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The Agenda-Setting function of mass media

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In choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom staff, and broadcasters play an important part in shaping political reality. Readers learn not only about a given issue, but also how much importance to attach to that issue from the amount of information in a news story and its position. In reflecting what candidates are saying during a campaign, the mass media may well determine the important issues – that is, the media may set the "agenda" of the campaign.
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e agenda-setting function of mass media
Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw
e University of Texas at Austin / e University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill
In choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom sta, and broadcasters play
an important part in shaping political reality. Readers learn not only about a giv-
en issue, but also how much importance to attach to that issue from the amount
of information in a news story and its position. In reecting what candidates are
saying during a campaign, the mass media may well determine the important
issues– that is, the media may set the “agenda” of the campaign.
Keywords: agenda setting, North Carolina, political reality
In our day, more than ever before, candidates go before the people through the
mass media rather than in person (Berelson, Lazarsfeld, & McPhee, 1954). e
information in the mass media becomes the only contact many have with politics.
e pledges, promises, and rhetoric encapsulated in news stories, columns, and
editorials constitute much of the information upon which a voting decision has to
be made. Most of what people know comes to them “second” or “third” hand from
the mass media or from other people (Lang & Lang, 1966).
Although the evidence that mass media deeply change attitudes in a campaign
is far from conclusive, the evidence is much stronger that voters learn from the
immense quantity of information available during each campaign (Berelson etal.,
1954; Cohen, 1963; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1948; Trenaman & McQuail,
1961). People, of course, vary greatly in their attention to mass media political
information. Some, normally the better educated and most politically interested
(and those least likely to change political beliefs), actively seek information; but
most seem to acquire it, if at all, without much eort. It just comes in. As Berelson
etal. succinctly puts it: “On any single subject many ‘hear’ but few ‘listen’” (p. 228).
But Berelson etal. also found that those with the greatest mass media exposure are
most likely to know where the candidates stand on dierent issues. Trenaman and
McQuail (1961) found the same thing in a study of the 1959 General Election in
England. Voters do learn.
e Agenda Setting Journal : (), –.  ./asj...mcc
 - / - - © John Benjamins Publishing Company
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 Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw
ey apparently learn, furthermore, in direct proportion to the emphasis
placed on the campaign issues by the mass media. Specically focusing on the
agenda-setting function of the media, Lang and Lang (1966) observe:
e mass media force attention to certain issues. ey build up public images of
political gures. ey are constantly presenting objects suggesting what individuals
in the mass should think about, know about, have feelings about. (p. 468)
1
Perhaps this hypothesized agenda-setting function of the mass media is most suc-
cinctly stated by Cohen (1963), who noted that 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” (p. 13). While the mass media may have little
inuence on the direction or intensity of attitudes, it is hypothesized that the mass
media set the agenda for each political campaign, inuencing the salience of attitudes
toward the political issues.
Method
To investigate the agenda-setting capacity of the mass media in the 1968 presiden-
tial campaign, this study attempted to match what Chapel Hill voters said were
key issues of the campaign with the actual content of the mass media used by them
during the campaign. Respondents were selected randomly from lists of registered
voters in ve Chapel Hill precincts economically, socially, and racially represent-
ative of the community. By restricting this study to one community, numerous
other sources of variation– for example, regional dierences or variations in media
performance– were controlled.
Between September 18 and October 6, 100 interviews were completed. To se-
lect these 100 respondents a lter question was used to identify those who had not
yet denitely decided how to vote-presumably those most open or susceptible to
campaign information. Only those not yet fully committed to a particular candidate
were interviewed. Borrowing from the Trenaman and McQuail (1961) strategy, this
study asked each respondent to outline the key issues as he saw them, regardless
. Trenaman and McQuail (1961) warn that there was little evidence in their study that televi-
sion (or any other mass medium) did anything other than provide information; there was little
or no attitude change on signicant issues. “People are aware of what is being said, and who is
saying it, but they do not necessarily take it at face value” (p. 168). In a more recent study, however,
Blumler and McQuail (1969) found that high exposure to Liberal party television broadcasts in
the British General Election of 1964 was positively related to a more favorable attitude toward
the Liberal party for those with medium or weak motivation to follow the campaign. e more
strongly motivated were much more stable in political attitude.
