The Media Agenda: Who (or What) Sets It?

The Media Agenda: Who (or What) Sets It?  

David H. Weaver and Jihyang Choi
The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication
Edited by Kate Kenski and Kathleen Hall Jamieson

Print Publication Date: Aug 2017

Subject: Political Science, Political Institutions, Comparative Politics
Online Publication Date: Sep 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199793471.013.37

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter provides an overview of media agenda setting, also known as agenda build­
ing. Although much of the agenda-setting research tradition has focused on how media af­
fect the public agenda, agenda building examines how the media’s agenda comes about.
The chapter considers five possible influences on the news media agenda: influential
news sources, other media, journalistic norms and traditions, unexpected events, and me­
dia audiences. Research to date indicates that there is no one decisive factor that deter­
mines the media agenda. Instead, media agendas are built as a joint product of these in­
fluences. The chapter concludes by offering suggestions for future areas of research that
would refine understanding of the media agenda-setting process.

Keywords: agenda setting, intermedia agenda setting, journalistic norms, journalistic traditions, media agenda
setting, media audiences, news sources, public relations, unexpected events

ALTHOUGH the bulk of the research on media agenda setting has focused on the relation­
ship between news media agendas and public agendas (McCombs and Shaw, 1972; Mc­
Combs, 2004), there have been some studies of influences on news media agendas, a type
of research that Dearing and Rogers (1996) have termed media agenda setting to distin­
guish it from the more common public agenda-setting studies that focus on influences on
the public agenda. Others have called this “agenda-building” (Gilberg et al., 1980; Lang
and Lang, 1981; Weaver and Elliott, 1985).

This branch of agenda-setting research includes studies of various influences on media

agendas, such as news sources, other news media, the norms and traditions of journal­
ism, unexpected events, and media audiences. It tries to unpack the original agenda-set­
ting role of the news media assumed by many public agenda-setting studies. If the news
media are often transmitting agendas set by other influential actors and institutions in so­
ciety, it may not be entirely accurate to think of journalists as the original agenda setters
for the public, although they still have much discretion about what to emphasize and
what to ignore.

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The Media Agenda: Who (or What) Sets It?

One model for thinking about the influences on news media content is an onion, the con­
centric layers of which represent the numerous influences on the media agenda (Mc­
Combs, 2004). This metaphor also illustrates the sequential nature of this process, with
the influence of an outer layer being, in turn, affected by layers closer to the onion’s core
(see figure 26.1). Shoemaker and Reese (1996), in Mediating the Message, have proposed
five layers of the onion, ranging from the prevailing societal ideology to the psychology of
the individual journalist. Some of the intermediate layers representing the influence of
news organizations and professional norms and media routines of journalism are the main
focus of the sociology of news research studied by Breed (1955a), Tuchman (1976), and
Gans (1980), among others. (p. 360)

Figure 26.1 A metaphorical onion of media agenda

setting.

In this chapter we consider five possible influences on the news media agenda: (1) influ­
ential news sources such as the US president, public relations activities, and political
campaigns; (2) other media (sometimes studied under the label intermedia agenda set­
ting); (3) the social norms and traditions of journalism; (4) unexpected events such as the
earthquake and tsunami in Japan in March 2011; and (5) media audiences, who have
more influence now than in the past because of the Internet.

News Sources: Presidents and Public Relations

The single most influential news source in the United States is the president. Virtually
everything that a president does is considered newsworthy. One measure of the
president’s agenda is the legislative action proposed in his annual State of the Union ad­
dress. Required by the US Constitution, for more than a hundred years this yearly report
was a written document submitted to Congress. But in the late twentieth century the an­
nual address became a major media event, broadcast live nationally by the television net­
works as it was delivered to a joint evening session of the House of Representatives and
the Senate.

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The format of this address in recent times—a listing of issues or a developed argument
about a few key problems that the president wants the Congress to engage with—makes
it a convenient measure of the president’s priorities, or agenda. This ranking of issues
(p. 361) can be compared with the media agenda before and after the address to get a

sense of whether the president is setting the media agenda or responding to it, or both. A
comparison of President Jimmy Carter’s 1978 State of the Union address with the agen­
das of the New York Times, Washington Post, and three national TV networks by Gilberg,
McCombs, and Nicholas (1980) found no significant impact of this address on the follow­
ing month’s news coverage of his eight priority issues. But there was evidence that the
media coverage of these issues during the month prior to the address had influenced
President Carter’s agenda.

