A Test of Media-Centered Agenda Setting: Newspaper Content and Public Interests in a Presidential Election

RUSSELL J. DALTON
University of California, Irvine

PAUL ALLEN BECK

Ohio State University

ROBERT HUCKFELDT
Indiana University, Bloomington

WILLIAM KOETZLE
University of California, Irvine
The conventional wisdom in political communications research is that the media play a dominant role in defining the agenda of elections. In Bernard Cohens words, the media do not tell us what to think, but they tell us what to think about. The present article challenges this conclusion. We present data on media coverage of the 1992 presidential election from the first nationally representative sample of American newspapers and compare these to the issue interests of the American public. We conclude that past claims that the media control the agenda-setting process have been overstated. Candidates messages are well represented in press coverage of the campaign, and coverage is even independent of a newspapers editorial endorsement. We argue that agenda setting is a transaction process in which elites, the media, and the public converge to a common set of salient issues that define a campaign.

Keywords agenda setting; Bush campaign; candidate agenda setting; Clinton campaign; editorial endorsement, impact of; journalist agenda setting; election press coverage; media agenda; Perot campaign; public agenda

At the core of elections is a competition to define the flow of information to the votersand thereby influence the electorates choice. Successful presidential candidates are often the ones who convince the voters that their priorities reflect the nations needs or who respond best to the needs expressed by the public. Unsuccessful candidates are often the ones whose message does not resonate with the
A previous version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, April 1995. We would like to thank Lee Becker, Craig Brians, Thomas Patterson, Ruediger Schmitt-Beck, Holli Semetko, Martin Wattenberg, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on this article.

463
Political Communication , 15:463481, 1998 Copyright 1998 Taylor & Francis 1058-4609/98 $12.00 + .00

464

Russell J. Dalton et al.

public, either because they cannot sense the publics interests or because they offer programs with limited appeal. In simple terms, one could predict the outcome of the 1992 U.S. presidential election by answering the question of whether the campaign was about selecting experienced and proven leadership or improving the performance of the economy. While electoral researchers may agree with the preceding statements, they disagree on how the information flow of elections is determined. The process of setting the political agenda is a complicated part of the campaign and governing processes. Political communications research has often argued that candidates must rely on the media to spread their messages, allowing the media to define election themes by selecting certain events and by framing the presentation of the news (Entmann, 1993; Patterson, 1993). This is the well-known agenda-setting hypothesis: The media influence what people are interested in, even if they have less impact in determining the content of opinions (Cohen, 1963). Here, we study the 1992 U.S. presidential election to examine agenda setting in American electoral politics with a special focus on the influence of the press.1 We examine the contribution of various actors to the process of agenda setting to provide systematic evidence of the content of the political agenda in 1992 and the presss intermediary role between the candidates and the public. In addition, by tracking the flow of campaign information through daily newspapers, we lay the foundation for understanding the information base that citizens can use in making their electoral choices.

Conceptualizing the Agenda-Setting Process

An important debate in the political communications literature focuses on the role various societal actors play in creating the political agenda. The theoretical literature on the importance of the media in agenda setting can be traced back to Bernard Cohens (1963) argument that the mass media may not be successful in telling people what to think, but the media are successful in telling people what to think about. There is considerable empirical evidence in support of this argument. It begins with McCombs and Shaws (1972) finding that the issues presented by the media were strongly correlated with the publics own issue interests. A number of other surveys found similarly high agreement between public interests and media content with different samples and under different media conditions (Coombs, 1981; McCombs, 1981; McLeod, Becker, & Byrnes, 1974; Shaw & McCombs, 1977; Semetko, Blumler, Gurevitch, & Weaver, 1991; Weaver et al., 1981). Experimental research has further demonstrated that, in experimental settings, media content can influence political interests (Iyengar & Kinder, 1987). We do not challenge these correlations. Indeed, the bulk of our analysis is built around such correlational analysis. Instead, we ask whether these correlations are evidence of causation. There are at least two possible explanations of the correlation between media content and public interests. In its strong form, the media-centered model, the agendasetting hypothesis maintains that the media exercise an independent causal role in determining the publics interests. The media are seen as autonomous actors who set the agenda of both the public and political elites. The media supposedly use their control of the information process to excerpt specific events and thus present a selective image of the world. Through investigative reporting and news analysis,

Media-Centered Agenda Setting

465

the media may also inject themes into an election separate from the events of the campaign trail. This process implies that the correlation between public interests and media content comes about because the public is adopting the medias view of politics. Stated in such stark terms, support for the media-centered model might be limited; yet several recent reviews make such direct claims. For instance, Holli Semetkos review of this literature concludes: Support for the agenda-setting hypothesis has been found using all of these methodological approaches, further strengthening the argument of a powerful news media . . . agenda setting is a process led by the news media (Semetko, 1996, p. 271). Similarly, Maxwell McCombs recent review article discusses agenda setting as a conditional process, yet his explanation of the medias influence is also quite blunt: Early agenda-setting scholars asked who set the public agenda. The empirical answer was that to a considerable degree the news media set the public agenda (McCombs, 1994, p. 9). Statements about the medias role as an agenda setter have become conventional wisdom in the literature that deserves more direct evaluation. Explanations of media-centered agenda setting come from multiple and often contradictory sources. Some critics point to the liberal orientation of journalists and argue that newspaper and television journalists project their own views and interests onto the campaign. Others note the concentration of press ownership by large corporations and argue that this leads to a distinctly conservative recounting of the news (Bagdikian, 1992). (The logical contradiction between simultaneous claims that the media project a more liberal and a more conservative image of the campaign should raise our skepticism of such claims.) Less ideological critiques claim that the media are simply profit-driven enterprises and thus, report what will sell. This might mean the exploitation of glamorous events or scandals or the avoidance of news that might antagonize some readers. There is one common theme in these arguments: The media have an independent agenda that they project through their reporting. An alternative approach to agenda setting suggests that media content and the publics interests result from an ongoing transaction process among candidates, the media, and the public (Bauer, 1964; Frueh, 1991; Becker & Kosicki, 1995). Similarly, scholars such as Just et al. (1996) describe agenda setting as a process by which multiple actors construct shared meanings about the campaign. The transaction model posits that the actual agenda of the campaign results from the interaction of social actors; each actor is constrained by the others and by the flow of actual political events. The candidates attempt to project their messages to the voters, but these messages are partially conditioned by what they expect (hope) will resonate with the public. Indeed, modern campaigns now pretest their themes with focus groups and opinion polls to determine which themes are likely to evoke a public response (Altschuler, 1982; Salmore & Salmore, 1989). Similarly, the public may bring its own interests into a campaign, but voters also have to respond to the choices presented by the candidates. Even if the media or specific newspapers have their own agenda, their reporting of the campaign is constrained by the candidates actions and their readers interests. Furthermore, these social actors are responding to political events that shape the discourse of the campaign.2 In other words, the transaction model suggests strong correlations between media content and public interests (and the issue themes projected by the campaigns), but such correlations are not evidence of media causation. These patterns derive from the convergence on a common agenda based on interactions among the campaigns,

