Journal of Communication ISSN0021-9916 O R I G I N A L A RT I C L E苹果测试
泡椒土豆丝Thoughts on Agenda Setting,Framing,
and Priming
David H.Weaver
School of Journalism,University of Indiana,Bloomington,IN47405
This article discuss similarities and differences between‘‘cond-level’’agenda tting and framing,and between priming and agenda tting.It prents data on the number of studies of agenda tting,framing,and priming indexed by Communication Abstract from1971to2005,and it offers some conclusions about the cognitive pro-cess involved in agenda tting,priming and framing.
doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00333.x
As someone who has worked on studies of media agenda tting since the1972U.S. presidential election(Weaver,1977;Weaver,McCombs,&Spellman,1975),I am more familiar with the theoretical debates and empiricalfindings of this branch of media rearch than with theories and rearch focusin
g on framing or priming. Nevertheless,I e the areas of communication rearch as interconnected and as involving some similar,although not identical,cognitive process 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-tting rearch that is more concerned with which issues are emphasized(or what is covered)than how such issues are reported and discusd.’’路由器的作用与功能
Whereas the‘‘first level’’of agenda tting is focud on the relative salience (usually operationally defined as perceived importance)of issues or subjects,the ‘‘cond level’’examines the relative salience of attributes of issues,as McCombs (2005)and Ghanem(1997)have described in detail.The agendas of attributes have been called‘‘the cond level’’of agenda tting to distinguish them from the first level that has traditionally focud on issues(objects),although the term ‘‘level’’implies that attributes are more specific than objects,which is not always the ca.The perspectives and frames that journalists employ draw attention to certain attributes of the objects of news coverage,as well as to the objects them-lves,and some of the perspectives can be very ,a‘‘Cold War’’frame).
Corresponding author:David H.Weaver;e-mail:weaver@indiana.edu
142Journal of Communication57(2007)142–147ª2007International Communication Association
D.H.Weaver Agenda Setting,Framing,and Priming Framing and agenda tting
Tankard,Hendrickson,Silberman,Bliss,and Ghanem(1991,p.3)have described a media frame as‘‘the central organizing idea for news content that supplies a context and suggests what the issue is through the u of lection,emphasis,ex-clusion,and elaboration.’’Entman(1993,p.52)argues that‘‘to frame is to lect some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text,in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition,causal interpretation, moral evaluation,and/or treatment recommendation for the item described.’’(italics in original).McCombs(1997,p.37)has suggested that in the language of the cond level of agenda tting,‘‘framing is the lection of a restricted number of themat-ically related attributes for inclusion on the media agenda when a particular object is discusd.’’He argues that there are many other agendas of attributes besides aspects of issues and traits of political candidates,and a good theoretical map is needed to bring some order to the vastly different kinds of frames discusd in various studies.
回首过去展望未来Not all scholars agree that cond-level agenda tting is equivalent to framing, at least not to more abstract,or macrolevel,framing.Gamson(1992)has conceived of framing in terms of a‘‘signature matrix’’that includes various condensing symbols (catchphras,taglines,exemplars,metaphors,depic
tions,visual images)and rea-soning devices(caus and conquences,appeals to principles or moral claims). Some would argue that cond-level agenda tting is more similar to thefirst part of this matrix than to the cond,becau it is easier to think of condensing symbols as attributes of a given object but more difficult to think of reasoning devices as attributes(Weaver,McCombs,&Shaw,2004).微信如何查看银行卡余额
In this prent issue of the Journal of Communication,the authors employ a num-ber of definitions of framing,including problem definitions,causal interpretations, moral evaluations,and treatment recommendations,as well as key themes,phras, and words.The article on the constructionist approach to framing argues that ‘‘framing incorporates a wider range of factors than priming and agenda tting, which are both cognitive concepts,’’and that‘‘frames are tied in with culture as a macrosocietal structure.’’
Whatever definitions of framing are ud,and there do em to be many more than for agenda tting or priming,it is clear that this term has become much more common in communication rearch articles than either agenda tting or priming in the past decade,rising from2articles indexed in Communication Abstracts in 1976–1980(as compared with15on agenda tting)to76in1996–2000and165in the2001–2005period(e Figure1).In contrast,agenda-tting artic
les incread steadily from1971–1975to1991–1995(from4to40),then dropped a bit from1996 to2000,and went back to slightly above40in the2001–2005period.Articles focusing on priming in the communication journals indexed by Communication Abstracts were nonexistent from1971to1985,very few from1986to1995(5), but became a bit more frequent in the last half of the1990s(14)and thefirst half of the2000decade(25).Overall,then,there is a pattern of dramatic growth in Journal of Communication57(2007)142–147ª2007International Communication Association143
framing studies from the first half of the 1990s to the prent,of some modest growth in priming studies,and a leveling off of agenda-tting studies.
It is not clear why framing has become so much more popular with communi-cation scholars than either agenda tting or priming in the past 10years,but it may have something to do with the ambiguity or the comprehensive nature of the term.‘‘Frame’’can be applied to many different aspects of messages and to many different types of messages.It can also be studied by means of systematic content analysis or more interpretive textual analysis alone,although many of the articles in this issue of Journal of Communication attempt to analyze the relationships between media frames and audience frames,a more theoretically fruitful approach to studying framing.
But whether framing is more or less similar to cond-level agenda tting depends very much on how framing is defined,as suggested earlier.For example,a study by de Vree,Peter,and Semetko (2001)concerns the framing in news reports of the introduction of the Euro monetary unit.This study defines frames in terms of amount of conflict over the introduction of the Euro and the economic conquences of adopting it in various countries.Amount of conflict ems to fit the dictionary definition of an attribute (an inherent characteristic or quality),whereas economic conquences em to go beyond what would usually be considered an attribute of an issue.
