Editing Agenda-setting theory (section)

=== Early research ===
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The history of study of agenda-setting can be traced to the first chapter of [[Walter Lippmann]]'s 1922 book, ''[[Public Opinion (book)|Public Opinion]]''.<ref name="Lippmann-1922">{{cite book|last=Lippmann|first=W|title=Public opinion|url=https://archive.org/details/publicopinion00lippgoog|year=1922|publisher=Harcourt|location=New York}}</ref> In that chapter, "[https://web.archive.org/web/20060911204711/http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7EHyper/Lippman/ch01.html The World Outside And The Pictures In Our Heads]", Lippmann argues that the mass media are the principal connection between events in the world and the images in the minds of the public. Without using the term "agenda-setting", Walter Lippmann was writing about what we today would call "agenda-setting". According to Lippmann, the public responds not to actual events in the environment but to the pseudo-environment, which is a term referring to “the pictures in our heads.”

“For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeing for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. And although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it.”<ref name="Lippmann-1922" /> The media step in and essentially set the agenda, offering simpler models by which people can make sense of the world.

Following Lippmann's 1922 book, [[Bernard Cecil Cohen|Bernard Cohen]] observed (in 1963) that the press "may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think ''about''. The world will look different to different people," Cohen continues, "depending on the map that is drawn for them by writers, editors, and publishers of the paper they read."<ref name="Cohen 1963">{{cite book|last=Cohen|first=B|title=The press and foreign policy|year=1963|publisher=Harcourt|location=New York}}</ref>

As early as the 1960s, Cohen had expressed the idea that later led to formalization of agenda-setting theory by McCombs and Shaw. The stories with the strongest agenda setting influence tend to be those that involve conflict, terrorism, crime and drug issues within the United States. Those that do not include or involve the United States and politics associate negatively with public opinion.

Although Maxwell McCombs already had some interest in the field, he was exposed to Cohen's work while serving as a faculty member at [[UCLA]], and it was Cohen's work that heavily influenced him, and later Donald Shaw.<ref name="Rogers 1993 68–84">{{cite journal|last=Rogers|first=E|title=The anatomy of agenda-setting research|journal=Journal of Communication|year=1993|volume=43|issue=2|pages=68–84|doi=10.1111/j.1460-2466.1993.tb01263.x}}</ref> The concept of agenda setting was launched by McCombs and Shaw during the 1968 presidential election in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. They examined Lippmann's idea of construction of the pictures in our heads by comparing the issues on the media agenda with key issues on the undecided voters' agenda. They found evidence of agenda setting by identifying that salience of the news agenda is highly correlated to that of the voters' agenda. McCombs and Shaw were the first to provide the field of communication with empirical evidence that demonstrated the power of mass media and its influence on the public agenda. The empirical evidence also earned this theory its credibility amongst other social scientific theories.<ref name="Rogers 1993 68–84" /><ref name="Dearing 1988 555–5942"/>

An unknown scholar named G. Ray Funkhouser performed a study highly similar to McCombs and Shaw's around the same time the authors were formalizing the theory.<ref>{{cite journal|last=Funkhouser|first=G|title=The issues of the sixties: An exploratory study in the dynamics of public opinion|journal=Public Opinion Quarterly|year=1973|volume=37|issue=1|pages=62–75|doi=10.1086/268060}}</ref> McCombs, Shaw, and Funkhouser presented their findings at the same academic conference. Funkhouser's article was published later than McCombs and Shaw's, and Funkhouser does not receive as much credit as McCombs and Shaw for discovering agenda setting. According to [[Everett Rogers]], there are two main reasons for this.<ref name="Rogers 1993 68–84" /> First, Funkhouser did not formally name the theory. Second, Funkhouser did not pursue his research much past the initial article. Rogers also suggests that Funkhouser was geographically isolated at [[Stanford]], cut off from interested researchers, whereas McCombs and Shaw had got other people interested in agenda setting research.