The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media*

Abstract

The information in the mass media becomes the only contact many have with politics. People vary greatly in their attention to mass media political information. Media news content also was divided into “major” and “minor” levels to see whether there was any substantial difference in mass media emphasis across topics. The media appear to have exerted a considerable impact on voters’ judgments of what they considered the major issues of the campaign. Any argument that the correlations between media and voter emphasis are spurious – that they are simply responding to the same events and not influencing each other one way or the other – assumes that voters have alternative means of observing the day-to-day changes in the political arena. The media are the major primary sources of national political information; for most, mass media provide the best – and only – easily available approximation of ever-changing political realities.

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