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e agenda-setting function of mass media 
of what the candidates might be saying at the moment.
2 Interviewers recorded the
answers as exactly as possible.
Concurrently with the voter interviews, the mass media serving these voters
were collected and content analyzed. A pretest in spring 1968 found that for the
Chapel Hill community almost all the mass media political information was pro-
vided by the following sources: Durham Morning Herald, Durham Sun, Raleigh
News and Observer, Raleigh Times, New York Times, Time, Newsweek, and NBC
and CBS evening news broadcasts.
e answers of respondents regarding major problems as they saw them and
the news and editorial comment appearing between September 12 and October 6
in the sampled newspapers, magazines, and news broadcasts were coded into 15
categories representing the key issues and other kinds of campaign news. Media
news content also was divided into “major” and “minor” levels to see whether there
was any substantial dierence in mass media emphasis across topics.
3 For the print
media, this major/minor division was in terms of space and position; for television,
it was made in terms of position and time allowed. More specically, major items
were dened as follows:
1. Television: Any story 45 seconds or more in length and/or one of the three
lead stories.
2. Newspapers: Any story which appeared as the lead on the front page or on any
page under a three-column headline in which at least one-third of the story (a
minimum of ve paragraphs) was devoted to political news coverage.
3. News Magazines: Any story more than one column or any item which appeared
in the lead at the beginning of the news section of the magazine.
4. Editorial Page Coverage of Newspapers and Magazines: Any item in the lead
editorial position (the top le corner of the editorial page) plus all items in
which one-third (at least ve paragraphs) of an editorial or columnist comment
was devoted to political campaign coverage.
Minor items are those stories which are political in nature and included in the study
but which are smaller in terms of space, time, or display than major items.
. e sur vey question was: “What are you most concerned about these days? at is, regardless
of what politicians say, what are the two or three main things which you think the government
should concentrate on doing something about?”
. Intercoder reliability was above .90 for content analysis of both “major” and “minor” items.
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 Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw
Findings
e over-all major item emphasis of the selected mass media on dierent topics
and candidates during the campaign is displayed in Table1. It indicates that a
considerable amount of campaign news was not devoted to discussion of the major
political issues but rather to analysis of the campaign itself. is may give pause to
those who think of campaign news as being primarily about the issues. irty-ve
percent of the major news coverage of Wallace was composed of this analysis (“Has
he a chance to win or not?”). For Humphrey and Nixon the gures were, respec-
tively, 30 percent and 25 percent. At the same time, the table also shows the relative
emphasis of candidates speaking about each other. For example, Agnew apparently
spent more time attacking Humphrey (22 percent of the major news items about
Agnew) than did Nixon (11 percent of the major news about Nixon). e over-all
minor item emphasis of the mass media on these political issues and topics closely
paralleled that of major item emphasis.
Table1. Major mass media reports on candidates and issues, by candidates
Quoted source
Nixon Agnew Humphrey Muskie Wallace LemayaTo t a l
e issues
Foreign policy
Law and order
Fiscal policy
Public welfare
Civil rights
Other
7%
5
3
3
3
19
9%
13
4
4
9
13
13%
4
2
(*)b
(*)b
14
15%
5
0
25
2%
12
2
4
11
10%
6
2
2
2
15
e campaign
Polls
Campaign events
Campaign analysis
1
18
25
9
17
21
30
10
30
1
25
35
(*)b
19
28
Other candidates
Humphrey
Muskie
Nixon
Agnew
Wallace
Lemay
11
5
1
22
11
(*)b
3
1
5
5
5
1
3
4
5
5
(*)b
3
1
Total percent
Total number
101%
188
100%
23
99%c
221
100%
20
100%
95
11
98%c
558
a Coverage of Lemay amounted to only 11 major items during the September 12–October 6 period and
are not individually included in the percentages; they are included in the total column.
b Less than .05 per cent.
c Does not sum to 100% because of rounding.
