Interview with Maxwell McCombs
Jan Alyne Barbosa e
Silva1
2008
During the week of May, 26 and 30, 2008, Maxwell McCombs had been lecturing at Universidad de Navarra, in the city of Pamplona, Spain, where has been a visiting professor since 1994. In order to sum up his huge
curriculum, McCombs is graduated in Journalism at Tulane University,
worked as a reporter at New Orleans Times-Picayune, and received his
Masters and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. He had also been
director of the News Research Center of the American Newspaper
Publishers Association for ten years, and, at present, holds the Jesse
H. Jones Centennial Chair in Communication at the University of Texas
at Austin, where he runs the subjects of Content Analysis, Agenda
Setting, Contemporary Trends in Journalism and Political Communication.
Worldwide cited reference and precursor in agenda setting research, he
is quite fond of metaphors, has a very refined sense of humor, and
method accuracy when it comes to explain the ideas surrounding agenda
setting research, which he has been conducting for over 40 years
together with collaborators from several different universities and
countries. This interview is rather a collection made from the classes
he had run in that week, and some hours of conversation we had taken to
complement the material. Besides making a comprehensive review about
the settings, concepts and domains within agenda-setting research,
McCombs talks about important studies conducted within the field,
collaborations with scholars and students, criticisms addressed to
agenda-setting theory, as well as new challenges and perspectives for
research on the World Wide Web.
A comprehensive perspective of agenda setting theory
MM: Agenda-setting started with a very small study in Chapel
Hill in North Carolina, in the summer of 1968, during a presidential
election in United States, and that small study tested basically one
hypothesis that has expanded to a theory which have five distinct
stages. The intellectual father of agenda-setting theory is Walter
Lippmann, an American Journalist and social commentator, and in 1922,
he published an influential book on public opinion. In the opening
chapter of Public Opinion has the title:
The world outside and
the pictures in our heads: the world outside, meaning reality, and the
pictures in our heads, meaning the world as we imagine it to be, what
we think it is. His thesis was that the news media is the link between
the world outside and those pictures in our heads, and he made the
important observation that people's behavior is a
response, not to the environment as it actually exists, but to the
environment as they think it exists. Although Lippmann had never used
the term "agenda-setting", the idea he was presenting was
essentially what we call now agenda-setting. The field of
communication really didn't begin to develop until
1930s, and, particularly for the area of political communication, I
usually mark the historical beginning of the field with the Erie County
election study, in the United States, in 1940, almost 18 years after
Lippmann's book was published. But in Columbia school,
Lazarsfeld and his partners took a very different approach from
Lippmann's to study mass communication.
Lippmann's ideas sat there, people read them, but it
didn't really attract a lot of researchers. The
Lazarsfeld's school carried out a number o empirical studies in the
1940s and in the 1950s. By roughly 1960, one of Lazarsfeld students,
Joseph Klapper, wrote a book called
Effects of Mass
Communication, which I sometimes say that it's the
worst title book I've ever seen in our field, because
the argument of the book is essentially that there are no effects of
mass communication. And that was where essentially where the field had
arrived both theoretically and empirically in about 1960s. There were a
number of studies that would find no media effects on attitudes and
opinions - which is the focus of Lazarsfeld's
research. But persuading people is not the primary purpose of
Journalism. The primary purpose of Journalism is to inform. So we
thought that, perhaps, there are other kinds of effects, and it was out
of that perspective that we drew the idea of agenda setting. Then, I
moved from UCLA, in Los Angeles, to North Carolina, where I met Don
Shaw, who has been not only my research collaborator, but also my best
friend for more than 40 years now, and we began to talk about how we
could test Lippmann's idea, and
that's when we came out with the metaphorical idea of
agendas. So, in the 1968 presidential election, we did a very small
test of the idea that has come to be known as agenda-setting. We did
not have a huge grant to do this, and we needed to do it in a very
strategic way. If there are effects in an election, where are they most
likely to be bound? Klapper's explanation of why there
were no effects was based on the idea of selective perception, that
media did not have effects on people's attitudes and
opinions because people put up a psychological defense against being
persuaded. If selective perception is the explanation for a lack of
effects, we decided to focus our study on undecided voters; we believed
that if there would be some kind of media influence, they were likely
to be seen among them, because they would be more open to media
messages. We decided to look at the agenda of issues in the elections
presented in the media and at the undecided voters'
agenda, and see of we could find some evidence of media influence over
the perception among members of the public. The kind of influence we
were interested about was not so much attitudes and opinions, but
rather perceptions of importance; the key connecting concept here is:
transfer of salience or prominence. So the media agenda is simply a
description of the patterns of coverage - in the case of Chapel Hill
study - of the issues in the campaign. These effects may take some
time to take place. We could look at the pattern of coverage of over a
week, or over a month, six weeks, two months, over some period of time,
using content analysis. So, we did content analysis of nine media that
undecided voters used in Chapel Hill to find out about the elections,
and we could determine what the media's agenda was,
using rank order, that is, what was the pattern of coverage for the
issues of the campaign, and more specifically, which issue is most
prominent, which is the second, third and so on. The public agenda
generally means that you have to do some kind of survey or poll. At the
time we were doing this research, we did our own survey, making a lot
of phone calls and knocking on doors to find undecided voters. So, we
found a small group of undecided voters and fortunately we had some
guidance from earlier public opinion research about how to get the
agenda of issues among the public. Back in the 1930s, the Gallup Poll
began asking the open-ended question that goes something like this:
"What do you think is the most important problem facing this country
today?" The jargon of this question is MIP. It's a well-established
question among public opinion research and we used a variation of
Gallup question. Then, we had a set of issues that have been ranked
according to how they have appeared in the media, and the same set of
issues - how important the public perceives them to be - and we can
construct a correlation between the two. In the original Chapel Hill
study, the correlation was almost perfect. That suggested that, indeed,
there is a great correspondence between the media's agenda and the
public agenda. Obviously, it didn't establish causality, but it showed
that it was a promising area of research. That was in 1968. We tested
one other thing in Chapel Hill study. We found this striking
correlation between the pattern of coverage of issues in the media, and
the prominence of those issues among the public, which suggested a
significant influence of the media on the public. Conventional wisdom
would say that selective perception blunts these effects, and we
thought that maybe they would only occur among people who were very
undecided. So we went back and looked at our data, and included all
types of undecided voters - the ones who had no idea about who they
were going to vote, and those who were leaning towards a candidate, but
were not totally committed - and wondered if, among those people, we
could find influence of selective perception, and to what extent
selective perception is a better explanation, or to what extent is
agenda-setting a better explanation for what issues they think are
important. The selective perception argument for agenda-setting
effects is that if you were leaning to the Republican candidate, you
would mostly read articles or watch TV news stories, and tend to pick
up the issue agenda about the Republican candidate. The same thing
would happen to the Democrat leaning voters. Our hypothesis was that if
a person were leaning to vote for the Republican candidate, the agenda
they would report as important would reflect the total pattern of media
coverage, not the Republican's, and the same for the Democrat's. That
would be a competing hypothesis: the agenda setting hypothesis against
the selective perception hypothesis, and, overwhelmingly, we found the
evidence supporting agenda-setting effects. This study is called
Stage 1 of agenda-setting research and it is still a very active
area. There are five stages at present and they are not stages in the
sense of historical stages, because all of them remain active arenas of
research. In 1972, the next presidential election, we set out to do two
important things in expanding this research. First, to test the idea of
causality, measuring both the public agenda at several points overtime
and the media agenda at several points overtime, and also to see if we
could determine in which direction was the influence. That had been
done in a larger city in North Carolina, Charlotte. Another important
aspect of that study was that we took a random sample with all voters:
decided and undecided. In the 1972 study, the evidence was very
clear-cut, that it was the influence of the media on the public and
not the other way around. This was replicated again in the next
presidential election, in 1976, in three different communities in the
United States, and at this point the research began to expand very very
rapid. We also introduced the Stage 2 with this research. Our argument
was that the media had unlimited power in focusing public attention on
certain issues, and this was not a return to the earlier theories, such
as the hypodermic theory. There were obviously some constraints of
media influence and in 1972, in Charlotte, we began to define what
those constraints are, specifying the processes that links the media
agenda to the public. The key aspect of the process, which is the
second stage, is the psychological concept of need for orientation,
that explains the limits of media influence on the public agenda. The
idea is that people need to map or understand their surroundings.
