The evolution of agenda-setting research and theory from 1972 to 2025: from newspapers and TV to social media and artificial intelligence
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: My sincere thanks to Professors Lei Guo and Christopher Vargo for arranging this special issue of Communication and Change, "Revisiting Agenda-Setting Theory in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, " and to all those who have contributed to it.As someone who has been associated with agenda-setting research-and has worked with the two founders of it, Professors Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw-for more than 50 years, I'm pleased to contribute my thoughts and experiences about its origins and development during this past half-century.I arrived at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fall of 1971, where McCombs and Shaw were young associate professors of journalism, after the first 1968 agenda-setting study and before the second one in 1972 and the publication of the original agenda-setting article in Public Opinion Quarterly (McCombs & Shaw, 1972).I was lucky as a first-year doctoral student to be involved in the planning of the 1972 threewave Charlotte, NC, panel study and the analysis of the data from that study thanks to an invitation from Max McCombs.That resulted in our 1973 ICA paper on need for orientation, presented in Montreal, Canada (McCombs & Weaver, 1973); a 1975 article in American Politics Quarterly on Watergate and agenda setting (Weaver et al., 1975); and a book chapter on need for orientation in the 1977 book, The Emergence of American Political Issues, edited by Shaw and McCombs (Shaw and McCombs, 1977; Weaver, 1977).Even at this early stage, it was clear that agenda-setting effects of the mainstream news media were not universal.McCombs and I developed the construct of need for orientation (a combination of personal relevance and uncertainty) to try to explain and predict which members of the public would be most and least affected by news media agendas.We found that those who had high levels of interest in the 1972 U.S. presidential election, and high uncertainty about which party or candidate to vote for, were most likely to have issue agendas similar to those in The Charlotte Observer newspaper and the network television news programs.The third major study of agenda setting was done during the 1976 presidential election year, after Max and I had left Chapel Hill, and included nine waves of interviews with the Open Access
Source: Communication and Change
Author: David H. Weaver
Institutions: Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana University
Language: English
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid:
OpenAlex ID: W4416097690