2. Literature Review
2.2 Agenda-setting Theory
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construction of all media agendas. (p. 103)" Hence, in this study, agenda-setting theory, from first level to second level, would be explicated next to discuss the relationship, based on the concept of information subsidies, between news releases and news coverage in the following section.
2.2 Agenda-setting Theory
Based on the discussed concept of information subsidies in the last sections, news releases, as one of typical forms of it, have strong influences on the decision-making process and agenda selection while journalists or editors producing the news. Logic implies that through news releases and other forms of activities, public relations practitioners supply information subsidies for journalists to create media agenda (Gandy, 1982). Furthermore, this study will examine the relationship between the news releases and news coverage under the theoretical framework, agenda-setting theory, especially in the second level. This section consists of the origin and the core value of the agenda-setting theory, divides the
agenda-setting theory into two levels, and how media's agenda set by applying agenda setting theory to the information-subsidy relationship between news releases and the printed news.
First, the core value of the agenda-setting theory is the "transfer of salience," suggesting that the salience in news influences the salience of topics on the public agenda. This influence process begins with the agenda of "objects" receiving prominent attention in the mass media.
The term "object" used here is the same with the term "attitude object" in the social
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psychology (McCombs, 2005). McCombs also suggested that the famous summary statement by Bernard Cohen(1963) should be revised into that the media not only tell people what to think about, but also tell people how to think about it.
Agenda-setting as a concept is not limited to the correspondence between salience of topics for the media and the audience. We can also consider the saliency of various attributes of these objects (topics, issues, persons, or whatever) reported in the media. To what extent is our view of an object shaped or influenced by the picture sketched in the media, especially by those attributes which the media deem newsworthy?...Consideration of agenda-setting in terms of the salience of both topics and their attributes allows the concept of agenda-setting to subsume many similar ideas presented in the past. The concepts of status-conferral, stereotyping, and image-making all deal with the salience of objects or attributes. (Shaw & McCombs, 1977, p. 12)
2.2.1 First-level and second-level agenda setting
Within the theoretical framework of agenda-setting theory, Shaw and McCombs explicated that "what to think" is the first-level agenda setting, emphasizing the salience of objects and their attention; and "how to think about" is the second-level agenda setting, focusing on the salience of "attributes" and the whole comprehension. Normally, the news media do more than presenting an agenda of objects, and they also describe each of those objects with attributes. Some attributes of these objects are emphasized while some are
mentioned less frequently and some just only in passing. For each object on the media agenda, there also is an agenda of attributes.
In defining attributes, previous research has identified two major classes: substantive and affective. (McCombs, Lopez-Escobar, & Llamas, 2000). For example, for the substantive agenda, describing a politician includes mentions of the position in the ideology or the issue,
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biographical information, personality and so forth. Meanwhile, the affective agenda includes positive, neutral, and negative descriptions of any of the aforementioned substantive
attributes.
2.2.2 Setting media's agenda
In 1980s, scholars began to ask "Who sets the media's agenda?" Gandy (1982), for example, argued that “I suggest we go beyond agenda-setting to determine who sets the
media agenda, how and for what purpose it is set, and with what impact on the distribution of power and values in society” (p. 266). McCombs (2004), in his book Setting the Agenda,
used a useful metaphor for understanding the relationship between all these other agendas and the agenda of the mass media, which is "peeling an onion."
"The concentric layers of the onion represent the numerous influences at play in the shaping of the media agenda, which is the core of the onion. "(p.98)
Scheufele (1999) also conceptualized framing as a continuous process where outcomes of certain process serve as inputs for subsequent processes, and labeled one of four processes as framing setting, which is similar with McCombs and his colleagues' idea "second-level agenda setting." Therefore, this study follows the same route as the process from the news release to the news coverage. Figure 2.1 presents the process model of framing research by Scheufele (1999).
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Figure 2.1 The process model of framing research (Scheufele, 1999)
For public relations practitioners, logic implies that they regard journalists as
audiences/readers and further deliver messages through channels journalists keep. And this study assumes that journalists receiving the news release and referring to it while selecting and producing news is also called frame setting, or called "second-level agenda setting,"
transmitting the attribute salience. Figure 2.2 shows the model the framing setting in this study.
