Porous frontiers: priming as an extension of agenda setting and framing as a complementary approach

Agenda setting and priming both work under the premise that media affect audience evaluations by influencing the likelihood of some issues rather than other coming to mind. Framing, in turn, rests on the idea that, by representing the world in a certain way, media influence people to think about the world in particular ways. Agenda setting, priming and framing all suggest that media messages participate in the formation of the public knowledge and that knowledge is activated and used in politically relevant decisions. This paper provides a concise, accessible and clear overall perspective on these three theories and aims to provide theoretical and methodological clarifications that may lead to a better accommodation of these three ways of conceptualizing media influence on public opinion. The first part characterizes and elucidates on the meaning of priming and framing as traditionally being seen as an extension and a sub-species of agenda setting. It argues that although priming may be conceived as an extension of agenda setting, framing is not a sub species of agenda setting. In the second part, it contends that agenda setting and framing constitute different strands of research –  namely, media effects based on an accessibility model and on a social constructivist, applicability model – and that, as such, they develop themselves autonomously and independently, even if they complement

In fact, a massive, direct persuasive of media effect may even be unlikely because audiences selectively avoid contrary information, they suffer from an information overload and choose their media interest in a strong competition media environment (McGuire, 1986). Bennett & Iygengar (2008, p. 709) even claimed we are now entering a "new era of minimal effects" (cf.  (Price & Tewksbury, 1997, p. 175). The concern about the persua-sive impact of mass media was, thus, redirected to a cognitive perspective emphasizing information-processing.
Emblematic of the cognitive effects of mass-media is Agenda-Setting research, a paradigm of research on public opinion (Dearing & Rogers, 1996, p. 10) that establishes a connection between the importance of issues by public opinion and the selective coverage of particular public problems by mass media (McCombs & Shaw, 1972 (Weaver, 2007, p. 144). There is a dramatic growth of framing studies (including media and newspaper's framing process) with a modest growth in priming studies and a levelling off of agenda setting research (idem).
Since agenda setting, primingcoming from the cognitive psychology-and framing all describe aspects of mass media's cognitive effects, these theories tended to be assimilated together, more exactly, priming and framing have been integrated to agenda setting theory (McCombs, 2004, p. 57;Dearing & Rogers, 1996, pp. 62-67;Diaz, 2004, p. 66). It is well known agenda setting refers to the strong correlation between the emphasis mass media place in certain issues and the importance attributed to these issues by audiences (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). Priming, by its turn, refers to the "changes in the standards that people use to make political evaluations" (Iygengar & Kinder, 1987, p. 63)  The paper provides a concise, accessible and clear overall on these three theories and it aims to make conceptual clarifications that may lead us to a better accommodation of these three media impacts on public opinion, specifically to tell apart agenda setting and priming as media effects models from framing as a cultural construction of the social world. Second, agenda setting strong causal effect is also dependent on time-order since the cause must precede the effect. This means that any measured public concern about the issues of the moment has to be juxtaposed with the concern of news media about those issues in the preceding condition where exposure to one stimulus influences a response to a subsequent stimulus without conscious control or intention. For example, the word "Journalist" is recognized quicker following the word "Media" than the word "Building". It is defined as "the effects of a prior context on the interpretation and retrieval of information" (Fiske & Taylor, 1984, p. 231). Priming has its origins in the psychological network models of memory, according to which information is stored in memory as nodes (concepts) that are con- given the huge amount of information, individuals routinely draw upon those parcels of information that are particularly salient at a given time (Moy et al., 2016, p. 5).
By other hand, priming is essentially an outgrowth of the media effects process initiated by agenda setting (Brosius, 1994, apud Moy et al., 2016. This is clear when McCombs Agenda setting and priming, although being conceptually distinct theories, start to refer to the same cognitive, information-processing effects.
They both deal with the salience of object's attributes that guide individuals process of opinion. "Attribute priming" (Kim et al., 2002, p. 11 Third level agenda setting is, therefore, named a "Network Agenda Setting Model" and hypothesizes that "the more likely the news media mention two elements in tandem, the greater change that the audience will perceive these two elements as inter- And what about framing?

Framing as a subspecies of Agenda Setting
The concept of framing has today so many different uses and theoretical backgrounds that it has not a single definition that is agreed upon (Scheufele, 2008). Entman (1993) considers it a "fractured paradigm" but this is not an absolute risk. On the contrary, this diversity makes framing a thriving concept with many applications making the media effects domain "a bridging concept" (Reese, 2007). 27 The most cited definition of framing belongs to Entman (1993, p. 52) who writes: "To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/ or treatment recommendation for the item described".
A frame could be a phrase, a metaphor, image or analogy and it is used basically to communicate the essence of an issue. According to Gamson & Modigliani (1987, p. 143 It presupposes a non-differentiation between agenda setting (specifically, second-level, object agenda setting) and framing (Popkin, 1994) and it takes framing into the theory of media effects (Iyengar, 1991).
That's why some authors "complaint" that agenda setting researchers, by extending the original notion into a second level, are entering the realm of framing (Kosicki, 1993).

