The Scary World in Your Living Room and Neighborhood: Using Local Broadcast News, Neighborhood Crime Rates, and Personal Experience to Test Agenda Setting and Cultivation

The State of Cultivation

“…Especially strong evidence is provided by Romer, Jamieson, and Aday (2003), who also find that the relationship between local news exposure and fear of crime is independent of local crime rates. Gross and Aday (2003) are virtually alone in not finding this association, although they did find that those who watch more local news are more likely to cite crime as the ''most important problem'' in their city.…”

Agenda-Setting and Priming in Prime Time Television: Crime Dramas as Political Cues

“…The third issue is that the cultivation hypothesis specifies that increasing the perception that one will be a victim of crime is the psychological process by which portrayals of violence influence attitudes. Gross and Aday (2003) counter this argument by showing that fear of victimization is associated with personal experience with crime, but not with media consumption. To the contrary, these authors find that the agenda-setting effect is associated with media consumption, but not with an individual's personal experience with crime.…”

EU perceptions in Northeast Asia: a cross-national comparative study of press coverage and citizens’ opinion

“…The media's agenda-setting effect is observed when the news media consumers accept as the most important problem for society those issues that are given more prominent attention by media outlets (Dearing and Rogers 1996;Gross and Aday 2003). Some controlled experiments have clearly demonstrated this media effect (Iyengar and Kinder 1987;Iyengar et al 1982Iyengar et al , 1984 and is widely acknowledged that whilst "[t]he 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" (Cohen 1963: 13).…”