Another study of a very different president, Richard Nixon, by McCombs, Gilbert, and
Eyal (1982), found that the agenda on fifteen issues in Richard Nixon’s 1970 State of the
Union address did predict the subsequent month’s news coverage by the New York Times,
Washington Post, and two of the three national TV networks. But there was no evidence
that the prior news media agenda had influenced Nixon’s agenda. Additional replications
based on President Ronald Reagan’s 1982 and 1985 State of the Union addresses by Wan­
ta and colleagues (1989) yielded mixed evidence about the relationship between the news
media agenda and the president’s agenda, suggesting that the US president is sometimes
able to influence the subsequent media agenda and sometimes follows earlier news media
and public agendas.

In a time-series analysis of the New York Times and The Public Papers of the President
from 1981 to 1996, spanning the first and second Reagan terms, the single term of the se­
nior George Bush, and the first term of Bill Clinton, Holian (2000) found that in most in­
stances, Republican presidents influenced the subsequent media agenda on Republican
issues such as taxing and spending, government regulation, and crime and punishment.
But Republican presidents Reagan and Bush tended to follow the media emphasis on the
Democratic issues of Social Security, Medicare, education, and gender equality. In other
words, Reagan and Bush tended to discuss these traditionally Democratic issues publicly
when others, either the media or their political opponents, placed them on the media
agenda. Democratic President Clinton, on the other hand, influenced newspaper cover­
age of issues related to Social Security and Medicare. Thus, there is evidence from
Holian’s study that the US president is more likely to influence the media agenda for is­
sues traditionally “owned” by his political party.

Government information officers and commercial public relations practitioners are other
important news sources that influence media and policy agendas. They subsidize the ef­
forts of news organizations to cover the news by providing substantial amounts of infor­
mation, frequently in the form of press or video releases (Gandy, 1982). In one of the ear­
lier studies of this process, Sigal (1973) found that nearly half of the front-page news sto­
ries in the New York Times and Washington Post from 1949 to 1969 were based on press
releases, press conferences, and other information subsidies. Considering that both news­
papers are major organizations with large staffs and impressive resources, their substan­

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tial reliance on public relations sources underscores the key role that information subsi­
dies play in the formation of all media agendas.

At the state level, Turk (1986) found that news coverage of six state government agencies
in Louisiana’s major daily newspapers also was based substantially on information
(p. 362) provided by those agencies’ public information officers. Slightly more than half of

the information subsidies provided by these officers, mostly written news releases but
sometimes personal conversations, appeared in subsequent news stories. Interviews
probing the reasons for this influence of information subsidies revealed the central role of
journalistic norms and routines, especially perceptions of newsworthiness.

At the local (city) level, Weaver and Elliott (1985) analyzed a year’s worth of city council
minutes and coverage of the council in the local newspaper. They found a strong overall
correlation (+.84) between the agendas of the council and the local newspaper, suggest­
ing that the local paper closely reflected the priorities of the city council, although for
some issues the newspaper ranking of issues deviated considerably from the council rank­
ing, especially those concerning arts and entertainment, utilities, animal protection, and
awards. When asked about these discrepancies, the reporter covering the council for that
year said that he consciously “boiled down” the subjects of education, animal protection,
honors and awards, and historical events because they were not controversial and did not
lend themselves to a good story. As with Turk’s study in Louisiana, this local study rein­
forces the importance of journalistic norms and traditions, especially ideas about news­
worthiness, in shaping the media agenda.

News Sources: Campaigns

Political campaigns are also an important influence on media agendas, at least in coun­
tries that hold regular elections. Even though the ultimate goal is to win elections, in­
creasingly campaigns also try to control the media agenda in hopes of influencing the
public agenda (Jamieson and Campbell, 1992). Part of the media agenda is under the di­
rect control of political campaigns. Huge amounts of money are spent on political adver­
tising, especially on television ads, to convey candidates’ agendas and images, but cam­
paigns also exert major efforts to influence news media agendas, because these agendas
are less obviously self-serving and thought to be more credible to the public than are po­
litical ads.

A comparative analysis of the 1983 British general election and the 1984 US presidential
election found that politicians in Britain had considerably more influence on the news
agenda than their counterparts in the United States (Semetko et al., 1991). American
journalists had substantially more discretion to shape the campaign news agenda than
did British journalists.

