Lecture Notes: Agenda Setting, From the Newsroom to the Feed

Executive summary

• The concept: agenda setting is the idea that the issues emphasized by the media become the issues the public considers most important.
• The classic evidence: in a study of the 1968 U.S. presidential campaign, McCombs and Shaw (1972) found an almost perfect correlation between media emphasis and what voters named as key issues.
• The digital shift: the agenda is now set by editors, algorithms and personal networks at the same time. Research shows that even incidental exposure on social media can move what people think is important (Feezell, 2018).
• The executive lesson: in politics and in crisis, the first battle is not over opinions. It is over which issues people are thinking about at all.

The original idea

The intuition predates the theory. In 1963, political scientist Bernard Cohen wrote that the press "may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about." Persuasion is hard. Attention is easier to direct.

Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw turned that intuition into a testable hypothesis. During the 1968 presidential campaign, they interviewed 100 voters in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who had not yet committed to a candidate. They asked what issues mattered most, and compared the answers with the content of the newspapers, news magazines and television newscasts those voters relied on.

The results were striking. The correlation between the emphasis the media placed on major issues and the importance voters assigned to them was +.967 (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). Voters also tended to follow the media's overall agenda rather than only the coverage favorable to their preferred candidate. The media, in other words, were not just reflecting public concern. They appeared to be setting it.

Why it works

Three mechanisms help explain the effect:

1. Limited attention. No citizen can follow every issue. Media coverage acts as a signal of what deserves attention.
2. Repetition and prominence. An issue that appears often, on the front page or at the top of the newscast, is perceived as more important.
3. Need for orientation. People who are interested in a topic but uncertain about it rely more heavily on the media to tell them what matters.

The theory also clarifies a common mistake in political communication. Campaigns often invest heavily in winning the argument on an issue. Agenda setting suggests that choosing which issue is being discussed can matter more than winning the debate about it.

The digital agenda

More gatekeepers, less visible

In 1968, the agenda was set by a relatively small number of editors. Today, it emerges from three overlapping layers:

• Traditional media, which still produce much of the original reporting.
• Platform algorithms, which decide which stories, posts and videos each user sees, and in what order.
• Personal networks, from friends and family to group chats, which filter and share content with an implicit endorsement.

Agenda setting by accident

The digital version of the effect does not require people to seek out news. Feezell (2018) studied incidental exposure, the political content people encounter on social media while doing something else. She found that this exposure can still shape which issues people consider important, and that the effect matters especially for people with low interest in politics, the same group that traditional news struggles to reach.

This changes the strategic picture. A citizen who never reads a newspaper may still absorb a political agenda from what appears between photos, videos and messages from friends. Whoever shapes that stream shapes the agenda of people who believe they do not follow politics.

The algorithmic editor

Last week we discussed a field experiment showing that engagement-based ranking amplifies moral outrage and intergroup conflict. Read through the lens of agenda setting, that finding has a further implication. If algorithms systematically promote conflict, then conflict becomes the issue, and policy questions that generate less emotion lose salience regardless of their importance.

Applications for campaigns and leaders

1. Decide the issue before the message. Before drafting a response, ask which issue you want the public to be thinking about. The best message on the wrong issue still helps the other side.
2. Do not amplify the opponent's agenda. Every rebuttal repeats the topic. Sometimes the strategic move is to change the subject with something more relevant, not to answer.
3. Map the three layers. Track what the press is covering, what platforms are amplifying, and what is circulating in private networks. They are often different agendas.
4. Reach the low-interest audience. Incidental exposure means short, shareable, credible content can reach voters and stakeholders who will never read a policy paper.
5. Treat crises as agenda fights. In a reputational crisis, the goal is often not to win the argument, but to prevent the issue from dominating the public agenda for longer than it must.

Closing note

Cohen's sentence remains one of the most useful in political communication: the power of the media lies less in telling us what to think than in telling us what to think about. The difference today is that the editor is no longer one person in a newsroom. It is a system of algorithms and networks that few people see and fewer understand. Leaders who understand that system can still shape the agenda. Those who ignore it will find their agenda set for them.

References

Cohen, B. C. (1963). The press and foreign policy. Princeton University Press.

Feezell, J. T. (2018). Agenda setting through social media: The importance of incidental news exposure and social filtering in the digital era. Political Research Quarterly, 71(2), 482–494. https://doi.org/10.1177/1065912917744895

McCombs, M. E., & Shaw, D. L. (1972). The agenda-setting function of mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly, 36(2), 176–187. https://doi.org/10.1086/267990