Agenda-Setting and Priming in the Prime-Time Hour

The effects of agenda setting and priming are well established in regards to the news media. Considerably less attention has been paid to these phenomena in entertainment media, in spite of the fact that entertainment media make up a much larger portion of television programming. This paper argues that agenda-setting and priming effects generalize to entertainment media. It develops a theory of entertainment media influence based on evidence that individuals do not treat entertainment media as irrelevant sources of political information. It then tests this theory using evidence from two controlled laboratory experiments and analysis of the 1996 National Election Study. In conjunction, these data suggest that significant agenda-setting and priming effects are associated with a wide range of television dramas. Congruent with recent research on news media priming (Miller and Krosnick 2000) priming is found to be moderated by trust in the media source. Political knowledge is found to be inconsequential as a moderator of these effects. These findings suggest that previous research in media effects has employed too narrow a focus. Non-news sources of political information appear to play a significant role in the construction of political attitudes. 1 A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2003 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, April 3-6, Chicago, Illinois. Research for this project was funded in part by The Ohio State University’s Program for the Enhancement of Graduate Studies (PEGS) grant. All data are available by request.