Projecting Tomorrow's Challenges: Toward a Temporally Nuanced Framework for Studying Agenda Setting

Traditional agenda-setting research often focuses on the most urgent problems that dominate present public agendas. Challenging the prevalent conflation of importance with urgency in agenda-setting research, this article proposes a shift from a singular to a layered temporal conceptualization of public agendas. The suggested framework distinguishes between the immediate agenda, which addresses problems perceived as most urgent, and the delayed agenda, which focuses on issues deemed most important for the future. Enriching agenda-setting theory with insights from construal level theory, the study examines the psychological and media-related factors shaping the placement of topics on these agendas. Drawing upon original survey data and a large-scale news content analysis from the French 2022 Presidential Elections, as well as survey data from the 2023 to 2024 war in Israel and Gaza, the findings provide empirical support for the proposed framework. The results indicate that participants prioritize psychologically proximate issues on the immediate agenda, whereas psychologically distant issues gain importance on the delayed agenda. Additionally, we identify media agenda-setting effects that extend beyond the immediate temporal layer. Specifically, both studies provide evidence for a media priming effect, where news exposure increases issue salience without affecting temporal layering. The Israeli case reveals additional initial evidence for an urgency effect, where news exposure boosts issue salience of some issues primarily on the immediate agenda. Overall, the study contributes to a deeper understanding of public agendas and news media effects, introducing a temporally nuanced perspective that enriches classical approaches to agenda-setting research.