For some unexplained reason, in June 1972, five unknown men broke into the Democratic National Committe headquarters looking for undetermined information. It was the sort of local crime story that rated two paragraphs on page 17 of the --Washington Post--. Yet edition Ben Bradlee and reporters Bob woodward and Carl Bernstein gave the story repeatedly high visibility even thought the public initially seemed to regard the incident as trivial.
President Nixon dismissed the break-in as a "third-rate burglary," but over the following year Americans showed an increasing public awareness of Water-gate's significance. Half the country became familiar with the word --Watergate-- over the summer of 1972. By April 1973, that figure had risen to 90 percent. When television began gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Senate hearings on the matter a year after the break-in, virtually every adult in the United States knew what Watergate was about. Six months after the hearings President Nixon still protested,"I am not a crook." But by the spring of 1974, he was forced from office because the majority of citizens and their representatives had decided that he was.
THE ORIGINAL AGENDA: NOT WHAT TO --THINK--, BUT WHAT TO THINK --ABOUT--
Journalism prefessors Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw regard Watergate as a perpect example of the agenda-setting function of the mass media. They were not surprised that the Watergate issue caught fire after months on the front page of the --Washington Post--. McCombs and Shaw believe that the 'mass media have the ability to transfer the salience of items on their news agendas to the public agenda."1 (satu kecil ke atas) They arent suggesting that broadcast and print personnel make a deliberate attemp to influence listener, viewer, or reader opinion on the issues. Most reporters in the free word have a deserved reputation for independence and fairness. But McCombs and Shaw say that we look to news professionals for cues on where to focus our attention. " We judge as important what the media judge as important."2 (Dua kecil di atas)
Althought McCombs and Shaw first referred to the agenda-setting function of the media in 1972, the idea that people desire media assistance in determining political reality had already been voiced by a number of current event analysts. In an attempt to explain how to United States had been drawn into Wprd War I, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Walter Lippmann claimed that the media act as a mediator between "the world outside and the pictures in our heads."3 (Tiga kecil di atas) McCombs and Shaw also quote University of Wisconsin political scientist Bernard Cohen's observation concerning the specific function the media serve:" The press may not be succesful much of the time i telling people what to think, but it is stuningly succesful in telling its readers what to think about."4 ( Empat kecil ).
Starting with the Kennedy-Nixon contest in 1960, political analyst Theodore White wrote the definitive account of four presidential elections. Independent of McCombs and Shaw, and in opposition to then-current wisdom that mass communication had limited effects upon its audience, White came to the conclusion that the media shaped those election campaigns:
The power of the press in America is a primordial one. It sets the agenda of public discussion; and this sweeping political power in unrestrained by any law. It determines what people will talk and think about-an authority that in other antions is reserved for tyrants,priests, parties and mandarins.5 (Lima Kecil)
A THEORY WHOSE TIME HAD COME
McCombs and Shaw's agenda-setting theory found an appreciative audience among mass communication researchers. The prevailing selective -exposure hypothesis claimed that people would attend only to news and views that didn't threaten their estabilished beliefs. The media were seen as merely stroking pre-existent attitudes. After two decades of downplaying the influence of newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, the field was disenchanted with this limited-effect approach. Agenda-setting theory boasted two attractive features: it reaffirmed the power of the press while still maintaining that individuals were free to choose.
McCombs and Shaw's agenda-setting theory represent a back-to-the-basics approach to mass communication research. Like the initial Erie Country voting studies,6 the focus is on election campaigns. The hypothesis predicts a cause-and-effect relationship between media content and voter perception. Although later work explores the conditions under which the media priorities are most influential, the theory rises or falls on it's ability to show a match between the media's agenda and the public's agenda later on. McCombs and Shaw supported their main hypothesis with results from surveys they took while working together at the University of Nort Carolina at Chaper Hill.7 (McCombs is now at the University of Texas.) Their analysis of thee a-setting research. The study provides an opportunity to examine in detail the type of quantitative survey research that Stuart Hall and other critical theorists so strongly oppose.
MEDIA AGENDA AND PUBLIC AGENDA: A CLOSE MATCH
"Media agenda"
The pattern of news coverage across major print and broadcast media as measured by the prominence and length of stories.
McCombs and Shaw's first task was to measure the --media agenda--. They determined that Chapel Hill residents relied on a mix of nine print and broadcast sources for political news-two Raleigh papers, two Durham paperss,-- Time, Newsweek. the out of-state edition of the --New York Times--, and the CBS and NBC evening news.
They estabilished --position-- and --length-- of story as the two main criteria of prominence. For newspapaer, the front-page headline story, a three-column story on an inside page, and the lead editorial were all counted as evidence of significant focus on an issue. For news magazines, the requirement was an opening story in the news section or any political issue to which the editors devoted a full column. Prominence in the television news format was defined by placement as one of the first three news items or any discussion that lasted more than 45 seconds.
Because the agenda-setting hypotesis refers to substantive issues, the researchers discarded news items about campaign strategy, posisiton in the polls, and the personalities of the candidates. The remaining stories were then sorted into 15 subject categories, which were later boiled down into 5 major issues. A composite index of media prominance revealed the following order of importance: foreign policy, law and order, fiscal policy, public welfare, and civil right.
In order to measure the --public's agenda--, McCombs and Shaw's asked Chapel Hill voters to outline what each one considered the key issue of the campaign, regardless of what the candidates were dropped from the pool of respondent. The researchers assigned the specific answers to the same broad categories used for media analysis. They then compared the aggregate data from undecided voters with the composite description of media content. The rank of the five issues on both lists was nearly identical.
--Public agenda--
The most important publicy issues as measured by public opinion surveys.
EIGHTH EDITION International Edition 2012,EM GRIFFIN.Wheaton College
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