Module 5

Framing & Agenda Setting

Agenda Setting
 Established in 1972 (or maybe long before)
Framing
 Goes beyond to individual
 More contextual

What is Media Framing?

- Entman, 1992 “the presence or absence of certain keywords, stock phrases, stereotyped
images, sources of info and sentences that provide thematically reinforcing clusters of
facts or judgments”
- Media salience
Research on Framing
- Analysis of news frames
- Effects of news frames
Abrahims- framing highlights certain parts of reality

Useful in understanding media’s role – specifically in politics.

Has powerful effects on audience.
Audience uses frames to interrupt events and understand world around them.

Gamson and Modigliani’s 5 Framing Devices:

Metaphors
Exemplar
Catchphrases
Depictions
Visual Images

Focal Points in Frame Analysis:

Gender of author, placement of article, and terms used to refer to particular frame
Tankar (2001 study): Headliines, photographs, leads, selection of sources, quotes and pull
quotes, logos, statistics and charts, concluding statements and paragraphs

Types of Frames:
o Issue-specific news frames
o Generic news frames
o May be applied to analysis of other topics

Advantages and Disadvantages of Frame Analysis

 Issue-sensitivity
 A unique set of frames for every study
 Difficult to generalize, compare, and use a empirical evidence for theory building
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Dynamic Framing
o Chyi & McCombs, 2004
- Two dimensional scheme
- Time
- Space

Agenda Setting

The Media
o Determine what issues the public considers salient
o Through selective focus on
o Certain topics or aspects
How the media affect our cognition

What is Agenda-Setting?
 Presupposition:
- No absolute form of reality
 Reality is subject to creation by mass mediated messages
- Mediated reality
 Most researched area in mass communication in the 1970s

Precursors of Agenda Setting (1950s)

 Norton Long
o The media caused a topic to increase in salience
 Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang
o “the mass media force attention to certain issues… suggesting what individuals in
the masses should think about, know about, have feelings about
 Bernard Cohen
o “it may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it
is stunningly successful in telling people what to think about”

Origins of “Agenda-Setting”
- Maxwell McCombs & Donald Shaw
- Chapel Hill study (1972, Public Opinion Quarterly
 Seminal study on the 1968 presential election
- Hypothesis:
 The media set the agenda for each president campaign and
 Influenced the salience of attitudes towards political issues
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Basic elements of agenda setting (Defleur and Dennis)

1. The press selects a number of issues, topics, and events from its continuous surveillance
of the environment to process and report daily as the news
2. Because of limited space and time and because of journalists’ convictions as to what is
newsworthy, many issues and topics are ignored and do not become a part of the news
3. The press gives each of the news stories selected greater or lesser prominence in its
reports by assigning it a particular position or giving it more or less space or time in print
and broadcast news presentations
4. The selection of stories presented, with their different levels of prominence, spaces and
time, forms the news agenda of the press
5. When people attend to these news reports, they will perceive the order of prominence
assigned by the press in its agenda of stories and will use it to decide on their personal
rankings of importance of the issues and topics that makes up the news

Evolution of Agenda-Setting
- The theory was spurred by:
o The dissatisfaction or discontent with the limited effects model (1950s-1960s)
o The possibility that the limited effects conclusion was derived from the wrong
perspective (attitude change)
- Shift of research focus
- Key question
o How do the media affect our cognition?

Three types of agenda setting

 Public Agenda Setting
 Policy Agenda Setting
 Media Agenda Setting

Extensive studies to prove media plays an important role in audience’s viewpoint.

Agenda-Building: Media and public agenda shape the media content

Information, technology, and sources, and audience affect media agenda.

Media considers all of these to determine what becomes news.

Agenda Setting in Politics

 Setting the voters agenda
o Who is doing it?
o Who has control of the agenda?
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Criticism’s of Agenda Setting

1. Many contingent issues affect AS
a. Obtrusive vs. unobtrusive issues
i. Unobtrusive issues: issues on which people have not made up their minds
ii. AS is more powerful in predicting effects in the case of unobtrusive issues
b. Media formats
i. Newspapers have a stronger effect that TV does
ii. Why: Newspaper readers’ interst in public affairs issues
2. Many AS studies are one-way cross-sectional rather than longitudinal
3. AS depends on the issue
4. Who sets the agenda for the media?
a. Media professionals
b. Audience
c. Officials
d. Other media, ect.

Testing AS
 The Charlotte study in 1972 (McCombs and Shaw)
o A larger sample
o Panel design (intervews in June and Octorber)
o Cross-lagged Correlation
 Unclear results
o The media might set the public’s agenda
o The publics agenda remained unchanged from T1 to T2

Current Directions in AS
- Towards priming and framing
- Different levels
- Marriage of AS and Framing through object and attribute agenda setting