Investigating Journalist Influences on Political Issue Agendas at Westminster

Abstract

This piece investigates the role of news media and journalists in setting political agendas. It presents evidence to challenge the agenda-setting paradigm most often adopted in such research. Instead it argues for greater employment of methods and perspectives more usually employed in media sociology. It then presents findings from research on Members of Parliament (MPs) in Britain. The findings, based mostly on semistructured interviews with 40 MPs, offer some interesting perspectives on the relationship between political journalism and the political process at Westminster. The overall conclusion is that intense media attention on issues can shift political agendas and policy development, but not according to the simple stimulus-response model of agenda-setting commonly employed. More often, news content and journalists play a significant role in setting agendas because politicians use them, in a variety of ways, to promote or negotiate agendas and policy options among themselves. In other words, journalism and journalists have a significant social and cultural role in helping MPs, consciously or unconsciously, to reach agreed agendas and positions.

Keywords:

• journalism
• agenda-setting
• political elites

Thanks to the Nuffield Foundation (Award Number SGS/32887), which provided the initial funding for this research.

Notes

1. For a very useful summary and analysis of work in this area, see Walgrave and van Aelst (2004).

2. See Boorstin (1962) and Edelman (1964) for early observations of the process of symbolic over substantive politics.

3. At the same time, there are indications that news media may have greater priming and reinforcement effects on these same individuals. Such might be deduced from Iyengar and Kinder (1987) and Zaller (1992, 1997) and also in MacKuen (1984) and Miller and Krosnick (1997). For MacKuen (1984), “Short-term public responsiveness to events on the public stage is concentrated only at the upper stratum of political involvement” (p. 383).

4. For a range of other objections to media effects and agenda-setting forms of research, see Morley (1980), Ang (1986), Gauntlett (1998), and Norris et al. (1999).

5. This included 23 Labour, 11 Conservative, and 6 Liberal Democrat and Independent MPs (32 men and 8 women). In all, 2 of the interviewees were party leaders, 13 had government ministerial experience, 17 had shadow ministerial experience, and 8 were, or had been recently, chairs of parliamentary select committees.

6. There are also several documented case studies where media campaigns appeared to change substantive policy or legislative decisions (see, for example, Nelson, 1989; Manheim, 1994; Stauber & Rampton, 1995; Anderson, 1997; Davis, 1999).