This document summarizes key concepts related to agenda setting and framing in journalism. It discusses four categories of media effects: agenda setting, priming, cueing, and framing. Agenda setting refers to how the media influences the public's perceptions of what issues are important. It also reviews research on agenda setting and the factors that influence setting the public, media and policymaker agendas. The document then discusses priming, cueing and framing effects, how frames can be used to shape thought, and provides a model of the framing process.

1. Journalism 614:
Agenda Setting and Framing

2. Categories of Effects:
♦ 1. Agenda Setting
♦ 2. Priming
♦ 3. Cueing
♦ 4. Framing

3. Agenda Setting is
♦ …the process by which problems and
alternative solutions gain or lose public
and elite attention.
♦ …a fierce competition because we cannot
consider every issue at once because the
public’s “carrying capacity” is too small

4. Why is Agenda Setting Important?
♦ E. E. Schattschneider: ‘The definition of the
alternatives is the supreme instrument of power”
♦ Control over agenda means control over outcomes
♦ Agenda setting is therefore about getting on the
agenda, and about keeping things off of it.

5. The Foundations of a Paradigm
♦ Rejection of persuasion
– Focus on cognitive processes
♦ Rediscovery of powerful effects
– Response against the limited effects paradigm
♦ Interest in media--politics interface and
conditions under which effects occur

6. Agenda Setting
♦ Agenda-setting
– “telling us what to think about” (Cohen)
– Identified with McCombs & Shaw (1972)
– Emphasis on how the media shapes public opinion
concerning the relative importance of issues
– Indicators of media emphasis
• Attention (frequency and length of stories)
• Placement (top story, “above the fold”)
• Content cues (headlines, photos, tone)
• Number of sources / Number of outlets
• Others?

7. Four Phases of Research
♦ Nearly 300 published studies
– First phase - publication of McCombs &
Shaw’s original research - coin the term
– Second phase - follow-up to confirm the effect
and discover contingencies
– Third phase - new domains - agenda of
candidate character and personal concerns
– Fourth phase - attention to the sources of the
media agenda - inter-media effects

8. How Issues Reach the Agenda
♦ Group conflict
♦ Leadership activity
♦ Protest movements
♦ Media coverage or activity
♦ Changes in indicators
♦ Political changes
♦ Crises and Focusing Events

9. Special Role of Focusing Events
♦ “a rare, sudden, well-known, actually or
potentially harmful event.”
– Mass Shooting, Earthquake, Govt Shutdown…
♦ Tend to induce sudden attention to issues
♦ Can trigger intensive group interest/activity
♦ Focusing events can fade fast off agenda

10. Studying Agenda Setting
♦ Time-order is key
– Media shape public agenda?
– Media follow public agenda?
– Both respond to something else
• Institutional prompting
• Objective reality
– Studies show that there is a time-ordered
connection between media and public agenda
• Cross-lagged correlations - arbitrary time lag
• More sophisticated studies improve early methods

11. Major Questions
♦ Who sets the public agenda, and under what
conditions is this effect likely to occur?
♦ Who sets the media agenda, and which
media direct the agenda-setting process?
♦ Who sets the agendas of interest groups,
leaders, and policy makers?

12. Contingent conditions
♦ Need for cognition/orientation
– Increases agenda setting through media surveillance
♦ Political involvement/interest
– Increases agenda setting through news use
♦ Issue abstraction
– More pronounced for abstract issues
♦ Personal viewpoints
– Increases when consistent with personal orientation
♦ Interpersonal discussion
– Reduces media dependence for agenda development

13. Setting the media agenda
♦ Intermedia agenda setting - influence that agendas
of different media have on each other
♦ Political advertising — and political elites —
drive the agenda of all news organization
♦ National news agencies have been found to drive
the agenda of local news agencies
♦ National newspaper have been found to drive the
agenda of television networks and digital outlets

14. Setting the elite agenda
♦ Reciprocal causation between journalists
and policy makers - both have influence
♦ Media coverage can help shape the agenda
of policy-makers
– However, these effects do not appear to
ultimately affect policy making itself
♦ Elites pay attention to the public agenda
that the media helps to establish

15. Problems with Agenda Setting
♦ Trouble linking evidence to key theories of
society, news work, and human psychology
– Often focused on aggregate level effects – shift
in issue priorities across the population – and
rely on incomplete psychological explanations
– Failure to fully integrate content and effects in
coherent studies of media effects
• Limited experimental evidence

16. Questions about Digital Media
♦ May lessen the agenda-setting effects
– More content choice
– More control over content
– More outlets and opinions
♦ Blogs, in particular, rely on media agenda
– This may strengthen agenda setting effects

