Public Policy and the Mass Media

Mass media can, and often do, play a critical role in policymaking. The typical view of media is that they matter in the early stages of the policy process—that media can help to set an agenda, which is then adopted and dealt with by politicians, policymakers, and other actors. The impact of media is rarely so constrained, however. Our argument here, in short, is that media matter, not just at the beginning but throughout the policy process.

In this article, we review two research programs that could benefit from a more extensive dialogue: media and policy studies of agenda setting. We focus on three key distinctions that divide these two robust research programs: the agenda(s) under investigation (public versus policymaking), the typical level of analysis (individual versus systemic), and framing effects (individual versus macro level). We map out these differences and their impacts on understanding the policy process. There is often a policy disconnect in the agenda-setting studies that emanate from the media tradition. Though interested in the effects of political communication, scholars from this tradition often fail to link the media to policy outcomes, policy change, or agenda change. Policy process scholars have increasingly rejected simple linear models in favor of models emphasizing complex feedback effects. This suggests a different role for the media-one of highlighting attributes in a multifaceted political reality and involvement in positive feedback cycles. Yet, political communication scholars have for the most part been insensitive to these potentials. We advocate a shared agenda centering on the role of the media in the political system from an information processing framework, emphasizing the reciprocal effects of each on the other.

Contemporary media and political studies have produced a huge amount of books, articles and analyses about the influence media have upon politics, but there are still very few works devoted to these specific issues: which way, to what extent, and with what result can media coverage influence particular policies and political decision making. There are also very few studies that analyze these questions using empirical data. The proposed study combines the theoretical basis of agenda-setting theory, i.e. the interrelationships between media and policy agendas, with empirical detail using statistical and qualitative content analysis. The main assumption is grounded on the opinion that the previous model, in which media agenda generally follows policy agenda, is changing to reflect the growing role of media in making politics.

In the research field of media and politics the agenda-setting approach is one of the main accounts. It theorizes about the impact of mass media coverage on political priorities. Yet, agenda-setting offers a one-sided perspective. It only takes into account the impact of media on politics and not the other way around and it only deals with positive power and neglects negative power -that is the power to prevent other actors from devoting attention to specific issues. In this paper we develop a broader typology of media-politics interactions dealing with both direction of influence and with positive and negative impact. Depending on the context, we expect political actors or the media to dominate the interaction process. We test this theory relying on comparative data in five small European countries and drawing on a survey among MPs.

Comparative Political Studies, 2007

Do mass media determine or codetermine the political agenda? Available answers on this question are mixed and contradictory. Results vary in terms of the type of political agenda under scrutiny, the kind of media taken into account, and the type of issues covered. This article enhances knowledge of the media's political agenda-setting power by addressing each of these topics, drawing on extensive longitudinal measures of issue attentiveness in media, Parliament, and government in Belgium in the 1990s. Relying on time-series, cross-section analyses, the authors ascertain that although Belgium is characterized by a closed political system, the media do to some extent determine the agenda of Parliament and government. There is systematic variation in media effects, however. Newspapers exert more influence than does television, Parliament is somewhat more likely to follow media than government, and media effects are larger for certain issues (law and order, environment) than for oth...

Objective. The agenda-setting literature has demonstrated the media's ability to set the issue agenda for the public. One byproduct of this work is that researchers have produced some evidence suggesting that the audience will, on occasion, set the issue agenda for the media. Given disparate sets of findings, researchers do not have a framework to better understand on which issues the media will set the agenda for the public and on which issues the public will set the agenda for the media. It is the goal of this article to provide empirical support for a framework suggesting that the events comprising issue areas predetermine the direction of influence between the media's and the public's issue agendas. Methods. I construct a historical data set comprised of 35,000 stories from the nightly network news and responses to Gallup's Most Important Problem question. I look for evidence of causal influence between news issue content and public issue concerns using Granger analysis and vector autoregression. Results. Issue areas comprised of spectacular events, such as defense, will be reported by the media and subsequently affect the salience the audience assigns to those issues. In issues not normally comprised of spectacular and singular events, such as energy and environment, public issue concerns appear to drive issue coverage in the news. Issues such as transportation and education, which comprise few spectacular events and little public concern, will receive sparse coverage in the media. Conclusion. The findings provide support for a framework based on events; the types of events that typically comprise issue areas will affect the likelihood of those issues coming on the news agenda. This then affects the direction of influence between the public and the media. The framework supported here allows for the integration of the media effects and media content literatures. This has implications for understanding how the news agenda is constructed and how the commercial media meets democratic ideals.

Journal of Communication, 2006

Recently the study of the relationship between the media and the political agenda has received growing attention of both media and political science scholars. However, these research efforts have not led to a general discussion or a real theory on the media's political agenda setting power. This article first analytically confronts the often contradictory results of the available evidence. Then, it sketches the broad outline of a preliminary theory. Political agenda setting by the media is contingent upon a number of conditions. The input variables of the model are the kind of issues covered, the specific media outlet, and the sort of coverage. Political context variables, the features of the political actors at stake, are at the heart of the model. The model proposes five sorts of output ranging from no political adoption to fast substantial adoption of media issues.

2010

ABSTRACT-In the research field of media and politics the agenda-setting approach is one of the main accounts. It theorizes about the impact of mass media coverage on political priorities. Yet, agenda-setting offers a one-sided perspective. It only takes into account the impact of media on politics and not the other way around and it only deals with positive power and neglects negative power-that is the power to prevent other actors from devoting attention to specific issues.

Public Opinion Quarterly, 1972

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