This striking difference between the influence of the US and British campaigns on the
media agendas was due, in large part, to significant cultural differences in American and
British journalists’ orientations toward politicians and election campaigns. American elec­
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tion news coverage weighed election news against the newsworthiness of all other stories
of the day, whereas the British journalists considered election campaigns inherently im­
portant and deserving of coverage. British journalists were also more ready to (p. 363) use
party-initiated material, whereas US journalists were concerned that the political cam­
paigns not be allowed to dictate the media agenda and that candidates not be given a
“free publicity ride.”

Another study also shows that US journalists are not likely to uncritically accept cam­
paign agendas. This research on the 1992 US presidential election by Dalton and his col­
leagues (1998) found high correlations among candidate platform, media-initiated, and
public agendas, but a subsequent analysis using partial correlations by McCombs (2004)
showed that when the media agenda is viewed as intervening between the candidate and
public agendas, the original correlation of +.78 drops to +.33, suggesting that there is
still considerable discretion on the part of the media to set the public agenda in a presi­
dential election.

A more recent comparison of the agendas of the summer 2000 national convention accep­
tance speeches of US presidential candidates Al Gore and George W. Bush with the agen­
das of the coverage of these speeches in five newspapers found an average correlation of
+.48 for Bush and +.31 for Gore, suggesting that even in the reporting of major candi­
date speeches, the US newspaper journalists were not willing to let the candidates dic­
tate the news agenda (Mentzer, 2001). On the other hand, the consistency of the agendas
of the coverage of the acceptance addresses in the five newspapers (USA Today, New
York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Los Angeles Times) was considerably
higher, with an average correlation of .56 for Gore’s speech and .68 for Bush’s, suggest­
ing that journalistic views of newsworthiness were an important influence on the newspa­
per story agendas.

At the state level in the United States, Roberts and McCombs (1994) found that in the
1990 Texas gubernatorial election, the candidates’ advertising agendas exerted signifi­
cant influence on the campaign agendas of the local newspaper and the local television
stations even after other factors were taken into account. This analysis also found that
the newspaper agenda influenced the television news agenda, rather than vice versa, and
this leads to the second major influence on news media agendas, often called intermedia
agenda setting.

Intermedia Agenda Setting

Another part of the answer to the question, “Who sets the media’s agenda?” can be found
by looking over time at how the changes in one medium’s agenda precede or follow
changes in another’s. This kind of interaction takes place because journalists tend to
closely follow their colleagues’ news stories. One of the first scholars to analyze this
process was sociologist Breed (1955b), who wrote about newspaper opinion leaders and
the process of standardization of newspaper content.

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In the US setting, for example, there is considerable anecdotal and some empirical evi­
dence about the agenda-setting influence of the New York Times on other news media
(Danielian and Reese, 1989; Reese and Danielian, 1989; McCombs, Einsiedel, and (p. 364)
Weaver, 1991), as well as the influence of wire service news on the gatekeeping decisions
of Ohio newspaper and television wire editors (Whitney and Becker, 1982).

In a book about the reporting of the 1972 US presidential election, Crouse (1973) made
the phrase “pack journalism” famous when he wrote about how Johnny Apple of the New
York Times set the agenda for the other journalists covering the Iowa caucuses: “He
would sit down and write a lead, and they would go write leads. Then he’d change his
lead when more results came in, and they’d all change theirs accordingly” (Crouse, 1973,
85). Although Crouse referred to this as “pack journalism,” it can also be thought of as a
case of intermedia agenda setting.

A more recent example of large-scale intermedia agenda setting comes from a study by
Trumbo (1995) of the reporting on the issue of global warming from 1985 to 1992. He
found that as the news coverage of this issue steadily accelerated toward its peak in
1989, five major newspapers—among them the New York Times, Washington Post, and
Wall Street Journal—significantly influenced the agenda of the three national television
networks. A major intermedia agenda-setting role also was played by science publications
regularly scanned by media science writers and editors.

The major wire services, such as the Associated Press, also have an important intermedia
agenda-setting influence. A study of how twenty-four Iowa daily newspapers used the AP
wire found that even though each newspaper used only a small number of the available
wire stories, the patterns of coverage reflected essentially the same proportion for each
category of news as the total AP file (Gold and Simmons, 1965). Likewise, a reanalysis of
one of the early studies of gatekeeping (White, 1950) by a wire service editor called “Mr.
Gates” found a substantial correlation (+.64) between the combined agenda of the wire
services he used and Mr. Gates’s selections for his newspaper (McCombs and Shaw,
1976). A reanalysis of a follow-up study of Mr. Gates seventeen years later when he used
only a single wire service (Snider, 1967) found a correlation of +.80 between the wire
agenda and his news agenda.