466

Russell J. Dalton et al.

the media, and the public. One would therefore expect a general consensus in various aspects of campaign coverage and relatively little evidence that the media are independently creating the campaign agenda. In summary, the crucial issue is the degree of control that the media actually exercise in reporting election news and the impact of these reports on public interests. Researchers have used various methodologies to examine the topic of agenda setting, ranging from cross-sectional analyses to experimental studies and longitudinal designs. As our contribution to this literature, we examine a key element of the media-centered model that has previously received little systematic study: variations within and between newspapers in their coverage of campaign issues. We study the agenda-setting process by comparing the salient topics of the 1992 U.S. presidential election for the candidates, the press, and the public. We examine implications of the media-centered and transaction models by analyzing newspaper coverage of the campaign to determine whether there is evidence that the media were selecting or creating a distinct view of the election. For example, we can examine whether media-initiated reporting projects a different agenda than campaign-initiated articles or whether a papers editorial position affects its election coverage. In addition, our research is based on a relatively rare national study of agenda setting that includes data from the candidates, the media, and the public. The results, we believe, provide new evidence of the medias role in the agendasetting process in the context of American electoral politics.

Data Sources
The first element in our study was a national public opinion survey (see the Appendix for details). We selected 39 counties from a stratified design to represent the U.S. population. We interviewed a small sample of the public in each county by means of a random-digit dialing telephone survey. The core of our analysis is based on a detailed coding of newspaper coverage of the 1992 presidential election (see the Appendix). For each of the counties in our sample, we collected the major newspaper (in a few instances, two newspapers) read by county residents. This produced a sample of 46 newspapers representative of those read by a cross section of the American public. We coded 6,537 articles that included news coverage of the campaign, news analyses, opinion and editorial articles, political cartoons, and letters to the editor on campaign themes. For each article, we coded up to four separate narratives. The term narrative describes what might be considered a separate story within an article: an actor involved in a specific event dealing with a certain topic. An article that began with George Bush talking about the economy followed by Bill Clintons response would be coded as containing two separate narratives. We coded each narrative for its main topic, main actor, and the target of the action (if any).3

The Candidates, the Campaign, and Political Agendas

We began our analysis by examining the degree to which candidates appeared successful in presenting their own priorities in media reports on their respective campaigns. We expected the purest measure of the candidates preferred campaign agendasand the area least susceptible to media-centered redirectionto involve reports of what the candidates did on the campaign trail. Furthermore, this

Media-Centered Agenda Setting

467

would provide a baseline for examining other features of press coverage of the election. From the total media database, we focused on campaign-initiated news about the election.4 We created a subset of articles that matched the following criteria: (a) They were initiated by actions of the candidates campaigns, such as a rally or press release; (b) they were news articles reporting on specific events that had occurred in the previous 48 hours, excluding news analyses, op/ed pieces, and letters to the editor; (c) the topic of the narrative was a political issue, rather than candidate personalities, campaign standings, or campaign organizations; and (d) the major actor in the narrative was either the presidential or vice presidential candidate or an official spokesperson for the campaign. A total of 1,113 narratives met these criteria. Table 1 presents the topics that appeared in campaign-initiated news articles. The candidates separate agendas were fairly distinct in these data. The Democrats central campaign theme seemed quite clear. Its the Economy, Stupid was the unofficial theme of the Clinton campaign, and these words were prominently displayed in Clinton headquarters. The Clinton campaign emphasized the weakness of the economy under the Bush administration, increasing unemployment, and the governments lack of response to these economic problems. Ross Perots mission in 1992 was to force the other candidates to discuss the federal deficit and the nations

Table 1

Issue content of narratives in campaign-generated articles (in percentages) Bush campaign Bush platform/record Clinton platform/record Perot platform/record Economic issues Budget and finance Social programs Foreign policy Environment/energy Minority and rights issues Legal issues Political system, institutions Defense policy Education and research Housing/infrastructure Other domestic issues Other international issues 7.4 9.5 0.4 21.1 18.1 11.2 8.6 7.4 5.5 3.6 2.1 1.7 0.6 0.4 1.5 0.8 Clinton campaign 12.2 8.9 0.6 31.9 9.4 12.4 6.9 7.1 1.8 2.0 2.1 2.2 1.0 0.4 1.0 0.1 Perot campaign 9.2 7.6 12.2 36.6 17.6 3.8 6.1 0.0 0.0 1.5 3.8 1.5 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0

Total 9.8 9.0 1.9 27.9 14.1 10.9 7.5 6.4 3.1 2.6 2.3 1.9 0.7 0.4 1.1 0.4

Note . Table entries are the major topics discussed by each campaign in campaigngenerated news articles in which the topic was an issue or policy and the main actor was a presidential candidate, vice presidential candidate, or campaign spokesperson. The unit of analysis was a narrative within an article. The numbers of narratives were as follows: Bush, 474; Clinton, 508; and Perot, 131.

