Agenda Setting
What it is
Controlling what people think about by controlling what topics receive attention, coverage, and prominence in public discourse.
How it works
Real-world examples
- •Founding study: McCombs and Shaw's 1968 Chapel Hill study found that voters' issue priorities tracked the volume of news coverage rather than the candidates' stated positions.
- •Crime in the 1990s: local television crime coverage rose while US violent crime fell after 1991; Gilliam and Iyengar (2000) showed that exposure to crime news shaped both fear and policy preferences.
- •2016 US election: the Shorenstein Center's analysis of general-election coverage (Patterson 2016) found that coverage of Hillary Clinton's emails and other controversies exceeded coverage of her policy positions.
- •Partisan channels on both sides: DellaVigna and Kaplan (2007) estimated that the entry of Fox News into cable markets between 1996 and 2000 raised the Republican vote share; Martin and Yurukoglu (2017) estimated persuasive effects for both Fox News and MSNBC audiences, larger for Fox.
- •United Kingdom, 2016: Loughborough University's media monitoring found immigration became the most covered issue of the referendum campaign's final weeks, led by the Daily Mail, the Sun, and the Express.
- •Platforms: Facebook's 2018 ranking change that rewarded engagement, documented in the Wall Street Journal's 2021 Facebook Files, set agendas by outrage rather than significance; trending-topic lists do the same by volume.
Ethical guidelines
Editors and leaders must choose what to cover; that choice is legitimate when it is transparent and proportionate to the public interest. It becomes manipulation when attention is engineered to bury inconvenient facts or to keep a manufactured issue salient for private benefit.
- ●Agenda-setting power carries responsibility to represent issues proportional to their actual impact.
- ●Deliberately burying important stories to protect interests is a betrayal of public trust.
- ●Transparent editorial criteria help the public understand why certain topics receive coverage.
How to defend against it
- ►Regularly ask: "What important things are NOT being talked about right now?"
- ►Seek out specialist and international media for coverage of under-reported issues.
- ►Be skeptical when a single story dominates all coverage — ask what else is happening.
From the Defense Playbook
When you have to correct a falsehood, open with the true statement, mention the falsehood once with a clear warning that it is false, and close by repeating the truth, so that the accurate version gets the prominent positions and the most repetitions.
When you correct a falsehood, put the true statement in the headline, subject line, first sentence, and image, and keep the false claim out of those positions, because most of the audience will see only that part and will carry away whatever it says.
Every playbook entry states how strong its evidence is and when not to use it. Browse the full playbook.
References
- McCombs, M. E., & Shaw, D. L. (1972). The agenda-setting function of mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly, 36(2), 176–187 · linkThe Chapel Hill study: the issues undecided voters rated most important closely tracked the issues the news media had covered most, the original evidence for the entry's claim that media shape what people think about.
- Cohen, B. C. (1963). The Press and Foreign Policy. Princeton University PressSource of the formulation the entry paraphrases: the press rarely succeeds in telling people what to think, but is remarkably successful in telling them what to think about.
- Iyengar, S., & Kinder, D. R. (1987). News That Matters: Television and American Opinion. University of Chicago PressControlled experiments establishing the causal direction: altering which problems television news covered changed which problems viewers judged most important (agenda setting) and the standards by which they evaluated the president (priming).