The Agenda Setting Journal - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2019

The current study draws evidence from the Smithsonian Institution while examining a classic agenda-setting hypothesis during a period of 30 years in relation to media attention of the Smithsonian and a behavioral index of public salience, – namely its long-term, monthly visits. Second, it explores a larger theoretical concern often expressed by scholars in terms of the agenda-setting function over two different eras, the analog and the digital media periods.

This study explores relationships between agenda building, agenda indexing (reflected through share of voice as the key variable), and agenda-setting effects, measured through the combination of public opinion survey data and quantitative content analysis. It conceptually distinguishes between the three metrics often used interchangeably in the professional discourse by advertising and media practitioners – share of voice, share of influence, and share of conversation – and explores how they could be applied in political communication research to become useful tools for agenda-setting researchers. The results of the study indicate that an increased level of nationalism serves as a significant predictor for EU policy support through the pathway of decreased pro-EU sentiment, which, on the agenda level, is reflective of pro-nationals being less supportive of the EU policies and the idea of European integration.

For the past 50 years since the seminal agenda-setting study, scholars have continued to make strides in understanding the importance mass communication plays in public opinion formation. Although scholars have measured both first- and second-level agenda setting often using open-ended response, more close-ended measures might assist in measuring the theory, adding to the rich data. This experimental study directly compared open-ended responses shown to gauge an agenda-setting effect with close-ended responses to enhance the assessment of both first- and second-level agenda setting. The findings identified close-ended scales, including news salience, social salience, personal salience, and feelings salience, that add to the precision of measuring the salience of issues and attributes, indicating we have alternative measures to gauge agenda setting.

This paper explores the philosophical orientations within which agenda setting operates, and agenda setting’s place within the broader framework of the media effects tradition, specifically in comparison with framing and priming. It also responds to earlier criticisms of agenda setting for its supposed lack of theoretical richness and narrowly understood underlying mechanisms.

Both ontological and epistemological statuses of the agenda-setting theory are analyzed in order to place agenda setting into the communication discipline’s broader context. This paper demonstrates that the most important distinction between framing and agenda setting is that they are based on different ways of knowing. While the epistemological bases of priming are similar to the theory of agenda setting, the paper argues that further progress will depend not only on practical studies of different aspects of agenda setting, but also on theoretical and philosophical conceptualizations in the future.

This exploratory study continues early first-level work on intermedia visual agenda setting, which asks what influences the visual media agenda, and extends it into the third level of network analysis. The top visual agenda of the Associated Press is compared to the top visual agenda of 45 U.S. newspapers (divided into three tiers of circulation) over two constructed weeks. Findings indicate some transfer of the visual agenda at both the first and third levels. Additionally, the networked visual agenda has a moderate significant correlation to all newspapers. Sports and local vs. national/international coverage are identified as key aspects of authority over how the visual agendas are formed and transferred. While the AP places sports images high on the visual agenda, newspapers relegate them to inside pages unless they are important events. Smaller-circulation papers put fewer international topics on their front page than medium and high-circulation newspapers.