Agenda-setting
Controlling which topics the audience thinks about, and how prominently, so that the question of what matters is settled before any question of what is true.
The press, Bernard Cohen wrote in 1963, "may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about." Agenda-setting is that power used deliberately. A topic given the front page for a month becomes a national concern whether or not anything about it has changed; a topic never covered does not exist for most of the public. The device does not argue a position; it decides the syllabus.
McCombs and Shaw measured the effect in the 1968 election and found that the issues voters named as most important matched the issues the local media had emphasized, almost regardless of the voters' own experience. Propagandists supply the emphasis: with press releases, events, leaks, and repetition, they put their topic on the agenda and keep their opponents' off it. Exploits Availability Heuristic and Salience Bias.
Historical examples
McCombs and Shaw asked undecided voters in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, what the key issues of the 1968 campaign were, and compared the answers with the issues emphasized by the media those voters used. The correspondence was almost perfect. The study founded agenda-setting research and has been replicated in hundreds of settings since.
McCombs, Maxwell E., and Donald L. Shaw. "The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media." Public Opinion Quarterly 36, no. 2 (1972): 176–187. Source
Bernays's "Torches of Freedom" stunt, in which debutantes lit cigarettes during New York's Easter parade, was engineered to become the next day's news and did. The story put women's smoking on the public agenda as a question of freedom; the client, the American Tobacco Company, was not mentioned. Setting the agenda was the product Bernays sold.
Tye, Larry. The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations. New York: Crown, 1998; Brandt, Allan M. The Cigarette Century. New York: Basic Books, 2007.
In advertising and commerce
Modern public relations measures its success in agenda terms: mentions, share of voice, and "earned media." A campaign that gets its issue into the news has succeeded before any argument about the issue begins. Trade guides teach the "news peg," the event or survey manufactured to give journalists a reason to cover the client's topic today.
Ewen, Stuart. PR! A Social History of Spin. New York: Basic Books, 1996.
List the five topics you saw most this week. For each, ask: did anything about it change this week, or did the attention change? Who benefits from the attention?
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
For three weeks every bulletin led with shoplifting, and by the end of the month polls named crime the country's top problem. Recorded crime had not changed.
What to notice. Salience moved without the facts moving; the coverage set the public's priorities.
A lobby group releases a survey every Monday, timed for the slow news day, and its topic runs every Tuesday.
What to notice. The agenda is supplied by a source with a schedule and an interest; the topic's prominence is manufactured.
The industry's largest hazard has never appeared in the trade press it funds.
What to notice. Keeping a topic off the agenda is the same device in reverse.
Sources
- McCombs, Maxwell E., and Donald L. Shaw. "The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media." Public Opinion Quarterly 36, no. 2 (1972): 176–187. doi:10.1086/267990
- Cohen, Bernard C. The Press and Foreign Policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.
- McCombs, Maxwell. Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity, 2014. ISBN 978-0745661100
- Tye, Larry. The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations. New York: Crown, 1998. ISBN 978-0805067897