468

Russell J. Dalton et al.

economic problems. Consequently, about a third of the daily newspaper reports on both the Clinton (31.9 percent) and Perot campaigns (36.6 percent) dealt with economic issues, often criticizing the nations past economic performance and stressing the need for change. These themes were much less common in articles about the Bush campaign (21.1 percent). Because a diverse set of issues was included under the general heading of economic issues, these broad comparisons actually underestimated the differences between the candidates. For example, reports on the Clinton campaign devoted more than twice as much attention to unemployment than did reports on either Bush or Perot. Conversely, articles on the Bush campaign were more likely to explain how the situation of specific business sectors presented a more positive view of the nations economy. Counterbalancing the issue of the economy, the Bush (and Perot) campaign emphasized budget issues and government finance. Taxes were especially prominent in budget/finance narratives from the Bush campaign, whereas the Clinton campaign stressed the federal budget deficit. A full 15.3 percent of media reports about Bush were related to the tax issue, as compared with only 6.1 percent for the Clinton campaign. For Bush, the tax issue was an alternative to the economic thrust of the Clinton campaign; for Perot, this reinforced his broader criticisms of government. Together, the economy and budget/finance dominated the campaign, accounting for more than 40 percent of the coverage of the Clinton and Bush campaigns. The Perot campaign offered an even clearer focus; more than half of Perots coverage dealt with the economy or budget/finance issues. Beyond economic issues, the Perot campaign gave little attention to issues that might be considered central questions of contemporary governance. Environmental policy, education and research, and minority issues received scant attention in reports on the Perot campaign. Other key issues such as defense policy or law and order issues received minimal coverage. The daily press presented a sharp image of Perots primary concerns. Other elements of campaign reporting also fit the candidates presumed agendas. The Bush campaign wanted to stress foreign policy because it was seen as a strength of the Bush candidacy and stood in sharp contrast to the limited international experience of a governor from Arkansas. Stories on the Bush campaign devoted slightly more attention to foreign policy issues, although the lead over the Clinton campaign was not substantial. The media reported the Bush and Clinton campaigns as devoting significant attention to social issues, but this meant social welfare for the Democrats and drug problems or AIDS for the Republicans. Another notable aspect of the Table 1 data is the modest attention paid to a host of other issues: education and research, law and order, and defense policy. The limited attention given to minority-related issues is especially striking; the Republicans actually devoted more attention to these issues than the Democrats. This may reflect the Democrats complacency about the minority vote, at least in events reported through the mainstream media, as well as Clintons conscious effort to distance himself from the Democrats past image of liberalism. In addition, the slightly higher level of Republican attention to social issues can partially be traced to the abortion issue (Republicans, 2.4 percent; Democrats, 0.2 percent; Perot, 0.0 percent). Such findings do not mean that these issues were not discussed in 1992; rather they were not among the most prominent themes in media coverage of the candidates campaigns. In summary, press accounts of the respective presidential campaigns seem to match descriptive accounts of these campaigns (Abramson, Aldrich, & Rohde, 1994;

Media-Centered Agenda Setting

469

Arterton, 1993; White, 1993). Much as Stempel and Windhauser (1991) found in their earlier study of the 1984 presidential election, the three presidential campaigns were fairly successful in communicating their broad agendas in press reports.5 Candidates cannot totally control the content of the message. We know from other reports that candidates feel hindered by the mediating role that the press and television play in the campaign and the publics lack of receptivity to certain themes the candidates want to emphasize. Indeed, this type of constraint is consistent with the transaction model. Still, the news coverage of the campaign indicates that the candidates preferred issues were presented to the electorate in 1992.

Examining Media-Initiated Articles

At the core of the debate between the media-centered and transaction models is the question of the medias control of the information flow about the election. An indirect test of these models compares the pattern of campaign-initiated reporting we have just discussed with the presentation of the election in media-initiated reporting. This includes articles such as journalists reports, news analyses, opinion columns, editorials, and political cartoons. If there is evidence of a media-centered agenda, it should be most apparent when the press is writing its own interpretations of the campaign. For instance, Thomas Patterson argued that reporters and candidates have different issue biases that can be seen in part when issue news initiated by reporters is compared with that initiated by candidates (1980, p. 33). Similarly, Just et al. (1996), after analyzing press reports of the 1992 campaign for a small set of local newspapers, maintain that journalist-initiated articles are systematically more critical of the candidates. Our detailed coding of daily newspaper coverage of the 1992 election enabled us to compare these various elements of coverage.

Media-Initiated News
From our total newspaper database, we selected media-initiated news reports about the election, as we had done for Table 1. The media-initiated news articles included journalists reports on the campaign, news analyses, and press-conducted interviews with the candidates.6 Comparing how campaign-initiated narratives on the election differ from media-initiated news article may indicate whether the media pursue a distinct agenda. Table 2 reports the issue content of media-initiated news articles in which one of the candidates or a campaign spokesperson was the main actor. These data display many of the same patterns seen in campaign-initiated news articles (Table 1). Like the candidates themselves, press reports about the election focused on the economy and budget/finance themes. As shown earlier, the Clinton campaign stressed the former and the Bush campaign stressed the latter. Reports on the Bush campaign also devoted more attention to foreign policy, defense, and the subset of social programs that were being emphasized by the candidates. If we simply correlate the percentage of total coverage devoted to each of the 16 themes in Tables 1 and 2, there is a very strong parallel between these two images of the 1992 campaign (Pearson r = .96). The most noticeable difference between campaign-initiated and media-initiated news articles was the greater attention to the overall programs and records of the three

470

Russell J. Dalton et al.

