This article reports the findings of the second in a series of field experiments on the agenda-setting effects of news media investigative reports. The authors used a pretestposttest quasi-experimental design to assess the impact of a newspaper investigative series about rape on a randomly selected group of Chicagoans and a purposive sample of policy makers. Unlike the first study, the series had a minimal impact on public opinion and policy making, but affected profoundly the subsequent newspaper coverage of rape. David L. Protess and Donna R. Leff are Associate Professors at the Medill School of Journalism and the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research (CUAPR); Margaret T. Gordon is Professor at the Medill School of Journalism and Department of Sociology, and Director of the CUAPR; all are at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60201. Stephen C. Brooks is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Akron. The authors wish to thank Fay Cook, Peter Miller, and Tom Tyler for comments on earlier versions. Requests for reprints may be addressed to David Protess, Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research, Northwestern University, 2040 Sheridan Rd., Evanston IL 60201. Public Opinion Quarterly Vol 49:19-37 ? by the Trustees of Columbia University Published by Elsevier Science Publishing Co., Inc. 0033-362X/85/0049-19/$2 50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.144 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 05:20:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 20 DAVID L. PROTESS AND OTHERS 1981; Regier, 1930), or impressionistic (Bernstein and Woodward, 1974; Crouse, 1973; Salisbury, 1980.) This article reports the second in a continuing series of studies' designed to assess empirically the effects of particular news media investigative reports on public and formal agendas. The first (Cook, et al., 1983), utilizing a pretest-posttest experimental design, found that a nationally televised investigative news report on fraud and abuse in the federally funded home health care program had significant effects on both kinds of agendas. The study found that home health care-related issues (and not unrelated issues) became significantly more important to citizens and policy makers exposed to the television investigative report than to nonviewers. Nonetheless, actual policy changes following the televised report resulted more from direct pressure for reform by the journalists themselves than from demands by the general public. The current study uses a quasi-experimental research design to measure the effects of a Chicago Sun-Times newspaper investigative series. The series disclosed government improprieties in the handling of cases of rape and other sexual assaults of Chicago area women. Thus, we continue to focus on media accounts of official wrongdoing in a social problem area. We again employ a design that is better suited to test causal hypotheses than other methodologies traditionally used in agendasetting research (Cook and Campbell, 1979), including cross-sectional (McCombs and Shaw, 1972; McLeod, et al., 1974; Erbring, et al., 1980) or panel study designs (Tipton, et al., 1975; Shaw and McCombs, 1977; MacKuen, 1981). This study, however, uses as its content the topic of rape rather than home health care, is in a local rather than a national publication, and is in a print rather than broadcast medium. If media indeed have an ability to influence citizen judgments of issue importance, then they might also produce other changes. For numerous reasons, most agenda-setting studies fail to pursue these possible additional consequences. This article first will examine the attitudinal impact of the Sun-Times rape series. Next we trace the effects of the series on public policy making in Chicago. Finally, we will measure the effects of the series on the news media's own agenda of concerns: specifically, subsequent Sun-Times coverage of rape and related issues.