Media do not tell people what to think so much as what to think about.
Coverage volume shapes which issues voters name as important, regardless of what they conclude about them. McCombs and Shaw established this in the 1968 Chapel Hill study.
In practice
- A regulator's inquiry into one bank's culture puts bank culture on every board agenda for a year, whatever any board concludes about it.
- A single documentary about landfill turns household recycling into a dinner-table argument in a hundred thousand homes.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Communication & Media
- Essay
- Theories of what stands between an event and its audience