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e agenda-setting function of mass media 
Table2 focuses on the relative emphasis of each party on the issues, as reected
in the mass media. e table shows that Humphrey/Muskie emphasized foreign
policy far more than did Nixon/Agnew or Wallace/Lemay. In the case of the “law
and order” issue, however half the Wallace/Lemay news was about this, while less
than one-fourth of the Humphrey/Muskie news concentrated upon this topic. With
Nixon/Agnew it was almost a third– just behind the Republican emphasis on for-
eign policy. Humphrey of course spent considerable time justifying (or commenting
upon) the Vietnam War; Nixon did not choose (or have) to do this.
e media appear to have exerted a considerable impact on voters’ judgments of
what they considered the major issues of the campaign (even though the question-
naire specically asked them to make judgments without regard to what politicians
might be saying at the moment). e correlation between the major item emphasis
on the main campaign issues carried by the media and voters’ independent judg-
ments of what were the important issues was +.967. Between minor item emphasis
on the main campaign issues and voters’ judgments, the correlation was +·979. In
short, the data suggest a very strong relationship between the emphasis placed on
dierent campaign issues by the media (reecting to a considerable degree the em-
phasis by candidates) and the judgments of voters as to the salience and importance
of various campaign topics.
Table2. Mass media report on issues, by parties
Republican Democratic American
Nixon/Agnew Humphrey/Muskie Wallace/Lemay
Issues Major Minor Tot a l Major Minor Total Major Minor Total
Foreign policy
Law and order
Fiscal policy
Public welfare
Civil rights
34%
26
13
13
15
40%
36
1
14
8
38%
32
6
13
11
65%
19
10
4
2
63%
26
6
3
2
64%
23
8
4
2
30%
48
7
14
21%
55
12
12
26%
52
10
13
Total percenta
Total number
101%
47
99%
72
100%
119
100%
48
100%
62
101%
110
99%
28
100%
33
101%
61
a Some columns do not sum to 100% because of rounding.
But while the three presidential candidates placed widely dierent emphasis upon
dierent issues, the judgments of the voters seem to reect the composite of the mass
media coverage. is suggests that voters pay some attention to all the political news
regardless of whether it is from, or about, any particular favored candidate. Because
the tables we have seen reect the composite of all the respondents, it is possible that
individual dierences, reected in party preferences and in a predisposition to look
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 Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw
mainly at material favor able to one’s own party, are lost by lumping all the voters to-
gether in the analysis. erefore, answers of respondents who indicated a preference
(but not commitment) for one of the candidates during the September–October
period studied (45 of the respondents; the others were undecided) were analyzed
separately. Table3 shows the results of this analysis for four selected media.
e table shows the frequency of important issues cited by respondents who
favored Humphrey, Nixon, or Wallace correlated (a) with the frequency of all the
major and minor issues carried by the media and (b) with the frequency of the
major and minor issues oriented to each party (stories with a particular party or
candidate as a primary referent) carried by each of the four media. For example, the
correlation is .89 between what Democrats see as the important issues and the New
Yor k Times’s emphasis on the issues in all its major news items. e correlation is
.79 between the Democrats’ emphasis on the issues and the emphasis of the New
Yor k Times as reected only in items about the Democratic candidates.
If one expected voters to pay more attention to the major and minor issues
oriented to their own party– that is, to read or view selectively the correlations
between the voters and news/opinion about their own party should be strongest.
is would be evidence of selective perception.
4 If, on the other hand, the voters
attend reasonably well to all the news, regardless of which candidate or party issue
is stressed, the correlations between the voter and total media content would be
strongest. is would be evidence of the agenda-setting function. e crucial ques-
tion is which set of correlations is stronger.