Figure 1: Maxwell McCombs
David Weaver, a graduate student of Donald Shaw in Chapel Hill, worked on
this idea of how people approach the media. The first aspect of need
for orientation is that no one reads every item on a newspaper
everyday, because they don't see all of them as relevant. And the
second aspect is uncertainty. If you already know everything you want
to know about a certain topic, you may or may not need to know more
about it. This concept cannot be measured, because there's no absolute
level of uncertainty. Some people read just two facts about a topic and
are quite happy with that. Other people read 12 books on the topic and
they feel that they don't know enough. So, uncertainty is defined by
each individual. Regarding the public issues, if the need for
orientation is very low, you are not going to find very strong
agenda-setting effects. If the need for orientation is moderate, you
are going to find moderate effects, and if the need for orientation is
very strong, you are going to find very strong effects. In Chapel Hill
study, we were very lucky in one sense; we studied only undecided
voters. This concept had not been developed at that time, and that
group we studies had a high need for orientation. The third stage
stands from the idea of what is on the agenda. I talked about an agenda
of issues, but we would talk about other items on the agenda, such as
corporations, political candidates or brand names. The Chapel Hill and
Charlotte studies have looked at the agenda of objects, that is, the
thing you have an opinion about, and if the agenda of objects become
prominent on the public agenda. But the objects have some
characteristics, attributes that define them. When the media talk about
some object, they don't just name the object, they describe it in some
fashion. And this is the third stage, the attribute or second level
agenda setting, which began in the 1970s. In this sense,
agenda-setting effects can occur in terms of objects or in terms of
attributes. The basic research model is the same, with rank order and
content analysis to see if there are correlations between the public
and media agenda. To measure the attribute agenda among the public, the
open-ended question we used in 1976, with three different communities
in the US, was: "Suppose you had a friend that have been away for a
long time and knew nothing about George Bush (or another political
figure), what would you tell them?" It doesn't push you to any
particular attribute, and we find the same kind of agenda setting
effect for attributes, as we have found for objects. As soon as we
begin to know the image in people's heads, we already begin to move
into the area of the consequences of agenda-setting effects, which
lead to attitudes and opinions, meaning that your behavior is a
response to the pictures you have about an object. If we get back to
the chapter of Walter Lippmann's book -
The world outside
and the pictures in our heads - first level of agenda setting says:
What are the pictures about? Second level of agenda setting literally
says: what are the pictures? And then, we begin to say: What are the
consequences of having the pictures? On the fourth stage, we went back
to considerations of attitudes and opinions, because if we think back
40 years, when we began doing agenda setting research, people were
convinced that there were no media effects on attitudes and opinions,
and we went off in a different direction. So, we came back to that
question, but now looking in a much more nuanced way. We don't expect
all of the content of the media to have an impact on people's attitudes
and opinions, only those aspects of the content that people consider
relevant, and for what they see conditional information in the media.
So we kind of understand the conditions under which we may find these
attitudes and opinions. The fifth and last stage is concerned with the
sources of the media agenda. So, the media agenda, which has been an
independent variable, becomes a dependent variable. Historically, this
occurs in 1980s and asks: if the public is set by the public agenda,
who sets the media agenda? Where does this agenda come from? I have a
metaphor to answer that question, and the metaphor is peeling an onion.
An onion has many layers and you can make this theoretical onion as
more simple or complex as you want to. I usually do a very simple onion
and it has about three layers: the outer layer is composed of humongous
events, like typhoons and plain crashes, and things that obviously get
into the news. But if we think about more deliberate building of an
agenda, then, the other layer consists of those efforts by political
campaigns, public relations agencies, public information officers etc.
