Agenda-setting Effects of Business News on the Public's Images and Opinions about Major Corporations
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Volume 6 Number 1
Agenda-setting Effects of Business News on the Public’s Images and Opinions about Major Corporations Craig E. Carroll and Maxwell McCombs The University of Texas at Austin
ABSTRACT Although the agenda-setting effects of the news media on people’s attention to, comprehension of, and opinions about topics in the news primarily have been studied in political communication settings, the central theoretical idea — the transfer of salience from the media agenda to the public agenda — fits equally well in the world of business communication. In the case of corporate reputations, only the operational definitions of the objects and attributes on these agendas are changed here to frame five key theoretical propositions about the influence of news coverage on corporate reputations among the public. This presentation of five basic propositions about first and second-level agenda setting effects as well as intermedia agenda-setting effects offers a theoretical roadmap for systematic empirical research into the influence of the mass media on corporate reputations.
Corporate Reputation Review, Vol. 6, No. 1, 2003, pp. 36–46 # Henry Stewart Publications, 1363–3589
Page 36
INTRODUCTION There has been tremendous growth in the volume of business news appearing in the mass media during recent decades. The New York Times business journalist Diana Henriques (2000) notes that coverage of the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, for example, has doubled in the last ten years of the 20th century. This expanding business news coverage is of particular importance to organizations attempting to manage issues because much of what consumers and other external stakeholders learn about companies and the issues that surround them comes from the news media (Chen
and Meindl, 1991; Deephouse, 2000; Dutton and Dukerich, 1991; Fombrun and Shanley, 1990). In these post-Enron times, media reports on such issues as financial disclosure and corporate governance have become particularly salient. The day-to-day selection and display of news by journalists focuses the public’s attention and influences its perceptions. The specific ability to influence the salience of both topics and their images among the public has come to be called the agendasetting role of the news media (McCombs and Reynolds, 2002). Although most of the research exploring this agenda-setting role documents how media coverage of public issues and political candidates influences which issues and candidates the public thinks are the most important, and which attributes are the most important when describing these issues and political candidates, this paper explicates the applicability of agenda-setting theory for explaining the influence of the media on corporate reputations among the public. These agenda-setting effects result from routine coverage of firms in the media and, increasingly, coverage of firms’ involvement in major problems and issues ranging from product recalls to financial scandals. AGENDA-SETTING INFLUENCE OF THE MASS MEDIA The core proposition of agenda-setting theory is
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