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Theories that apply from brexit referendum
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Journal of Communication ISSN 0021-9916ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Framing, Agenda Setting, and Priming: The
Evolution of Three Media Effects Models
Dietram A. Scheufele1 & David Tewksbury2
1 Department of Life Sciences Communication and School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of
Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI 53706
2 Department of Speech Communication and Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at
Urbana–Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801
This special issue of Journal of Communication is devoted to theoretical explanations
of news framing, agenda setting, and priming effects. It examines if and how the three
models are related and what potential relationships between them tell theorists and
researchers about the effects of mass media. As an introduction to this effort, this essay
provides a very brief review of the three effects and their roots in media-effects research.
Based on this overview, we highlight a few key dimensions along which one can com-
pare, framing, agenda setting, and priming. We conclude with a description of the con-
texts within which the three models operate, and the broader implications that these
conceptual distinctions have for the growth of our discipline.
doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00326.x
In 1997, Republican pollster Frank Luntz sent out a 222-page memo called
‘‘Language of the 21st century’’ to select members of the U.S. Congress. Parts of
the memo soon spread among staffers, members of Congress, and also journalists.
Luntz’s message was simple: ‘‘It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it’’ (Luntz, in
press). Drawing on various techniques for real-time message testing and focus
grouping, Frank Luntz had researched Republican campaign messages and distilled
terms and phrases that resonated with specific interpretive schemas among audiences
and therefore helped shift people’s attitudes. In other words, the effect of the mes-
sages was not a function of content differences but of differences in the modes of
presentation.
The ideas outlined in the memo were hardly new, of course, and drew on decades
of existing research in sociology (Goffman, 1974), economics (Kahneman & Tversky,
1979), psychology (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984), cognitive linguistics (Lakoff, 2004),
and communication (Entman, 1991; Iyengar, 1991). But Frank Luntz was the first
professional pollster to systematically use the concept of framing as a campaign tool.
The Democratic Party soon followed and George Lakoff published Don’t Think of an
Corresponding author: Dietram A. Scheufele
Journal of Communication 57 (2007) 9–20 ª 2007 International Communication Association 9
,Models of Media Effects D. A. Scheufele & D. Tewksbury
Elephant (Lakoff, 2004), a short manual for liberals on how to successfully frame
their own messages.
With the emergence of framing as a communication tool for modern campaigns
has come a resurgence of academic research on other cognitive campaign effects,
such as agenda setting and priming, many of which are thought to be related or at least
based on similar premises (for overviews, see McCombs, 2004; Price & Tewksbury,
1997; Scheufele, 2000). This special issue of the Journal of Communication is an
examination of whether and how framing, agenda setting, and priming are related
and what these relationships tell theorists and researchers about the effects of mass
media. As an introduction to this issue, this essay will provide a very brief review of
the three effects and their roots in media effects research. Next, it will highlight a few
key dimensions along which one can compare them. It will conclude with a descrip-
tion of the aims of this issue and the broader context within which the relationships
between framing, agenda setting, and priming operate.
The emergence of three models of political communication
The emerging body of research on framing, agenda setting, and priming has signaled
the latest paradigm shift in political-communication research. Scholars of mass com-
munication often suggest that the field passed through a series of paradigms in the
20th century (McQuail, 2005). The early hypodermic needle and magic-bullet mod-
els of the 1920s and 1930s were quickly replaced by a paradigm based on the much
more theoretically and methodologically sophisticated ideas that Lazarsfeld and his
colleagues in Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research put forth in
The People’s Choice (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1948) and subsequent studies.
Media effects were much more complex in nature than previously assumed, they
argued, and depended heavily on people’s homogenous networks and their selective
informational diets, which reinforced existing attitudes rather than changed them.
The 1970s marked the second major paradigm shift in research on political
communication when Noelle-Neumann’s (1973) proclamation about the return of
powerful mass media coincided with George Gerbner’s (Gerbner & Gross, 1974)
development of the theory of cultivation. Ironically, the two researchers had dia-
metrically opposed political agendas but came to similar conclusions. Both assumed
that mass media had strong, long-term effects on audiences, based on the ubiquitous
and consonant stream of messages they presented to audiences. But although
Noelle-Neumann often blamed left-leaning journalists for shaping opinion climates
and therefore influencing the dynamics of opinion expression and formation,
Gerbner identified conservative media conglomerates—and especially entertainment
television—as the main culprit for shaping perceptions of reality by promoting
commercially motivated worldviews. Also notable in the 1970s was the birth of
agenda-setting research in political communication. Sparked by the landmark study
by McCombs and Shaw (1972), the effect drew considerable attention from re-
searchers frustrated by the minimal-effects perspective common at the time.
10 Journal of Communication 57 (2007) 9–20 ª 2007 International Communication Association
, D. A. Scheufele & D. Tewksbury Models of Media Effects
The 1980s and early 1990s, finally, brought the most recent stage of political-
effects research. Sometimes labeled ‘‘negation models’’ (McQuail, 2005), approaches
like priming and framing were based on the idea that mass media had potentially
strong attitudinal effects, but that these effects also depended heavily on predispo-
sitions, schema, and other characteristics of the audience that influenced how they
processed messages in the mass media.
Parsimony versus precision: framing, agenda setting, and priming
The three models we focus on in this issue—framing, agenda setting, and priming—
have received significant scholarly attention since they were introduced.
Agenda setting refers to the idea that there is a strong correlation between the
emphasis that mass media place on certain issues (e.g., based on relative place-
ment or amount of coverage) and the importance attributed to these issues by
mass audiences (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). As defined in the political commu-
nication literature, Priming refers to ‘‘changes in the standards that people use to
make political evaluations’’ (Iyengar & Kinder, 1987, p. 63). Priming occurs when
news content suggests to news audiences that they ought to use specific issues as
benchmarks for evaluating the performance of leaders and governments. It is
often understood as an extension of agenda setting. There are two reasons for
this: (a) Both effects are based on memory-based models of information process-
ing. These models assume that people form attitudes based on the considerations
that are most salient (i.e., most accessible) when they make decisions (Hastie &
Park, 1986). In other words, judgments and attitude formation are directly cor-
related with ‘‘the ease in which instances or associations could be brought to
mind’’ (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973, p. 208); (b) based on the common theoret-
ical foundation, some researchers have argued that priming is a temporal exten-
sion of agenda setting (Iyengar & Kinder, 1987). By making some issues more
salient in people’s mind (agenda setting), mass media can also shape the consid-
erations that people take into account when making judgments about political
candidates or issues (priming).
Framing differs significantly from these accessibility-based models. It is based on
the assumption that how an issue is characterized in news reports can have an
influence on how it is understood by audiences. Framing is often traced back to
roots in both psychology and sociology (Pan & Kosicki, 1993). The psychological
origins of framing lie in experimental work by Kahneman and Tversky (1979, 1984),
for which Kahneman received the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics (Kahneman, 2003).
They examined how different presentations of essentially identical decision-making
scenarios influence people’s choices and their evaluation of the various options
presented to them. The sociological foundations of framing were laid by Goffman
(1974) and others who assumed that individuals cannot understand the world fully
and constantly struggle to interpret their life experiences and to make sense of the
world around them. In order to efficiently process new information, Goffman
Journal of Communication 57 (2007) 9–20 ª 2007 International Communication Association 11
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