to feed information to the media, organized information that comes from
the traditional news sources of journalism. So, one source would be
external, another sources are other media. The professional values of
Journalism, the traditions of Journalism influence the shape of the
media agenda. Some kinds of things are considered important, some are
not considered important, some aspects of a news event are considered
important, some are not so important, these help shape not only what
gets covered, but also how it gets covered. And this changes somewhat
overtime, not radically, but they change somewhat overtime. So, the
third area of influence is often referred to as Intermedia
Agenda-Setting, that is, the influence of news organizations on each
other. In most content, there is at least one, sometimes more than one,
elite news media, and it tends to influence - more than these other
aspects - the shape of media agenda overtime. In the United States,
The New York Times plays that role of agenda-setter of American
press. Such an institutional role has simply developed informally
overtime, but it is sufficiently established now that every afternoon,
The Associated Press sends its U.S. clients a memo, not for
publication, it is an internal memo that says: `The news stories on
the front page of The NYT tomorrow morning will be:' and, then, the
list. In Austin, Texas, where I live, the Austin American-Statesman
can even take one step further, by printing the South Western addition
of The NYT, which is transmitted by satellite, even before printing the
local paper. The design of The NYT and the design of the Austin
American Statesman are totally different; they don't look anything
alike. But if you look at the agenda of the stories, they will be very
similar. Obviously, a big local story is going to get the top of the
agenda in Austin. But when you begin to look at the national stories of
the agenda, they are going to be closely modeled after The New York
Times. So, there is an entire area of research within Journalism -
Intermedia agenda-setting - the influence of the news media on
each other to the study of news media themselves. The earlier work
refers to this area as Sociology of News that typically goes back to
the traditions of journalism and the influence of sources on
Journalism, and that begins to link agenda-setting within an
established academic tradition. Those are the five stages of
agenda-setting research, and they represent the settings within the
domain of public affairs. The domains and the settings are nothing more
than operational definitions, and they open up the possibilities to all
sorts of new applications, where you simply look at the relationship
between two agendas at the extent to which the prominence of the item
on one agenda can influence the prominence of that item on another
agenda, and it can be any agenda that you are interested in, any set of
objects, and any set of the characteristics of the attributes of those
objects that you are interested in.
J: We know you are a journalist, but how was the link between you
journalistic career and your academic career? How did it start? How did
that happen?
MM: My short answer is that I was a victim of a benevolent
conspiracy (laughs). When I studied Journalism as an undergraduate, at
Tulane University in New Orleans, I had a professor there, Walter
Wilcox, who, when I was finishing the course, said: `Before you begin
to work as a journalist, you should go to Stanford, and get a Masters'.
So, I applied to the Masters program at Stanford and went to the very
next fall to California to study there. The head of the program was the
advisor to all graduate students and this was his last year before
retiring. I appeared in his office in California in the fall and
referred to my professor in Tulane and he said: `Oh yes, Walt told me
about you'. He suddenly took a pad and a paper and said: `what do you
want to take? It's this
theory
course', and wrote that down, `and my Content Analysis course', and
wrote that down. "Go upper to the Psychology department and take
Statistics course, and, while you are there, take a Learning Theory
course". And then, as I sometimes put it, with some lots of democracy,
he says: `Go home, think about it, and come back tomorrow'. I had no
criteria! He said I should take these things, and I did. Essentially,
as a Master student, I took the first year of the Ph.D. program and,
then, he said: `go be a Journalist for a few years, then come back and
we'll support you Ph.D. program'. So I wrote a number
of newspapers, and the Times-Picayune in New Orleans had an opening,
so I went back to New Orleans, because I liked that city very much, and
was a journalist for three years. But by then, I had discovered this
whole world of research, and sometimes went to the library in Tulane
and read. So, as what I've said, I was a kind of a victim of a
benevolent conspiracy that pull me into the academic.
J: And Stanford at that time was doing research on media effects...
MM: Everything at Stanford was geared. They had a few
undergraduate Journalism courses, but their program was really a Ph.D.
program in Communication Research.
J: And your thesis? What was it about? We read your articles, but we
don't know much about your thesis...
MM: It was published, but I don't think anyone
has cited it in years; it was an experiment on how children learn
language from television. It had nothing to do with later research.
J: What year was it?
MM: That would be in 1966, and an article based on that was
published in Journal Communication about four years later.
J: Many scholars complain that media research is not centered in
Communication itself, but it is rather the result of interest from many
distinct fields. Do you believe that media effects is the research
tradition which comes closer to the Communication field itself?
MM: Yes, it is certainly. If you look at the literature of the
years, it has been the dominant focus. And it draws mainly on the
studies from other fields in the 1930s and in the 1940s, and from
Lazarsfeld's group; of course they were sociologists
who studied elections, Lasswell, a political scientist, Berelson...
they began to define media effects in the 1930s and 1940s and then,
when the Journalism schools began to offer their own Ph.D. programs,
they began to follow that same tradition very strongly. But of course,
as I remarked the other day, by roughly 1960, the evidence was: well,
there aren't a lot of effects on attitudes and
opinions, and people began to redirect their attention to other areas,
where agenda-setting came from. But the effects are still there, I
mean, agenda-setting is still very much a theory of effects, and it
covers a lot of other things, but it is interested in effects, its
evolution tends to follow that hierarchy of effects model. Framing is
essentially going down on the same path, as it is concerned with
effects. There are some other parts of the field in our college in the
University of Texas; there is a Department of Communication Studies,
and many of those people come out of more of a speech tradition of
rhetoric, but a lot of them also are into the political communication
area, and they are looking at...effects! The only time it appeared it
might move in a clearly different direction was in the...I have to look
up the citations...but a big swing interest in uses and gratifications,
I guess in the 1970s. I mean, again, that tradition goes way back,
there were studies particularly by the Columbia group in the 1940s on
uses and gratifications, studies of audiences for soap operas, I think
Berelson did a research on what it means to miss the newspapers, when
the newspapers strike, the routes of uses and gratifications also go
way back, it had never been a big segment of the field until I guess it
was Blumler and Katz did a book, some time in the 1970s, and, for a
period of maybe roughly ten years, it was a big area of interest, the
uses and gratifications, and many people at the time said: `uses and
gratifications is going to push aside the dominants of media effects
and that is going to become, if not the main focus of the field,
equally big with the effects'. It really didn't happen
because somehow - I mean, we have the residual impact of that, now we
routinely talk about uses and gratifications - there are a few
studies of uses and gratifications. It never became a theory, it has
always been a kind of remained perspective, and, after roughly eight or
ten years, the perspective was reasonably well developed, and then, it
got into what I call the dark side of academic world, where you do a
study and you say: 'For Internet users, when you look
at the uses and gratifications, there are these five
categories'. And they say: 'no, no,
no, there are seven'. I mean, those kinds of arguments
can go on forever and that just turns in on itself of these kind of
minor disputes over, you know? 'Is it the boundary
line here or is it over there?' And my concern is the
same thing may happen to framing because there are already so many
competing definitions and perspectives on framing that one person says
'oh, framing is this', and other
says, 'no, no, it's
this'. And I would say: `well, at least some aspects
of these definitions overlap with agenda-setting', and the other
would respond: 'no'.
J: I've read some articles of the book Framing Public
Life (1991) and some of them say that attribute agenda setting is not
framing research. I have to confess that I couldn't
see quite clearly the difference between them.
MM: Most people can't.
J: When Steve (Reese) came over here, I believe that the first question
I asked him was about the difference between attribute agenda-setting
and framing.
