Traditional agenda-setting theory is about the influence of mass media on the public's focus of attention, who and what people are thinking about. The expanded theory of agenda setting tested here during the 1995 regional and municipal elections in Spain elaborates the influence of the mass media on how people think about persons and topics in the news. Combining content analysis and survey data, this study documents the influence of newspapers, TV news, and both TV and newspaper political advertising on Spanish voters' images of political candidates.
We advance the central proposition of agenda-setting theory-that elements prominent in the mass media's picture of the world influence the salience of those elements in the audience's picture-through the explication of a second level of agenda setting: attribute agenda setting. This preliminary research on candidate images during the 1996 Spanish general election simultaneously examined 2 attribute dimensions-substantive and affective descriptions-to test the hypothesis that media attribute agendas influence the voters' attribute agenda. Empirically, a high degree of correspondence was found between the attribute agendas of 7 different mass media and the voters' attribute agenda for each of the 3 candidates. The median correlation from these 21 tests of the hypothesis is +.72. Sixth-order partial correlations in which the influence of the other 6 mass media are removed from the correlation between a medium's agenda and the voters' agenda for a particular candidate have a median value of +.73. Additional analyses of the attribute agendas of each medium's primary audience in comparison with its principal competitor also yielded evidence of second-level agenda setting. Future research should pursue complex longitudinal designs tracing the impact of media content on voters' images at both the aggregate and individual levels as part of the continuing scholarly dialogue on competing approaches to framing research and attribute agenda setting.Elements prominent in the mass media's picture of the world influence the prominence of those elements in the audience's picture. This is the central axiom of agenda-setting theory, a statement that the salience of elements on the media agenda is reflected in the salience of those elements on the public agenda. Theoretically, these agendas can consist of any set of elements, any aspect of the content of communication. In practice, the vast majority of the 300-plus empirical studies on agenda setting to date have focused on agendas composed of public issues. The core hypothesis in these studies is that the degree of emphasis placed on issues in the news influences the priority accorded these issues among the public
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