An experimental study by Charles Whitney and Lee Becker (1982) also found a substan­
tial agenda-setting influence of wire service news on experienced newspaper and televi­
sion wire editors, with a correlation of +.62 between the proportions of news stories in a
large wire service file and the smaller sample selected by the editors. By contrast, in the
control condition, where there were an equal number of stories in each news category,
there was no common pattern of selection, either in comparison with the wire service or
among the editors themselves.

The interaction between newspapers and broadcast media has been another focus of in­
terest. Generally, researchers have found that the direction of influence tends to be from
newspapers to broadcast media. Using data from a 1995 election study in the Navarra re­
gion of Spain, Esteban Lopez-Escobar and his colleagues (1998) examined patterns of in­
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termedia influence among the two local Pamplona newspapers and Telenavarra, the re­
gional newscast produced by the national public television service. They found correla­
tions of +.66 and +.70 between the newspapers and the subsequent television news
agenda. They also found strong evidence (+.99) for the influence of newspaper advertis­
ing on television news descriptions of the candidates, in keeping (p. 365) with Roberts and
McCombs’ (1994) US finding that campaign advertising agendas can influence news cov­
erage.

Those instances when the mainstream media’s agenda is shaped by that of alternative
media have also been investigated. Mathes and Pfetsch (1991, 51) studied the role of the
alternative press in the agenda-building process and found that some issues spilled over
from the alternative press into the established newspapers in “a multistep flow of commu­
nication within the media system.” The liberal newspaper Die Zeit was the first estab­
lished newspaper to cover a counter-issue (boycotting the 1983 German census, resisting
German government plans for a new ID card), followed by other liberal daily newspapers.
Shortly after the liberal papers covered the issue, the pressure to discuss it became so
strong that even the conservative media were forced to report on it. As Mathes and
Pfetsch put it, “Thus, the media agenda was built up in a process similar to a chain reac­
tion. At the end of the agenda-building process, a counter-culture issue became a general,
public issue” (1991, 53).

Mathes and Pfetsch also found what could be called a “second-level” agenda-setting ef­
fect: that the spillover effect from the alternative to the established media was not limited
to the topic or issue of coverage because “the established media on the left of the politi­
cal spectrum adopted the frame of reference for presenting the issues from the alterna­
tive media” (1991, 53), although this was not true for the conservative media. And they
found this agenda-setting process also influenced the policy agenda, because the political
elites and institutions could no longer ignore the issues that had received so much cover­
age in the established media.

Song (2007) similarly explored the process of second-level agenda setting from online al­
ternative media (Ohmynews and PRESSian) to conservative mainstream media in South
Korea. By tracing the reaction of online alternative media and mainstream media in set­
ting the agenda after two Korean schoolgirls were killed by a US military vehicle in 2002,
he found that the second-level agenda of alternative media—the anti-US sentiment— first
moved to the progressive newspaper Hankyoreh and then was finally accepted by two
leading conservative newspapers, Chosun and Joongang.

However, this study also revealed that the transfer of agendas from alternative to main­
stream media is not a generally occurring phenomenon; for that to happen the role of a
triggering external event is crucial. In the case of the death of the two schoolgirls, the
not-guilty verdicts of the US military court triggered nationwide anti-US protests; conse­
quently, even conservative media could not ignore the anti-US agenda of the alternative
media.

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Several studies have revealed that online media are exerting a significant intermedia
agenda-setting impact on traditional media. Ku, Kaid, and Pfau (2003) investigated the di­
rection of influence between the agendas of two presidential candidates’ political web­
sites and that of the traditional media (i.e., newspapers and television) during the 2000
US presidential election. A cross-lagged comparison revealed that the campaign issue
agenda of the political websites of Bush and Gore influenced the campaign agenda of
both national newspapers and television and, generally, that Bush’s website had a greater
intermedia agenda-setting influence on traditional media than did Gore’s.

Moreover, contrary to the findings of previous studies that document the major
(p. 366)

wire services’ agenda-guiding role for other media, two major online news sites in South
Korea, in a reverse fashion, influenced the issue agendas of wire services, while influence
in the opposite direction was not significant (Lim, 2006).

