ABSTRACT
During the recent past a fragile consensus has emerged among researchers which holds that television news programs can influence the relative salience of political issues in the minds of the American public — that is, that they are capable of setting the public agenda. Generally, however, there have been few efforts to redress a problem noted by Iyengar (1979: 398), that “most previous agenda-setting studies … document the congruence between media content and issue salience without attempting to identify variables which strengthen or weaken the relationship. …” The research reported in this article responds directly to this criticism by examining the impact of viewer characteristics and modes of news exposure on the agenda-setting effects of television news.
