Agenda setting provides an analysis strategy for linking press coverage and voter perceptions of front runners, and underscores the importance of studying the primaries early in an election year. Two studies were undertaken in 1976. The first study, in Onandaga County (New York), involved telephone interviews of 335 registered Democrats in late…

Presidential candidates in the United States tend to seek consensus rather than to try to discover new answers to problems and to convince voters that they should be elected to implement those answers. Reporters in the mass media emphasize objectivity and fairness in their reporting. This emphasis produces an intense interest in the…

The relationship between the media and public opinion concerning national elections is examined. Trends in public opinion and media emphasis were analyzed according to attention to political issues, ideological concepts, and party identification. A random sample of approximately 220 presidential election stories in the New York Times was taken for…

Analysis of the Wisconsin woman suffrage campaign of 1910-1920 suggests that public relations belonged not only to political or business practices, but was equally a process by which the masses achieved their own best interests in nineteenth and early twentieth century social reform movements. Woman suffragists were led by women, and the public…