124 Book Reviews

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Maxwell McCombs. Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public
Opinion. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 2004. 184 pp. $54.95 (cloth); $26.95
(paper).

GERALD M. KOSICKI
Ohio State University

The agenda-setting model has guided inquiry in public opinion and mass com-
munication about social and political issues for more than three decades. The
model has had tremendous heuristic value, and scholars in a number of fields
have found it helpful in organizing their research. Agenda setting is strongly
associated with the career of Maxwell McCombs, a longtime professor of
journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.
While many scholars have worked on various aspects of agenda-setting
research over the years, McCombs has been mining this territory longer than
anyone. No one has been a more tireless promoter of this model. McCombs
did the original empirical work in agenda setting with Donald Shaw, professor
at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Over his long career as a scholar and mentor,
McCombs attracted around him a large number of graduate students at
North Carolina, Syracuse University, and Texas to help carry on and expand
the work. This book is an integrated discussion of these empirical results,
organized into nine chapters and an epilogue. As such, the book is really a
summary of a long and distinguished career of one of the significant figures of
the past 40-plus years in the field of mass communication research.
As McCombs tells the story of agenda setting, it started as a modest hypoth-
esis about the issue priorities of the news media, as measured by content analy-
sis, affecting the issue priorities of the public, as measured in public opinion
surveys. Although the term “agenda setting” seems to imply a deliberate
attempt on the part of the media to create a certain agenda of issues, the inten-
tionality of the media agenda remains somewhat unresolved in the agenda-
setting research summarized by McCombs.
In the tradition of investigative reporting, for example, it is clear that journalists
sometimes work very hard to place certain issues on the public agenda that
others are trying to conceal. But in most other aspects of day-to-day news
reporting, journalists select from real-world situations and conditions in certain
ways, frame them, and allocate media space or time based on their assessments
of the story’s importance and timeliness, among other things. Often what the
news is on a given day is powerfully influenced by long-standing decisions on
staffing and resource allocations. This suggests that news is often influenced
by what happens in the world—but also by what else is happening in the
world. In other words, sometimes in slow news periods small stories dominate
the news for weeks until a major event such as the World Trade Center disas-
ter of September 11, 2001, drops small stories out of the news stream entirely.
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In some cases, journalists define issues with the help of certain social move-
ment actors, government officials, academics, or other types of credible news
sources. For other types of stories, journalists work with various interested
groups to help carry certain public interest agendas (e.g., Protess et al. 1991).
Protess et al. show that at least some of the time the public agenda is set not by
an agenda-setting type of “mobilization model” but by what they call a “coali-
tion model” of influence. One benefit of this approach is that it draws atten-
tion to a number of contextual factors such as historical circumstances,
political climate, and availability of policy alternatives, in addition to allowing
for various policy impacts ranging from effects on individuals to the achieve-
ment of actual governmental reforms. It is unclear in the book precisely how
these various external factors that operate on journalistic decision making
relate to the idea that the media set the agenda.
The agenda-setting literature discusses mainly issues in public opinion and
media coverage, but as it has developed over the years it seems to mainly
refer to lists of topics that are specified rather abstractly, such as “arms con-
trol,” “crime,” “economy,” “jobs,” “race relations,” and so on. These are the
typical kinds of categories with which agenda-setting research concerns
itself. In fact, in reading the book, one learns surprisingly little about the
details of any of these topics, how they were reported in the news, or what
consequences this reporting had. The real concern of agenda setting seems to
be not so much issues as it is broad topics in the news. Many scholars today
increasingly recognize that an issue is something inherently contested—a
controversial matter about which there are strong views presented on various
sides. One gets little sense of controversy about the various matters taken up
in this volume.
McCombs makes a spirited argument that agenda setting has branches that
subsume framing and priming, but this argument likely will not convince
many readers. There are many problems and opportunities associated with
framing research, but it at least holds the possibility of detailed examination of
the substance of issues and how journalists and other professional communi-
cators, corporate officials, public officials, and the public grapple with them.
This is so because the framing perspective tends to view issues as inherently
contested arenas. Framing research also connects well with literatures on citi-
zenship and public discourse, social movements, and the sociology of news.
There are also clear links to various psychological information-processing
mechanisms (Pan and Kosicki 2005).
As for priming, McCombs presents arguments that newer variations of
“agenda-setting theory” encompass media priming research as well. However,
it is unclear how the specific ideas underlying the agenda-setting model are
robust enough to be broadened to cover convincingly these additional phe-
nomena. Price and Tewksbury (1995) argued persuasively in their landmark
treatise on news and judgments and perceptions of public issues that agenda
setting is a special case of the more general theory of media priming.
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Agenda setting, in its quest for correspondences between the media and pub-
lic agendas, seems to miss several points about issues that cry out for attention.
In the studies discussed, causal direction is typically assessed in a straightfor-
ward way, that is, the media agenda as measured at time one is correlated with
the public agenda at time two. However, causation is more than time order.
Although chapter 7 is devoted to “Shaping the Media Agenda,” relatively little
attention is given to the idea that real-world conditions might cause both media
agendas and public agendas. This is more than a picky methodological point.
Many interesting avenues of exploration are missed by the failure to give more
prominence to the impact of real-world events, legislative activity, and the activ-
ities of foundations, political parties, religious organizations, and other social
movement organizations and interest groups (e.g., Glynn 2005).
The essence of agenda setting seems to be the insight that exposure to
media agendas drives public agendas. Accordingly, one might think that, in an
era where polling information about public issues is ubiquitous and the avail-
ability of media content data and the means for analyzing it have never been
more available, the future of agenda-setting research itself might be bright.
But looking at the problem from the frame of information technology’s influ-
ence on how individual citizens actually use the news, there may be storm
clouds gathering on the horizon.
As McCombs acknowledges in the epilogue, the emerging communication
environment is seen by many to be in a state of rapid change. Information con-
sumers today have a great many choices and, most important, can select topics
in advance to which they choose to be exposed. This self-selected nature of
media may represent a profound challenge to models of media influence such as
agenda setting that are grounded in media’s consonance. As Sunstein (2001) has
noted, the ability of each user to set standing orders for information, such that
only news about certain topics chosen in advance will be received, may cause
profound shifts in the information landscape of ordinary citizens. One does not
have to agree with all of Sunstein’s dire predictions for the future of democracy
to see the imposing conceptual and practical challenges looming ahead for
research models such as agenda setting. McCombs does briefly sketch some
scenarios suggesting that such issues might not materialize. While the exact
nature of the future media system is unknown, it continues to evolve in ways
influenced by technology, as well as other economic, political, and social forces.
However, adapting the agenda-setting model to transition in an era in which a
large proportion of the public chooses to receive public affairs information in a
self-selected manner poses a substantial challenge for scholars.

