The TV Agenda-Setting Influence on Campaign 2000

The argument of the agenda-setting hypothesis – that media influence what we think about rather than directly what we think – has been popular for a generation, both because of its promise of demonstrating important media effects and because it overcomes several methodological problems of integrating content analyses of media content with individual-level measures of media effects. In this project, we combine data from a year-long national study of voter involvement and an archive of TV news coverage of Campaign 2000. The data set is analyzed with a time-series technique to address the influence of TV news coverage on aspects of public involvement in the campaign. A small but important contribution of television news to public involvement is demonstrated