How Town Administrator's View Relates to Agenda Building in Community Press

Abstract

Effort to set in press related to extent of effort to influence press content. When McCombs and Shaw published their seminal agenda-setting article in 1972,1 they set off a host of replicating studies. Researchers, frustrated by the media model described by Klapper2 and convinced the mass media are a powerful political force, began to map out varying conditions which result in similarities in the issue agendas.,of a medium and its audience.3 Other researchers also found the press has a direct impact on government issue priorities beyond its influence on the public agenda.4 In a critique of these setting studies, Lang and Lang5 have argued that the agenda-setting hypothesis is only a part of what Cobb and Elder call agenda building, a term which describes the broader process of how press, public and governmental agendas are formed and how they influence each other.6 Since the media appear to play a pivotal role in building both public and government agendas, determining what forces influence the building of the press becomes as important a research topic as mapping out what impact that has on public policy priorities and ultimately governmental policy. Students of who sets the media have looked at the impact of journalistic norms,7 the effects of social forces within the newsroom itself,8 and the influence of other reporters from other newspapers9 in determining how a medium's is built by those within the industry. Looking at forces outside the news business, Gandy suggests large corporations and industries exert a powerful influence on the mass media by subsidizing the cost of information-gathering through data analysis, news releases and press conferences.10 Cutlip found 35% of newspaper content came from public relations handouts from various organizations, agencies and offices. Olien, Donohue and Tichenor suggest newspaper and television coverage of an environmental issue they were studying generally occurred after interest groups defined the problem and began publicity campaigns.12 Smith found that general public opinion on recreation and health care influenced a newspaper's rather than the other way around.13 Weaver and Elliott discovered newspaper coverage of city council meetings in a small city pretty much mirrored the established by the council itself.14 Although Weaver and Elliott did not discuss attempts by council members to influence what the paper covered, one might guess these town legislators did make such attempts. At other levels of government, public officials' attempts to build the press have been documented by numerous studies. Cohen, Dunn, Sigal and Miller all describe information-subsidizing techniques used by state department officials, government agency heads, state legislators and congressmen to influence the press agenda.15 Turk documented the success of such attempts when she found that 48% of all stories in Louisiana metropolitan dailies on six state agencies resulted from material furnished by a public information officer.16 These studies looked at relationships of press and government officials at the state or national level. Relatively few studies have examined the relationship municipal officials have with the press, and these have been limited to a single town or several towns in a single state. These relationships may not hold for all states or all regions of the country. There is some evidence that Southern cities, for example, are less pluralistic in their power structure, leading to more centralized decision making practices.17 Tichenor, Donohue and Olien suggest community pluralism affects how a newspaper functions in the process of building a town's issue agenda.18 In addition, those studies focusing on America's small town newspapers and community issues have not paid special attention to the town's mayor or city manager and how he or she interacts with the press. …