Agenda-Setting Theory

Applying the Agenda-Setting Theory on the Watergate Scandal
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Institution: Introduction
In the first chapter of his 1922 classic, Public Opinion, “The World Outside the Pictures in Our Heads,” Walter Lippmann tells of a small island in 1914, inhabited by a sprinkling of different nationalities; Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Germans. There were no cables in the island, and for their news, the residents relied on a British mail steamer that visited once every two months. In September of that year, the steamer was yet to arrive with “new” news from the mainland. The locals were still talking about a story carried in the latest newspaper; the impending trial of Madame Caillaux after being charged of shooting Gaston Calmette. When the steamer finally docked in mid-September, the islanders were anxious to hear about the outcome of the trial. However, they were shocked to learn that while for six weeks they had lived together peacefully, concerned only about the outcome of the murder trial, Europe was at war; the German neighbors were no longer friends with the French and Britons. This anecdote demonstrates the function of the media in “setting the agenda” for public discussion. In the case of the islanders, the murder trial was the salient issue of public interest until news of the war arrived, effectively changing the agenda to war-related issues. In any country, the news items that people see in newspapers, watch on TV and hear on the radio are the basis of what they talk about. The Agenda-Setting Theory is based on this premise; that the media gives the public an “agenda” or topic to talk about through the daily content it publicizes as news. With reference to the Agenda-Setting Theory, this essay seeks to demonstrate that the media influences public opinion by presenting the audience with issues to think about. The paper argues that the media’s coverage of the Watergate Scandal shaped public perception of leadership qualities by presenting the integrity of political leaders as an issue of public interest.
Literature Review
The concept of agenda-setting has its roots in the work of Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion. Lippmann argues that the mass media connect events in the world with the mental images in the collective public mind (Lippmann, 2007). Thus, without using the phrase “agenda-setting,” Lippmann laid the ground for the theoretical conceptualization of the role of the media in influencing public opinion by “setting the agenda” of what people think and talk about in the public sphere. In 1968, researchers Drs. Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw carried out a study on that year’s presidential elections to find out the relationship between issues of public concern and their coverage by the media. The research, known as “The Chapel Hill Study,” focused on the correlation between election issues that voters considered to be of significant importance and the media’s coverage of those issues (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). The research findings showed that there was a strong correlation (r > .9) between media coverage and the importance the public attached to certain issues.
During the campaigning period, the media gave prominent publicity to the race riots and lawlessness that were common at the time in the U.S., following the emergence of the civil rights movement. Republican candidate Richard Nixon ran against Democrat incumbent Lyndon Johnson on the promise to end the widespread lawlessness and restore social order. The media’s intense publicity of the riots encouraged anti-Lyndon sentiments among an American electorate that was increasingly getting concerned about the escalating lawlessness (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). Thus, the media’s agenda-setting role involved presenting security and social order as the salient issues that the public ought to concern itself with. Another issue that received much publicity was the Vietnam War, which the media portrayed as unjustified and costly to America. Despite the repeated assurances of president Lyndon Johnson that America was winning the war, the American media portrayed a different picture. This negative media coverage of the U.S. invasion of Vietnam heightened antiwar sentiments among the American voters, and subsequently influenced the outcome of the presidential election in which Lyndon lost to Nixon. Thus, by comparing the content of media news with what the electorate considered the major issues of public concern, the researchers concluded that media reportage influences public opinion by determining the issues that people consider important.
James Dearing and Everett Rogers (1988) added to the theory by identifying the three levels in which the media functions as an agenda-setting agent: public, media, and policy agenda setting. In public agenda setting, the media influences public opinion by determining the issues that the public talk about. For instance, repeated reportage of an assassination will make the public speculate about its political implications. In media agenda setting, public interest and opinion influences what the media reports. For instance, public obsession with the likely outcome of an election may prompt the media to give more coverage to poll opinion results. It’s kind of a reverse-agenda setting situation, whereby the media gets its news from the public. In policy agenda setting, the media gives prominence to issues concerning the elite/leaders. An example is when leaders or policy makers address issues that have been given prominent coverage by the media, such as beefing up security after reported incidences of insecurity and public complaints.
Application of the Agenda-Setting Theory to the Watergate Scandal
Background Information
In June 1972, five men who were initially believed to be burglars gained access into the headquarters of the Democratic Party’s National Committee, an incidence that would later blow up as the Watergate Scandal. The incidence was at first downplayed as an everyday act of theft, and received little coverage in the mainstream media; it was reported in two paragraphs tucked in the middle pages of the Washington Post. However, despite the public’s lack of interest, and while President Nixon dismissed the break-in as a “third-rate burglary,” the paper gave it intense publicity through repeated reportage. In the days that followed, public awareness of the incidence increased among Americans, and it became a dominant issue for discussion within the public sphere. By early 1997, about 90 percent of Americans were aware of the incidence. When the media began to cover Senat...