News story descriptions and the public's opinions of political candidates

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 84, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 299-314

  Kim, Kihan ^a   McCombs, Maxwell ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HARTFORD   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ELECTION; METROPOLITAN AREA; POLITICAL PARTICIPATION; SURVEY; TELEPHONE NETWORK;

NORTH AMERICA; TEXAS; UNITED STATES;

EID: 34848910396     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769900708400207     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. The importance of this theoretical distinction between attention and comprehension is noted in McGuire's information-processing model: William J. McGuire, "Theoretical Foundations of Campaigns," in Public Communication Campaigns, ed. Ronald E. Rice and Charles K. Atkin (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989), 43-65.
2. Donald L. Shaw and Maxwell McCombs, The Emergence of American Political Issues: The Agenda Setting Function of the Press (St. Paul, MN: West, 1977), 1-18.
3. Maxwell McCombs, Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2004), 36-52.
4. Lee Becker and Maxwell McCombs, "The Role of the Press in Determining Voter Reactions to Presidential Primaries," Human Communication Research 4 (summer 1978): 301-07;
5. David H. Weaver, Doris A. Graber, Maxwell McCombs, and Chaim H. Eyal, Media Agenda-setting in a Presidential Election: Issues, Images, and Interest (New York, NY: Praeger, 1981).
6. Pu-tsung King, "The Press, Candidate Images, and Voter Perceptions," in Communication and Democracy: Exploring the Intellectual Frontiers in Agenda-Setting Theory, ed. Maxwell McCombs, Donald Shaw, and David Weaver (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997), 29-40.
7. Maxwell McCombs, Juan Pablo Llamas, Esteban Lopez-Escobar, and Federico Rey, "Candidate Images in the Spanish Elections: Second Level Agenda Setting Effects," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 74 (winter 1997): 703-17.
8. Maxwell McCombs, Esteban Lopez-Escobar, and Juan Pablo Llamas, "Setting the Agenda of Attributes in the 1996 Spanish General Election," Journal of Communication 50 (spring 2000): 77-92.
9. Guy Golan and Wayne Wanta, "Second-Level Agenda Setting in the New Hampshire Primary: A Comparison of Coverage in Three Newspapers and Public Perceptions of Candidates," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 78 (summer 2001): 247-59.
10. Spiro Kiousis, Philemon Bantimaroudis, and Hyun Ban, "Candidate Image Attributes: Experiments on the Substantive Dimension of Second-Level Agenda Setting," Communication Research 26 (August 1999): 414-28.
11. Shanto Iyengar and Donald Kinder, News That Matters: Television and American Opinion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), quote on 63.
12. Shanto Iyengar and Adam Simon, "News Coverage of the Gulf Crisis and Public Opinion: A Study of Agenda Setting, Priming and Framing," Communication Research 20 (June 1993): 365-83 (quote on page 368).
13. Jon Krosnick and Laura Brannon, "The Impact of the Gulf War on the Ingredients of Presidential Evaluations: Multidimensional Effects of Political Involvement," American Political Science Review 87 (December 1993): 963-75;
14. Jon Krosnick and Donald Kinder, "Altering the Foundations of Support for the President Through Priming," American Political Science Review 84 (June 1990): 497-512;
15. Joanne Miller and Jon Krosnick, "News Media Impact on the Ingredients of Presidential Evaluations: A Program of Research on the Priming Hypothesis," in Political Persuasion and Attitude Change, ed. D. C. Mutz, P. M. Sniderman, and R. A. Brody (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996);
16. Joanne Miller and Jon Krosnick, "News Media Impact on the Ingredients of Presidential Evaluations: Politically Knowledgeable Citizens Are Guided by a Trusted Source," American Journal of Political Science 44 (April 2000): 295-309.
17. Sei-Hill Kim, Dietram Scheufele, and James Shanahan, "Think About It This Way: Attribute Agenda-Setting Function of the Press and the Public's Evaluation of a Local Issue," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 79 (spring 2002): 7-25.
18. Hans Mathias Kepplinger, Wolfgang Donsbach, Hans Bernd Brosius, and Joachim Friedrich Staab, "Media Tone and Public Opinion: A Longitudinal Study of Media Coverage and Public Opinion on Chancellor Helmut Kohl," International Journal of Public Opinion Research 1 (winter 1989): 326-42.
19. Daron R. Shaw, "The Impact of News Media Favorability and Candidate Events in Presidential Campaigns," Political Communication 16 (April/June 1999): 183-202;
20. David C. Barker and Adam B. Lawrence, "Media Favoritism and Presidential Nominations: Reviving the Direct Effects Model," Political Communication 23 (January/March, 2006): 41-59;