In general, Table3 shows that voters who were not rmly committed early in
the campaign attended well to all the news. For major news items, correlations
were more oen higher between voter judgments of important issues and the issues
reected in all the news (including of course news about their favored candidate/
party) than were voter judgments of issues reected in news only about their can-
didate/party. For minor news items, again voters more oen correlated highest with
the emphasis reected in all the news than with the emphasis reected in news
about a favored candidate. Considering both major and minor item coverage, 18
of 24 possible comparisons show voters more in agreement with all the news rather
than with news only about their own party/candidate preference. is nding is
better explained by the agenda-setting function of the mass media than by selective
perception.
. While recent reviews of the literature and new experiments have questioned the validity of
the selective perception hypothesis, this has nevertheless been the focus of much communication
research (Carter, Pyszka, & Guerrero, 1969; Sears & Freedman, 1967).
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e agenda-setting function of mass media 
Table3. Intercorrelations of major and minor issue emphasis by selected media
with voter issue emphasis
Selected media Major items Minor items
All news News own party All new News own party
New York Times
Voters (D)
Voters (R)
Voters (W)
.89
.80
.89
.79
.40
.25
.97
.88
.78
.85
.98
−.53
Durham Morning Herald
Voters (D)
Voters (R)
Voters (W)
.84
.59
.82
.74
.88
.76
.95
.84
.79
.83
.69
.00
CBS
Voters (D)
Voters (R)
Voters (W)
.83
.50
.78
.83
.00
.80
.81
.57
.86
.71
.40
.76
NBC
Voters (D)
Voters (R)
Voters (W)
.57
.27
.84
.76
.13
.21
.64
.66
.48
.73
.63
−.33
Although the data reported in Table3 generally show high agreement between voter
and media evaluations of what the important issues were in 1968, the correlations
are not uniform across the various media and all groups of voters. e variations
across media are more clearly reected in Table4, which includes all survey re-
spondents, not just those predisposed toward a candidate at the time of the survey.
ere also is a high degree of consensus among the news media about the signicant
issues of the campaign, but again there is not perfect agreement. Considering the
news media as mediators between voters and the actual political arena, we might
interpret the correlations in Table5 as reliability coecients, indicating the extent
of agreement among the news media about what the important political events are.
To the extent that the coecients are less than perfect, the pseudo-environment
reected in the mass media is less than a perfect representation of the actual 1968
campaign.
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 Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw
Table4. Correlations of voter emphasis on issues with media coverage
Newsweek Time New York
Times
Raleigh
Times
Raleigh News
and Observer
Major Items .30 .30 .96 .80 .91
Minor Items .53 .78 .97 .73 .93
Durham
Sun
Durham
Morning Herald
NBC
News
CBS News
Major Items .82 .94 .89 .63
Minor Items .96 .93 .91 .81
Table5. Intercorrelation of mass media presidential news coverage for major and minor
items
Newsweek Time
New
York
Times
Raleigh
Times
Raleigh
News &
Observer
Durham
Sun
Durham
Morning
Herald NBC CBS
Major Items
Newsweek
Time
New York Times
Raleigh Times
Raleigh News and
Observer
Durham Sun
Durham Morning
Herald
NBC News
CBS News
.65
.46
.73
.84
.77
.89
.81
.66
.99
.59
.66
.49
.47
.68
.65
.60
.54
.51
.64
.60
.47
.68
.38
.83
.92
.90
.70
.74
.70
.80
.87
.88
.79
.77
.71
.85
.80
.93
.73
.79
.81
.81
.66
.89
.84
.73
.84
.76
.79
.76
.81
.90
.93
.94
.75
.78
.68
.68
.66
.72
.82
.91
.89
.72
.42
.43
.66
.62
.60
.77
.76
.82
Minor Items
Two sets of factors, at least, reduce consensus among the news media. First, the ba-
sic characteristics of newspapers, television, and newsmagazines dier. Newspapers
appear daily and have lots of space. Television is daily but has a severe time con-
straint. Newsmagazines appear weekly; news therefore cannot be as “timely”.
