Media, the President, and Public Opinion

Using a broadened conceptualization of agenda setting, this volume's objective is to examine the drug issue from mid-1984 to mid-1991 to determine how drug-related issues and events -- both real and fabricated -- and the primary agendas drove the issue over time. Based on this objective, four questions are posed: <br> * How did the media structure interpretations of drug issues and events? <br> * How did the president structure public relations interpretations and presentations of issue and event information over time? <br> * What were the interactions of the drug-issue agendas, the president's public relations agendas, the media, and the public, while controlling the policy agenda and a real-world measure of the severity of the drug problem? <br> * How did the relationships of these agendas differ during the Reagan and Bush presidencies? <br> These questions were addressed with detailed content analyses of the media agenda over time, the presidential public relations agenda over time, and a multivariate ARIMA analysis of the time series agendas. No previous studies to date have addressed and modeled these agendas simultaneously with ARIMA modeling methods.<br>