Donald L. Shaw, Donald Shaw, Professor, University of North Carolina, USA;
L. Stevenson, Robert Stevenson, Professor, University of North Carolina, USA;
Bradley J. Hamm, Bradley Hamm, is a professor at is a professor at islet university.
The world of 1968 is very different from the world of the early 21st century. U.S. President Richard Nixon, elected in 1968, was planning to emerge from the quagmire of the Vietnam War, and anti-war voices echoed in cities, as did the traditional American black civil rights movement. The Assassins assassinated the President's strong contender, Democrat Robert E. Lee. F. Kennedy, who is the son of John F. Kennedy F. Kennedy's younger brother, who was also assassinated in 1963, was also assassinated by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Also in the same year, CBS host Walter Cronquette sent a report from Vietnam, suggesting that the time had come to withdraw troops from Vietnam, arguing that no matter what, after all, the country had fought a just war. These major events continue to enter the public consciousness.
1 1968 study
At Chapel Hill in North Carolina, these and other issues recurred in newspapers and television, and it was here that the first study of the public agenda for news began (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). In 1968, scholars were able to sample information into a small community and were guaranteed a representative image of major issues. Chapel Hill has three major television networks, NBC, CBS and ABC, as well as public television and several daily newspapers. During the 1968 presidential election, Chapel Hill Research used content analysis to monitor two television networks and five daily newspapers.
In 1968, citizens who wanted information had to read newspapers, watch television, listen to radios and buy magazines. A panel study, conducted at the time, identified 100 people who decided to vote as repeat visiting groups who hesitated between Republican candidate Richard Nixon (who later won) and Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey, most of whom needed information to make decisions. At the time, it was easy to track their choices of information over time and see if there was a link between major media issues, public awareness, and candidate selection, although the 1968 study did not track whether and whose votes were cast by hesitant voters. But it turned out that there was a connection.
Media information was available to audiences in 1968 and still to audiences in 2001, but the mediums that carried the agenda that could form public issues were greatly expanded. In 1968, in the news map of the world, you could easily distinguish between a few events reported by the major media, but now we see a montage in which the colors of one agenda are abstractly mixed with others. Today, it becomes challenging to obtain an overview of the information accessed by the public in the Chapel Hill area (and across the country) through sampling strategies.
Of course, the major news outlets still have enormous power to attract public attention. In 1994, rugby star and commentator O. The murder of J. Simpson's wife, Nicole Simpson (and her boyfriend), has brought other issues out of the public eye, as did the death of Princess Diana in a car accident in 1997. But in 2001, the most popular TV entertainment programs could only attract about 1/3 of the audience in prime time 10 years ago. For example, the audience of the World Baseball Tour is declining every year. 2000 produced the lowest ratings in league history. The previous record low also appeared in the recent year, in 1998, when the ratings fell by more than 50% compared to 1986. One viewership point represents 1 million TV households, which means that the world tour's audience has been reduced by 12 million in less than 10 years.
Similarly, American spectators watching the 2000 Summer Olympics reached their lowest point since 1968. Television viewers of NBA basketball games are also declining, exacerbated by the retirement of Chicago Bulls player Michael Jordan. There are always many possible justifications behind every drop in ratings, and some TV officials even blame the ratings survey system itself. But in any case, the audience for mass communication is not, and perhaps never has been, a passive recipient of mass communication. Individuals can organize their own agendas.
2 Agenda settings in place and class
The process of social evolution represents the collision of various agendas in the process of historical development. Looking back, it is clear that American communication has gone through four distinct stages, each of which has a dominant medium. The theoretical research perspective of each stage is also adapted to that stage. In the United States, roughly between 1700 and 1870, newspapers were the medium of informing and encouraging citizens to rebel against England and fight for political independence, and newspapers, supplemented by magazines, continued to perform this role in the American Civil War, in which slavery was completely eradicated from the southern states in the northern states. The Declaration of Independence dealt with the independence of a region, and although the civil war was a social issue of slavery, it was still an issue linked to a particular region. Local journalism provides people with an agenda for where they live, and it was, and remains, a major advantage of newspapers.
