For instance, even if readers don't have strong feelings about immigration, they will believe that it is a pressing problem at the time if there is consistent journalistic coverage of it over the period of a few months.
The stories with the strongest agenda setting influence tend to be those that involve conflict, terrorism, crime and drug issues within the United States.
[14] The concept of agenda setting was launched by McCombs and Shaw during the 1968 presidential election in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
McCombs and Shaw were the first to provide the field of communication with empirical evidence that demonstrated the power of mass media and its influence on the public agenda.
[14][10] An unknown scholar named G. Ray Funkhouser performed a study highly similar to McCombs and Shaw's around the same time the authors were formalizing the theory.
Rogers and Dearing describe how following types of agenda setting (dependent variable in research) are influenced by other factors:[17] Studies have shown that what the media decides to expose correlates with their views on things such as politics, economy and culture.
Financial resources, technologies, foreign trade and money spent on the military can be some of the main factors that explain coverage inequality.
[6] As more scholars published articles on agenda-setting theories it became evident that the process involves not only active role of media organizations, but also participation of the public as well as policymakers.
[23] However, when the focus is placed not only on policymakers' personal agendas, but also on the broader salient issues where media represent only one indicator of public sentiment, Berkowitz suggests talking about policy agenda-building.
Cobb and Elder assert that while the public can influence the media agenda, they do not significantly shape it; instead, journalists anticipate audience needs when generating story ideas.
In the most comprehensive study to date, Wallsten tracked mainstream media coverage and blog discussion of 35 issues during the 2004 presidential campaign.
For instance, in 2005 Eason Jordan, the chief news executive at CNN, abruptly resigned after being besieged by the online community after saying, according to various witnesses, that he believed the United States military had aimed at journalists in Iraq and killed 12 of them.
[26] Similarly, in 2002, Trent Lott had to resign as Senate majority leader due to his inappropriate racist remarks that were widely discussed in the blogosphere.
[27] For instance, policymakers have been found to be more influential than the overall group of news sources because they often better understand journalists' needs for reliable and predictable information and their definition of newsworthiness.
[23] News sources can also provide definitions of issues, thus determining the terms of future discussion and framing problems in particular ways[23][28] The relationship of media and policymakers is symbiotic and is controlled by the shared culture of unofficial set of ground rules as journalists need access to official information and policymakers need media coverage; nevertheless the needs of journalists and policymakers are often incompatible because of their different time orientation as powerful sources are at their best in routine situations and react more slowly when crisis or disaster occur.
[30] They discovered that certain individual and group characteristics are likely to act as contingent conditions of media impact and proposed a model of "audience effects".
[30] According to the audience-effects model, media coverage interacts with the audience's pre-existing sensitivities to produce changes in issue concerns.
[31] Obtrusive, or issues with low threshold, are generally the ones that affect nearly everyone and with which we can have some kind of personal experience (e.g. citywide crime or increases in gasoline prices).
[17][31][33][34] Over time, agenda-setting theory evolved to include additional dimensions outside of the initial object salience level (specific issues, public figures, etc.).
McCombs, Shaw, Weaver and colleagues generally argue that framing is a part of agenda-setting that operates as a "second-level" or secondary effect.
The most recent agenda-setting studies explore "the extent to which the news media can transfer the salience of relationships among a set of elements to the public".
[46] Based on that, Renita Coleman and H. Denis Wu (2010)[47] study whether the TV portrayals of candidates impacts people's political judgment during the 2004 U.S. presidential Election.
"[48] The first level of agenda-setting, such as a policy issue gaining public attention, corresponds to the "knowledge" component of the hierarchy of effects theory.
[50] McCombs and Shaw originally established agenda-setting within the context of a presidential election and there have been numerous studies regarding agenda setting and politics.
[62] Another study found that in modern China, internet public opinion has emerged as a rival agenda-setting power to traditional media.
[63] In an analysis of the policy making process concerning temporary labor migration to Japan, researchers observed how migrant advocacy organizations influence public opinion through agenda setting, priming and framing, which had a limiting effect on the impact of other interest groups.
The advent of the Internet and social networks give rise to a variety of opinions concerning agenda-setting effects online.
While some theorize that the rise of social media will bring a downfall to journalists' ability to set the agenda, there is considerable scholarship to counterbalance this form of thinking.
[71] The advances in technology have made agenda-melding accessible for people to develop because there is a wide range of groups and individual agendas.
One reason for the academic neglect of this concept is seen in the fact that there have been only few empirical investigations on the one hand, while no sufficient theoretical basis has been established on the other.