50 years of studies on agenda setting – Ways of a media theory

Abstract

With this issue of Mediapolis we intend to mark the 50 years since the seminal study of Chapel Hill, which gave rise to one of the most consistent areas of studies of Communication Sciences, carried out on the media: the theory of agenda setting or scheduling. This story began when Maxwel McCombs and Donald Shaw, then two young researchers, decided to examine how, in connection with the 1968 U.S. presidential elections, which opposed Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, the media could somehow influence public opinion. To this end, they conducted a study based on 100 undecided voters residing in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, eventually finding a very strong correlation coefficient between the media agenda and the voter agenda. The agenda setting, at an early stage, began by stating that people end up knowing certain issues by the effect of the selection made by the media, which in this way transforms themes, people and events into a privileged subject of public debate, marking a parallelism between the media agenda and the public opinion agenda.