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Some fundamental concepts in agenda-setting are related to a simple cognitive memory decay process. Accounting for issue obtrusiveness and amounts of prior coverage, predictions for the size of the relationship between declining accumulated television coverage and issue salience are derived. Levels of declining accumulated coverage are estimated by applying an exponential decay function to the prominence of daily television coverage. This function presumably models simple forgetting of coverage that occurs within individual audience members. Three issues (inflation, Iran, and the Soviet Union) were investigated over an 1,826-day period, using the daily prominence of television coverage obtained from television news archives and daily salience of the issues interpolated from monthly archived poll data. The size of the relationship between accumulated coverage and issue salience was found to decrease with the amount of coverage of an issue prior to the beginning of the study period. A new unobtrusive issue (Iran) was found to have the strongest agenda-setting effects and more rapidly declining coverage effects than other issues.

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This study investigated cross-media credibility perception with respect to news coverage about the Iraq War. In an environment of political partisanship, perceptions of media credibility were likely affected by the audience's political position on the war. Based on hostile media effect theory, a set of hypotheses was proposed to investigate whether the minority opinion group, war opponents, evaluated the Internet as a more credible medium than did neutrals or supporters. An online survey was conducted to which 481 people responded (71% war supporters, 19% opponents, 10% neutrals). Results showed that opponents of the war perceived the Internet as less aligned with a pro-government position and as more credible than did neutrals or supporters. The opponent group also showed a strong negative correlation between perceived pro-government alignment and perceptions of Internet credibility. For the minority partisan group, the diversity of information and views on the war was the main reason for the perception of high credibility of the Internet as a news channel.

This study examined the effects of synchrony and the number of cues on the person perception process in computer‐mediated communication. One hundred and forty‐two participants in groups of three or four engaged in collaboration over five weeks to develop oral reports, using alternate versions of communication systems or meeting face‐to‐face. Consistent with the hyperpersonal model, those using low cue media felt their partners were more credible, and reported more social attraction, less uncertainty, and more involvement in the interaction than those using high cue media. People interacting with synchronous media felt increased social attraction, self‐reported involvement, and certainty. They also felt that their conversations were more effective, although this effect appeared mainly in low cue groups. Results of an exploratory path analysis suggest that future research should focus on causal chains rather than direct effects, and that intervening variables (such as involvement) may be central to our understanding of the effects of communication technology systems.