But between 1870 and 1930, the magazine became an important agenda carrier for people of different classes, and the class in this case is a class in the broad sense, not limited to economic status. Magazines, such as Redbook, were originally created for women, and Progressive represented the interests of farmers. The Nation, edited by Englishman Edward Lawrence Godkin, represents the views of the upper middle class and the management class, while Atlantic, Scribner's and Harper's were founded earlier and became a showcase for American work. In 1902, Licoln Steffens and Ida B. Tarbell (among others) drew attention to the magazine's ability to set agendas, and their pickpocket-style investigative reporting drew public attention to economic inequalities that had existed in the past and were associated with economic giants such as oil tycoon Rockefeller, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, and financial magnate J. Kelly. P. Morgan and so on.
While magazines emerged to accommodate the interests of specific audiences, some daily newspapers also began to focus on class agendas. Joseph Pulitzer's St. Louis Post, and the new York World, became crusade advocates for the poor and migrant workers struggling to find a place in the U.S. economy. William Randolph Hirst, Pulitzer's main contender, continued to complain along the lines of the New York World and other newspapers. In 1870-1930, many groups gathered around certain agendas, using magazines to achieve ideals.
3 Agenda setting of the mass media
The practice of linking radio stations began in 1926, with NBC's David Sarnoff as the first, followed by THE CBS's William Paley in 1928, which allowed political and cultural leaders to influence the national agenda. By the late 1920s, a large portion of national advertising had gone from newspapers to broadcasts, and by the late 1930s, most Americans reported that they were getting their information from broadcasting rather than the print media.
In 1933, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the radio program Fireside Talk to appease Americans in the early days of the Dark Depression, while Adolf Hitler and his followers used the new technology to gain power and establish a dictatorship throughout the country. The era of radio and television networks from 1930 to 1980 (from 1981 onwards, the audience of television networks began to decline continuously) was also an era of new social and scientific and technological developments, such as systematic and scientific polls, which also began to be used by scholars to track the use and effect of mass media. This period produced an impact (or limited) influence on the electorate of the news media (Klapper, 1960), the proliferation of journalism (Deutschman & Dannielson, 1960), media nurturing theory (Gerbner, 1977), the spiral of silence, and the study of agenda setting.
These and other theories of media effects, inspired by the mass media and rooted in the age of mass media, have not since seen new landmark studies of mass media effects, as DeFler put it. One of the most recent hypotheses that has the potential to become an exciting new direction is the disequilibration hypothesis of the late Steven Chaffee and colleagues (Chaffee, 1996). These theories belong to the era of mass media, which is also the era when mass media can be widely reached.
These theories also make recommendations to policymakers. Some argue that modernization would be achieved if citizens of economically underdeveloped countries could learn about the economic and social models of some developed countries through the media – modernization was considered a good thing at the time. David Lerner and Wilbur Schramm, as well as other scholars, have made these points. It was in the 1950s and 1960s. We now know that history and culture are a powerful force in the changing of nations, limiting the effectiveness of agendas from distant places.
The era of mass media has witnessed many studies, such as those related to agenda setting, which attempt to track the social effects of media and are contemporary versions of the principle of subcutaneous injection of journalistic effects. Others, such as Clapa, have concluded that media like television have limited effect, and in fact in the 1960s and early 1970s, it was clear that the mass media had a very limited influence on attitudes, and even less on the values that are deeply rooted in us.
Therefore, the early agenda setting effect mainly explored the impact of news-related issues in the four major media on collective cognition. Over time, agenda-setting studies have found that public events appear in the media earlier than they do in the public, especially for matters as less prominent as overseas events, and that media coverage always leaves something in the public's collective memory. All of this is for groups (Rogers, 1995).
Iyengar (1997) found through a series of experiments that if information is manipulated to conform to certain personal impressions, even if only partially, they have a huge impact in the process of assimilation of certain issues by the public. Entmann (2000) argues that news about black Americans, for example, is reported (possibly unconsciously) in a context framed by stereotypes.
4 Agenda setting and agenda integration in space
But with the development of the Internet in the 1990s, along with the spread of cable television and other media, citizens' access to information from other sources increased dramatically. We are in an age of space, where individuals can collect news from a variety of different sources through new media and assemble them into news images that best fit them. Mass media is still important to these individuals, but they will not dominate this image. We know that the mass media is very important in monitoring the environment because CNN's audience expands rapidly when major news happens, and conversely shrinks rapidly when those news becomes old news. Mass media are both information providers and sentinels, and their vigilance function became more prominent in the early 21st century. Once they sound the alarm, many in the audience choose their own medium and get the message.