Table5 shows that the highest correlations tend to be among like media; the lowest
correlations, between dierent media.
Second, news media do have a point of view, sometimes extreme biases.
However, the high correlations in Table5 (especially among like media) suggest
consensus on news values, especially on major news items. Although there is no
explicit, commonly agreed-upon denition of news, there is a professional norm
regarding major news stories from day to day. ese major-story norms doubtless
are greatly inuenced today by widespread use of the major wire services– espe-
cially by newspapers and television– for much political information.
5 But as we
. A number of studies have focused on the inuence of the wire services (Casey & Copeland,
1958; Cutlip, 1954; Gold & Simmons, 1965; Lewis, 1960; Stempel III, 1964; Van Horn, 1952).
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e agenda-setting function of mass media 
move from major events of the campaign, upon which nearly everyone agrees, there
is more room for individual interpretation, reected in the lower correlations for
minor item agreement among media shown in Table5· Since a newspaper, for ex-
ample, uses only about 15 percent of the material available on any given day, there
is considerable latitude for selection among minor items.
In short, the political world is reproduced imperfectly by individual news me-
dia. Yet the evidence in this study that voters tend to share the media’s composite
denition of what is important strongly suggests an agenda-setting function of the
mass media.
Discussion
e existence of an agenda-setting function of the mass media is not proved by
the correlations reported here, of course, but the evidence is in line with the con-
ditions that must exist if agenda-setting by the mass media does occur. is study
has compared aggregate units-Chapel Hill voters as a group compared to the ag-
gregate performance of several mass media. is is satisfactory as a rst test of
the agenda-setting hypothesis, but subsequent research must move from a broad
societal level to the social psychological level, matching individual attitudes with
individual use of the mass media. Yet even the present study renes the evidence in
several respects. Eorts were made to match respondent attitudes only with media
actually used by Chapel Hill voters. Further, the analysis includes a juxtaposition
of the agenda-setting and selective perception hypotheses. Comparison of these
correlations too supports the agenda-setting hypothesis. Interpreting the evidence
from this study as indicating mass media inuence seems more plausible than
alternative explanations. Any argument that the correlations between media and
voter emphasis are spurious– that they are simply responding to the same events
and not inuencing each other one way or the other– assumes that voters have
alternative means of observing the day-to-day changes in the political arena. is
assumption is not plausible; since few directly participate in presidential election
campaigns, and fewer still see presidential candidates in person, the information
owing in interpersonal communication channels is primarily relayed from, and
based upon, mass media news coverage. e media are the major primary sources
of national political information; for most, mass media provide the best– and
only– easily available approximation of ever-changing political realities.
It might also be argued that the high correlations indicate that the media simply
were successful in matching their messages to audience interests. Yet since numer-
ous studies indicate a sharp divergence between the news values of professional
journalists and their audiences, it would be remarkable to nd a near perfect t
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 Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw
in this one case.
6 It seems more likely that the media have prevailed in this area of
major coverage.
While this study is primarily a sociology of politics and mass communica-
tion, some psychological data were collected on each voter’s personal cognitive
representation of the issues. Shrauger (1967) has suggested that the salience of the
evaluative dimension– not the sheer number of attributes– is the essential feature
of cognitive dierentiation. So a content analysis classied respondents accord-
ing to the salience of aect in their responses to open-ended questions about the
candidates and issues.
7 Some voters described the issues and candidates in highly
aective terms. Others were much more matter-of-fact. Each respondent’s answers
were classied by the coders as “all aect,” “aect dominant,” “some aect but not
dominant,” or “no aect at all.
8 Regarding each voter’s salience of aect as his cog-
nitive style of storing political information, the study hypothesized that cognitive
style also inuences patterns of information-seeking.
