Concept
agenda-setting
The idea that the emphasis the news media give to issues influences how important the public considers those issues: the media shape not what people think, but what they think about.
Agenda-setting is the influence of the emphasis the news media give to issues (space, airtime, position, repetition) on how important the public considers those issues. The theory’s sloganised expression is the 1963 sentence of the political scientist Bernard Cohen: the press may not always succeed in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling them what to think about.
The empirical birth of the concept is the study that Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw did in Chapel Hill in autumn 1968: very high correlations were found between the issues that 100 undecided voters considered important and the issues that nine media sources emphasised (+0.967 for major news items). The authors noted that this did not prove the theory but was consistent with it.
Researchers speak of three agendas: the media agenda, the public agenda and the policy agenda. First-level agenda-setting transfers the salience of issues, and second-level agenda-setting transfers the salience of the attributes of issues or persons. The effect is not the same in everyone and on every issue; it depends on conditions such as need for orientation.
In the Turkish literature the same concept has been called not only “gündem belirleme” but also names such as “gündem oluşturma”, “gündem kurma”, “gündem hazırlama” and “gündem koyma”. Lesson: Agenda-Setting.
Example
In 1968 in Chapel Hill, the ranking of the campaign issues voters considered important closely resembled the ranking of the issues that nine media sources emphasised (+0.967 for major news items).