Agenda Setting & Media Priming

• Agenda-setting is the media's transfer of issue salience to the audience, making frequently or prominently covered issues seem important.
• Agenda-setting shows importance of issues to the audience, not persuasiveness.
• Agenda-setting is not persuasion theory, but it shows how people perceive an issue as important
• A meta-analysis by Wanta & Ghanem of 90 studies shows a 0.53 correlation between media and public agendas across three decades.
• Attention to the news does not particularly moderate the effect between media and public agenda.
• Media agenda can reach people through conversation, even if they don't follow the news closely.
• Media priming prepares people by making certain topics more salient in the public, influencing evaluations of other things, like the president.
• Media priming on how a president is evaluated takes place when coverage focuses on issues like unemployment, which influences public perception of the president's handling of those issues.
• Salience encompasses both the perceived importance, a conscious judgment, and the accessibility of a cognitive construct as an implicit, subconscious phenomenon.
• In a political context, issue management is a manipulative strategy to bring certain issues to the forefront, benefiting political goals.
• Individuals with higher education and orientation needs exhibit stronger agenda-setting effects
• "Need for orientation" is based on the idea that individuals vary on how driven they are to keep up with issues covered in the news.
• These individuals express interest in issue updates, facts, and journalists' views.
• Issue obtrusiveness refers to issues we experience firsthand that do not rely on news coverage like gas and groceries
• Agenda building refers to factors that cause media to choose issues and agendas, which can be politicians, industries, and stakeholders.
• NY Times is known to function as an opinion leader that affects issues other news outlets cover.
• Intermedia agenda-building influences how media affects the perception of certain agendas.
• Due to media fragmentation, agenda-setting is evolving, with the public choosing sources, diminishing media control.
• Social media is changing the flow of agendas by allowing public input, making the public an active participant rather than a passive audience.
• Framing is the interpretation of an issue or event depicted in media messages, where the phrasing makes a difference.
• Frame building refers to how frames are created by media, journalists, and politicians to benefit the goals of certain groups.
• A media frame is a central organizing idea that provides meaning to unfolding events, highlighting some information while neglecting other aspects.
• An individual's frame is a mental cluster of ideas that guides information processing based on experience, culture, and schemata.
• Episodic frames portray issues based on specific instances, such as healthcare with a single mother's struggle.
• Thematic frames use broader examples, like discussing healthcare lacking statistics and historical accounts.
• Episodic frames lead people to attribute problem causes to individuals and thematic frames attribute problem causes to societal circumstances.
• Media can influence public discourse and shape audience frames through frame building, frame setting, individual-level framing effects, and journalists.
• Frame building, frame setting, individual-level framing effects, and journalists can all influence each other simultaneously.
• Television typically frames obesity in an episodic way, attributing responsibility to individuals rather than using thematic frames.
• Framing can use different messages, but some say the term lacks specific meaning itself
• Message frames shape how audiences interpret an issue and how people perceive a society.

Types of Frames

• Content frames emphasize different topic angles.
• Strategy frames emphasize messages of win/loss.
• Emotional frames affect people and audiences' feelings.
• Gain/loss frames emphasize gains versus losses.
• There is tension between offering high-quality news and making a profit.
• Economic pressures affect the extent to which news media can serve democratic functions
• There is a tension between providing objective information and helping viewers form an opinion.
• Journalists might also serve democracy by lending a voice to certain groups or by offering critique of political and other societal institutions.
• Gatekeeping refers to how news reporting was chosen by journalists to determine what gets printed/reaches the audience.
• Specific groups bypass traditional media "gates" to spread information and views directly to the public due to the internet.
• Gatewatching involves media users observing various information outlets and emphasizing what is relevant to their interests.
• Produsage is where news users can contribute/comment on news.
• The most common form of news access is obtaining it directly from a news organization (88%), along with in-person conversations (65%).
• The two-step flow process means people learn about news from others or learn about it directly from a source via the internet.
• News factors are characteristics of news stories while news values are factors journalists see as important to cover.
• Kepplinger & Ehmig said the relative impact of news story characteristics on selection is called news value and news value are characteristics of journalists
• For example, TV news requires footage for an event to be included-so an event for which appealing footage exists may have a greater likelihood of being covered in TV news than an otherwise more newsworthy

News Factors

Geographical Proximity

• Geographical proximity means that events near the target audience are more likely to get covered.

Cultural Proximity

• Cultural proximity means that events near the target audience are more likely to get covered.

Negativity

• Negativity means that scholars say humans pay more attention to the negative.

Conflict

• Conflict means negative events often make the news

Personalization

• Personalization means negative events often make the news

Attention Levels To News

Information Search

• News items may receive different levels of attention
• Information search is purposefully seeking specific information-in the news context, this may be looking up news on particular stocks, whether a particular bill has passed, or for the weather forecast.

Information Scanning

• Information scanning is voluntarily exposure to news while not seeking specific information; for instance, habitually browsing a newspaper or watching a TV newscast.

Incidental information exposure

• Incidental information exposure is encountered incidentally in the course of other actions, for instance, while using a search engine that displays news updates on its start page.

Information avoidance

• Information avoidance means that individuals may purposefully avoid news

• Formal presentation uses techniques like fast-paced cuts, dramatic imagery and music, and large headlines to gain attention.

• 2 key theoretical lenses for what triggers attention to news is information utility

• Information utility is when an audience believes information that is more "useful".

• An event that has greater magnitude per greater consequences has greater perceived utility and close exposure and attention

• Likelihood of being affected increases perceived utility and greater attention for the news story

• Immediacy affects how the consequences are thought to be occur will produce different levels of perceived utility

• Efficacy associated with a reported issue alter perceived utility in that the events of the course is hard to change

• An attitude is an evaluation connected to an object, stored in one's memory.

• A more important attitude for individuals means they are more likely to pay attention.

• Self-interest means that the attitude object is thought to pertain to one's own material status or opportunities.

• Events that relate to one's key norms and values will have greater importance in news

• A group affiliation, sense of feeling with groups (or people) makes them feel like they should render an attitude if those others are associated

• Knowledge gap is where some citizens have low knowledge of public affairs and are low educated- having tension in society and less equality

• US market model may contribute to a larger knowledge gap with lack of equality- Swiss broadcasting system pivotal in enhancing knowledge levels instead

• Softening of news means to modify news toward entertainment

• High choice environment refers to audiences who may choose to consume entertainment over public affairs.

• Virtue circle means the interaction between an individual's news selection and the news that is available with an interactive fashion in shaping citizens' political knowledge.

• This could mean that the audience wants entertainment over educational attainment

Influence on news

• Number of news outlets increased competition which led to an increase in "entertaining" news to attract audiences
• Think of these news programs as generating audience attention that can be sold to entertainment based stories to gain more viewers to purchase offered products from advertisers
• News as a focal business produces audience attention that they can sell to advertisers
• Critics argue that an entertainment oriented audience in a competitive market means they spend more money on advertised goods.

Biases

• Personalization means that news reports emphasize individual people instead of political, societal, or economic issues.

• Dramatization means that news pertains to information bias, such as crisis, to gain emotional appeal.

• Fragmentation, news features disconnected events.

• Authority disorders: political issues means that those in office need to step in, not the citizens

• Debates can have positive or negative influences to attract a larger audience or inhibit an understanding of issues.

• News coverage contrasted with expectations from news audiences to attract and further justify the use of what consumers realistically expect,

• Zaller believes and argues that news is a burglar alarm of what details citizens need and monitor.