Agenda-setting Theory - Three Types of Agenda-Setting

Three Types of Agenda-Setting

1) Public agenda setting- Is in which most important public issues or problems are measured by public opinion and agenda.

2) Media agenda setting- Is the pattern in which news coverage print and broadcast news gets measured through the importance and depth of the story.

3) Policy agenda setting- Is more scientific in its nature it’s the thought in which we pay more attention to how the media or public might influence elite policy makers. Example (President, Congress, Religion)

Mass communication research, Rogers and Dearing argue, has focused a great deal on public agenda setting - e.g., McCombs and Shaw, 1972 - and media agenda setting, but has largely ignored policy agenda setting, which is studied primarily by political scientists. As such, the authors suggest mass communication scholars pay more attention to how the media and public agendas might influence elite policy maker's agendas (i.e., scholars should ask where the President or members of the U.S. Congress get their news from and how this affects their policies). Writing in 2006, Walgrave and Van Aelst took up Rogers and Dearing's suggestions, creating a preliminary theory of political agenda setting, which examines factors that might influence elite policy makers' agendas.