ABSTRACT
One consequence may be that the public will worry more about the foreign crisis and less about economic woes: classical agenda setting. Problems prominently positioned in television broadcasts loom large in evaluations of presidential performance. Network news programs seem to possess a powerful capacity to shape the public's agenda. A president's overall reputation, and, to a lesser extent, his apparent competence, both depend on the presentations of network news programs. Opinion divides over whether media effects have been demonstrated at all; over the relative power of television versus newspapers in setting the public's agenda; and over the causal direction of the relation between the public's judgments and the media's priorities. The agenda-setting hypothesis demands that viewers adjust their beliefs about the importance of problems in response to the amount of coverage problems receive in the media. Agenda setting appears to be mediated, not by the information viewers' recall, but by the covert evaluations triggered by the news presentations.
