The focus of this paper is on agenda setting and media coverage of the SARS epidemic. The effort is to study the connection between the two based on data from Media Tenor. The idea that the media set the order of importance of issues seems fairly obvious. Issues that gain importance in public perception are generally those issues that the media determine to be important. This proposition has been supported in more than 200 studies over the past 25 years (Dearing & Rogers, 1996) in studies that have encompassed not just elections but non-election studies as well. In that simple sense, it would seem, the media set the agenda for us. We perceive as the big issues of the day those issues that the media focus on.

Agenda setting, a term coined by McCombs and Shaw in a 1972 study, shows a correspondence between the order of importance given in the media to issues and the order of significance attached to the same issues by the public and politicians (McQuail, 1994, p. 256). This theory further supports a statement made by Cohen (1963) that the news media may not directly affect how the public thinks about political matters, but they do affect what subjects people think about. In short, they set the agenda for what political matters people consider important (Severin & Tankard, 1997, p. 252). McCombs, Shaw and Weaver, describe the role of agenda setting in determining public opinion. In order to understand the nuances of agenda setting, an understanding of frames, schema and priming is essential. This is primarily because they are the elements that go into setting an agenda. McCombs and Ghanem (2001) discuss the common ground between agenda setting and framing and state that they both tell us how to think about things.

According to Entman (1993), frames call attention to some aspects of reality while obscuring other elements, which might lead audiences to have different reactions. They provide a context to understand issues. Frames make interpretation possible and can alter the kinds of inferences made. Journalists use syntax, themes, script and rhetoric to frame news. Fisk and Taylor defined schemas as cognitive structures that represent knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among those attributes. Priming, according to Iyengar and Kinder (1987) is a psychological process whereby media emphasis on particular issues activates in people’s memories previously acquired information. For instance, a media reference to a possible terrorist attack in America using chemical weapons is likely to make people remember the duct-tape and plastic sheeting stories popularized by the news media not too long ago.

During the past ten years, cognitive priming has been primarily adopted by communication researchers to analyze the effects of TV news on audiences’ perception and evaluation of political leaders. One of the major accomplishments of applying the priming theory to agenda-setting research has been that it provided as plausible, theoretical model of how the media might influence people’s perception of the importance of issues or events and how these perceptions in turn might affect political attitudes, opinions and behaviors.

The cognitive basis for framing effects (Cappella & Jamieson, 1997):

1. Knowledge of issues is organized as connections among concepts or constructs in memory (‘nodes’) that differ in how easily they can be accessed.
2. The pattern of connections is through associates (sometimes hierarchical ones); activation spreads through the knowledge store along these lines of association.
3. Access to knowledge depends on activation, which in turn depends on recency and frequency of prior activation, chronic ease of access and current external stimulation.
4. Framing makes certain information in a news story salient and depresses the importance of other information. News frames stimulate access to certain information, making it more accessible at least temporarily. Priming and the spread of activation are the mechanisms through which news frames stimulate thought processes and emotional reactions.
5. The knowledge activated by news frames accomplished through priming and spreading activation, alters the accessibility of beliefs through changes in the ease of activation and through cuing scripts pertinent to the topic.
6. The judgments activated by news frames take place either through recall of information as the basis for political judgments or tallying the effective implications of information as judgments.
7. The news frames that describe the behavior of a political actor or entity invite inferences by the citizen about the character of the actor (character traits). These traits are both knowledge about the entity and have evaluative implications for how the person feels about the actor. When a single trait is implicated again and again, it can become the organizing ‘theme’ for the person’s theory about the actor or about political actors in general.
8. Strategic frames describe the behavior of politicians, make salient the self-interest of those actions, invite negative character attributions, cue stock stories about ‘politics as usual’ and reinforce cynicism.
9. News stories, even those strategically framed, often carry substantive information about issues, albeit set in the context of self-interested manipulation. Attentive exposure can alter political knowledge by increasing the accessibility of information, changing the associations among the constructs and cuing and strengthening existing localized networks of concepts.

The information processing approach underlying the media priming approach gives political knowledge a central place in how and when news information is stored and retrieved. Obviously different people can be exposed to the same message and yet perceive it differently, depending on their prior knowledge about the issue under consideration. Theories of social cognition assume that an individual’s understanding of political events and actions is determined by the interaction between existing cognitive structures and new information. Thus, general political interest, knowledge about candidates or parties, or even a specific goal such as obtaining more information on a candidate’s stand on certain issues, should strongly influence how mass-mediated information is processed by each individual. Studies that have investigated the role of political involvement in agenda setting and priming have provided only inconclusive evidence. Schank and Abelson (1995) argue that:

1. Virtually all human knowledge is based on stories constructed around past experiences.
2. New experiences are interpreted in terms of old stories. (Priming)

The content of story memories depends on whether and how they are told to others (framing) and these reconstituted stories form the basis of the individual’s remembered self.