17. Priming (Iyengar & Kinder)
♦ Drawing attention to an issue can change
the criteria used to evaluate political leaders
– Issues high on the public agenda serve as basis
for judging the success or failure of elites
– Short-term effect or long-term effect?
– Priming in politics may have profound effects
• E.g., Media attention to Persian Gulf war primes
positive evaluation of Bush Presidency which
reversed when focus was shifted back to the
economy (Krosnick)

18. Priming Issues
♦ Increasing attention to effects of priming on other
issues through the “spread of activation”
♦ Encountering moral-ethical issues changes how
people understand other issues they encounter
– Come to understand other issues in ethical terms
♦ Can also prime particular candidate characteristics
– Focus on issues can prime judgments of competency or
integrity, depending on the issue

19. Second Level Agenda-Setting
♦ Revised version of the theory
♦ Media tell us how and what to think
– Attention to particular attributes
♦ Sounds like framing
– “to frame is to select some aspects of a
perceived reality and make them more salient
in a communication text” - Entman

20. Framing
♦ Two broad traditions
– Sociological - Outcome of news work
• The process of news production
– Psychological - Categories of the mind
• The process of audience consumption

21. Framing and Cueing
♦ The power of language to shape thought
– Frames - broad organizing principles
• Idea used to structure a news story
• Journalistic decision
– Cues - labels and categories
• Word or phrase with rhetorical value
• Contested by elites

22. Framing and Cueing
♦ Episodic vs. Thematic frames
♦ Strategy vs. Policy frames
♦ Ethical vs. Material frames
♦ Individual vs. Societal frames
♦ Pro-life vs. anti-abortion
♦ Estate tax vs. death tax
♦ Terrorists vs. insurgents

23. Episodic vs. Thematic
♦ Iyengar, 1991
– Media tend to present social problems in
episodic terms (individual, short-term) instead
of thematic terms (collective, long-term)
– This patterns encourages audiences to attribute
responsibility for solving the problem to the
individual instead of the collective

24. Strategy vs. Policy
♦ News coverage tends to focus on the game
of politics, and the competition between
players, instead of the features of policy
– Particularly true during elections
♦ Leads to audience cynicism and may
contribute to the erosion of efficacy

25. Ethical vs. Material
♦ News media tend to construct issues in
terms of opposing rights / moral principles,
as opposed to economics or pragmatics
♦ Encourages simplified electoral decision
making and character attributions

26. Individual vs. Societal
♦ News media tend to frame issues at the
individual level, as opposed to the societal
level, due to dominant news values
♦ This frame distinction interacts with other
coverage elements to influence the
complexity of thought, tolerance judgments

27. News Norms and Frame Effects
♦ These dominant news norm of focusing on
specific episodes over broader themes,
political strategy over policy, matters of
principle over pragmatics, and individuals
over groups all reduce citizen competence
– What does this say about the work of
journalists? How might they change?

28. Frames and Cognitive Processing
♦ Message frames interact with:
– Audience predispositions and knowledge
– Framing effects are not uniform
• Different for different people
♦ Cognitive structures (schemas):
– Constellations of knowledge used to organize
processing of new info (e.g., news stories)
• Organized into associated networks of information
• Developed through past experiences, information
exposure, and social interactions

29. Associative Networks
♦ Networks of interrelated constructs
– Frames/cues activate mental constructs
♦ Construct activation from interconnected network
– Spread of activation through associated nodes
♦ Complexity of activated thoughts
– Concerned with form, as opposed to content, of memory
– Complexity as an indicator of political sophistication?

30. Model of Framing Effects

31. Source and Language Cues
♦ Source cues - who is making the comment?
– Conservative or Liberal
– Black or White
– Different leaders
♦ Language cues - what labels are used?
– Urban sprawl vs. Suburban development
– Pro-Choice vs. Abortion Advocates
– Insurgent vs. Terrorists

32. Powerful Cues Recast Debates
♦ Get in Groups of three to four:
– Pick a set of cues that has defined the debate
about a specific policy or product
– Pick a policy debate or product category and
discuss how the cues have defined this choice
♦ Ex. Partial Birth Abortion vs. Late Term Abortion

33. Frames and Cues Interact
♦ Organizing devices and source or language cues
work together to influence judgment
– Tolerance judgments affected by individual frame
combined with “othering” cues
♦ How might they work together to influence
tolerance and the desire to speak out?
♦ Get Back in Groups: Come up with an example of
how a news frame and elite cue might work
together to sway opinion in particular ways.
– Can stick to the cue you had in mind or pick new one