MM: It depends on what definition of framing is. In very
general terms, both, agenda-setting theory and the various approaches
to framing are concerned with - using some of
Lippmann's terms - how the media structure
representations of the world and in terms of how those representations
influence how people see the world. So, the general interest of the two
theories is very much the same: representations of reality and the
influence of that on individuals. The comparisons of the research in
the two areas have become somewhat problematic because there are many
definitions of frames. My approach is not to look at the literature
about he definition of frames, because there are probably a hundred,
but rather, review the literature on the studies that have been made,
and where framing and attribute agenda-setting overlap. Other kinds
of research will say they're not equivalent, and some
others say they're related, that is, they overlap, but
they are not quite the same thing. Taking that approach where
attributes and frames are equivalent: I put in my briefcase an issue of
Communication and Society because there are two articles on framing,
according to the titles, and one article on agenda-setting, according
to the title. They are three out of the five articles of this issue of
the journal. If you look at the lead article: `Media framing on capital
punishment and its impact on individuals cognitive responses'. The
article has two parts. The first one is content analysis of media
framing on capital punishment, and the second part is an experiment. If
you look at the data tables of this particular article, you see that
you could have done the same study calling it a second level of
agenda-setting study, where the attribute of the study is capital
punishment that have appeared in the media overtime. Both approaches
tend to start at the very traditional content analysis, and you develop
a list of categories, where different perspectives on this issue have
been talked about, and then, you go through to count how many articles talked about this and how many talked about that. There are a very
large numbers of these articles that appear, and that is probably the
most common that has been for perhaps ten years now. Some people have
argued that this is really not framing, that is just traditional
content analysis with a fancy new title. Steve Reese has made that
argument that this isn't really framing research. But
it appears under that name in the journals. Twenty years ago it would
have been media coverage of, or if you are doing an agenda-setting
study, you would do something other than just measure the
attributes' agenda, because the agenda-setting deals
with the relationship between that media agenda and usually the public
agenda. The recent issue of Journal of Communication talks mostly about
framing. Two of them talk about the knowledge activation model, and
this is a theoretical paper originally done about ten years ago that
uses that model, and says agenda setting is this and framing is that.
But the empirical evidence is that distinction doesn't
hold up. As soon as I got that issue of the journal, I scanned it and
looked at the footnotes and I said: 'what evidence do
they support for this distinction?' They
don't. About three weeks ago, Joan Mellor, who is a
psychologist, but her appointment is in the Political Science
Department at the University of Minnesota, launched a very interesting
set of experiments which directly tested that model, and two of the
experiments directly tested the notion where they say
'agenda-setting is this, framing is
that', and neither experiments support that position,
they found no supporting evidence. I reviewed a proposal for a book
recently by Franklin Angelo,
who proposes to get chapters
representing different points of view about framing
, to try to
create a dialogue, and get some convergence to sort some of this out.
So, when I wrote my review back to the publisher, an editor with whom I
work for about 20 years, I said: 'This is a very
exciting book, an important needed book, and I certainly endorse it for
publication, and I wish Frank good luck to get that among those framing
people.
Figure 2: Maxwell McCombs
He talks about a dialogue and I hope he can create that, rather
than everyone saying: 'my view is...'
There are many definitions of frames that, in fact, are a series of
relationships, and, in some instances, I think they are essentially the
same. We have already talked some about the large body of primary
descriptive research, where the word framing appears in the title, but
in many ways, they are simply the same kind of traditional content
analysis of news coverage that exists within seventy years. They would
just have a nice name, where they call framing, rather than just press
coverage. But the operational definitions in most of those studies of a
frame would function as the operational definition of attribute
agenda-setting. If I clip the data out of those I would say: Is this
a framing study or an attribute agenda-setting study? There is no way
in the world to make a distinction! So there's a large
literature there, it's primarily descriptive, a few of
those studies move on to look at effects and that's
perhaps the main distinction between that body of work on attribute
agenda setting. We've looked at the example of
campaign story with the descriptions of the candidates as framing
stories simply presented as frames. But my seminar analyzed that
it's an attribute agenda setting study, and found
that, in fact, it was evident it was significantly influenced in the
campaign year of the campaign of the media agenda. Moving over toward
the proposition that perhaps these concepts overlap, they operate in
essentially the same domain, and perhaps what it distinguished slightly
different is the idea of Salma Ghanem (1996) of compelling arguments.
That is: particular attributes seem to play a distinct role in the
process of influence. One possible use of the term frame is to restrict
to more fundamental critical trades that functions as what Salma would
call compelling arguments. If you have evidence of that, the simple
definition would be the dominant attribute in some set of attributes.
The compelling argument idea has a lot of potential. Here and there in
the literature you find evidence, and not always using that term, that
certain aspects of the situation exert most of the influence of the
media coverage on the public response to that coverage. I
don't think there is a huge number on that study. You
may be able to count them on one hand, and almost certainly on two, but
there might be an area where people could ask: `are there, for various
issues compelling arguments, certain attributes that play a
particularly strong role in influence in the public response to that?'
More interesting would be - and you could find some generalizations
across issues - what it would get into what we might call cultural
definitions of frames. Are there certain ways of talking about various
issues that a particular public in a particular country find specially
compelling? That begins to get into a more fundamental cognitive
structure, that is how people form their images and organize their
thoughts about particular public issues. To my knowledge, no one has
truly done anything with that, but I think it's a very
nice extension of Salma's idea of compelling
arguments. This brings to an extent to what Toshio Takeshita is doing
in Japan; his distinctions about attributes and frames have a
hierarchical relationship to each other. That is where they are
connected, where they overlap. He has frames as more abstract
categories of dimensions, and you have attributes as more or less what
we are accustomed to dealing with, through the accumulated tradition of
content analysis and agenda-setting research. The studies he has done
to date, look at one issue - the economic situation in Japan -
and he began the research with focus groups, getting pictures of people
talking about the issue and the purpose of the focus groups was to
identify the appropriate attributes of the economic situation that
describe the way people at that time were thinking about the problem in
that country. Out of those focus groups, he asked people: `how much of
these things matter? Why we are having economic problems?' for:
performing banks, overprotective policies, rising levels of public
expenses, unemployment, changes in the unemployment system, a pretty
traditional list of, I think, 13 attributes, and the survey he did to
measure the public attribute agenda. So, the first step of the research
is simply to measure the attribute agenda in the public. Once he has
that data, he goes to the content analysis and look at the same
attributes agenda in the media. At that point, it looks very much to
the traditional study of second level of agenda setting. The addition
is that he fits this data into a higher level or the abstract
theoretical framework. The general theoretical framework he is working
with is the one of problematic situations, a kind of way to look at
attributes in a more abstract fashion. A book titled something like
Communication and Culture is a study done not just in Japan, but also
in Germany and the United States. I recall also some data from Hong
Kong and a number of other studies from other countries.