Table 2

Issue content of narratives in media-generated articles (in percentages) Bush campaign Bush platform/record Clinton platform/record Perot platform/record Economic issues Budget and finance Social programs Foreign policy Environment/energy Minority and rights issues Legal issues Political system, institutions Defense policy Education and research Housing/infrastructure Other domestic issues Other international issues 15.0 2.6 1.3 22.2 13.2 10.7 18.0 3.8 2.6 2.1 1.3 3.8 1.3 0.4 1.3 0.4 Clinton campaign 2.5 17.3 0.0 27.9 9.6 9.6 10.2 4.1 2.5 8.1 2.5 2.0 1.5 0.5 1.0 0.5 Perot campaign 6.0 3.0 23.9 19.4 25.4 4.5 1.5 1.5 0.0 1.5 10.4 0.0 0.0 0.0 1.5 1.5

Total 8.8 8.4 3.8 24.1 13.5 9.4 12.7 3.6 2.2 4.4 3.0 2.6 1.2 0.4 1.2 0.6

Note . Table entries are the issues discussed by each campaign in media-generated news articles in which the main actor in the narrative was a presidential candidate, vice presidential candidate, or campaign spokesperson. The unit of analysis was a narrative within an article. The numbers of narratives were as follows: Bush, 234; Clinton, 197; and Perot, 67.

candidates in the latter. For instance, only 7.4 percent of campaign-initiated narratives in which the Bush campaign was the main actor concentrated on his overall program or record (Table 1), as compared with 15.0 percent of media-initiated narratives (Table 2). Through freedom from reporting the days events, such media-initiated articles added some breadth of perspective to campaign coverage. We are not claiming that daily newspapers faithfully report every news event and policy pronouncement of the presidential candidates. It is easy to cite individual examples where a journalist or one newspaper projected a different version of reality than other news media. We must, however, remember that media is a plural term. The content and impact of the press result from collective processes, not single narratives or even a single newspaper. Cumulating all reporting together, media-initiated news articles about the election broadly reflected the same issue agenda articulated by the campaigns themselves. This does not rule out the possibility that daily newspapers presented a candidates issues in a distorted or incomplete way, but this is a more subtle claim for press bias than is commonly made by the media-centered literature.

Evaluative and Editorial Articles

The presss ability to exercise discretion in the reporting of campaign themes is also limited because it is tied to the events of the campaign and thus the themes that

Media-Centered Agenda Setting

471

the candidates want to discuss. Newspapers may have more discretionary power in other election coverage, especially in their analysis articles and editorial material (Semetko et al., 1991). If we are to find evidence of an independent press agenda, surely it should appear in articles that arise from the media and are evaluative by design. We included a variety of such articles in our analyses: political analyses, opinion/editorial columns, political cartoons, and letters to the editor. Political analyses may be written by a newspapers political correspondent or another reporter. These articles do not focus on immediate political events but generally discuss the candidates and/or the campaign. Even more distinct are opinion/editorial columns, in which the journalistic norms of objectivity and neutrality are partially lifted. This represents a large share of newspaper attention to the campaign: About a fifth of all the articles we coded were op/ed columns. Cartoons are a visual form of an opinion article. Finally, letters to the editor often address election themes, providing evaluative content to the newspapers information flow. Letters from readers also yield some measure of what themes interest the public, albeit an atypical group of the public. Table 3 presents the main issue themes in these various types of articles. For the sake of simplicity, we combined all narratives in which any of the presidential

Table 3

Issue content of narratives in political analyses, op/ed columns, cartoons, and reader letters (in percentages) Political analyses Bush platform/record Clinton platform/record Perot platform/record Economic issues Budget and finance Social programs Foreign policy Environment/energy Minority and rights issues Legal issues Political system, institutions Defense policy Education and research Housing/infrastructure Other domestic issues Other international issues 11.2 10.8 5.6 22.2 13.1 10.0 8.1 2.5 4.3 3.1 5.0 2.1 0.8 0.2 3.8 0.3 Op/ed columns 12.7 12.2 5.3 18.5 15.8 8.9 11.5 2.9 3.0 2.3 1.6 1.0 1.9 0.7 1.0 0.5

Cartoons 15.0 10.5 12.2 24.8 20.1 3.1 6.8 2.7 0.0 0.0 1.4 0.7 0.0 0.3 2.4 0.0

Letters 14.1 11.1 4.7 15.6 13.5 11.6 7.7 6.0 7.1 1.3 1.7 1.9 1.5 0.3 1.7 0.2

Total 13.0 11.5 6.1 19.3 15.3 9.0 9.5 3.5 3.9 2.0 2.3 1.4 1.4 0.5 1.2 0.2

Note . Table entries are the issues discussed by all three campaigns combined in mediagenerated non-news articles in which the main actor in the narrative was a presidential candidate, vice presidential candidate, or campaign spokesperson. The unit of analysis was a narrative within an article. The numbers of narratives were as follows: news analyses, 481; op/ed columns, 1,153; cartoons, 294; and letters, 533.

472

Russell J. Dalton et al.

campaigns were the main actor. We found a very similar profile to the themes discussed in campaign-initiated and media-initiated news articles. The most frequently discussed themes in all four types of articles were the economy and budget/finance issues. A set of other issuesdefense, legal issues, and educationgenerated little attention from any source. If we compare the salience of issues in the articles in Table 3 with reports in media-initiated news articles (Table 1), the average correlation is strikingly high ( r = .92).7 Beyond these broad similarities, several interesting differences appeared across the various types of articles. Readers letters, for example, gave greater attention to hot button issues that received less attention by the candidates: social issues, minority rights issues, and the environment. These are the types of issues that might stimulate a significant number of individuals to write a letter to their local newspaper. It is also somewhat surprising that readers letters were less often concerned with Ross Perot, since Perot claimed to be the populist candidate. Yet, what is most striking about the patterns in Table 3 is the similarity across types of articles. This applies even to opinion/editorial columns and cartoons, in which the authors had the greatest freedom to say what they wanted rather than what the candidates wanted. Some opinion columnists might have used their discretionary power to introduce new topics into the electoral coverage. Indeed, this is a legitimate role for them to pursue. When cumulated across all op/ed articles, however, the broad themes of coverage closely mirrored those of the campaign itself.