Another study suggests that the directionality of agenda setting between online media
and traditional media can be reciprocal rather than mostly one-way (Lee, Lancendorfer,
and Lee, 2005). This study compared the issues discussed on the Internet bulletin boards
and those in newspaper coverage during the 2000 general election in South Korea. The
cross-lagged comparisons indicated that, at the first level of agenda setting (issues and
topics), traditional media’s agenda influenced the agenda of Internet bulletin boards. But
at the second level of agenda setting (attributes of issues), the Internet bulletin boards
exerted an agenda-setting impact on newspapers.

These findings suggest that the intermedia agenda-setting ability of traditional media still
remains powerful, even though they are losing their dominance. This is the case because
often the new media are not likely to create their own agendas, but rather rely on the re­
porting of elite mainstream media. Findings by Roberts, Wanta, and Dzwo (2002) show
that issues discussed on electronic bulletin boards (EBBs) were mainly derived from the
stories that traditional news media such as newspapers and wire services produced. The
New York Times had the strongest agenda-setting influence on issues discussed on EBBs
in this study.

Studies of the intermedia agenda-setting influence of social media such as blogs and mi­
croblogs have come to similar conclusions. Network analysis is frequently adopted to ex­
plore which media are exerting more influence than others.

For example, Reese and his colleagues (2007) measured the agenda-setting effects of
blogs by tracing to what extent blogs include links to professional news media and other
blogs. They found that blogs tend to make links to professional news media more often
(47.6 percent) than to other blogs (33.5 percent), suggesting that the blogosphere is
largely dependent on issue agendas generated by professional journalists.

Likewise, a study by Meraz (2009) also assessed hyperlink usage in 2007 within the
eleven newsroom political blogs of the New York Times, the Washington Post. and eigh­
teen top US independent political blogs. This study found that more than 50 percent of
the top-linked pages were those of traditional media, while 33 percent were from citizen

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media. Again, the Washington Post and the New York Times were the two most-linked-to
sites. In the microblog setting, the pattern was similar. The most frequently “retweeted”
stories on Twitter were found to be from traditional news sources such as CNN, the New
York Times, and ESPN (Asur et al., 2011). The authors argue that “social media, far from
being an alternate source of news, functions more as a filter and an amplifier for interest­
ing news from traditional media.”

As political activists start to use online media to promote their issue agendas, the impact
of these media as potential agenda setters has also been assessed. However, findings
show that the online media the political activists are using have only a minor influence on
traditional media. Blogger activists did not succeed in affecting overall news media agen­
das during the “Downing Street Memo” controversy in the United Kingdom (p. 367) but
did have a limited influence on the op-ed pages of mainstream newspapers for a short
time (Schiffer, 2006). Likewise, the citizen activist–created YouTube advertisements dur­
ing the 2008 US presidential election primaries did not impact the agenda of the profes­
sional activist group’s official campaign ads (Ragas and Kiousis, 2010), but the issue
agenda of the YouTube ads was strongly correlated with the salience of issues in cover­
age by partisan media (e.g., the Nation).

Studies also suggest that the extent of intermedia agenda setting by new media is contin­
gent on the kinds of issues in question: some are more likely to be transferred than oth­
ers. For example, a particular issue (abortion) on electronic bulletin boards (EBBs) did
not exert any significant influence on traditional media, while other issues (e.g., immigra­
tion) yielded immediate and substantial correlations with the issue agendas of traditional
media (Roberts, Wanta, and Dzwo, 2002). These researchers argue that controversial is­
sues are less likely to be picked up by other media, while “unobtrusive” issues (those that
do not affect most people directly) such as immigration are more likely to be.

Cornfield and colleagues (2005) also point out that the escalation of the conversation
from the online environment to the mainstream media is dependent on a number of exter­
nal factors, including the kinds of information discussed. Their study finds that an issue
such as a political scandal is more likely to trigger a “buzz” on blogs since that kind of is­
sue tends to lure a lot of people, including experts, into a sort of detective game.

Given that much attention has been paid to particular cases of online media functioning
as strong agenda setters (e.g., bloggers’ identification of flaws in CBS’s reporting that
during the Vietnam War George W. Bush had been given preferential access to a coveted
slot in the National Guard and was derelict in discharging his duties while a Guardsman),
the findings of limited intermedia agenda-setting effects of online media seem to be coun­
terintuitive. However, some argue that the role of online media is nonetheless significant,
because they may function as a channel that telegraphs the climate of public opinion to
journalists (Lee, Lacendorfer, and Lee, 2005) or act as a guide for the mainstream media
to the rest of the Internet (Cornfield et al., 2005).

