Description of Agenda Setting

Agenda setting is an important way for the mass media to influence society, and its ideas come mainly from political science, Lippmann's Public Opinion, which first put forward the idea, is regarded as a founding work in the field of communication.

The basic idea of agenda setting originally came from Walter Lippmann, an American journalist and social commentator, who in 1922 put forward his ideas in his classic book Public Opinion:" The news media influence 'the images in our minds'", which became the prototype of agenda-setting theory.

In 1963, Bernard Cohen came up with the most influential formulation of agenda-setting: "Most of the time the press may not be successful in telling its readers what to think; but it is surprisingly successful in telling its readers what to think," he said. But it is amazingly successful in telling its readers what to think", which points more clearly to the agenda-setting function of the media.

In 1968, two researchers from North Carolina, Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw, conducted an empirical study of Lippmann's ideas. They investigated and analyzed the impact of the media's election coverage on voters during the 1968 U.S. presidential election and published a report in Public Opinion Quarterly in 1972. published a paper in Public Opinion Quarterly in 1972 - "The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Communication" as a summary of their research. The main implication is that the very practice of the mass media of paying attention to certain issues and ignoring others can influence public opinion, and that people generally tend to be aware of those issues to which the mass media pay attention and use the priorities set by the mass media for those issues to determine the extent to which they pay attention to them. Their study marked the birth of a new theory of communication effects, the "agenda-setting" theory. This theory is divided into two aspects: one is the process of dissemination of issues from the media agenda to the public agenda, and the other is the role of the news media in forming these issues and objects in the minds of the public.

The Dictionary of Journalism explains agenda-setting theory as, "Developed by Malcolm McCombs and Donald Shaw in 1972. ...... The core idea is that the prominent coverage of an event and a social issue by the mass media at a certain stage will arouse general public concern and attention, and then become the central topic of discussion in social opinion." American scholars Werner Severin and James Tankard Jr. in their book Communication Theory: Origins, Methods, and Applications, put forward a more rational understanding of agenda-setting theory, arguing that "the agenda-setting function of the media refers to the media's ability to reinforce the importance of the topic in the public's mind through the repeated broadcasting of a certain type of news report. " In Chinese scholar Guo Qingguang's book, A Course in Communication, he argues that the central idea of agenda-setting is that mass communication has the function of setting the agenda for the public, and that the media's news reporting and information conveying activities give different degrees of prominence to various "issues". The news reporting and information dissemination activities of the media influence people's judgments about the "events" of the world around them and their significance by assigning different degrees of prominence to various "issues".

According to the research of McCombs and Shaw, the agenda-setting effect of the media also depends on the frequency of the public's contact with the media, the degree of the public's need for the media, the interpersonal communication at the time, and the interests of different members of the public, among other factors. Moreover, interpersonal communication and personal observation, as well as many specific situations, can also increase or diminish the effect of media agenda-setting. Some other scholars have found through their research that time is also an important factor in media agenda setting, and that the effects of media agenda setting do not appear immediately, usually after a few weeks of news coverage. At the same time, there is generally a limit to the amount of information that the public can receive, and too much agenda tends to weaken the effect of media agenda setting. A study by McCombs and Shaw found that the public can't have more than 5-7 topics on their agenda, or audiences will ignore many of the topics that the media deems important.

The agenda-setting function of traditional media (newspapers, radio, and television) has been accepted by many scholars and empirically studied in many aspects of political and social life. It is also widely realized that traditional media have a subtle yet powerful influence on the public agenda to a certain extent. However, with the rapid development of the Internet, the network as a new media has become an important carrier of information dissemination. Because of the strong interactivity of online communication relative to traditional media, online audiences are free to choose information and express their views, both as communicators and receivers; at the same time, the agenda-setting function of traditional media in the form of front page or headline is no longer so obvious on the Internet; furthermore, the amount of information on the Internet is incomparable to that of traditional media. Therefore, many scholars believe that the agenda-setting function of the media in network communication will be weakened, or even no longer exist.