Framing, Agenda Setting, and Priming: The Evolution of Three Media Effects Models

This special issue of Journal of Communication is devoted to theoretical explanations of news framing, agenda setting, and priming effects. It examines if and how the three models are related and what potential relationships between them tell theorists and researchers about the effects of mass media. As an introduction to this effort, this essay provides a very brief review of the three effects and their roots in media-effects research. Based on this overview, we highlight a few key dimensions along which one can compare, framing, agenda setting, and priming. We conclude with a description of the contexts within which the three models operate, and the broader implications that these conceptual distinctions have for the growth of our discipline. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00326.x In 1997, Republican pollster Frank Luntz sent out a 222-page memo called ‘‘Language of the 21st century’’ to select members of the U.S. Congress. Parts of the memo soon spread among staffers, members of Congress, and also journalists. Luntz’s message was simple: ‘‘It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it’’ (Luntz, in press). Drawing on various techniques for real-time message testing and focus grouping, Frank Luntz had researched Republican campaign messages and distilled terms and phrases that resonated with specific interpretive schemas among audiences and therefore helped shift people’s attitudes. In other words, the effect of the messages was not a function of content differences but of differences in the modes of presentation. The ideas outlined in the memo were hardly new, of course, and drew on decades of existing research in sociology (Goffman, 1974), economics (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979), psychology (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984), cognitive linguistics (Lakoff, 2004), and communication (Entman, 1991; Iyengar, 1991). But Frank Luntz was the first professional pollster to systematically use the concept of framing as a campaign tool. The Democratic Party soon followed and George Lakoff published Don’t Think of an