The capacity of the mass media to cover issues as well as the capacity of recipients to be concerned about issues is limited. The coverage on and the concern about new issues will consequently remove old issues from the agenda of both the mass media and the general public. The present study investigates two models of this process of issue competition. The equal-displacement model assumes that a rise of one issue in the media by a given number of stories is matched by an equal fall in all other issues summing up to a similar number of issues. The restructuring model assumes that unexpected, surprising or otherwise newsworthy events create killer issues that move several other issues completely off the agenda and leave others untouched. A content analysis of all news shows of the two major TV stations in Germany and 53 weekly surveys regarding 16 different issues covering the whole year 1986 shows that—within the media agenda—there were no killer issues affecting the coverage of the TV stations. In the public agenda, however, some killer issues could be identified. Coverage of these issues increased public concern about them and decreased concerns about other issues. Consequences of these results for agenda-setting theory and for politics are discussed.
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Hans-Bernd et al. (1995) studied this question.