Concept
priming
An issue or area that stands out in the media becoming the yardstick people use when judging a leader or an event.
Priming is an issue or area that stands out in the media becoming the yardstick people use when evaluating a leader, an institution or an event. In Krosnick and Kinder’s theoretical formulation, the more attention the media pay to an area, the more citizens weigh what they know about that area in their overall judgments.
We can put its relation to agenda-setting like this: agenda-setting describes which issue becomes salient; priming describes the salient issue being used as a yardstick of judgment. Iyengar, Peters and Kinder’s experiments showed that problems emphasised in the evening news became more heavily weighted in evaluating the president’s performance. Scheufele and Tewksbury compare framing, agenda-setting and priming as three neighbouring but separate models of media effects.
For this lesson this is only a short definition; the concept’s detail, measurement and critique are covered in the Priming and Second-Level Agenda-Setting lesson. For the main concept, first look at agenda-setting.
Example
When the Iran–Contra scandal broke in 1986, intervention in Central America became more heavily weighted in evaluating President Reagan’s performance than it had been before the scandal (Krosnick and Kinder 1990).