References
Glynn, Carroll J. 2005. “Public Opinion as a Social Process.” In The Evolution of Key Mass Com-
munication Concepts, ed. Sharon Dunwoody, Lee B. Becker, Douglas M. McLeod, and Gerald
M. Kosicki, pp. 139–63. New York: Hampton Press.
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Pan, Zhongdang, and Gerald M. Kosicki. 2005. “Framing and the Understanding of Citizenship.”
In The Evolution of Key Mass Communication Concepts, ed. Sharon Dunwoody, Lee B.
Becker, Douglas M. McLeod, and Gerald M. Kosicki, pp. 165–204. New York: Hampton
Press.
Price, Vincent, and David Tewksbury. 1995. “News Values and Public Opinion: A Theoretical
Account of Media Priming and Framing.” In Progress in Communication Sciences, ed. George
Barnett and Frank J. Boster, pp. 173–212. Greenwich, CT: Ablex Publishing Corp.
Protess, David L., Fay Lomax Cook, Jack C. Doppelt, James S. Ettema, Margaret T. Gordon,
Donna R. Leff, and Peter Miller. 1991. The Journalism of Outrage: Investigative Reporting
and Agenda Building in America. New York: Guilford Press.
Sunstein, Cass. 2001. Republic.com. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
doi:10.1093/poq/nfj003

John G. Matsusaka. For the Many or the Few: The Initiative, Public
Policy, and American Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2004. 200 pp. $29.00 (cloth).

JOHN GASTIL
University of Washington

In our new century, initiatives have captured national headlines as electoral

battlefields for debates on gay marriage, immigration, and other social issues.
Partisans now often view the initiative as a symbolic tool to boost voter turn-
out, but it has a longer history as a straightforward fiscal policy tool. It is this
older use of the initiative that concerns John Matsusaka in For the Many or
the Few.
Matsusaka is interested in facts. “People often fail to reach agreement when
the point of contention is inherently subjective,” he explains. The question of
whose interests the initiative serves “involves nothing more than objective
facts: either special interests are empowered by the initiative process or they
are not. A debate that essentially hinges on matters of fact should be amenable
to resolution by careful examination of the evidence” (p. xi). Accordingly,
after concluding his research, Matsusaka considers the matter settled: “The
only view that is currently supported by scientific evidence is that the initia-
tive makes policy more responsive to public opinion” (p. 175).
Such words may ring sweetly for some, but they sound naive to those who have
seen the desiccated corpse of positivism crumpled in a ditch alongside the schol-
arly highway. Matsusaka does offer a remarkable collection of data that speaks
clearly on some matters, but he takes his data further than they can go, overlooks
rival interpretations, and reaches definitive conclusions his data do not warrant.
One of Matsusaka’s simplest and most important accomplishments is to
explain clearly that the initiative is a normal practice. Critics like David
Broder would have us believe that the initiative is a crazy procedure that a few
loony states dreamed up a century ago and have begun madly swinging about
the room like a feral cat. By contrast, Matsusaka’s comprehensive inventory