Another example by Callaghan and Schnell (2001)deals with how the news media framed elite policy discour concerning the issue of gun control.The
scholars Figure 1Number of studies of agenda tting,framing,and priming,1971–2005.
Note :The data were complied from Communication Abstracts Basic Search with ‘‘agenda tting,’’‘‘framing,’’and ‘‘priming’’as key words ‘‘anywhere in record,’’respectively.The first rearch article using the term ‘‘framing’’appeared in 1980in Journalism Quarterly ,and the first article using the term ‘‘priming’’appeared in 1986in Discour Process .
Agenda Setting,Framing,and Priming D.H.Weaver 144Journal of Communication 57(2007)142–147ª2007International Communication Association
D.H.Weaver Agenda Setting,Framing,and Priming defined frames as stated or implied arguments.Examples included‘‘guns deter crime,’’‘‘guns don’t kill,people do,’’and‘‘there is a constitutional right to bear arms.’’The arguments em to go beyond the commonly held definition of attri-bute becau they are more than just characteristics or qualities of the issue.
Priming and agenda tting
元宵煮几分钟A number of scholars have become interested in the effects of media agenda tting on public opinion and government policy.The focus on the conquences of agenda tting for public opinion(
sometimes labeled‘‘priming’’)can be traced back at least to Weaver,McCombs,and Spellman(1975,p.471),who speculated in their study of the effects of Watergate news coverage that the media may suggest which issues to u in evaluating political actors,but who did not u the term priming to describe this process.
Their speculation was supported a decade later when Iyengar and Kinder(1987), in controlledfield experiments,linked television agenda-tting effects to evalua-tions of the U.S.president in a demonstration of what some cognitive psychologists have called priming—making certain issues or attributes more salient and more likely to be accesd in forming opinions.Weaver(1991)also found that incread concern over the federal budget deficit was linked to incread knowledge of the possible caus and solutions of this problem,stronger and more polarized opinions about it,and more likelihood of engaging in some form of political behavior regarding the issue,even after controlling for various demographic and media-u measures.
Willnat(1997,p.53)has argued that the theoretical explanations for the cor-relations,especially between agenda tting and behavior,have not been well devel-oped,but the alliance of priming and agenda tting has strengthened the theoretical ba of agenda-tting effects by providing‘‘a better understanding of how the mass media not only tell us‘what to think about’but also‘what to think’’’(Coh
en,1963). Scheufele(2000)asrts that the theoretical premis of agenda tting and framing are different—that agenda tting(and priming)rely on the theory of attitude acces-sibility by increasing the salience of issues and thus the ea with which they can be retrieved from memory when making political judgments,whereas framing is bad on prospect theory that assumes that subtle changes in the description of a situation invoke interpretive schemas that influence the interpretation of incoming informa-tion rather than making certain aspects of the issue more salient.
Conclusions
There are similarities between cond-level agenda tting and framing,even if they are not identical process.Both are more concerned with how issues or other objects (people,groups,organizations,countries,etc.)are depicted in the media than with which issues or objects are more or less prominently reported.Both focus on the Journal of Communication57(2007)142–147ª2007International Communication Association145
Agenda Setting,Framing,and Priming D.H.Weaver most salient or prominent aspects or themes or descriptions of the objects of interest. Both are concerned with ways of thinking rather than objects of thinking.But framing does em to include a broader range of cognitive process—such as moral
evaluations,causal reasoning,appeals to principles,and recommendations for treat-ment of problems—than does cond-level agenda tting(the salience of attributes of an object).
It ems likely that agenda tting and priming are bad on more similar cog-nitive process,as Scheufele(2000)has suggested,becau both are salience bad, although agenda tting ems to be more than just a matter of accessibility,as Takeshita(2006)has argued and as studies using the concept of need for orientation (Matthes,2006;Weaver,1977,1991)have found(perceived relevance and uncer-tainty affect the degree of agenda tting).Not all persons are equally affected by the same amount and prominence of media coverage,and not all easily accessible infor-mation is considered important.
As Takeshita(2006,p.277)points out,‘‘salience is a word with two meanings.’’Thefirst one is the idea of perceived importance,whereas the cond one(‘‘top of mind’’)is clor to the idea of accessibility.The two meanings do em to be correlated,but not identical,as illustrated by a study by Nelson,Clawson,and Oxley (1997)that concluded that their measure of perceived importance(a lf-report question)was more theoretically valuable than their measure of accessibility (respon time)becau perceived importance was found to mediate the subquent effect of framing while accessibility did not.
To sum up,there are similarities and connections between agenda tting,prim-ing,and framing,but they are not identical approaches.Framing studies have far outstripped both agenda tting and priming studies in popularity during the past decade,but framing ems to be the least well defined of the three,conceptually or operationally.Future studies should make renewed efforts to define frames and framing more clearly,and to clarify the similarities and differences—and explore the relationships—between framing and agenda tting,and between framing and priming.A number of the articles in this issue of Journal of Communication are beginning to do this,which is a promising sign of things to come.
References
Callaghan,K.,&Schnell,F.(2001).Asssing the democratic debate:How the news media frame elite policy discour.Political Communication,18,183–212.
Cohen,B.C.(1963).The press and foreign policy.Princeton,NJ:Princeton University Press. de Vree,C.H.,Peter,J.,&Semetko,H.A.(2001).Framing politics at the launch of the Euro:
A cross-national comparative study of frames in the news.Political Communication,18,
107–122.
吃元宵的来历
Entman,R.M.(1993).Framing:Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm.Journal of Communication,43(4),51–58.g邮箱
Gamson,W.A.(1992).Talking politics.New York:Cambridge University Press.
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