It's a very interesting comprehensive international
study looking at this notion of problematic situations. In the original
study by Ito Kepplinger and Eldelstein, they came up with seven basic
problematic situations: loss of value, need for value, institutional
breakdown, social conflict, steps towards solutions, blocking the
obstacles and undetermined situations. The attribute agenda-setting
answer is using a time lag of 13 weeks. If you compare the way the
media talk about the economic situation and the way the public in their
response on the survey talk about them, there will be the usual kind of
outcome attribute agenda-setting analysis, the way public is thinking
about the economic situation is very much the way that the media was
talking about that.
J: What makes you to establish partnership with other scholars to work
on a project?
MM: I've always been very open to working with other
people. I just find it much more interesting to exchange. I did not
know Don Shaw until I moved to the University in North Carolina, but we
quickly became...well, I'm not quite sure whether we
became friends first or research partners first, it kind of happened
simultaneously, we were roughly the same age, we were interested in
many of the same things, and we can still work together.
It's much the same over the years with people like
Toshio Takeshita, and particularly lots of graduate students. If people
have interesting ideas, and I think I have something to
contribute...but sometimes students come and say
'would you work with me on this?' and
I like the idea, and I say 'I think
you've got a great idea, I'm not sure
you need me, I say 'I'll be happy to
kind of listen to its developments, but go do it yourself, you
don't need a partner'.
I've always enjoyed collaborating with people.
J: I made a list of some criticisms on agenda-setting research and I
would like you to make comments about them.
MM: Ok.
J: That agenda-setting it's not a theory, but rather
a model or a hypothesis, because it is always subject to be tested.
MM: People
have very strange definitions of a theory. As you saw, it states very
clear propositions about a whole series of relationships, and how
agendas are related in the psychology of
that relationship. I think it's well developed as any
theory in our field. You could say, maybe the Chapel Hill study tested
a hypothesis, but we are a long way from Chapel Hill study.
J: How about the sterilization of public issues when traditional agenda
setting research follows the legacy of public opinion polling?
MM: To
some extent, I think that is true, but if you think about that the key
measure, the Most Important Problem question is an open-ended
question, and people can say whatever they feel like saying.
There's always the temptation in analyzing the data to
fit in the categories they'd been using in the past,
but if you have some sensitivity to your data, you'll
become aware of that. What it used to be one category maybe now needs
to be two, or I need to address that not just one. I think
that's probably particularly the strength of attribute
agenda-setting, you don't just deal with the general
category of topics, I think you begin to dig into what are the
components. A study that no one has never really done
(I'm not sure if it has been done): there are studies
that look at the history of issues overtime; there are a few like this,
which have looked at one issue over long periods of time. It would be
interesting to do more longitudinal attribute agenda-setting studies,
and particular try to link those across issues and here is another
possible junction point with framing, to the extent that you take a
definition of a frame from a more cultural perspective. This is the
kind of part of the culture of the way people look at these things.
That would suggest that you ought to find some more patterns of
attributes across certain kinds of issues, and even, perhaps overtime,
they all systematically change. If they didn't all
change together, there is some interesting question, if at this point,
for a long period you say, I'll make up an example,
not for issues, but there's a very clear pattern of
attributes of political figures people emphasize. So,
it's very easy when you do that kind of attribute
agenda setting analysis on what your categories are.
I'm not sure if someone has ever looked at those over
time or across countries, and that would be interesting. Then again, I
would argue that is kind of framing is more sociological, in a sense of
finding more cultural patterns of perception. No one has really done
that. But certainly, if you have some sensitivity to you data to say to
the MIP question, then you should be able to avoid just locking things
into the categories that there have always been into the public
opinion. But, there is certainly a major influence of public opinion
research on agenda setting, because it is from where
we started. I say that's
the domain we started in, it's been moving to another
areas now, but that's the domain, so, obviously, it
shares some characteristics with that.
J: The general assumption of agenda setting is concerned to what people
talk about on their daily lives. But measuring the public agenda
through MIP question is one thing, and talk about media issues is
another...
MM: There's actually some evidence that indeed they do. A
study had been done many years ago when I was at Syracuse. What we were
interested in was: In Syracuse University, freshmen, unless they were
living in town, had to live in the university housing and they had a
common dining room. And the question was this: what people talk about
related to what they tell us in the survey. So, we did a survey and
asked what was the most important problem facing the country, and we
had our traditional data. Then, my graduate students get to spend an
exciting week going to this dining hall at lunch and dinner, and they
put their books there and were writing, and people were probably
thinking they were doing their homework, or a paper. They were actually
listening to what freshmen were talking about and making notes.
It's a technique we've used a few
times to study public opinion. There are some interesting studies done
during World War II in England because English people conveniently line
up at bus stops and you could listen to what they were talking about
while they were waiting in the queue. Of course that 98% of what they
were talking had absolutely nothing to do with public opinion and
public affairs, but what they did talk about very much corresponded to
what we found on the surveys, and you could, of course, study chat
rooms online, in order to see what people talk about;
there's some research on that, and probably the best
evidence on this are the studies I mentioned the other day on consumer
behavior, that people perceive "oh, the economy is the big problem",
and they have pessimistic attitudes about it, they find, within a very
short time, that their behavior corresponds to that, and the purchase
of certain types of products begins to decrease.
There's another piece of behavior with a lot of
research: voting. People go vote and which way do they vote? So, I
think there's good linkage between what people tell us
in the survey and what they do.
J: That traditional Mass Communication Research is concerned more about
measuring things and not thinking and reflecting about the findings...
MM: I
guess that there are two responses, and one of them is that some people
just don't like numbers,
and I think that part of it comes out of that. The other, of course -
and I think both some agenda-setting and some framing articles which
are dealing with public issues - are much too narrowly focused. I
think you need particularly in the introduction to the article to
briefly make a case of what "why would anyone care about this? What do
you need to know?" And it seems to me you can justify a piece of
research in two ways, either if the topic itself is of considerable
interest or in some ways it advances the theory. I'm
not really sure if a lot of articles do that. I'm not
sure this article on the media framing on capital
punishment...it's kind of interesting, but why should
I read this? I mean, you know why I would read it, but would I ask an
undergraduate Journalism student to read this article? Probably not.
