ABSTRACT
For the past three decades and now into a fourth, the agenda-setting function of mass media, first explored empirically in the United States in 1968 by McCombs and Shaw (1972), has been a major focus of mass communication research in the United States. It has also crossed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to become more international in scope. At the same time, it has expanded from a concern with the salience or prominence of issues to the attributes of issues and candidate images—a development that moves it closer to studies of “framing” that focus on how issues and other objects of interest are reported by news media as well as what is emphasized in such reporting.
