Thoughts on Agenda Setting, Framing, and Priming

As someone who has worked on studies of media agenda setting since the 1972 U.S. presidential election (Weaver, 1977; Weaver, McCombs, & Spellman, 1975), I am more familiar with the theoretical debates and empirical findings of this branch of media research than with theories and research focusing on framing or priming. Nevertheless, I see these areas of communication research as interconnected and as involving some similar, although not identical, cognitive processes and effects. As I have written before (Weaver, 1997–1998, p. 3), ‘‘focusing on framing does not necessarily mean discarding the findings of much agenda-setting research that is more concerned with which issues are emphasized (or what is covered) than how such issues are reported and discussed.’’ Whereas the ‘‘first level’’ of agenda setting is focused on the relative salience (usually operationally defined as perceived importance) of issues or subjects, the ‘‘second level’’ examines the relative salience of attributes of issues, as McCombs (2005) and Ghanem (1997) have described in detail. These agendas of attributes have been called ‘‘the second level’’ of agenda setting to distinguish them from the first level that has traditionally focused on issues (objects), although the term ‘‘level’’ implies that attributes are more specific than objects, which is not always the case. The perspectives and frames that journalists employ draw attention to certain attributes of the objects of news coverage, as well as to the objects themselves, and some of these perspectives can be very general (e.g., a ‘‘Cold War’’ frame).