A Burkean Theory of Media Effects Toward a Non-Salience Theory of Framing (original) (raw)

Bruce Gronbeck argues that a lack of rigor in political communication can be understood in the context of a historical conflation between political reality and rhetorical theory. In an overview of the field he concludes that "as 'rhetoric' and 'politics' have tumbled through Western writings about how to establish, maintain, improve, and control the State, with or without the active participation of the citizensubject, humane perspectives on government have narrowed, broadened, darkened, and brightened" (Gronbeck 151). By contrast, social scientific mass communication, beginning with the same assumption that "human beings cannot understand the world in all its complexity" has seen the development of a rigorous theory of agenda-setting that seeks to explain oscillations and patterns in the behavior of citizensubjects by asserting that, while "the news media [has] not told the voters what to think [it has]… told them what to think about" (Scheufele "Agenda-Setting" 300, Jowett and O'Donnell 192). In the broadest sense, agenda-setting research investigates how "the news media's ranking of issues (in amount and prominence of coverage)" influences "the public ranking of the perceived importance of these same issues" (Weaver,