Was Framing framed by Agenda Setting? -a constructivist approach
The question that follows is to determine the conditions from which it is possible to distinguish agenda setting and framing: was framing "framed" to Indeed, framing is not even equivalent to the attributes agenda setting. Gamson (1992) argues that framing is a kind of symbolic signature matrix (cf. Weaver, 2007, p. 143). This means that frames are not issues nor attributes but greater symbolic pillars, or leading perspectives, guiding the understanding of an issue. By recovering its sociological origins in Bateson and Goffman, we recognize that frames are meaning units that structure the perception of reality and mark out the adequate behaviors to adopt. Frames are, then, social angles and although they can be used strategically, this does not mean that frames equal strategies that aim to obtain a given effect.
It was precisely this reduction of the concept of frame to a strategic use in order to attain certain tactical objectives that brought it closer to the mass communication research ultimately making framing as a subspecies or an equivalence of agenda setting (Mendonça & Simões, 2012, p. 195). At this light, frames tended to be thought as discursive practices aiming to trigger some effects (Druckman & Nelson, 2003). Agenda setting and priming are memory-based models of information processing. The temporal dimension of these theories clearly assumes that issues (some aspects of them) are more accessible and easier recallable. They describe a temporal intensity that helps bring to the forefront some issues that will influence the standards they use when deciding and evaluating political problems or candidates.
Accessibility is, in simple terms, a function of "how much" or "how recently" audiences have been exposed to certain issues. Agenda setting and priming are accessibility models since are based on the ease these issues can be retrieved from memory. They are bounded by the frequency with which issues are portrayed and their argument is essentially quantitative suggesting that greater frequency of exposure to issues makes them more likely to be uses by media audiences (Kim & Scheufele, 2002, p. 9 For example, framing financial bankruptcy as an economic crisis will be more probable to guide a public evaluation if the issue is constantly repeated and the same frame applied in other issues (i.e. The death of football club's owner as a football club's crisis).
Likewise, an inapplicable frame is unlikely to be used, not matter how accessible it may be (i.e framing a singer's stage fall as a personal crisis, even this frame is one of the most frequent in today's mass media).
So, instead of endorsing the view that assimilates priming and framing to agenda setting, it is better to en-visage framing as an independent research strand: a general theory based on the operation and outcomes of a particular system of thought and action (Entman, 1993, p. 56).
More than trying to fit in framing and agenda setting (and specifically inserting framing in the second level, attribute agenda setting), it seems more plausible to consider framing as research approach of its own with similar benefits to the study of political communication and public opinion formation.
Framing is not a pass-partout concept (Van Gorp, 2007, p. 60) but, inspired by a socio-cultural perspective, it is more than a pure model of media effects. It is a research strand parallel to agenda setting that enlightens another kind of cognitive influence on media audiences.

Was Framing framed by Agenda
Setting?
By posing agenda setting (and priming as its extension) and framing as different approaches of research the answer is now perfectly clear.
Yes, at least a parcel of framing research tended to be assimilated to a media effect in the same way of agenda setting (cf. Druckman & Nelson, 2003). Nevertheless, a cultural approach to social construction carried on framing expands its theoretical scope (and domains of application) and prevents it to be reduced to a merely, more or less, mechanical effect in which frames condition and determine media audiences. So, framing was "framed" inside a frame of media effects similar to agenda setting (cf. Mendonça & Simões, 2012). Nevertheless, it is an applicability-based model, it differs fundamentally from accessibility-based models like agenda setting or priming.
There is also a recent development in media that suggests a clear demar- The frontier between agenda setting and framing exists: but is is a porous frontier that like membranes surge them into entering a mutual dialogue in order to better describe how issues are accessible and have been framed. In effect, without a rooting attitude on the social construction of frames, accessibility-based models are vague and cannot fully explain the social reproduction of issues. In reverse, these porous frontiers between agenda setting and framing will take researchers to acknowledge that recurrent frames are frequent because they are more accessible to both media and audience.
Framing, thus, is not an extension nor a refinement -a sub-species -of agenda setting. Framing is perhaps better described as the faithful companion of agenda setting research in the task of enlightening media role on political communication. Together they refer to the encompassing process in which "the most important problem to public opinion" may also be the one best framed (in both reiteration, distributive and discursive terms).