Media Effects: Agenda-Setting, Priming & Framing

Question 1

What are maximum effects?

Answer 1

• Hypodermic Needle, Transmission and Two Step Flow models all part of this
• “Surely something is happening”
• But how to measure it?

Question 2

What are minimal effects?

Answer 2

• Agenda-Setting
• Framing and Priming
• Agenda setting, priming and framing all claim minimal effects, and take into account non-media orientations

Question 3

How can we measure agenda?

Answer 3

• By degrees of issue importance:

* By who adopts the agenda:

Question 4

What types of agenda are there by degrees of issue importance?

Answer 4

• Issue awareness
  
  • Don’t care, but vaguely aware it exists
• Issue salience
  
  • Important to you/the media
• Issue priorities
  
  • Want action/most important issue

Question 5

What types of agenda are there by who adopt the agenda?

Answer 5

• Public agenda setting (the original McCombs and Shaw model)
• Media agenda setting (extended by Rogers and Dearing)
• Policy agenda setting (extended by Rogers and Dearing)

Question 6

What is public agenda setting?

Answer 6

• The media doesn’t tell us what to think, but what to think about
• Media make learning about issues (and the issue landscape) easy (or ‘accessible’)
• Learning rather than persuasion
• And learning happens incidentally - shortcuts are important
• Questions
  
  • Assumes direction of the relationship (i.e. media to voters)
  • Why can media set agendas but not persuade?
  • Could some confounding factors be causing both media and public agendas?

Question 7

What is media agenda setting?

Answer 7

• Do media originate the agenda, or just convey it from somewhere else?
• 1996
• Can take political economy, ‘media effects’ or sociological approaches
• Many possible sources: legislators, executives, parties, public relations, other media (groupthink/herding of journalists)
• How can they be isolated for study?
• Do media actors also use shortcuts? - i.e. to decide what should be on the news

Question 8

What is policy agenda setting>?

Answer 8

• Does the media affect policy-makers’ agenda?
• Are legislators, bureaucrats etc influences by what they read in the papers?
• Hard to disentangle ‘real life’ and media effects
  
  • One punch laws and closing hours
  • Dondale abuse legislation following 4Corners program
• Question has largely languished

Question 9

What are framing and priming?

Answer 9

• Agenda setting looks on story selection as a determining of public perceptions of issue importance and, indirectly through priming, evaluations of political leaders
• Framing focuses not on which topics or issues are selected for coverage by the news media, but instead on the particular ways those issues are presented
• Priming extends agenda-setting by getting audiences to think about issues in a particular way

Question 10

What is framing?

Answer 10

• Concerns not just whether news is presented, but how
• Basis in sociology
• All news is presented in some kind of ‘frame’
  
  • Can be explicit or implicit
  • Can be narrative-based
  • Can be almost impossible to identify
• But we interpret news via our own frames
  
  • We’re often entirely unaware of it
  • They help to organise our experiences

Question 11

What is framings sociological basis?

Answer 11

• Evering Goffman writs about the ‘organisation of expereince’
• i.e. we use frames to organise how we expereince the world
• Essentially constructivist idea

Question 12

How are frames employed?

Answer 12

• Media producers use frames to report: Media frames

* We use frames to interpret: Individual frames

Question 13

What are media frames?

Answer 13

• What factors influence thew way journalists or other societal groups frame certain issues?
• How do these processes work and, as a result, what are the frames that journalists use?
• Aspects
  
  • Narrative
    
    • Good guys and bad guys?
  • ‘News judgements’
    
    • What’s in or out?
    • What gets emphasis?
    • Visual cues
    • Photographic choices

Question 14

What are individual frames?

Answer 14

• “Which factors influence the establishment of individual frames of reference, or are individual frames simply replications of media frames?”
• “How can the audience member play an active role in constructing meaning or resitsting media frames?”
• Aspects
  
  • The meaning that we ascribe to a text
  • Emphasises the role of the reader/viewer/listener
  • Introduced briefly in transmission model
    
    • We don’t consume media homogeneously

Question 15

What is priming?

Answer 15

• Repeated exposure to stimuli (in form o words, narratives, frames etc) leads to an attitudinal response
• Borrowed from psychology
  
  • Stimulus-response idea a la hypodermic needle
• Boat People vs Asylum seekers or refugees
• Gay marriage vs marriage equality
• Relies on informational shortcuts like agenda-setting and framing
• Research
  
  • Lends itself to experimental
    
    • Use different terms in randomised surveys
    • Show randomised groups different news stories
  • BUT: how pervasive are the effects?
  • Can priming change behaviour long term?