C. Michael Hall Article

by
C. Michael Hall

Department of Tourism, University of Otago, and Department of Marketing, University of Stirling
Tourism issues, agenda setting and the media

Recent international e vents such as those of September 11, 2001, the Bali bombing, the American-led invasion of Iraq and the SARS outbreak in China have highlighted the perceived impact of crises and /or instability on tourism. Such issues have long been recognised as a factor which influences tourist decision-making (e.g., Hall and O’Sullivan, 1996) but, critically, they also highlight the role of the media in influencing public opinion and perception of events. Therefore, critical to an understanding of the likely longer-term pattern of response to issues which affect tourism is an understanding of how the media deals with such concerns and how this, in turn, may affect tourist perceptions and policy making.

Public perceptions of the relative importance of an issue are largely determined by the news media (Wood and Peake, 1998) whether directly to the receiver of the media communication or by word of mouth. The media interprets issues, giving them more or less significance through the amount or type of coverage provided. The amount of media coverage of an issue may not reflect its actual importance in real terms. In the case of tourism, the recent SARS outbreak while an important health issue, arguably pails into significance each year when compared to the number of deaths from diseases such as dengue fever or malaria carriers of which also travel back to their home country.

The media, particularly television news, also focus attention on specific events through this same interpretive function (Iyengar & Kinder 1987). However, not only does the media influence general public opinions, it also plays a major part in informing consumers images of destinations and transport modes, their relative safety and security, either directly in terms of being read, heard or watched, or indirectly through the advice given by friends, relatives and other sources of "word of mouth" information (Fodness & Murray 1997). Moreover, with global communication events can be played out live on the television screen, there is the potential for having an even greater impact on the viewing public. Yet the media serves to filter which events are shown and which are not.

These issues highlight the importance for understanding the means by which tourism- related issues and events get onto media or policy agenda. Agenda -setting research focuses not on the opinions surrounding issues, but on issue salience. Cohen was the first to state what has become the central public agenda-setting hypothesis: the press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about” (1963, p.13).

Following from Cohen’s discussion, public agenda -setting work demonstrated that increased issue salience for the media leads to increased issue salience for the public – in agenda-setting terms, that the media agenda has an impact on the public agenda, where anagenda is a ranking of the relative importance of various public issues (Dearing and Rogers, 1996).
Relatively little research has been undertaken on this topic from the perspective of tourism, yet such research may shed important light on how tourism is perceived in policy or issue terms. For example, in a study of the 1999 New Zealand general election Padgett and Hall (2001) reported that tourism was generally considered by candidates to be a very