Every morning, millions of people wake up and reach for their phones to check the news. Within minutes, they’ve absorbed headlines about a political crisis, a public health concern, or an economic shift. But here’s a question worth sitting with: why are those particular stories at the top of your feed, and not hundreds of others equally worthy of attention? The answer lies in one of media studies’ most durable and empirically tested ideas – agenda-setting theory. Specifically, its two core levels reveal not just what the media puts in front of us, but how deeply that shapes the way we understand the world around us.
Table of Contents
- The foundation: what agenda-setting theory actually says
- First-level agenda-setting: telling us what to think about
- Second-level agenda-setting: telling us how to think about it
- Attribute salience: the building blocks of how issues are portrayed
- Framing: where attribute salience becomes a narrative
- How the two levels work together
- The theory’s continued relevance in a digital media landscape
- Why these core concepts matter for understanding media
The foundation: what agenda-setting theory actually says
Agenda-setting theory starts from a deceptively simple observation. Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw, in their landmark 1972 study published in the Public Opinion Quarterly, found that the issues the media covered most frequently and most prominently were the exact same issues the public identified as most important. The theory proposes that by giving more coverage to certain topics, the media makes those topics more noticeable – more salient – in the public’s mind. The media, in other words, does not hand us conclusions. It hands us a list of what to be concerned about.
The mechanism at the heart of this is called salience transfer. When news organizations repeatedly cover a particular topic – granting it extensive airtime, front-page placement, and detailed treatment – they effectively transfer the perceived importance of that topic from the media’s agenda to the public’s agenda. This transfer isn’t coercive. It is gradual, cumulative, and largely invisible to the audience experiencing it. The result is that what the press treats as important, the public often comes to treat as important too.
This foundational insight has been tested and confirmed in hundreds of empirical studies across different countries, media environments, and political contexts. The core concepts of the theoretical framework are a media agenda, a public agenda, and the transfer of salience of items from one to the other – and agenda-setting effects are largely an incidental result of people’s routine use of the news media.
First-level agenda-setting: telling us what to think about
The original and most studied dimension of the theory is what researchers now call first-level agenda-setting. This level operates at the broadest scale – it is about which issues, topics, or public figures get placed on the public radar at all. First-level agenda-setting is characterized by object salience – an “object” in this context being any topic, issue, event, or person that the media’s coverage directs our attention toward.
Consider how this plays out in practice. During an election cycle, one major television network might run nightly segments on border security, while another devotes sustained coverage to healthcare costs. Researchers of mass communication analyze how this kind of consistent exposure from one main news source affects a viewer’s personal priorities on public issues. Over time, the audience of the first network is primed to weigh border security heavily; the audience of the second, healthcare. Neither group has been told what position to hold. But both groups have been told, through repetition and prominence, what matters.
Three mechanisms drive this process at the first level:
- Frequency and repetition: An issue covered night after night builds a sense of urgency. The constant repetition signals to audiences that this is something worth tracking.
- Prominence and placement: A lead story on a broadcast or a front-page headline carries far more weight than a brief buried deep in the publication. The two basic assumptions underlying this research are that the press filters and shapes reality rather than merely reflecting it, and that media concentration on a few issues leads the public to perceive those issues as more important.
- Duration of coverage: A sustained, in-depth investigation signals gravity. A brief mention signals the opposite.
First-level agenda-setting also has a notable gatekeeping dimension. Gatekeeping is the process by which a news story travels through multiple decision-makers – writers, editors, publishers – before reaching the public. Each checkpoint is a moment where a story can be amplified or quietly dropped. What survives this process shapes the public’s sense of what the world looks like that day.
Second-level agenda-setting: telling us how to think about it
For several decades, agenda-setting research focused almost exclusively on the first level. But as researchers dug deeper, they noticed something the original framework couldn’t fully account for: the media wasn’t just selecting topics – it was also describing them in particular ways, and those descriptions were influencing public attitudes, not just public awareness. This led to the concept of second-level agenda-setting, also called attribute agenda-setting.
Researchers Balmas and Sheafer (2010) articulated the distinction clearly: the first level emphasizes media’s role in telling us “what to think about,” while at the second level, the focus shifts to the media’s function of telling us “how to think about” those topics. The shift is significant. It moves the theory from the realm of topic selection into the territory of perception, attitude, and meaning-making.
Attribute salience: the building blocks of how issues are portrayed
At the second level, media influence operates through attributes – the specific characteristics, qualities, and properties attached to an issue or person in news coverage. While the first level of agenda-setting involves the transmission of object salience, the second level involves the transmission of attribute salience – and attribute agenda-setting converges with framing theory in that both draw attention to how particular attributes dominate the way certain topics are addressed among publics.
These attributes come in two types:
- Cognitive (substantive) attributes: These describe the factual characteristics of a topic – a politician’s policy record, a country’s economic indicators, the scientific dimensions of a health crisis.
- Affective (evaluative) attributes: These carry an emotional valence – positive, negative, or neutral. Whether a public figure is described as “determined” or “stubborn,” “experienced” or “out of touch,” shapes the emotional response the audience brings to them.
A compelling real-world example comes from election coverage. When media consistently portray a public figure like a business leader as a “visionary, path-breaking entrepreneur,” they are practicing second-level agenda-setting by emphasizing specific positive attributes of that person’s personality. The public agenda for how that person is perceived is shaped not just by the fact that they receive coverage (first level), but by the consistent bundle of attributes that coverage applies to them (second level).