Daniel. C. Hallin (1994), states that the behavior of the media is closely tied to the degree of consensus; the media play a relatively passive role and generally reinforce official power to manage public opinion. When political elites are divided on the other hand, the media become more active, more diverse in the points of view they represent, and more difficult to manage.

Hugel, Degenhardt and Weiss (1989) argue that the notion of a need for orientation is closely linked with the uses and gratifications approach, which places the emphasis on audiences' needs, which they seek to gratify via their use of the media. If audience members feel a need for orientation on a political issue, they will turn to the media for that orientation. Global news conglomerates definitely have an agenda of their own, both economic and political and one factor is almost always tied to the other. Stuart Allan (1998) states, “Cultural studies researchers sought to identify the ways in which the news media systematically extend and reinforce the interests of economic and political elites.” Allan also makes the point that a ruling group is hegemonic only to the extent that it acquires the consent of other groups within its preferred definitions of reality. The presence of alternate news media is testament to the fact that there is a significant degree of opposition to the hegemony of mainstream news media.

The agenda setting role of the news media is a form of hegemony that is evident the world over. An event is deemed important or worthy of discourse, if it merits a mention in the news media. The news media achieve this by framing an event or events in such a manner that it will hold public interest and rake in advertising revenue. News events appear and after a while there is no more follow up, the reason being that it has worn out its usefulness from the network’s perspective. Todd Gitlin (1980) argues that news frames are, “principles of selection, emphasis and presentation composed of little tacit theories about what exists, what happens and what matters” (p.6). Thus news media can be viewed as being “complicit in the cultural reproduction of capitalist relations of production in direct accordance with the interests of a ruling class or bloc.” (Allan, 1998).
Since mainstream news media set the agenda for what constitutes news, it is very difficult for alternate news media to break through with other events that may merit equal or more importance. There is an unwritten consensus among consumers of news that the mainstream news media are to be believed.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs conducted a study titled ‘what the people want from the press’ in September 1997.The findings of this study indicate that the public focuses more on local media than the national press. Beyond the importance of local news & information, the public recognizes that the media plays a vital role watching over public officials & institutions & society. The media are not seen as speaking for the public; rather they are seen as elitist and detached from the real world. There are several companies that specialize in analyzing news media and drawing quantitative results based on content analysis of the media coverage. Media Tenor is one such organization.

Media Tenor
Media Tenor was founded in 1994 in Bonn, Germany as the first international institute specializing in continuous, comprehensive media content analysis. Media Tenor’s goal has always been to provide an objective, transparent view of media content in order to provide a firm basis on which to assess, refine, and more effectively implement the highest standards of journalism.

Media Tenor was a founding member of the International Media Monitoring Association in Washington, D.C. in 1995 and opened offices in the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic the following year. In 2000, offices in the United States and South Africa joined the network and in 2001, Media Tenor opened an additional German office near Berlin. Media Tenor now employs an international staff of 180 media researchers with backgrounds in a variety of fields including economics, political science, public relations, and journalism.

Even through rapid expansion, Media Tenor’s mission remains unchanged: the objective, continuous, and comprehensive monitoring of international media content. Every day Media Tenor receives hundreds of periodicals, records the leading television news programmes in the Czech Republic, Germany, South Africa, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and the United States, and searches the content of more than 40,000 internet sites and news groups in order to create the most accurate, comprehensive, and useful database of media content information in the world. (Source: www.mediatenor.com)

Methodology
Media Tenor’s research methodology was developed in cooperation with experts from the universities of Berlin, Leipzig, London, New York, Mainz and Munich as well as other partner institutes that belong to the International Media Tenor Association.

Over 150 coders read through each medium, first identifying and categorizing each report according to a comprehensive topical index, such as reports containing information on a particular company or industry, on a political event, or on a variety of other areas of interest.

Each report’s content is then encoded: the primary and secondary protagonists, primary and secondary topics, locations, explicit valuations, implicit ratings, sources’ identities, genders, and nationalities as well as other pertinent information are entered into an internationally networked database. Some topical areas are coded in even greater detail, with each of these aspects fully documented for each statement within the report, providing an extremely accurate database that reflects the exact frequency that certain topics, protagonists and locations are present in the media.
Media Tenor researchers then analyze the data for trends in the coverage of individual businesses, industry sectors, political events, countries’ images, and special research areas, such as HIV/AIDS, Holocaust reparations and a variety of other topics. Media Tenor places this research into the context of overall media content trends as well. Individual media are each analyzed for general content trends and are then compared to one another. The same analysis is also performed on overall types of media, such as Internet newsgroups, daily newspapers, and television news programs, providing an objective, comprehensive overview of media types and their relative influence.