So, I think sometimes I think people become so narrowly focused on
their particular interest or sometimes a particular methodology. I read
an article many years ago and the title was something like
Two many hacked problems the other than explicating them, and, ok,
it's yet another study of because the topic itself has
very important conditions of change. I think they change in some
significant way, in about every presidential election in the United
States, there will be dozens of studies of the elections. From that
point of view, I think it's a fair criticism. How
interesting is it going to be to look at? How many articles The New
York Times ran on the presidential primaries? It needs to make some
more important point. You need a certain amount of that as you develop
a point of view, you need some replication, but after a certain point,
that's enough, let's move on to
something new.
J: As the literature in agenda setting is so vast, to what extent should
a person read until start his or her empirical research?
MM: Going
back to the previous question: when you say to yourself:
I've seen other examples of this, this is more of the
same, theoretically, you are ready to stop. It's a
serious problem people have. Sometimes, the students never want to
finish their dissertations, because they think: `in the new issue of
this, I want to read these three articles'. You may never finish! There
is always a new article. At some point, you just have to cut off and,
unless someone says that there's this super important
new article that you have to use, read and take into account. At some
point, you just need to say `I think basically I've
got it'. And then start doing the research. You may want to browse some
of the newer material, and you may include new literature review, but
once you feel that you have the basic ideas,
you should start the research. You know, I've started
collecting new material for a new additional of the book and I think
we've looked into four journals from 2000 through last
year, and there were about 30 new articles that we have abstracts and I
would guess maybe four or five of those are really important and new.
The others are interesting and they update and apply to maybe slightly
different areas, but if you look at the list of 30 new and think `do I
need to read the 30?' That would be nice if you did, but read the
abstracts, and then go read these two or three if the abstracts are
interesting, but most of them we rely on the abstract. From there, I
know what basically is all about.
J: Steve Reese explained the hierarchy of effects model and I asked him:
`how about the audience? Does the audience influence journalists on the
selection of news?' And he told me to forget about the audience. I
wonder if the Internet would have the potential to change that.
MM: I
think it does and it needs to. My theory about why newspaper readership
and TV news viewing are declining in the US is that journalists are too
detached to the audience. If we did a simple model, most journalists
see it is as producers-message-audience. For journalists, it is
producers' message. That's it.
I'm a message producer. Particularly elite journalists
are probably out of touch. One example, let's go back
to Clinton administration. They called a news conference to announce a
program of expanded scholarship for graduate students, a fairly
ambitious program they were trying to create, funded by the Federal
Government, and it would be US$ 10.000. For a Texas student,
it's a big amount of money. And the person related to
the story said that they were leaving the news conference, the person
heard one saying to another journalist - they were both television
networks Journalists with very big salaries: "That is not an important
program". US$ 10.000 is nothing. That is just a chance to gain into
political attention. Particularly for the elite journalists, they live
in a very unreal world.
J: To what extent has the Internet changed the way we consume
information and shaped the public agenda?
MM: An
interesting question to pursue is: If people have access to the
Internet, what is the behavior pattern? What do they actually use?
Where do they go on the Web? If agenda setting has become a more
fragmented process, channels people use reflect their diversity of
agendas? Here, we can go back and look at some background from the
past, what we learned since the Chapel Hill
study, and basically what we've learned is that across
many different media
agendas
2 , the medium correlation between those agendas
is +81, which is very high. If we tighten the comparison either by just
looking at the newspapers, the correlation would go up a little bit
more or if we look just at the TV or to only national newspapers, the
correlations would go up some more, or to the correlation of a local
newspapers would be higher. But, even when we mix, national, local news
media and different formats on newspapers and television, which
presents the news in slightly different ways, there's
an extraordinary high level up agreement on what is the issue agenda
and that's been replicated many times since. And that
is really not a surprising finding because if you think about the power
of professional norms and traditions in journalism as a window through
the world, when they look at that window, they have a certain set of
news values in mind. For those who are involved in research, I
sometimes say you can think of these correlations as reliability
coefficients for the applications of news values. If many different
Journalists look out at the same window on the same day in the world,
and apply basically the same set of news values and traditions,
it's not surprising they come to highly similar
answers to what we should tell our audience about today.
There's a medium +.68 correlation also in a study done
by Shaw's student, who content analyzed traditional
and Internet news media outlets. And they agreed even more on what the
top 3 stories are, with a correlation of +.78. So, in terms of
diversity of agendas, it appears that to a considerable degree,
we've been finding the same pattern on the Internet
that we've found among traditional media that the
media tend to agree with each other. The additional question, which
goes back to what channels do people use, how many people make
substantial use of specialized sites, which might turn their agenda to
a particular direction. But the surveys, particularly in the United
States, indicate that, for most people, using the Internet as news
source is a very casual activity. People by large do not read the
online versions of newspapers on the way they actually read the printed
newspaper. What we find is that people in fact complain about reading
things on a computer screen for any linked period of time more than
five minutes, people by large don't find comfortable
to sit there for 15, 20, 25 minutes to reading online.
St: How about blogs? They are news sources for a lot of people...
MM: They
are sources for Journalists, not actually a lot of people.
There's an interesting survey, I think about a year
and a half ago in the United States, and they asked a very
straightforward question: "How often do you read a blog on the
Internet?" The most common answer given by slightly more than two
thirds of the respondents was: "What is a blog?" There are some
important blogs out there, but they're mostly
important in the world of Journalism and political operatives. They
really haven't achieved the state of a mass media.
They seem to be more a creature of - the term sometimes used in the
USA is their audience consists of political junkies - people who are
intensely interested in politics, which, for example, I think it
explains why they have been successful - particularly in this
presidential primaries season- as fund raising resources. Because the
people who go to the blog, who go to the candidate websites, are
intensely interested in politics, and of course, they are also the ones
who are more likely to contribute with money and the advantage of the
bloggers or the campaign websites is that it makes easier to do that
because in most instances you can pay with your credit card or bank
account number and give an amount of money, and you pay your
contribution, you don't have to write a check or put
it in an envelop and address it and go mail it, you can do all that
online. There have been a number of agenda-setting studies looking at
the relationship between blogs and the media and the bulk of the
evidence suggests they're very much creatures of the
media, that is, their agendas are set by the mainstream media. There is
a dissertation completed in Texas at the end of 2007 looking at this
link between political blogs - conservative, liberal and moderate
- and the agendas of The NYT and The Washington Post. And by chance,
the period that Sharon Maraz did her dissertation, the period that she
happened to pick - it turned out that was a month with bad news for
the current administration - was the period where the attorney
general, Alberto Gonzalo, was called before congress and he was a very
absent minded professor, he didn't remember much of
anything. What was interesting was that the conservative blogs were
very quiet during that period, the liberal blogs of course were over
the top, and the moderates were kind of in between. There is also an
interesting study from two years ago, based on a very large Pew survey
looking at the agenda setting influence of blogs and the media. And it
again suggested that, by large, the influence is from media to blogs.
