Agenda Setting

Historical Background

Historians acknowledge the role of journalism in facilitating the very development of the United States in the 19th century, primarily by assisting the growing number of immigrants in acquiring literacy and a sense of what it meant to belong to this country. Investigative journalism by intrepid reporters such as Nellie Bly brought critical issues to the attention of the newspaper-reading public. These were the issues people learned to care about and respond to.

In the first part of the 20th century, journalists such as Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens used their influence to alert the newspaper-reading public to financial and government improprieties, which led to changes in law, policy, and newspaper sales. Coverage of events in Europe, the buildup to U.S. involvement in World War I, and the propaganda campaigns enacted by the government to drum up support for U.S. involvement in the war, encouraged the citizenry to carry out their patriotic duties. The power of mass communication to mold and sway public opinion caught the attention of and generated concern among critics and scholars.

Renowned U.S. journalist Walter Lippmann was a keen observer of the impact of mass media on the public. He wrote that what people thought about, that is the pictures inside people’s heads, did not necessarily reflect the real world. Over the course of the 20th century, scholars heeded Lippmann’s words suggesting that those pictures inside people’s heads are influenced by what they encounter in the mass media.

For the first few decades of the 20th century, critics and scholars saw the media as having powerful effects. The audience was perceived as gullible and easily manipulated; in other words, the media could indeed tell people what to think. But by the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s, scholars came to think that the media had more limited effects. This transition occurred following two studies of mass communication events: the analysis of the “War of the Worlds” panic phenomenon in 1938 and a study of voter decision making in the 1940 presidential election.

While many who listened to the Mercury Theater broadcast of the H. G. Wells story “War of the Worlds” panicked at the “Martian landing” in Grover’s Mills, New Jersey, not everyone did. Among those who did listen, there was no uniform response. Instead, people responded in idiosyncratic ways. Scholars concluded those responses were a function of their individual differences.

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