A Direct Test of Media Bias

To this point, we have relied on inferential tests of the media-centered model, comparing different types of newspaper coverage with our expectations of the agenda preferred by each campaign. Admittedly, a comparison of different types of newspaper articles is only an indirect test of whether election coverage is manipulated by the press. At the heart of the media-centered model is the assumption that the press selectively reports the news and thus affects public interests. If such biases systematically exist, a direct test of this model would presume that a newspapers own partisan preferences would influence its selection of news stories about the major party candidates. Benjamin Page (1996), for example, has recently restated the argument that the media use news coverage to project their own policy preferences. Similarly, studies of the ownership patterns of the press at least implicitly presume that editorial control affects the reporting of the news. The media-centered model would predict that a newspapers presidential endorsement influences its reporting of the campaign. Because of the unique nature of our study, we were able to directly test for such potential media biases. We compared the coverage of both candidates between newspapers that endorsed either Bush or Clinton.8 If the media-centered model is correct, we would expect that a newspaper endorsing Bush might emphasize the agenda of the Bush campaign and minimize the importance of the issues stressed by the Clinton campaign. The paper might give more prominence to foreign policy issues or the problems of the budget deficit. If a paper that leaned toward Clinton wanted to benefit its candidate, it would disproportionately emphasize the economy and other issue themes of the Clinton campaign. Table 4 shows that a newspapers presidential endorsement had little impact

Media-Centered Agenda Setting

473

on the issue content of its election reporting. For instance, papers that endorsed Bush and those that endorsed Clinton presented very similar images of the Bush campaign. The correlation between the percentage of attention to the 15 topics was .92. Reports on the Bush campaign devoted more time to the budget, economic issues, and foreign policyas we expectedbut there was little difference in this pattern across papers. Similarly, coverage of the Clinton campaign focused on the economy and social programs, and the amount of attention given to the various issues was similar regardless of whether the newspaper endorsed Clinton or Bush (r = .94). These data undercut the autonomous agenda-setting presumptions of the media-centered model. If a newspapers editorial position did not lead it to project different agendas of the campaign, as the media-centered hypothesis would suggest, then we must question whether daily newspapers really do tell people what to think about during elections. This does not imply that all newspapers present the same coverage of the election. We would, in fact, expect significant variations across individual newspapers, reflecting the composition of their readership, the salient issues in the community and region, and other such factors (Erbring, Goldenberg,
Table 4

Issue content of narratives as a function of a newspapers editorial endorsement (in percentages) Bush coverage a Paper endorsed Bush Bush platform/record Clinton platform/record Economic issues Budget and finance Social programs Foreign policy Environmental policy Minority and rights issues Legal issues Political system, institutions Defense policy Education and research Housing/infrastructure Other domestic issues Other international issues 12.0 0.0 22.9 16.9 8.4 13.3 6.0 3.6 1.2 2.4 2.4 3.6 1.2 2.4 3.6 Paper endorsed Clinton 10.9 5.2 19.4 17.5 10.4 12.3 10.0 3.3 3.8 0.4 1.9 0.4 0.9 2.8 0.4 Clinton coverageb Paper endorsed Bush 11.9 10.7 32.1 7.1 11.9 4.8 7.1 2.4 3.6 2.4 2.4 3.6 0.0 0.0 0.0 Paper endorsed Clinton 5.4 10.0 31.2 11.4 10.4 7.4 8.0 4.0 5.4 1.5 1.0 0.0 0.5 3.5 0.5

Note . Table entries are the issues discussed in news articles and news analyses cross tabulated with the editorial position of the newspaper. References to Perots platform were excluded because of the small number of references. The unit of analysis was a narrative within an article. a Numbers of narratives: Bush endorsement, 83; Clinton endorsement, 211. b Numbers of narratives: Bush endorsement, 84; Clinton endorsement, 202.

474

Russell J. Dalton et al.

& Miller, 1980). Individual newspapers also may deviate from these general patterns. But a newspapers own ideological position provides a crucial test of the media-centered hypothesis that the press systematically creates the agenda of elections. We find little evidence that editorial leanings lead to a different agenda in election reporting.

The Publics Agenda

The key reference point for judging the process of agenda setting is the publics interests. The transaction model views agenda setting as an interactive process. Candidates attempt to define the election in terms of their preferred issues, but they are constrained by political events and the interests of the public. The media are important intermediaries in this information process, although they largely report on the events and activities of the campaigns. Citizens enter an election with preexisting concerns that may be modified or reinforced by the candidates statements about what issues are important. The voters might want the candidates to discuss one set of concerns, but the election itself revolves around the choices the candidates decide to offer. Furthermore, the candidates, the public, and the media are responding to ongoing events in the world, such as the release of economic statistics or international actions. Although it is difficult to speak of causal effects in this context, the correlation between candidate agendas and the publics agenda is an important indicator of the content of elections and the representation process. Past research has presented mixed evidence on the match between the publics priorities and those of campaigns (McCombs, 1981; McCombs & Shaw, 1972; McLeod, Kosicki, & McLeod, 1994; Semetko et al., 1991; Weaver, 1984). Most of these investigations, however, have been based on local studies rather than national coverage of a national campaign. Our study is in a unique position because, in addition to coding the content of a nationally representative group of newspapers, we also interviewed a sample of people who lived in the circulation areas of these newspapers. During the interviews, we asked respondents what they felt were the most important problems facing the nation. We coded their responses using the same categories applied in the newspaper study. The distribution of the publics issue interests and the issues presented in the various press forms is displayed in Table 5. Column 1 shows the results from the public opinion survey, and the next two columns display the issue themes in campaign-initiated news articles and media-initiated news articles. The match between the publics interests and those presented by the American press is striking. Voters agreed that the economy was the dominant issue in 1992 (32.6 percent among the public), reflecting the attention this topic received in campaign-initiated and media-initiated news narratives. The problems of the federal budget, taxes, and government finance also resonated with a large share of the public (17.3 percent). Social programs and social issues generated strong public interest, especially national health care that fell under this heading. Many of the issues that were relatively undiscussed by the candidatesdefense, law and order, and educationheld similarly low interest for most citizens. Foreign policy, the forte of the Bush administration, evoked very little interest among the public. In overall terms, there was an extremely high correlation between the attention the

Media-Centered Agenda Setting

Table 5

475

Issue content of platforms, campaign-initiated news, media-initiated news, and public interests (in percentages) Campaign initiated 35.1 17.8 13.7 9.5 8.0 4.0 3.3 2.9 2.3 0.9 0.4 1.4 0.6 Media initiated 30.5 17.0 12.0 16.0 4.6 2.8 5.6 3.6 3.3 1.5 0.5 1.5 0.8

Public Economic issues Budget and finance Social programs Foreign policy Environment/energy Minority and rights issues Legal issues Political system, institutions Defense policy Education and research Housing/infrastructure Other domestic issues Other international issues 32.6 17.3 19.4 2.9 3.4 6.2 5.2 5.6 1.3 4.4 0.7 1.4 0.1

