Jessica Birthisel | Feb. 10, 2011
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| Photo by Jessica Birthisel |
| Oklahoma State's Wayne Wanta talked about how agenda setting theory is adapting to a new media environment. |
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And agenda setting theory itself is changing, too, to adapt to online media and new ways people are selecting news, Wanta told his audience Monday afternoon in Ernie Pyle Hall lounge.
Agenda setting theory suggests a correlation between the issues presented in the media and the issues that audiences believe to be most newsworthy. A change of attitude toward issues isn’t necessarily part of the effect, Wanta said, but news coverage can increase the issues’ salience in the eyes of viewers.
One issue Wanta uses to explain the theory is gun control.
“A news medium might start a series of stories dealing with why we really need strict gun control laws in the United States,” said Wanta. “The public sees these messages, but here’s the key… our attitudes don’t change, what happens is, we think gun control must be a really important issue.”
But the field has moved beyond researching issues, said Wanta. A second level of research has begun to study the attributes of those issues, such as emotional and cognitive characteristics, and properties that describe the object or issue at hand.
Another way the research is shifting, says Wanta, is that agenda setting scholars now study more than issue coverage — they also study the coverage of people, places and things.
He presented some of his own research to demonstrate this shift. Some of his current work compares positive, negative and neutral news coverage of countries around the world with a survey that asked people to rate various attitudes toward countries and the importance of those countries to the United States.
The study found that negative news coverage of a nation is correlated with negative attitudes toward that country. Positive news coverage of a nation had no influence on public perceptions.
In addition to these new research topics, Wanta talked about challenges the Internet poses for agenda setting research, particularly in regard to motivation among young people, self-selection of news, polarization of attitudes, information overload and the role of opinion leaders on social media sites.
Wanta used examples from Facebook to show how social media might have affected user attitudes toward political candidates and issues in the 2008 election.
Playing devil’s advocate, professor Lars Willnat asked Wanta how he would justify the concepts of agenda-setting theory, which originated during a time with many fewer media options, to younger students.
“What do you tell students…when everything has changed?” asked Willnat. “The media has changed. It’s all selective now, self-selected. We look for the news. It’s not presented to us. So, what about agenda setting? What do you tell students? How do you do new research?”
Wanta said there are “a million ways to answer that.”
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| Photo by Jessica Birthisel |
| Wanta said agenda setting theory still is relevant. It now can be used to study not just issues but also people, places and things. |
Roy W. Howard Professor David Weaver, an agenda-setting researcher himself, mentioned a recent study that found despite more channels for news today, there’s less diversity in the news stories.
Wanta pointed out the agenda-setting potential within media aggregators like Digg and YahooNews, websites that rate news stories and potentially increase their likelihood of being read by other people.
Wanta concluded that these very complications and new realities will set the stage for interesting agenda setting research in the years to come.
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