Uncovering Rape: The Watchdog Press and the Limits of Agenda Setting

This article reports the findings of the second in a series of field experiments on the agenda-setting effects of news media investigative reports. The authors used a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design to assess the impact of a newspaper investigative series about rape on a randomly selected group of Chicagoans and a purposive sample of policy makers. Unlike the first study, the series had a minimal impact on public opinion and policy making, but affected profoundly the subsequent newspaper coverage of rape.