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In other words, online media sometimes have a substantial intermedia agenda-setting in­
fluence as an important source for elite media. Farrell and Drezner (2008) argue that
blogs often have significant political consequences, mainly because of the high reader­
ship among journalists and other opinion leaders. While blog exposure was limited to only
7 percent of the general population in their study, more than 83 percent of journalists had
used them, with 43 percent of journalists reporting use at least every week.

The outcome of this intermedia agenda setting is a highly redundant news agenda, at
least within a single country or culture. Across countries there may be considerable varia­
tion, as Peter and de Vreese (2001) found when they compared television news programs
and public surveys across five countries (Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands,
and the United Kingdom).

(p. 368) Journalistic Norms and Traditions

Some of these differences are due to different cultures and norms of politics and journal­
ism, as Pfetsch (2001) has pointed out in a comparative analysis of political communica­
tion cultures in Germany and the United States. Her study of political communicators and
journalists in the United States and Germany as key actors in media agenda setting found
more emphasis in the United States on the norms of objectivity, balanced content, diversi­
ty, and conflicts of interest, and less on ethically impeccable behavior, openness, and hon­
esty.

She also found the perceived relationship between political spokespersons and journalists
to be more conflictual and less harmonious in the United States than in Germany, leading
to a conclusion that in the United States professional journalistic norms govern interac­
tion between political actors and journalists, whereas in Germany political norms are
more important. These different norms and interactions can result in dissimilar political
agendas, as the comparative study of British and US election agendas by Semetko and
her colleagues (1991) has shown.

Early studies of the media’s selection of news items suggested that this process is highly
subjective. Journalists tended to select or reject news items based on their own personal
feelings or to reject some stories simply because there was insufficient space in a news­
paper (Snider, 1967; White, 1950). However, later work has argued that the media’s se­
lection of news items not only reflects the subjective decisions of a small number of jour­
nalists, but is also a result of a series of complex interactions involving a number of fac­
tors, including social norms and traditions/routines of journalism. Shoemaker and Reese
(1996) argued that various factors, including news values, journalistic norms of objectivi­
ty, and organizational structure, tend to influence individual journalist’s news decisions.

It is also noteworthy that the core traditions and professional norms of journalists may be
changing, as traditional media are increasingly adopting a convergence strategy with on­
line media to attract larger audiences. Some have argued that online media tend to have
different traditions and perceptions of their roles than do traditional media (Singer, 1998,
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2001). For example, the online media environment tends to privilege individual view­
points and opinions, which can challenge traditional journalistic norms of objectivity.
Moreover, the Internet’s unlimited news space has challenged the traditions of gatekeep­
ing, which have also been part of the core professional norms of journalists.

However, another study by Singer (2005) revealed that the norms of objectivity and gate­
keeping are so deeply ingrained among US journalists that even in the online environ­
ment of blogs, the journalists tended to “normalize” the news in order to fit their older
norms and practices. Based on a content analysis of ten national and ten local blogs to
which journalists affiliated with traditional media were uploading news, Singer’s study re­
vealed that among the national blogs most of the content was in the form of news digests
rather than commentary. Her analysis revealed that journalist bloggers rarely included
user-generated content in their blog posts, suggesting that they (p. 369) were trying to
stick to their traditional role as gatekeepers despite the new format that provides the pos­
sibility of a more interactive and participatory environment.

Unexpected Events
Another group of studies has focused on how unexpected events (such as natural disas­
ters, accidents, unanticipated violence, and dramatic terror attacks) get included on the
media agenda. These unpredicted events, such as the September 2001 attack on the
World Trade Towers in New York City or the March 2011 earthquake in Japan, can cata­
pult a related issue onto the media, public, and policy agendas. As Schudson (2007, 253)
puts it, “Journalists respond to events that they often have not anticipated and do not un­
derstand… . Events are one of the things that prevent both states and markets from tam­
ing and controlling the news.” The same can be said of news agendas. Unpredicted
events often lead to media agenda shifts that are not controlled by journalists, other news
media, news sources, the public, policymakers, or media audiences.