At the end of the day, journalists and publishers can turn to a dependable source of information on the end results of their own work. In addition, the media’s audience has the tools with which to better understand how the media work and how media content affects us all. (Source: www.mediatenor.com)

Results
Somewhere between the function of informing (reporting the facts) and persuading (selecting certain facts that support a particular argument) is an area in which we find the agenda setting role of the press. The concepts of framing and priming apply to a great extent to the media coverage of events following epidemics such as the Sudden Acute respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in China in 2003. Analysis of international news coverage on SARS by media tenor between November 2002 & April 2003 indicates that media coverage of SARS on a global scale far exceeded that of HIV / AIDS. This was based on 503 reports SARS and 37 on HIV / AIDS in 3 countries. Public perception of SARS seems to be influenced to great extent by media coverage. The research conducted by Media Tenor International found that reporting on SARS seems to entail far more than general factual information. This was found to be particular true of American, British & German media. In pushing the common problem of HIV / AIDS to the sidelines media have set an agenda that influences not only the image but also the economies of those countries that are mainly hit. Reporting in the American (ABC, CBS, NBC), British (BBC, ITV) and German news bulletins (ARD, ZDF, RTL, SAT.1, PROSIEBEN) shows an average of 13.9 percent of broadcasted reports with the World Health Organization or other experts--doctors or scientist in focus. In contrast other protagonists such as politicians and government contribute to an average of 86 percent. Correspondingly 52.8 percent of US-TV news reports on SARS concentrated on domestic cases whereas only 35.4 % of all reports dealt with the SARS actual hot bed, Asia. During Media Tenor’s research period it is clear that in the media under study, Asia is not framed or defined in terms of economic growth and international corporations in the media but rather with crisis of the non-economic kind--SARS.

Theoretical Implications
Five years after the economic crisis plunged many countries into financial crisis, SARS has led to a decreased economic confidence in Asia. The impact has been far reaching with even sports being affected. The women’s world championship to be played in China this year has been canceled and serious doubts passed over the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing. During the period of Media Tenor’s analysis on SARS coverage the American, British & German news bulletins have shown that HIV/ AIDS issues are not on their agenda any more--just as the Iraq war, plastic sheeting & duct-tape shifted international focus away from humanitarian crisis in Africa & other countries.

It can be argued that agenda setting occurs at several levels. Iyengar and Simon’s (1993) analysis of the Persian Gulf crisis illustrates the difference between the transmission of object salience and attribute salience. The fear of a worldwide SARS outbreak could be defined as object salience at a macro level and at the micro-level, there exists attribute salience such as the impact of SARS on trade and tourism in the affected countries. It would be interesting to study to what extent frames are contingent upon subjective interpretation. In information science, relevance is a concept popularized by Tefko Saracevic (1975) through his famous study in which a set of documents were given to subjects and based on a topic; the subjects were asked to divide them into a relevant pile and an irrelevant pile. The relevant pile was then put through the same test with another set of subjects. This was continued until only two documents remained and one was deemed irrelevant. If a news article could be broken up into news frames and put through a similar analysis in terms of framing effects and priming, it would be interesting to note the results. Would the frames hold true for all subjects and if so, what would the set agenda be? McCombs and Zhu (1995) grouped 179 unique categories into meaningful sets for an analysis of the public’s agenda of the most important problems facing the country from 1954-1994. In the set of 18 categories created by McCombs and Zhu, these 179 issues are the attributes of 18 objects. The problem is that all frames are attributes, but not all attributes can be assumed to be frames. An attribute is considered to be a frame only when it is a macro-attribute (McCombs & Ghanem, 2001).

Whether it be the coverage of SARS, HIV or the Blue Nile virus, media tend to shift focus away from other relevant issues and instead of disseminating useful information such as symptoms, methods of treatment etc, spread panic among audiences. Chinese restaurants were avoided and anyone traveling in the general vicinity of China was viewed as a potential carrier of SARS. A major limitation of this study is that news media in Asia were not taken into consideration. The way in which SARS was covered in India, China and Malaysia would have provided clearer insights into why SARS did not stir up as much concern in the sub-continent. Future analyses could include a more global coverage by news media and also corresponding opinion polls. A timeline study would be of interest just to study the extent of public memory and the impact that any particular medium has on how a particular issue is perceived.

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