Platform 14.1 7.5 14.1 9.8 7.6 4.8 7.0 7.3 7.2 7.6 3.3 7.1 2.9

Note . The first column is the distribution of responses from our public opinion survey to the question of what is the most important national problem; the second column is the total of all three candidates issue themes in campaign-initiated overage (see Table 1); the third column is the total of issue themes from media-initiated news narratives about the campaign (see Table 2); and the fourth column is the average attention to issues giving equal weight to Republican and Democratic platforms. Numbers of responses were as follows: public, 1,568; campaign initiated, 883; media initiated, 393; and platform, 1,813.

public gave to these 12 issues and the attention these issues received in campaigninitiated news ( r = .94 between columns 1 and 2) and media-initiated news ( r = .82 between columns 1 and 3). Some scholars might point to these very strong correlations between the presss content and the publics interests as causal evidence of the media-centered model. We see these data as more representative of the transaction model. Newspaper coverage of the election was closely linked to themes the candidates were emphasizing during the campaign, and evidence that the press interjects its own themes in news coverage or even editorial reports is limited. One bit of further evidence comes from our additional coding of the Democratic and Republican convention platforms. Unlike any other document or speech during the campaign, the platform is the partys attempt to define the issues facing the nation and the electorate (Pomper, 1976; Fishel, 1985). Platforms are comprehensive, representing the often diverse interests within the party and presenting a program for governance. Platforms are also generated by the partys own activists, usually under the direction of the winning nominee and his supporters; thus, platforms reflect the interest of those most involved in the nominees election. The messages of the platform also predate the newspaper reports we have analyzed. More important, campaign platforms are unmediated messages; they are not press or television reports of what the party said but the words of the party itself. 9

476

Russell J. Dalton et al.

The last column of Table 5 presents the issues included in the Republican and Democratic platforms in 1992.10 This unmediated measure of the candidates themes, predating the actual campaign by several months, still was strongly related to the publics interests ( r = .78).11 If one had access to similar objective measures of the candidates actions and statements during the campaign that were contemporaneous with press coverage, we believe the presss role in reflecting campaign discourse, rather than creating it, would be even more apparent.

Alternative Perspectives on Agenda Setting

Our findings suggest that the media-centered explanation for the agreement between newspaper content and public interests during election campaigns has been overstated. The press is an important participant in agenda setting, but our evidence indicates that newspapers do not play the dominant agenda-setting role portrayed in some political communications literature. We found little systematic evidence that the press as a collective projected a distinct agenda onto the 1992 presidential election. Certainly, some newspapers and journalists have distinct views, but such individual biases appear small and tend to cancel out when aggregated. Moreover, a newspapers presidential endorsement had little impact on its news coverage of the issue themes of the campaign. In sum, we believe that the press is part of the transaction process that sets the agenda of elections, but we found little evidence that it predominantly controls agenda setting, as claimed by advocates of the media-centered model. We see two reasons for why our conclusions differ from other contemporary research on media effects. First, we think the setting of presidential elections is different from the general process of opinion formation. Elections, especially presidential elections, are structured, highly visible, and institutionalized settings. During presidential elections, relatively well-defined sets of actors (the candidates and their campaigns) are consciously attempting to shape the public agenda. Through their daily campaign speeches and pronouncements, the campaigns are trying to define content. In addition, the candidates are systematically monitoring public opinion and attempting to persuade the public. This obviously differs from the general process of interest formation on issues such as inflation or crime, where there are no dominant actors and a single structure for information exchange. Such single issues, in nonelectoral settings, might show stronger media-centered effects. Because of this context, the electoral setting may limit the presss potential to create its own image of the campaign without challenge from other societal actors. It is extremely difficult for the press to convince the public or elites to focus attention on issues that are not being discussed by either candidate or that lack the potential to resonate with the public. Thus, the contingent conditions of agenda setting may work against the media-centered model in the electoral context and lean more toward a transaction model where the political agenda is determined by the interaction of multiple societal actors, and this is reflected in the presss recounting of the campaign. Second, our conclusion may differ from previous research because we have not accepted correlation as equal to causation but asked about the source of this correlation. Some might argue that the strong correlations between newspaper content and the publics interests shown in Table 5 indicate that the presss themes defined the publics image of the campaign. However, the very high levels of agreement

Media-Centered Agenda Setting

477

among the candidates, the press, the public actually speak against the mediacentered model. For instance, we found significant agreement between the content of press coverage and the party platforms, even though the latter represented an unmediated presentation of the candidates issue agendas. Furthermore, we showed that a papers editorial position does not systematically affect its selection of issues to report. Moreover, we expected the evidence of a media-initiated agenda to be most prominent on editorial pages; instead, all sources displayed the same broad political agenda. That is, we did not find evidence of a media-created agenda, unless everythingeven party platformsrepresented this agenda. Thus, we lean toward a transaction model of agenda setting. This model treats agenda setting as the political equivalent of an economic marketplace. Advertising is important, but so also are consumer preferences and the selection of products offered by merchants. The marketplace and the products of commerce are not determined solely by any one actor, but by the interaction among a set of actors. Our empirical results do not identify the causal influence of a single actor, but the interaction among various actors in defining the important issues of 1992. In 1992 the voters, the media, and the campaigns themselves devoted heavy attention to the economy and much less attention to housing issues, for example. This is not a causal relationship that can be solely attributed to the media; rather, it reflects the convergence of attention by these several actors. Candidates offer a selection of issues, some of which resonate with the public and some of which are dropped for lack of response. Citizens are potentially interested in a variety of issues, and their attention focuses on the subset discussed by the candidates and analyzed in the media. The media also might attempt to highlight issues that the candidates have overlooked or that the public would like them to address, but the media as a whole will not continue to discuss issues that neither the public nor the candidates consider important. The press contributes to the agenda-setting process but does not determine this process. To return to our marketplace analogy, one would find that the products sold by merchants almost perfectly match the products purchased by consumers, even though the exact influence of each in determining this product mix varies over time and across products. Advertising is an important part of this process, but advertising alone cannot create and sustain public demand for a product. Such is the case with political agendas. Candidates offer choices and invest more effort in those that sell. Citizens are interested political consumers, but consumption is based on the combination of their preferences and the available choices. The press, television, and other media facilitate these exchanges, but they cannot sustain themselves by advertising products that are not connected to these other actors. Much as Lutz Erbring and his colleagues (1980) argued in their research, press coverage interacts with the publics preexisting interests. We are not claiming that every newspaper and journalist hews close to the themes projected by the presidential candidates or that the specific content of news reports is exactly as the campaigns have presented the issues. Certainly, there are instances in which specific parts of the press do project their own views on a campaign. The anecdotal literature on election coverage is full of such references. When we look at the press in broad national terms, however, the idiosyncrasies of a single journalist or single paper fade into the background. Collectively the press is drawn to report on the set of policy issues that the candidates, the public, and the press jointly define as the themes of the campaign.

