Contributions
Since the Chapel Hill study, a great deal of research has been carried out to discover the agenda setting influence of the news media. The theory has not been limited to elections, and many scholars constantly explored the agenda setting effect in a variety of communication situations. This explains that agenda setting has a theoretical value which is able to synthesize social phenomenon and to build new research questions.
Another contribution of agenda setting is to show the power of media. Since the study of 1940 US presidential election in Erie County, Ohio by Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues, little evidence of mass communication effects has been found over the next twenty years. In 1960, Joseph Klapper’s The Effects of Mass Communication also declared the limited effect of media. Agenda setting caused a paradigm shift in the study of media effects from persuasion to informing by connecting media content and its effects on the public.
Read more about this topic: Agenda-setting Theory