Issue Advocacy and Traditional News Content
Since the original efforts of McCombs and Shaw (1972), the agenda of the news
media has been the focus of an abundance of academic research. Agenda setting theory
promulgates the notion that while the media do not tell the public what to think, they do
influence what they think about. Nevertheless, the media do not operate in a vacuum.
Rather, there are numerous forces that mediate the impact of agenda setting (Turk, 1986;
Gandy, 1982).
In addition to unmanipulated factual information, the media also disseminate
prejudices of the sources upon which they rely (Turk, 1986), and the diversity of potential
sources may be quite vast. According to Shoemaker and Reese (1991), these extramedia
influences on media content include interest groups, public relations campaigns,
advertisers, and government controls, to name only a few. Political advertising, for
example, has been shown to have a positive correlation with both newspaper and
television news agendas (Roberts & McCombs, 1994). Recent studies have also
examined the agenda setting impact of political Web sites on traditional news media as
well as their significant impact on the public’s agenda (Ku, Kaid, & Pfau, 2003).
Despite the growing body of literature on agenda setting influences, the agendas
of issue advocacy campaigns, or communication efforts used to convey information
regarding social issues and an organization’s position on those issues (Sethi, 1979), have
received little or no attention as a potential influence on either the media or the public’s
agenda. This is surprising, given the very nature of issue advocacy campaigns involves
the communication of often-controversial opinions usually in an effort to sway public
sentiment or generate support (Cutler & Muehling, 1989). Although issue advocacy
campaigns may seem innocuous by nature, some researchers suggest that issue advocacy
may be a particularly effective means of influencing policy because of its unique ability
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Convention