478

Russell J. Dalton et al.

Methodological Appendix
We selected counties as our primary sampling units (PSUs). All of the counties in the United States were stratified by population size, education, and change in population since the prior census; this produced 20 strata that each contained 5 percent of the population. A replicate design was used in which two counties were independently chosen from each cell with replacement. (Los Angeles County was randomly selected in both samples, so we actually had a total of 39 different counties.) These counties thus yielded a self-weighted sample of the entire U.S. population. We conducted a national telephone survey using the Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing facilities of the Center for Survey Research at Indiana University. The telephone sample was provided by Survey Sampling; it was drawn from the 39 counties that were our PSUs. The survey yielded a random sample of 1,318 voters, approximately evenly distributed across counties. We estimated the design effects of this sampling procedure; stratification and clustering appeared to have a minor impact on sampling precision relative to a simple random sample. The interviews lasted a bit more than an hour on average; interviewing began during the week after the election and was completed by the end of January. Extensive callbacks were made. The response rate for the survey was 48 percent, calculated as the ratio of completions to the sum of completions, refusals, and partial completions. The resulting sample overestimated voter turnout in comparison with census figures, but the vote shares averaged within 1.6 percent of the official vote totals. Our sample was more educated than the national adult population (although less so for the population of voters) but roughly matched the population in gender and racial distributions. The survey was deposited with the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan (Beck, Dalton, & Huckfeldt, 1995). For each county, we selected the major local newspaper; in a few counties, two newspapers were selected (see Beck, Dalton, & Huckfeldt, 1998 for a full list). We coded every third day during this period, along with every Sunday; there were a maximum of 27 days coded for each paper, depending on its circulation pattern. For each sampled day, we coded all articles dealing with the campaign that appeared in the first half of the news section of the paper. In addition, we coded any campaign-related articles that appeared under a separate election or campaign heading if this occurred later in the news section; we also coded all campaign articles that appeared on the editorial page. The coders were undergraduate students at the University of California, Irvine, who received several hours of training. Most of the coding was conducted under the direct supervision of the assistant project director. After the first weeks of coding, we conducted intercoder reliability checks by doublecoding a set of articles to assess the reliability of our media measures. The evaluative content measures displayed high levels of reliability for the variables included in these analyses. The coding guide was developed as part of the Cross National Election Project and has been applied in media content analyses in Britain (1992), Spain (1993), Japan (1993), and Germany (1990).

Notes
1. This research was conducted under a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES 91-23519) to Paul Beck, Russell Dalton, and Robert Huckfeldt. Additional support for

Media-Centered Agenda Setting

479

the coding of the media data was provided by a grant to Russell Dalton and Holli Semetko from the Joyce Foundation. 2. For example, MacKuen and Coombs (1981) found that the longitudinal correlations between public interests and media content were often strong, but in cases such as inflation and employment this relationship evaporated if objective conditions were entered into the analysis. In other instances, media content seemed to exert independent effects (e.g., crime and racial issues). Other longitudinal studies also show that the ability of media trends to predict public interests is quite varied, even if objective events are not controlled (Funkhouser, 1973; Brosius & Kepplinger, 1990). 3. The coding instructions for this variable were as follows: The main topic is the theme that is given greatest coverage in the article. Coverage is judged by the amount of space given to each theme, the ordering of the presentation, and the visibility of themes in the headline. If these criteria do not lead to a clear definition of main topic, select the topic that is cited more clearly in the headline. Up to four topics were coded for each article. 4. One of the key variables in our analyses involved the origin of the story. The coding instructions for this variable were as follows: This variable measures the stimulus for the action or events of the article. For example, if a congressional committee issues a report that is critical of Bushs economic policy, then code this as 1 (legislative action, Congress). If Clinton cites the same report in a press conference the next day, then code this as 7 (press conference/direct candidate statements to the press). If the article is not a news report, then there often is no identifiable setting, such as an analytic article on the candidates program. The coding categories covered three broad areas: (a) political settings (e.g., legislative or governmental actions), (b) articles based on events initiated by the presidential campaigns (e.g., campaign events, press conferences, or press releases), and (c) media-initiated articles (e.g., interviews and news analysis). For our entire sample of 6,537 articles, media-initiated articles were the most common (48.6 percent, of which 43.0 percent were journalist-initiated reports and news analyses). Campaign-initiated articles were the next most frequent (27.3 percent), and campaign events were the most common stimulus for these articles (14.5 percent). Only 9.2 percent of all campaign-related articles arose in governmental or other political settings. 5. The contrast between campaigns would be even clearer if it were not for the constraints on the election process. For instance, candidates must respond to the daily flow of national and world affairs. If the Labor Department issues its monthly unemployment statistics, the candidates are likely to comment on these figures. Similarly, each campaign attempts to force its opponents to discuss its preferred issues; elections are a dialogue, not a monologue. The issue profiles of each candidate are even clearer when we focus on instances where one campaign directly targets the other with its pronouncements (Dalton et al., 1995). 6. See Note 4 for the coding of the origin of the article. 7. The correlations between the percentage of attention to the 16 issues in Table 1 and the issues in the four types of articles in Table 3 were as follows: news analysis, .95; op/ed columns, .90; cartoons, .84; and letters to the editor, .87. 8. A total of 11 newspapers endorsed Clinton, and 5 papers endorsed Bush. Nationally, the majority of newspapers did not endorse either candidate (Stanley & Niemi, 1994). To maximize our sample size for this subset of newspapers, we combined election narratives from news articles and news analyses. 9. Most observations about the distinctive nature of American conventions and platform drafting reinforce the impression that the platform reflects the candidates interests. The campaign personnel of the winning nominee, rather than an established party organization, now control conventions (Shafer, 1988). This control by the winning nominee actually strengthens the argument that the platform should reflect the candidates own priorities. Even if most American voters do not read party platforms, the convention and platform