Eschewing causal language to discuss this relationship, the hypothesis states
that salience of aect will index or locate dierences in the communication behav-
ior of voters. But a number of highly ecient locator variables for voter commu-
nication behavior already are well documented in the research literature. Among
these are level of formal education and interest in politics generally. However, in
terms of e American Voter’s model of a “funnel” stretching across time, education
and political interest are located some distance back from the particular campaign
being considered (Campbell, Converse, Miller, & Stokes, 1960). Cognitive style is
located closer to the end of the funnel, closer to the time of actual participation in
a campaign. It also would seem to have the advantage of a more functional rela-
tionship to voter behavior.
Examination of the relationship between salience of aect and this pair of tradi-
tional locators, education and political interest, showed no signicant correlations.
e independent eects of political interest and salience of aect on media use are
. Furthermore, ve of the nine media studied here are national media and none of the remain-
ing four originate in Chapel Hill. It is easier to argue that Chapel Hill voters t their judgments
of issue salience to the mass media than the reverse. An interesting study which discusses the
problems of trying to t day-to-day news judgments to reader interest is Guido H. Stempel
III, “A Factor Analytic Study of Reader Interest in News,Journalism Quarterly, Vol. 44, 1967,
pp. 326–330. An older study is Philip F. Grin, “Reader Comprehension of News Stories: A
Preliminary Study,” Journalism Quarterly, Vol. 26, 1949, pp. 389–396.
. Aect denotes a “pro/con” orientation, a feeling of liking or disliking something. Cognition,
by contrast, denotes the individual’s perception of the attitude object, his “image” or organized
set of information and beliefs about a political object.
. Coder reliability exceeded .90.
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e agenda-setting function of mass media 
demonstrated in Table6. Also demonstrated is the ecacy of salience of aect as
a locator or predictor of media use, especially among persons with high political
interest.
9
Table6. Proportion of media users by political interest and salience of aect
Media Low political interest High political interest
High aect
(N = 40)
Low aect
(N = 17)
High aect
(N = 25)
Low aect
(N = 12)
TV 15.0% 17.7% 20.0% 41.7%
Newspapers 27.5 35.4 36.0 58.3
News Magazines 7. 5 11.8 24.0 33.3
Radio 12.5 11.8 8.0 33.3
Talk 20.0 17.7 64.0 75.0
Both salience of aect and media use in Table6 are based on the issue that re-
spondents designated as the most important to them personally. Salience of aect
was coded from their discussion of why the issue was important. Use of each com-
munication medium is based on whether or not the respondent had seen or heard
anything via that medium about that particular issue in the past twenty-four hours.
High salience of aect tends to block use of communication media to acquire
further information about issues with high personal importance. At least, survey
respondents with high salience of aect do not recall acquiring recent information.
is is true both for persons with low and high political interest, but especially
among those with high political interest. For example, among respondents with
high political interest and high salience of aect only 36 percent reported reading
anything in the newspaper recently about the issue they believed to be most im-
portant. But among high political interest respondents with low salience of aect
nearly six of ten (58.3 percent) said they acquired information from the newspaper.
Similar patterns hold for all the communication media.
Future studies of communication behavior and political agenda setting must
consider both psychological and sociological variables; knowledge of both is cru-
cial to establishment of sound theoretical constructs. Considered at both levels as
a communication concept, agenda-setting seems useful for study of the process of
political consensus.
. No statistical analysis is reported for the ve separate three-way analyses in Table6 because
of small N’s in some cells, but despite these small N’s the pattern of results is consistent across all
media
Uncorrected proofs - John Benjamins Publishing Company
 Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw
Acknowledgements
Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press from e Public Opinion Quarterly,
Vol.36, No. 2 (Summer, 1972), pp. 176–187.
is study was partially supported by a grant from the National Association of Broadcast-
ers. Additional support was provided by the UNC Institute for Research in Social Science and
the School of Journalism Foundation of North Carolina.
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e agenda-setting function of mass media 
Authors’ addresses
Maxwell E. McCombs
1407 Foxwood Cove
Austin, TX 78704
maxmccombs@utexas.edu
Donald L. Shaw
710 Emory Drive
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27517
cardinal@email.unc.edu
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