Framing: where attribute salience becomes a narrative
The most powerful expression of second-level agenda-setting is framing. Where attribute salience identifies which individual characteristics get highlighted, framing bundles those attributes into a coherent narrative or interpretive lens. McCombs defines framing as the “selection of – and emphasis upon – particular attributes for the news media agenda when talking about an object” – the process of cutting and shaping a story to communicate particular meanings beyond the bare facts.
The same event, reported with different frames, produces entirely different public understandings. Take a city-wide public protest. A newsroom can cover it through a public order frame, emphasizing traffic disruptions, property damage, and police response – producing fear or frustration in audiences. The same protest, covered through a social justice frame, emphasizes the demonstrators’ grievances, community voices, and historical context – producing empathy or solidarity. Research on the Watergate scandal demonstrated this clearly: media coverage initially downplayed the story, and it was not until it was reframed as one of the highest political scandals in U.S. history that public opinion shifted dramatically.
Framing is also where second-level agenda-setting touches on emotions, not just cognition. Research has found that the media’s emotional-affective agenda corresponds with the public’s emotional impressions of candidates and issues, and that negative emotions are more powerful than positive ones – with agenda-setting effects being greater on audiences’ emotional responses than on their cognitive assessments of character traits. This means the media shapes not just what we think about, and not just how we evaluate it, but also how we feel about it.
How the two levels work together
First-level and second-level agenda-setting do not operate independently – they function as a sequence. First-level agenda-setting focuses on the salience of issues, determining which topics matter to the public, while second-level agenda-setting focuses on the salience of attributes, determining how those issues or candidates are framed. Together, they describe a complete pipeline of media influence: the first level places an issue in the public’s field of vision; the second level tells the audience what to make of it once it’s there.
Coleman and Wu’s research connected this two-level model to the “hierarchy of effects” framework – arguing that first-level agenda-setting corresponds to the “knowledge” component (what people are aware of), while second-level corresponds to the “attitude” component (how people feel about it). This framing is useful because it shows that agenda-setting is not just a theory of information transmission – it is a theory of attitude formation.
Consider a concrete case. When major outlets began extensively covering climate change (first-level: placing the issue on the public agenda), that coverage also consistently emphasized particular attributes: scientists’ warnings, extreme weather events, governmental inaction (second-level: shaping the attributes and tone of the issue). Attribute agenda-setting research has shown that news coverage of global environmental problems in the months before the 1992 UN Rio de Janeiro conference resulted in a steady and measurable increase in public agreement with the media’s agenda on the issue. The public didn’t just learn that climate change existed – they learned to regard it as urgent, and with a particular emotional register.
The theory’s continued relevance in a digital media landscape
Agenda-setting theory was built around the era of broadcast television and print newspapers. Today’s media environment is dramatically different – fragmented, decentralized, and algorithm-driven. Does the theory still hold?
The short answer is yes, though with complications. In a time of 24/7 news cycles, clickbait headlines, and algorithm-driven platforms, today’s gatekeepers include not just editors, but algorithms and influencers, who decide which stories are trending and which are fading. The mechanism of salience transfer persists – it has simply migrated to new platforms. Trending topics on social media, pushed notifications, and algorithmically amplified content all perform functions structurally similar to what front-page placement did in the print era.
Second-level effects are, if anything, more pronounced online. Platform design amplifies emotionally charged frames – content that provokes outrage or fear (affective attributes) tends to spread faster and farther than neutral or measured reporting. This helps explain why misinformation gains salience when it is continually multiplied online, and why political polarization deepens when different media ecosystems establish conflicting agendas for the same events.
The theory also receives pushback. Critics argue that audiences are not passive recipients – they select, filter, and reinterpret media messages actively. But even granting an active audience, the agenda-setting framework remains valuable. You can actively choose which news sources you consume. You cannot easily opt out of the frames those sources use, or the cumulative weight of repeated coverage across an entire media ecosystem.
Why these core concepts matter for understanding media
The two levels of agenda-setting – object salience and attribute salience – explain why media influence is more subtle and more pervasive than simple propaganda. The theory does not argue that the media tells audiences what to think – it argues that the media structures the parameters of public debate by influencing which issues are discussed, worried about, and ultimately acted upon. That distinction matters enormously.
Understanding these concepts means understanding that a news story is never just a neutral relay of facts. Every story involves decisions about what to cover (first level) and how to describe it (second level). The core of agenda-setting is the inadvertent byproduct of the necessity of the news media to focus their attention on a small number of topics at any particular point in time – the transfer of salience from media agenda to public agenda is an incidental result of people’s routine use of the news media. Incidental, yes – but with profound effects on what democracies discuss, what governments prioritize, and what the public understands to be real.
Recognizing these mechanisms doesn’t make anyone immune to them. But it does provide a critical lens – a way of asking, when you encounter a news story: Why this story, why now, and what attributes has it been given?
What do you think? When you reflect on a news story that genuinely shifted your concern or attitude about an issue – was it the topic itself that moved you, or the way it was framed? And in today’s algorithmically curated media environment, who do you think now holds the real power to set the public’s agenda?
References
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/2747787
- https://communication.uii.ac.id/agenda-setting-theory-how-media-shapes-public-focus/
- https://db.arabpsychology.com/agenda-setting-theory/
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329638328_Agenda-Setting
- https://helpfulprofessor.com/agenda-setting-theory/
- https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/agenda-setting-theory
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda-setting_theory
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/agenda-setting-theory
- https://pressbooks.montgomerycollege.edu/commtheory/chapter/chapter-15-agenda-setting-theory/
- https://psynso.com/agenda-setting-theory/
- https://scrmci.medium.com/agenda-setting-theory-how-media-shapes-what-we-think-about-1e030c98077f
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