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THEORY-842: Among 100 Chapel Hill voters not yet committed to a candidate in September–October 1968, the aggregate emphasis they gave the campaign's main issues correlated +.967 with the emphasis of the major news items, and +.979 with that of the minor items, in the nine media serving them; and voters leaning to a candidate agreed more with all the news than with news about their own side in 18 of 24 comparisons

2 min read

Properties4
StatusActive
Tagssocial-science, society-and-governance
SourceLIT-1335 — The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media
Extended byTHEORY-838 — The emphasis the news media give to issues raises the importance their audiences assign those issues, independently of any change in the audiences' attitudes toward the issues: the media influence what people think about more than what they think

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Source

McCombs and Shaw (1972), Public Opinion Quarterly 36(2): 176–187, LIT-1335, read in full in NOTE-1046.

What was actually shown

One hundred registered voters from five Chapel Hill precincts, filtered to those “who had not yet definitely decided how to vote”, were asked between 18 September and 6 October 1968 to name “the two or three main things which you think the government should concentrate on doing something about”, “regardless of what politicians say”. The news and editorial content of the nine media that the spring pretest found to serve the community was coded, for 12 September–6 October, into fifteen categories, and split into major and minor items by space, position and time (intercoder reliability above .90).

The correlation between the media’s emphasis on the main campaign issues and the voters’ was +.967 for major items and +.979 for minor items. For the 45 respondents who leaned to a candidate, Table 3 compares, for four media, the correlation of their issue emphasis with all the news against its correlation with news about their own party. All the news correlates higher in 18 of the 24 comparisons, own-party news in 5, and one is a tie.

What could have come out otherwise: the voters’ issues could have matched the media poorly, or matched their own party’s news better than the whole. Selective perception predicts the second, and it lost 18 to 5.

What this does not say

  • Not that the media caused the voters’ ranking. The design is a cross-sectional aggregate correlation. The authors: “The existence of an agenda-setting function of the mass media is not proved by the correlations reported here.” The causal hypothesis is THEORY-838, Proposed.
  • Not that any voter’s attitudes changed. Only the ranking of issues was measured.
  • Not a statistical result in the usual sense. No test is reported, and the correlations run over a handful of issue categories. The coefficient type is not stated.
  • Not independent of the candidates. The media’s emphasis reflected “to a considerable degree the emphasis by candidates”.
  • Not beyond the sample. One community, undecided voters only, one campaign window.

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