The role of the news media in defining the important issues of the day, also known as the agenda-setting influence of mass communication, has received widespread attention over the past 20 years. Since the publication of McCombs and Shaw's seminal empirical study, more than one hundred journal articles and monographs have appeared. This collection exemplifies the major phases of research on agenda-setting: tests of the basic hypothesis, contingent conditions affecting the strength of this ...

Exciting intellectual frontiers are open for exploration as agenda-setting theory moves beyond its 25th anniversary. This volume offers an intriguing set of maps to guide this exploration over the near future. It is intended for those who are already reasonably well read in the research literature that has accumulated since the publication of McCombs and Shaw's original 1972 Public Opinion Quarterly article. This piece of literature documented the influence of the news media agend...

In this timely volume, the authors explore public affairs journalism, a practice that lies at the core of the journalism profession. They go beyond the journalistic instruction for reporting and presenting news to reflect on why journalism works the way it does. Asking current and future journalists the critical questions, "Why do we do it?" and "What are the ways of fulfilling the goals of journalism?" their discussion stimulates the examination of contemporary practice, probing ...

This "landmark work in urban sociology" examines the influence of neighborhoods on social phenomena and in our lives (Claude Fischer, City & Community).For over fifty years numerous public intellectuals and social theorists have insisted that community is dead. Some would have us believe that we act solely as individuals choosing our own fates regardless of our surroundings, while other theories place us at the mercy of global forces beyond our control. The...

Nearly the whole of America’s partisan politics centers on a single question: Can markets solve our social problems? And for years this question has played out ferociously in the debates about how we should educate our children. From the growth of vouchers and charter schools to the implementation of No Child Left Behind, policy makers have increasingly turned to market-based models to help improve our schools, believing that private institutions—because they are competitively driven—are b...

Doing News Framing Analysis provides an interpretive guide to news frames – what they are, how they can be observed in news texts, and how framing effects are uncovered and substantiated in cultural, group, and individual sites. Chapters feature framing analysts reflecting on their own empirical work in research, classroom, and public settings to address specific aspects of framing analysis. Taken together, the collection covers the full range of ways in which framing has been the...

This distinctive volume offers a thorough examination of the ways in which meaning comes to be shaped. Editors Stephen Reese, Oscar Gandy, and August Grant employ an interdisciplinary approach to the study of conceptualizing and examining media. They illustrate how texts and those who provide them powerfully shape, or "frame," our social worlds and thus affect our public life. Embracing qualitative and quantitative, visual and verbal, and psychological and sociological perspectives, this b...

Public Opinion is a comprehensive and multidisciplinary examination of public opinion in the United States. Drawing on scholarship in political science, psychology, sociology, and communications, the authors explore the nature of political and social attitudes in the United States and how these attitudes are shaped by various institutions, with an emphasis on mass media. The book also serves as a provocative starting point for the discussion of citizen moods, political participati...

Almost twenty-five years ago, Shanto Iyengar and Donald R. Kinder first documented a series of sophisticated and innovative experiments that unobtrusively altered the order and emphasis of news stories in selected television broadcasts. Their resulting book News That Matters, now hailed as a classic by scholars of political science and public opinion alike, is here updated for the twenty-first century, with a new preface and epilogue by the authors. Backed by careful analysis of p...

"A very important and long-awaited major contribution to the debate . . . Her work cannot be ignored."--Nils Petter Gleditsch, Journal of Peace Research"Barbieri builds on a solid foundation of work on trade and conflict and specifies the conditions under which trade reduces and increases conflict. . . . The bottom line is that this is an important book in the study of trade and conflict because of its comprehensive approach."--Kathy L. Powers, Perspectiv...

Notable advances resulting from new research findings, measurement approaches, widespread uses of the Internet, and increasingly sophisticated approaches to sampling and polling, have stimulated a new generation of attitude scholars. This extensively revised edition captures this excitement, while remaining grounded in scholarly research.Attitudes and Opinions, 3/e maintains one of the main goals of the original edition--breadth of coverage. The book thoroughly reviews bot...

Since its development shaped by the turmoil of the World Wars and suspicion of new technologies such as film and radio, political communication has become a hybrid field largely devoted to connecting the dots among political rhetoric, politicians and leaders, voters' opinions, and media exposure to better understand how any one aspect can affect the others. In The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication Kate Kenski and Kathleen Hall Jamieson bring together leading scholars, inc...