480

Russell J. Dalton et al.

creation process are still among the most visible aspects of the campaign. Platforms are thus not mere election rhetoric; they reflect the priorities of the presidential candidates. 10. We coded each sentence of the two platforms for the main theme using the coding framework of the newspaper analyses. We excluded the preambles of both platforms because of their lack of specific issue content but coded all other sentences and section headings. We appreciate Stoyana Petroffs assistance in coding these data. 11. The full correlation matrix is as follows: Public Campaign Media Campaign initiated .94 Media initiated .82 .92 Platforms .78 .76 .82

References
Abramson, Paul, Aldrich, John, & Rohde, David. (1994). Change and continuity in the 1992 Election. Washington, DC: CQ Press. Altschuler, Bruce. (1982). Keeping a finger on the public pulse: Private polling and presidential elections. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Arterton, F. Christopher. (1993). Campaign 92: Strategies and tactics of the candidates. In Gerald Pomper (Ed.), The election of 1992. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House. Bagdikian, Ben. (1992). The media monopoly (4th ed.). Boston: Beacon Press. Bauer, Raymond. (1964). The obstinate audience: The influence process from the point of view of social communication. American Psychologist, 19, 319328. Beck, Paul A., Dalton, Russell J., & Huckfeldt, Robert. (1995). Cross-national election studies United States study, 1992 [Computer file]. Ann Arbor, Ml: Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research. Becker, Lee, & Kosicki, Gerald. (1995). Understanding the message-producer/messagereceiver transaction. Research in Political Sociology, 7, 3362. Brosius, H., & Kepplinger, H. (1990). Linear and nonlinear models of agenda-setting in television. Dublin: Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communications Association. Cohen, Bernard. (1963). The press and foreign policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Coombs, Steven. (1981). Editorial endorsements and electoral outcomes. In M. MacKuen & S. Coombs (Eds.), More than news. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Dalton, Russell, Beck, Paul A., Huckfeldt, Robert, & Koetzle, William. (1995, April 610). Agenda setting in the 1992 campaign: The flow of campaign information. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. Chicago, IL. Dalton, Russell, Beck, Paul A., & Huckfeldt, Robert. (1998). Partisan cues and the media: Information flows in the 1992 presidential election. American Political Science Review, 92, 111126. Entman, Robert. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43, 5158. Erbring, Lutz, Goldenberg, Edie, & Miller, Arthur. (1980). Frontpage news and real world cues. American Journal of Political Science, 24, 1649. Fishel, Jeff. (1985). Presidents and promises: From campaign pledge to presidential performance. Washington, DC: CQ Press. Frueh, W. (1991). Medienwirkungen: Das dynamische-trasaktionale Modell, Theorie und empirische Forschung. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Funkhouser, G. R. (1973). The issues of the sixties: An exploratory study in the dynamics of public opinion. Public Opinion Quarterly, 19, 209215. Iyengar, Shanto, & Kinder, Donald. (1987). News that matters: Television and American opinion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Media-Centered Agenda Setting

481

Just, Marion, Criegler, Ann, Alger, Dean, & Cook, Timothy. (1996). Crosstalk: Citizens, candidates, and the media in a presidential campaign. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacKuen, Michael, & Coombs, Steven. (1981). More than news: Media power in public affairs. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. McCombs, Maxwell. (1981). The agenda setting approach. In D. Nimmo & K. Sanders (Eds.), Handbook of political communication. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. McCombs, Maxwell. (1994). News influence on our pictures of the world. In J. Bryant & D. Zillmann (Eds.), Media effects. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. McCombs, Maxwell, & Shaw, Donald. (1972). Agenda-setting function of mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly, 36, 176187. McLeod, Jack, Becker, M., & Byrnes, J. (1974). Another look at the agenda-setting function of the press. Communications Research, 1, 131165. McLeod, Jack, Kosicki, Gerald, & McLeod, Douglas. (1994). The expanding boundaries of political communication effects. In J. Bryant & D. Zillmann (Eds.), Media affects. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Page, Benjamin. (1996). Who deliberates? Mass media in modern democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Patterson, Thomas. (1980). The mass media election. New York: Praeger. Patterson, Thomas. (1993). Out of order. New York: Knopf. Pomper, Gerald. (1976). Elections in America. New York: Dodd, Mead. Salmore, Barbara, & Salmore, Stephen. (1989). Candidates, parties and campaigns: Electoral politics in America. Washington, DC: CQ Press. Semetko, Holli. (1996). The media. In L. LeDuc, R. Niemi, & P. Norris (Eds.), Comparing democracies: Elections and voting in global perspective. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Semetko, Holli, Blumler, Jay G., Gurevitch, Michael, & Weaver, David H. (1991). The formation of campaign agendas. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Shafer, Byron. (1988). Bifurcated politics: Evolution and reform in the national party conventions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shaw, Donald, & McCombs, Maxwell. (1977). The emergence of American political issues. St. Paul, MN: West. Stanley, Harold, & Niemi, Richard. (1994). Vital statistics on American politics. Washington, DC: CQ Press. Stempel, Guido, & Windhauser, John. (Eds.). (1991). The media in the 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Weaver, David. (1984). Media agenda-setting and public opinion: Is there a link? In R. Bostrom (Ed.), Communication yearbook 8. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Weaver, David, et al. (1981). Media agenda-setting in a presidential election. New York: Praeger. White, John. (1993). The general campaign: Issues and themes. In William Crotty (Ed.), Americas choice: The election of 1992. Guilford, CT: Dushkin.