Researchers have compared the effects of unexpected and pseudo-events on media’s re­
porting, and they have, to some extent, yielded conflicting results. A study by Livingston
and Bennett (2003) shows that, at least among the CNN international desk stories from
1994 to 2001, event-driven live reports that resulted from spontaneous occurrences (45
percent) outnumbered reports about the actions and pronouncement of governments (35
percent). However, it is also worth mentioning that even among the 45 percent of event-
driven reports, 39 percent of the stories included interviews with official sources.

Based on content analysis of news articles and a survey of journalists in the Philippines,
Tandoc and Skoric (2010) found that stories prompted by pseudo-events (60 percent) ex­
ceeded news stories based on unexpected events (40 percent). This finding stood in con­
trast to the self-reports from their survey of journalists, in which the majority (80 per­
cent) answered that unexpected, spontaneous events had a better chance of getting onto
the news media’s agenda than did pseudo-events. The authors refer to this situation as
“the pseudo-events paradox.”

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Moreover, it has also been argued that news media tend to have an advantage in control­
ling the national agenda during situations surrounding unexpected events. Lawrence
(2000, 9) notes that “in institutionally driven news, political institutions set the agendas
of news organizations; in contrast, as event-driven news gathers momentum, officials and
institutions often respond to the news agenda rather than set it.” However, it has also
been noted that not every unexpected event, however dramatic and sensational it might
be, influences the media agenda.

In After Disaster, Birkland (1997, 22) describes the kind of possible event that can influ­
ence the national agenda as one “that is sudden, relatively rare, can be reasonably de­
fined as harmful or revealing the possibility of potentially greater future harms, inflicts
harms or suggests potential harms that are or could be concentrated on a (p. 370) defin­
able geographical area or community of interest, and that is known to policy makers and
the public virtually simultaneously.”

In another study, however, Birkland (2004) points out that only the attack on the World
Trade Towers of September 11, 2001, had significant long-term effects on the agenda of
the US news media, making terrorism one of the most important issues on the media’s
agendas, while other unexpected terror incidents, such as the first bombing of the World
Trade Center, the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombing, and the Olympic Park
bombing during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, did not receive comparable attention from
media.

Studies indicate that this is the case because media agendas do not simply result from the
unexpected events themselves, but are a result of interactions among the event, the na­
ture of the event, and the composition of the community of actors involved (Birkland,
2006). In other words, an unpredicted event’s influence on the media agenda is depen­
dent not only on the characteristics of the event itself but also on the journalists’ norms
and traditions. Many researchers point out that in the process of deciding whether to cov­
er unexpected events journalists tend to rely on their normal routines (Tuchman, 1972,
1973).

Schudson (2007) describes journalists’ need to respond to events that they did not expect
as the “anarchy of events.” As did Tuchman, he argues that journalists tend to handle this
uncertainty by organizing and routinizing their process of work, as well as by assimilating
the new events using available cultural resources, such as past examples of similar
events.

In exploring the influence of unexpected events on media agendas, another interesting

point is that one critical, dramatic real-world event can alter the media’s agenda for a
long period of time. This phenomenon may be referred to as the “spillover effect,” in
which issues related to the unexpected event are drawn onto the media’s agenda. As Kep­
plinger and Habermeier (1995) assert, key events influence overall news criteria, and as a
result, the media tend to cover stories that are relevant to those key events, even after in­
terest in those events themselves wanes.

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The Media Agenda: Who (or What) Sets It?

In line with these arguments about the spillover effect, Choi (2009) found that, due to the
invasion of Iraq, related issues such as international politics and military-defense news
significantly increased in the US media for a long period of time. For example, the per­
cent of stories about international politics in the New York Times jumped from 17 percent
in 2001 to 31 percent in 2005.

The studies mentioned above suggest that journalists do not passively report unexpected
news events, but rather decide whether to cover them based on interactions between the
events and their own journalistic norms and traditions.

Media Audiences
While agenda-setting research has mostly focused on the media’s influence on public
agendas, some studies have demonstrated that occasionally the influence flows in the op­
posite direction, from the public to the media.

Based on causality tests between media agendas (as measured by the nightly net­
(p. 371)

work news from 1968 to 1990) and public agendas (measured by the Gallup’s Most Im­
portant Problem question), Uscinski (2009) found that for some issues, public concern
tended to precede media coverage. Among nineteen issues he investigated, civil rights,
the environment, energy, foreign trade, and social welfare were ones on which the public
was more likely to influence the media agenda rather than the other way around. Uscins­
ki argues that since those issues rarely are linked to obviously newsworthy external
events, the media tend to carry news stories about them only when there is evident de­
mand and concern from the public.