Occasionally, you'll see spectacular kind of case studies where purely
the influence went the other way, but those seem to be the
exception rather than the day-to-day
rule of what's going on out there on the Internet.
J: Going back to the centripetal
perspective on agenda
setting3, how could one define an agenda of a blog, which is maintained by a person - which can be either a
professional or an expert or just an amateur - but, at the same
time, it's a medium, and, depending on the kind of
interaction and audience, it can be part of an environment of other
mediums? I would not be able to define what kind of agenda is that.
MM: There's a strict agreement on that. There are a lot of
problems on trying to content analyze blogs because many of them change
during the course of the day. Maybe the best way of sampling what the
blog is talking about is to sample its contents three times a day to
look at it very early in the morning, then look at it again in the
early afternoon, and then look at it again in late evening. You may not
capture all changes because some things may come in and go out, but you
tend to get the main things. That's one aspect of
measuring the kind of agenda. The other aspect is that most studies
includes is what hyperlinks are there, and sometimes, they include the
other direction, what other blogs or media sites are hyperlinking to
this blog? So, you have the content of the blog itself, its links out
to other blogs, websites or newspapers. Interestingly, although you
could guess what comments are, nearly all the conservative blogs
extensively link to the New York Times, which they regard it as awfully
liberal, but they link to it. So it's a more complex
content analysis. On the other hand, it's fast, most
of them are text, it's actually, in some ways, simpler
than doing television, because when you get into the television, of the
visual images, which you can spend hundreds of hours doing it. It
becomes very difficult. For television, people ignore most of the
visuals, they just analyze essentially the words and
that's beginning to change. If you do visuals, you
have to make sure you have very clear hypothesis in advance, if
it's presented in this way, by that person, then
you'll know exactly which aspects of the visuals to
get. If you try to do everything that you can imagine in terms of the
visual, you'll never get the project finished.
St: I have the perception that people don't read blogs
when they want to get information by the media. My perception is that
people go to the versions of newspapers or to Internet news media to
get information, rather than a specialized media. Maybe people use
personal blogs or social networks like Facebook, to be part of
communities where you can interact, but if they want to get
information, they just go to traditional news websites.
MM: That's generally what the evidence shows.
The question becomes, then, for things like Facebook and social
networks: "What's the content of those? Are they
personal?" It sometimes may replace telephone conversations. If you
think of older media, in the case of blogs, the specialized magazines
and economic journals come, people read them very intensely, but the
general public doesn't. If you think about some of the
long-standing tradition of political journals in the United States,
things that have been around a hundred years or more, their
circulations are very tiny.
J: Floyd Allport (1937) says that the public opinion is different of the
published opinion. I wonder how to distinguish public opinion on the
Internet and if published opinion produces effects as well on Internet
environments.
MM: That's actually very difficult. It reminds
me an idea that I call "civic osmosis". The short answer to your
question is `I'm not sure if it's all
possible'. This is the larger answer. In a paper I started writing on
this, I used a cliché metaphor, that everyone knows, that says: You
can't see the forest for the trees. As researchers, we
get very interested in the trees and we spend a lot of time describing
the trees, measuring the trees, and sometimes forget that we have to
back off and think about the forest. Some individuals sit on some
trees, others individuals sit on other trees, most individuals sit on a
lot of different trees. We sometimes try to focus our research too
narrowly. If we go all the way back to one of the early Lazarsfeld's
studies in the 1940s, one of the important findings there was that use
of news media for most people overlaps. What they did was a series of
cross tabulation, looking at the readership of frequency with which
people read the newspapers, listened to news on the radio, to a lesser
extent, read news in the magazine, but they concentrated primarily on
newspapers and radio, and they found that they tremendously overlap.
Most people either consume a fair amount of both or not very much of
both, there weren't many specialist people saying that
listened to the radio a lot, but paying not much attention to
newspapers, or spent a lot of time reading the newspapers, but
listening to the news on the radio. I did a paper to bring that to
television, using the national election studies and replacing radio,
which declined as a news medium, by that time with television, and
found exactly the same pattern, that people's behavior
tends to be pretty much distributive across all the news media. Another
example that comes to mind about how this mixes. For the most part, if
you ask people where they've found out about
something, they don't really know. If you only read
one newspaper or listened to news on a certain radio station and I say:
`where did you find out about?'
Figure 3: Maxwell McCombs
It would be a very easy question to
answer. Some years ago, researchers were very aware of how this mix was
and people had no idea about where they really found out about things.
It was a diffusion study that Ray Funkhouser and I did. He had
developed a very interesting mathematical model of how the news of an
event should spread through a population, and I was going to do a study
in North Carolina to test this. The idea was that we needed some
anticipated news event that would appear in the news by the middle of
the day. So, we could begin interviewing late afternoon, and go until
late evening to see where people found out about this and how many
people know about it. The news event that popped up was - this is
back in the Cold War - an American submarine simply disappeared, it
is presumed that it sank, and six months later, they found the wreckage
of the submarine. This was announced at the news conference by the navy
in Washington at noon, and we began interviewing at about three
o'clock in the afternoon, and continued until nine at
night. And we asked a big question: "Have you heard any news about an
American navy vessel?" to see if the people knew about it, and when
they heard about this. The Vietnam War was going on at that time, and
ships were having all sorts of maintenance problems. Some people would
have guessed it would be something about Vietnam War, but not. We came
up with answers like: "We read in the news this morning, or I saw it
on TV last night". Among people who knew a submarine was found, 15%
of the answers were clearly invalid to where and when, as they could
not have read on the newspaper in the morning, because it
wasn't announced until noon. People
don't keep track of where they learn things; they
jumble. Sometimes people find out about an event because people tell
you. So, the metaphor the osmosis is that the information acquires
creeps into people's consciousness from many different
sources, and they don't keep close tabs, and, in
addition to those, these media agendas overlap.
J: Maybe on the Internet, the role of media is less important than the
role of the environment. I've read a
Reese's article saying that on the Internet, the
boundary lines of professional journalism are blurring.
Wouldn't it be more appropriate to study
agenda-setting from an information environment perspective, rather
than the media perspective?