Figure 2.1 The process model in this study Outcomes
Attributes
News Release
Process
Second-level agenda setting (Journalists as readers)
Inputs
Attributes
Newspapers
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Although most agenda-setting researches in the past had analyzed an agenda of public or political issues, for instance, the first empirical study of agenda setting was conducted during the 1968 presidential election by McCombs and Shaw. Still, other objects on the media agenda include public figures, institutions, and corporations, argued by Carroll and McCombs (2003). Furthermore, McCombs (2004) stated that
...workings of government and business, from the international level down to the local level, originates with public information officers and other public relations practitioners who represent important news sources. These communication professionals subsidize the efforts of news organizations to cover the news by providing substantial amounts of organized information, frequently in the form of press releases prepared in the exact style of news stories.(p.102)
2.2.3 Attributes of corporate reputation agenda
In this case, the agenda-setting theory, both in first and second level, might fit equally well in the world of business communication. In order to probe the substantive attribute agenda between corporation and news coverage, some previous studies provided general gauges for the assessment to attributes agendas of corporate reputation specifically. For example, Fombrun, Gardberg and Sever (1999) used a series of focus groups to assess exactly what people meant when they referred to corporate reputation, revised from three pilot
studies, and finally presented a valid and reliable scale- the Reputation QuotientSM,
measuring key attributes of reputation substantively. Table 2.1 presents the reputation scale.
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Table 2.1 The Reputation QuotientSM
Emotional Appeal
I have a good feeling about the company I admire and respect the company I trust this company
Products and Services
Stands behind its products and services Develops innovative products and services Offers high quality products and services
Offers products and services that are a good value for the money Vision and Leadership
Has excellent leadership Has a clear vision for its future
Recognizes and takes advantage of market opportunities Workplace
Environment
Is well-managed
Looks like a good company to work for
Looks like a company that would have good employees Social and
Environmental Responsibility
Supports good causes
Is an environmentally responsible company Maintain high standards in the way it treats people Financial
Performance
Has a strong record of profitability Looks like a low risk investment Tends to outperform its competitors
Looks like a company with strong prospects for future growth
Furthermore, Kiousis, Popescu, and Mitrook (2007) also used the Reputation Quotient index by Harris Interactive and the Reputation Institute as a valid measurement of corporate reputation among external stakeholders. The Reputation Quotient has been measured by Harris Interactive and the Reputation Institute annually since 1998. This instrument evaluates stakeholder perceptions of the most visible corporations in the United States and Europe across six attributes of corporate reputation and several sub-attributes, as the same as ones listed on Table 2.1. In the study, they analyzed the impact of corporate public relations
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messages on media coverage of corporations, on corporate reputation, and on financial performance, through two-level agenda-setting theory. And they found that object salience in public relations messages leads to increased salience in news coverage, and that a positive correlation between public relations messages tone and media coverage tone is supported.
However, the transfer of salience from media messages to perceptions of corporate reputation did not occur. They also pointed interestingly that they found agenda-setting effects for news coverage and financial performance but only for part of certain newspaper instead of the other, which suggests that agenda-setting effects are likely to vary from different media with different natures and focuses of the publication.
2.2.4 Affective tone of attributes
For the other type of attribute, for example, Deephouse (2000) incorporated mass communication theory to develop the concept, media reputation, and he referred to the affective dimension of the media’s attribute agenda as media "favorability." He used
"favorable" to indicate that a firm was praised for its actions or that the firm was associated with activities that should raise a firm’s reputation. On the other hand, he used "unfavorable"
when an organization was criticized for its actions or associated with actions that should decrease its reputation. A "neutral" rating identified a story that was the "declarative reporting of role performance without evaluative modifiers." In the same logic, this study referred to the affective attributes in the news items as positive, negative, and neutral according to
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aforementioned substantive sub-attributes. For example, it would be positive that there are characteristics describing that HTC has high quality products and/or services, whereas, it would be negative that there are characteristics describing HTC has poor quality products and/or services. But if there are characteristics describing both ways, it would be neutral. In this study, the valence of the object in the agenda, corporate reputation, would be also determined by numbers of positive, negative, and neutral affective attributes in the same news items.
Through aforementioned discussion, the agenda-setting effect not only influences public opinions in the context of political issues from the news media, but also exists and influences among news media and sources in the context of other objects and attributes, especially corporate reputation and communication in this study in the second-level agenda-setting, the salience of attributes substantively and affectively.
Based on the context of information subsidies between public relations practitioners in the corporation and journalists in news organizations, this study intends to examine the influence from corporate news release to media news coverage in Taiwan, taking a Taiwan-founded smart phone corporation, HTC, as an example, within the theoretical
framework of the agenda-setting theory. For the second-level agenda setting, attributes would be divided into twenty sub-attributes, substantively and affectively, within six main attributes:
overall corporate appeal, products and services, vision and leadership, financial performance,
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workplace environment and social responsibility, which are referred to previous studies (e.g.
Kiousis, Popescu, and Mitrook , 2007; Fombrun, Gardberg and Sever 2000).