No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

In choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom staff, and broadcasters play an important part in shaping political reality. Readers learn not only about a given issue, but also how much importance to attach to that issue from the amount of information in a news story and its position. In reflecting what candidates are saying during a campaign, the mass media may well determine the important issues – that is, the media may set the "agenda" of the campaign.

Communication scholars frequently invoke the concept of a marketplace of ideas during discussions about speechmaking, the diversity of media content and voices, and related First Amendment issues. They invoke it less often during intramural discussions of how specific concepts and perspectives, or our research agendas as a whole, have evolved over the years. Yet communication research does operate in a marketplace of ideas that is the quintessential laissez-faire market. The role of our journals is to create a market for the ideas advanced by members of the field. Individual scholars pick and choose topics at will-idiosyncratically and whimsically, some critics say-and publish at irregular intervals. Research teams, to the extent that they exist in communication research, usually arise spontaneously and have short life spans. Institutionalized focused research programs are rare. The communication research marketplace is a volatile arena, a situation fostered by the rapidly changing nature of communication itself during the past 50 years. Under these circumstances the continuing and growing vitality of agenda-setting research is remarkable. As a theoretical perspective, it has had a rich 25-year history since Mc-Combs and Shaw's (1972) opening gambit during the 1968 presidential elect ion.Philosopher of science James Conant (1951) noted that the hallmark o f a successful theory is its fruitfulness in continually generating new questions and identifying new avenues of scholarly inquiry. The fruitfulness of the agenda-setting metaphor is documented by three features: (a) the steady historical growth of its literature, (b> its ability to integrate a number of communication research subfields under a single theoretical um-Maxwell E.

No abstract

This study examines how the media can build a news event's salience by emphasizing different aspects of the event during its life span. A two-dimensional measurement scheme is proposed as a systematic way of examining media frames. This scheme yields cross-issue generalizability that liberates framing research from issue-specific boundaries. A content analysis examining the coverage of the Columbine school shootings in the New York Times documents the use of multiple frames on the time and space dimensions, visualizes framing as a process over time, and identifies certain frame-changing patterns in the coverage of this highly salient news event.