Scholars have frequently noted that journalists are more likely to react to spectacular and
easily reportable singular events and in the process ignore issues of actual public interest
due to a perceived lack of “newsworthiness” (Graber, 2010; Kosicki, 1993). However, the
findings of Uscinski imply that audiences may influence the media’s agenda when “obtru­
sive” issues (those that affect them directly, such as the environment, energy, and civil
rights) are involved.

The influence of audiences on media agendas is more conspicuous in an online environ­

ment. Studies have revealed that in such a setting, readers are not guided by the agenda
that the media suggest, but rather by that suggested by other audience members. This is
the case because many online news sites feature “news recommendations,” which show
the current number of times a news story has been viewed, the most popular stories
viewed within any given time span, and how readers rate a news story.

It is also true that in the highly competitive contemporary media environment, news orga­
nizations’ responsiveness to the number of clicks elicited by each news story results in
more news about weather, sports, crime, gossip, and entertainment than the information
about political, economic, and international issues that is essential for well-informed de­
mocratic deliberation, as Boczkowski (2010) has found in his research.

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The Media Agenda: Who (or What) Sets It?

Some studies have also examined how news recommendations affect the agenda of online
audiences. One example is a Web-based experiment by Knobloch-Westerwick and col­
leagues (2005) in which three groups browsed online news that featured explicit (average
rating) or implicit (times viewed) recommendations, or no recommendations. This study
revealed that such recommendations influenced both the audiences’ selection of news
and the length of the story. In other words, this study implies that recommendation sys­
tems based on audiences’ news selections function as a guiding agenda for the online me­
dia, rather than as cues of story importance, such as the display order and the headlines,
that the online media typically suggest.

Conclusions
This review of media agenda-setting studies illustrates an expansion of the scope of agen­
da-setting research from a concern with the relationship between media and public agen­
das to a concern with how the media agenda is determined. Although they play a major
role in shaping agendas, both of issues and attributes, journalists alone are not (p. 372)
entirely responsible for media agendas. Future studies should focus on the conditions un­
der which journalists’ agenda-setting discretion is heightened or lessened, as well as the
various influences on the formation of news media agendas discussed in this chapter.

One consistent finding from our last two national studies of US journalists (Weaver and
Wilhoit, 1996; Weaver et al., 2007) is that most do not consider setting the political agen­
da to be a very important role for journalists as compared with investigating government
claims, getting information to the public quickly, and analyzing complex problems, even
though making judgments about what to emphasize in news coverage and what to down­
play inevitably exerts some agenda-setting influence on the public and policymakers.

Sometimes it seems as if journalists are either not aware of the agenda-setting influence
of their news media or unwilling to acknowledge it, although some prominent figures in
journalism have been more forthcoming, such as the late Katharine Graham of the Wash­
ington Post, who was quoted as saying in 1993, “The power is to set the agenda. What we
print and what we don’t print matter a lot” (Freedom Forum Calendar, 1997). Likewise,
David S. Broder, former longtime political journalist for the Washington Post, has been
quoted as saying, “The premise we have to challenge as journalists is that the candidates
have the exclusive rights to control the dialogue” (Randolph, 1988, 14).

Thus the evidence gathered to date on media agenda setting suggests that news agendas
are constructed as a joint product between news sources and journalists, between promi­
nent media and other media, sometimes on the basis of unexpected events and media au­
dience preferences, and always according to the norms and traditions of journalism in dif­
ferent societies. As Berkowitz (1992, 81) has noted, “the creation of a news agenda is the
result of a process that depends on much more than a loosely linked transferral of one
group’s priorities to another.”

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The Media Agenda: Who (or What) Sets It?

But which of these possible influences has more or less impact on this process remains
uncertain, at least in relatively free and open political systems. This uncertainty only
heightens interest in studying who or what influences the media agenda in different cul­
tures and countries and during different periods of history. There surely is more to be
learned in trying to determine who or what sets the media agenda and how it is done.

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David H. Weaver

David H. Weaver (Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is Distinguished

Professor Emeritus at Indiana University.

Jihyang Choi

Jihyang Choi is a doctoral student at Indiana University and former newspaper jour­
nalist from South Korea. Her primary research focus is on the effects of new media
technologies on journalism and political communication.

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