We are still in the age of space, where individuals connect with other individuals through the telephone, travel, and the Internet. Overall, in 1981 the number of viewers of television networks began to decline steadily and is still declining, and the gap formed by this change is filled by a variety of more personalized media. Scholars have adapted communication theory to the new era, including culture theory, the spiral of silence, agenda setting, political influence, and audience change (e.g., Putnam, 2000).
As a potential theory, agenda-setting theory is constantly evolving, and scholars have found that in different contexts, the news media still seem to be able – and sometimes cannot – set public agendas. A series of studies, inspired by Harold Raswell, suggested that the media seemed to have some kind of function in which the collective attention of a community was focused on a set of agendas that were important to them, and in the process, the news media brought people together, at least cognitively,to achieve this (Shaw & Martin, 1992).
5 Duplicate studies of agenda setting
When the interconnectedness of individuals is in a new type of elastic relationship, a duplicate study of the original agenda-setting study appears to be opportune. Not only do we need to improve our research methods and content analysis methods as audiences and accessible mediums change, but we also need to conduct research on current social behavior.
Scholar Robert Putnam has attracted attention for his work Bowling Alone. Metaphorically (and literally true), they're bowling alone, not with their co-workers. The church is still a stable place to gain status, but the number of participants in the traditional church is declining. While the population has increased, television network viewers are losing, and daily newspaper circulation is slowly declining. If metaphors continue to illustrate, as people go to church and bowl with colleagues less and less, they also use fewer forms of other community activities, such as reading a book or watching community news.
We believe that agenda-setting theory is a theory rooted in the age of mass media, with a focus on social effects. But as implied by the use of a satisfaction orientation in communication theory, audiences are becoming more and more experienced. Individuals not only want to understand the public community, but also want to connect with others. So the purpose of communication is not only to discover and reveal, but also to relationships; what is important is not only communication, but also the maintenance of communities (communities). We live in a sea of competing agendas that are constantly hitting the levees of flood control in our hearts. If our integration with others in the complex evolution of society is a larger picture, agenda setting is only part of that picture. The former media process we call agenda-melding.
In 2001, the choice of information has changed a lot. If a person wants to repeat the first agenda-setting study, he must sample from the same network, including CNN and Fox channels, plus a large number of cable channels, with 10 to 15 channels in the Chapel Hill area (more than 80 in total). By 1998, U.S. households received an average of 57 channels (Nielsen, 1999). People with digital cable and satellite television can receive hundreds of stations or even more. In the 1920s, Walter Lippmann commented in Public Opinion that newspapers—the dominant news outlet of the era—painted a picture of the outside world for readers and helped us create "the image in our minds." The biggest challenge for media and opinion researchers in the 21st century is how to understand and measure these "images" in the age of de mass media.
Today at Chapel Hill, in front of the Great Post Office, there are 30 newspaper boxes, compared to just a few in 1968. Time Magazine, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report were the main magazines in the United States and the main magazines in Chapel Hill in 1968, and they are still there, but many new contenders have been added. Today, Chapel Hill also has many residents who receive news information through various World Warren website points.
There have also been changes in terms of news audiences. In 1968, people didn't travel as much as they do today, contact each other by email, and consciously join the global marketplace. Similarly, newspapers became something that people read occasionally, and the frequency of those who used to read the newspaper every day did decline. Stevenson (1994) observed that the role of aging in increasing reading rates is decreasing. Through cohort analysis of different generations, he found that when people get older, the rate of newspaper reading increases than when they are younger, but these young people, when they get older, do not have the same rate of reading newspaper as the previous generation.
The agenda setting tells us that the audience's judgment of the significance of the topic will be consistent, and some public issues can indeed enter the hearts of the audience. But recent research shows that audiences can also seize opportunities to use the Internet and other methods to build their own set of agendas (Shaw, McCombs, Weaver & Hamm, 1999). If the mass media does not have the same power to set the agenda as it did decades ago, then other media will become even more important. The TV remote control can be seen as a metaphor for modern media. Viewers are still watching TV and other media, but they become more likely when they "press the remote.". They have choice. Repeating the 1968 Agenda-setting study requires more than just more advanced research methods. The agenda-setting theory itself, like the world, has moved forward.
Translated by Liu Hailong
Editorial Board of International Press
October 24, 2021