order of
priorities set by the paper’s editorial team and
turn straight to the small ads or the sports pages.
Broadcasting is linear – one item following after
another – and its agenda unavoidable (except
by switching off ). Interviewers in broadcasting
are in control of pre-set agendas. Th ey initiate
and formulate the questions to be asked, and
have the chairperson’s power of excluding areas
of discussion. Very rarely does an interviewee
break free from this form of control and succeed
in widening the context of debate beyond what is
‘on the agenda’.
G. Ray Funkhouser and Eugene F. Shaw in
an article entitled ‘How synthetic experience
shapes social reality’ in Journal of Communica-
tion, Spring 1990, subdivide agenda-setting into
micro-agenda-setting and macro-agenda-setting.
Th e fi rst describes the way the mass media are
able, through emphasis on content, to infl uence
public perceptions of the relative importance
of specific issues. The second they define as
follows: ‘The potential of electronic media to
colour, distort, and perhaps even degrade an
entire cultural world view, by presenting images
of the world suited to the agenda of the media
(in the US case, commercial interests), we might
term “macro-agenda-setting”’.
In recent years agenda-setting has been viewed
as working from two levels, that of subject and
that of attribute; and the theory is that the
media’s attention to the attributes of a subject
is met with a corresponding image in the mind
of the public. Level 1 of agenda-setting concerns
the central theme or object of a public issue/
news story; Level 2, the salient characteristics of
the theme or object as emphasized by the media.
In an article, ‘Agenda-setting in the 1996 Span-
ish General Election’, published in the Journal
of Communication, Spring 2000, Maxwell
McCombs, Esteban Lopez Escobar and Juan
Pablo Llamas refer to ‘agendas of attributes, those
characteristics and traits that fi ll out the picture
of each object’. Some attributes are emphasized,
given prominence, others de-emphasized, ‘while
many are ignored’. McCombs and his colleagues
explain: ‘Just as objects vary in salience, so do