Whether or not media have the ability to cultivate our attitudes about issues, there is evidence that media do have an impact on what issues we think about in the first place. Agenda setting is the idea that extensive media coverage of a particular issue or event, such as health care reform in Washington or a major storm on the Eastern seaboard, will “set the agenda” for what issues people are thinking and talking about (see McCombs, 2005). Issues that do not get much coverage will not seem very important.

Agenda setting is important because we use the issues we are thinking about to evaluate political leaders and potential policy decisions (Scheufele & Iyengar, 2012). For example, when the troubled launch of the “healthcare.gov” Web site was getting nonstop news coverage in the fall of 2013, people tended to evaluate President Obama based on how they thought he was handling health care reform (as opposed to how he might have been dealing with other issues). Indeed, when his ratings dropped on his handling of “Obamacare” (as the Affordable Care Act is known) and the Web site rollout, his overall approval ratings also dropped (Blumenthal & Edwards-Levy, 2014). Obama’s decisions to delay enrollment and employer deadlines and Democrats’ efforts to distance themselves from the law were likely a reaction to the heavy press scrutiny at the time, along with continuing coverage of other problems with the health care law (Parker, 2014). As news coverage of “Obamacare” rises or falls in the future, the issue of health care policy may resurface or fade as an important political battle.

With a diverse range of media news outlets available online, we might predict that media would no longer provide an agenda but would instead result in people selecting their own news agendas. But there is evidence that traditional media do still have an agenda-setting effect, although it is weakened for people who use multiple online news sources (Shehata & Strömbäck, 2013). In addition, agenda-setting effects may be a two-way process online, in which news stories encourage people to search for those issues online, while people’s own online searches or Facebook or Twitter posts also influence the coverage in the news media (Ragas, Tran, & Martin, 2014).