Salience (language) - Public Opinion

Public Opinion

A particular study that researched salience and public opinion examined most of the agenda-setting research since the United States presidential election, 1968 which has been concerned with how the public salience of the issue is related to mass media’s ranking of these issues in terms of frequency of coverage and news play. The main hypothesis examined in this study is the ranking of certain issues by the media, which, in time, becomes the public agenda. More importantly, this article searched at whether the perceived public salience of the federal budget deficit is significantly related "to the amount of public knowledge about the issue, direction of public opinion regarding one possible solution to the issue, the strength of that opinion and political behavior such as writing letters, signing petitions, voting, etc". The result of this study concluded that "even though the federal deficit issue was one of the more salient to newspaper and voters during the 1988 election, it (the federal budget deficit) was not as emotional or dramatic as some of the other highly salient issues such as drug abuse or environmental pollution. Thus it seemed likely that public opinion regarding a solution to the federal budget deficit might be rather evenly split and would likely be more stable during the month of interviewing than would opinion on some of the other more dramatic issues being emphasized in news media coverage and political advertisements". In other words, issues that directly involve subjects, in this study, would conclude to be more salient than issues that do not involve them directly.(9)