Military Review English Edition November December 2016 | Page 118

community agenda setters for many people are generally
of three types. First, there are the traditional community agenda setters. Throughout most of human history,
agenda setters have been community leaders with whom
other community members had personal contact. Such
leaders include leading members of prominent families,
charismatic teachers, local government officials, military
or law enforcement officials, clergy, and informal as well
as formal peer-group leaders, among others. They gain
their influence either by inherited stature or from personal achievement as observed by the community.
However, starting with Gutenberg’s printing press in
1439, a second type of agenda setter emerged—personalities involved in producing and editing mass media distributed from afar. These agenda setters set community
agendas through the impersonal, long-distance influence
of widely distributed appealing words, ideas, and images.
Such powerful impersonal agenda-setting leaders have
evolved in our own time to have great vicarious influence
on community agendas because of the opinions reported
through the media that do not involve transfer through
immediate face-to-face contact. Since Gutenberg, mass
media expanded the circle of agenda setters to encompass charismatic political theorists, philosophers and religious thinkers, educators, national or international activists, entertainment and sports figures, fashion figures,
popular news reporters, and others with similar popular
appeal. Though it remains argued whether media-figure
influence or traditional person-to-person influence has
greater sway, there is little doubt that media figures have
become potent agenda setters through broad, but impersonal, contact with the public through mass media.2
On assessing just how influential media agenda setters
actually have become, it is useful to highlight the work of
media scholars Donald Shaw and Maxwell McCombs,
whose exhaustive research has persuasively demonstrated
the powerful influence mass media have on setting the
public agenda in the modern world. Their conclusions,
first demonstrated while researching the impact of media
on elections in the United States, definitively established
the immensely strong correlation between issues the media editorially select to cover and those that have pivotal
influence during election cycles. Subsequently, the studies
of Shaw and McCombs have been widely replicated by
hundreds of other media and sociology scholars, the majority of which have arrived at similar conclusions.3 Such
subsequent research appears to validate that media have
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Universe of issues people could
be thinking about
Issues of
individual
concern, influenced
by face-to-face
contact

What most people think about
(Graphic by Arin Burgess, Military Review)

Figure 1. Issues of Individual Interest
exceptionally strong, if not decisive, influence on framing
the community agenda-setting process that selects the
issues not only about which elections are decided but also
about the social issues in general that become the popular
focus of community concern, debate, and controversy.
As Shaw and colleagues Thomas C. Terry and Milad
Minooie noted in a recent article,
What is agenda setting? Political scientist
Bernard Cohen in the early 1960s discovered
that what people knew about foreign affairs
was closely related to the editorial selection
of items covered in the news media they
followed (i.e., media connect people and set a
news agenda).…
Cohen’s research led him to argue that the
press was not especially effective in telling
people what to think but was exceptionally
powerful in telling people what to think—
and talk—about. This, in a phrase, is agenda
setting: media frame and focus community
interest on a discrete set of issue by means of
regular news coverage.
Since then, hundreds of media studies have
confirmed the observation that news media
November-December 2016  MILITARY REVIEW