Agenda-setting Theory - History

History

The theory of agenda-setting can be traced to the first chapter of Walter Lippmann’s 1922 classic, Public Opinion. In that chapter, "The World Outside The Pictures In Our Heads," . Lippmann pointed out that the media dominates over the creation of pictures in our head and memory; he believed that the public reacts not to the actual event produced but the picture of the actual event in our memory. Lippmann argues that the mass media are the principal connection between events in the world and the images in the minds of the public. Without using the term "agenda-setting," Walter Lippmann was writing about what we today would call "agenda-setting." Following Lippmann, in 1963, Bernard Cohen observed 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. The world will look different to different people," Cohen continues, "depending on the map that is drawn for them by writers, editors, and publishers of the paper they read." As early as the 1960s, Cohen had expressed the idea that later led to formalization of agenda-setting theory by McCombs and Shaw.

Though Maxwell McCombs already had some interest in the field he was exposed to Cohen's work while serving as a faculty member at UCLA, and it was Cohen’s work that heavily influenced him, and later Donald Shaw. The concept of agenda setting was launched by McCombs and Shaw during the 1968 presidential election in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. They examined Lippmann’s idea of construction of the pictures in our heads by comparing the issues on the media agenda with key issues on the undecided voters’ agenda. They found evidence of agenda setting by identifying that salience of the news agenda is highly correlated to that of the voter’s agenda.

A relatively unknown scholar named G. Ray Funkhouser performed a study highly similar to McCombs and Shaw’s around exactly the same time the authors were formalizing the theory. All three scholars - McCombs, Shaw, and Funkhouser - even presented their findings at the same academic conference. Funkhouser’s article was published later than McCombs and Shaw’s, and Funkhouser doesn’t receive as much credit as McCombs and Shaw for discovering agenda setting. According to Everett Rogers, there are two main reasons for this. First, Funkhouser didn’t formally name the theory. Second, Funkhouser didn’t pursue his research much past the initial article. Rogers also suggests that Funkhouser was geographically isolated at Stanford, cut off from interested researchers, whereas McCombs had Shaw and got other people interested in agenda setting research.