MM: You certainly could. I could answer that in two directions.
The paper I presented in Brazil in November was focused on news
organizations. Are you familiar with Chris Andersen's
idea of the Long Tail (2006)? I used that, and I said: news media can
draw on these experts. Well, they don't have to be
experts, but people who are knowledgeable on some areas particularly to
expand their local news franchise. Two examples, one where you
don't have to be quoted as an expert: A big dilemma
always for decades for newspapers has been the sports section. There
are too many sports, played at too many different levels, and very few
people are interested in all of them. Most people are interested in
certain ones. So, even if you have a large sport section, 12, 14, 16
pages, still many things you can't publish. Then, -
it's been an Austin example -
there's a very large park near where we live. If you
drive through there on Saturday, there are about six or eight soccer
games going on. These are organized leagues of children of different
ages, starting at about eight o'clock in the morning,
and going on until about 4 o'clock in the afternoon.
This is just one part, and there are several other places, so there is
an immense amount of soccer going on. Obviously, not all of that are on
the newspapers, they don't have space for that, but if
you take the concept of the long tail, and you put your sports online
- you can put all that online, there is plenty of room for it - you
could find plenty of parents and grandparents who are quite willing to
write up the results of those games, you need an editor to browse, to
make sure weird things don't get online. So, you can
take the whole area of amateur sports, you could tremendously expand
that coverage, and these people have to be in the events, but they
don't have to be experts sports journalists to do
this. Moving to a more quote expert area, perhaps an example of what
Steve had in mind: there is a river that goes to the middle of Austin,
and then downtown, and the university going north of the river. South
of the river used to be totally residential, there are a lot of
musicians and composers and most of them used to live there. As the
city has grown larger and larger and more people want to be closer to
downtown, when we first bought our house - we've
lived just across of the south of the river - people would ask my
wife: `Where do you live?' `We live in south Austin' and it had a
distinct field. About ten or twelve years ago, the newspapers reported
on things in our area, and then we lived in Central Austin. In the last
two or three years now they're all building these big
condominium developments, and my line is now one more economic boom and
people ask: `Where do you live?' `We live downtown'. Well, downtown is
encroaching on what was a very nice middle class residential area,
right adjacent to this park, and there's a lot of
concern about, particularly, I mean, some of the condos are only five
or six stories high, but there a number of post of 15 or 20 story
buildings in what have always been residential areas. So, on the list
service of our neighborhood, for the last two or three years, there has
been a lot of material about the zoning of our neighborhoods, for what
kind of buildings could be there, the history of areas projects, of
various developers who are pushing these projects. In most instances,
this is not their profession, I think for one or two of them, they are
essentially urban planners, others simply have just an intense interest
in this area, and they have become experts. So, yes, that kind of
material is on the Internet, and they feel really concerned with a
proposal for a certain kind of imminent project in our area,
you're more likely to turn to the neighborhood list
service than the local newspaper. Part of my argument in this article
is the newspapers need to tap into this expertise. My guess would be,
across Austin, there are probably 15, 20, 25 of these neighborhood list
services, there may be even more, and a lot of what is on the list
service are like: `could you recommend a good painter for my house?'
`Where should I take my car to be repaired?' But a certain amount of
that material is serious discussion. This isn't really
Journalism, but it's useful. Whenever any significant
crime occurs in the neighborhood, it's there. There
were a whole series of articles that were talking about a number of
burglaries and attempted burglaries in the next neighborhood over, and
then, a long report from someone who obviously was knowledgeable about
this. I mean, they gave the address and the location that had been
ruined and there seem to be a lot of people coming and going. In effect
they said the police had this house under surveillance if they thought
it was a site for drug dealing. Part of the related robberies in the
area is from people who needed money to buy drugs. This clearly is
evolving the Internet, and I think it has the potential for news
organizations to organize that. Let's say if you and I
are the editors for neighborhood news in Austin, which means mainly we
sit by the computer all day browsing each list service and of course,
once you hit the pattern, you are able to choose what is important or
what it's new, and then, you move that out, you may
need a little bit of editing, you may need to call that person and say
"I have some questions", and get the reaction of the city government
about that. So I think it's an open question: how much
does that get integrated into journalism? It's not
necessarily Citizen Journalism, as that sometimes has been talked
about, but it certainly has the potential to become that. And, in this
case, I think people are genuinely experts.
J: I wonder if public agenda could be measured through network
analysis...
MM: That's clearly the direction to get.
Network analysis in terms of sociological components that fit together.
It can also be brought with other names, in terms of content analysis.
Most of the content analysis that you find in both framing studies and
agenda-setting studies is pretty traditional, they use computerized
content analysis, it just plucks keywords out, it's
just about using frequencies. It is really using the capability of the
more sophisticated content analysis to look at the Internet connections
among for instance these attributes, looking at the ranking others, but
I think we can go beyond that and kind of begin to say `how these
things link to each other and how do they link back to objects?'
J: Agenda-setting began as a reaction to selective exposure, but I
feel that, through network analysis on the Internet, it goes back to
the perspective to which was initially opposed to, because people go to
search what they want, they have more control about what information to
choose.
MM: We may find a substantial amount of that. There is this
kind of interesting ironies, as it was a reaction against attitudes and
opinions, we've come right back to that, it was a
reaction against selective perception, I think we're
finding some of that certainly on websites, and that becomes an
interesting question to be asked to what extent do people lock
themselves into a pretty close circle. Sometimes, we refer to the
expression
The Daily Me, the newspaper that has only what I
want to be in. Most people at least want some exposure to a broader
wave of news because of certain things; you can't say
`I want news about' because you don't know what
it's going to happen. So, most people leave the door
open about it, but I think it's an interesting
phenomena.
Footnotes:
1The interviewer is a Ph.D. researcher from the Post-Graduate Program in Communication and Contemporary Culture at the School of Communication of Universidade Federal da Bahia, as well as a professor of Theories of Communication, Theories of Journalism and Methodology of Scientific Research. Sponsored by Capes, her Ph.D. investigation is concerned with the development of research designs to investigate agenda setting on the World Wide Web. At the time of the interview, she had been doing a doctoral stage at Universidad de Navarra (in Pamplona, Spain).
2McCombs
talks about the matrix correlation and the mediums they have
analyzed.
3McCombs makes a distinction between two opposite trends in agenda setting research: the first one is the centripetal inwards perspective, in which agenda-setting basic concepts continue to be explicated; and the second is the centrifugal outwards perspective, in which
agenda-setting theory tends to be expanded.