21. Young Jun Son and David H. Weaver, "Another Look at What Moves Public Opinion: Media Agenda Setting and Polis in the 2000 U.S. Election," International Journal of Public Opinion Research 18 (summer 2006): 174-97.
22. Deborah Blood and Peter Phillips, "Economic Headline News on the Agenda: New Approaches to Understanding Causes and Effects" in Communication and Democracy: Exploring the Intellectual Frontiers in Agenda-Setting Theory, ed. Maxwell McCombs, Donald Shaw, and David Weaver (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997), 97-114;
23. Joe Bob Hester and Rhonda Gibson, "The Economy and Second-Level Agenda Setting: A Time Series Analysis of Economic News and Public Opinion about the Economy," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 80 (spring 2003): 73-90;
24. Tamir Sheafer, "How to Evaluate It: The Role of Story-evaluative Tone in Agenda Setting and Priming," Journal of Communication 57 (March 2007): 21-39.
25. McCombs, Setting the Agenda, 68-85.
26. Marilyn Roberts and Maxwell McCombs, "Agenda Setting and Political Advertising: Origins of the News Agenda," Political Communication 11 (July/September 1994): 249-62.
27. Harold G. Zucker, "The Variable Nature of News Media Influence," in Communication Yearbook 2, ed. B.D. Ruben (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1978), 225-40.
28. James P. Winter and Chaim H. Eyal, "Agenda-setting for the Civil Rights Issue," Public Opinion Quarterly 45 (fall 1981): 376-83.
29. Wayne Wanta, The Public and the National Agenda: How People Learn About Important Issues (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997).
30. Bernard Berelson, Content Analysis in Communication Research (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1952), 147-68;
31. Ole R. Holsti, Content Analysis for the Social Sciences and Humanities (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1969): 94-126.
32. Daniel Riffe, Stephen R. Lacy, and Frederick G. Fico, Analyzing Media Messages: Using Quantitative Content Analysis in Research (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998).
33. Previous agenda-setting research using these macro-categories include McCombs et al., "Candidate Images in the Spanish Elections" and McCombs, Lopez-Escobar, and Llamas, "Setting the Agenda of Attributes." Among the studies drawn upon for the original formulation of these six groups of candidate attributes are Dan D. Nimmo and Robert L. Savage, Candidates and Their Images: Concepts, Methods, and Findings (Pacific Palisades, CA: Goodyear, 1976);
34. Robert P. Abelson, Donald R. Kinder, Mark D. Peters, and Susan T. Fiske, "Affective and Semantic Components in Political Person Perception," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 42 (April 1982): 619-30;
35. Shawn W. Rosenberg, Lisa Bohan, Patrick McCafferty, and Kevin Harris, "The Image and the Vote: The Effect of Candidate Presentation on Voter Preference," American Journal of Political Science 30 (February 1986): 108-27.
36. For a contemporary review of the literature on candidate images, see Michael Pfau, J. Brian Houston, and Shane M. Semmler, Mediating the Vote: The Changing Media Landscape in U.S. Presidential Campaigns (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 81-106.
37. Richard Curtin, Stanley Presser, and Eleanor Singer, "Changes in Telephone Survey Nonresponse Over the Past Quarter Century," Public Opinion Quarterly 69 (spring 2005): 87-98. Noting the value of the University of Michigan's continuous Survey of Consumer Attitudes, which is widely cited by academics, journalists and policy makers as a benchmark of the response rates in general population surveys, Curtin, Presser, and Singer report a drop from about 72% to 60% between 1979 and 1996, and a steeper decline in subsequent years so that by 2003 the response rate was only 48%. Specifically in terms of survey research on what the public learns from the news media, Drew and Weaver's continuing series of election year studies had response rates of 50% in both 2000 and 2004. See David Weaver and Dan Drew, "Voter Learning and Interest in the 2000 Presidential Election: Did the Media Matter?" Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 78 (winter 2001): 787-98;
38. and Dan Drew and David Weaver, "Voter Learning in the 2004 Presidential Election: Did the Media Matter?" Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 83 (spring 2006): 25-42.
39. Jian-Hua Zhu and William Boroson, "Susceptibility to Agenda Setting: A Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Analysis of Individual Differences," in Communication and Democracy: Exploring the Intellectual Frontiers in Agenda-Setting Theory, ed. Maxwell McCombs, Donald Shaw, and David Weaver (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997): 69-84.
40. Michael X. Delli Carpini and Keeter Scott, What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).
41. Jennifer Jerit and Jason Barabas, "Political Knowledge," in Polling America, ed. Samuel Best and Benjamin Radcliff (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 539.