Keywords: News, media, journalism and public opinion

Much of our knowledge of today's world is mediated by mass communication. Most of the events ignored by the media do not really exist for us. In this regard, it is logical to assume that the intensity of media debate influences public attention to certain issues, as claimed by supporters of the agenda-setting theory. In this work, we compare the data of the Levada Center surveys on the most memorable events of the previous month according to Russians in 2014-2016 and the numbers of publications on these events in the Russian press for 1 week and 1 month prior to the survey. The survey is a monthly study by the Levada Center, and it usually takes place on the third Friday of each month. The question is presented as follows: "Which events of the past four weeks were most memorable to you?" The respondents are not given a list of events. The results are presented in a tabular format containing the list of events of the past month and the proportion of respondents who identified them as memorable. We compare these data with the number of publications in the press on each of the issues. To obtain this information, we use the Integrum base, which contains the contents of approximately 500 Russian magazines, over 250 national and more than 1000 regional newspapers.
Our analysis confirms media impact on public attention to the events. Even if respondents are asked about the most memorable events of the past month, the number of press articles published a week before the study is more important. Thus, the news has low resilience: people perceive the events that are taking place right now as being the most important, with the exception of some incidents that attract a high level of public attention. We can also argue that the prolonged retention of an issue on the information agenda draws public attention to it, and the intensity of the discussion of this issue immediately prior to the survey is also significant.
According to the agenda-setting theory, the maximum correlation between discussions in the media and public opinion can be achieved in the case of totalitarian states, where freedom of the media is virtually non-existent (McCombs et al., 2014). From this point of view, the limited independence of the Russian media, noted by researchers (Fredheim, 2016; Gehlbach, 2010) and the World Press Freedom Index ("World Press Freedom Index," 2016), should have contributed to the greater overlap of public and individual agendas. However, the value of the correlation coefficient between the number of articles in the press on the issue and the proportion of Russians considering the issue to be important is comparable to similar figures obtained by researchers in the United States (Benoit et al., 2003; Swanson & Swanson, 1978; Wanta et al., 2004; Wanta & Ghanem, 2007). Perhaps this can be explained by the gradually increasing role of the Internet as a source of information, as well as by the presence of independent print media.