Kyle Holody, assistant professor of communication at Coastal Carolina University, will present "The Role of the News Media in Determining How and Why We Vote" on Saturday, Sept. 17, at 10 a.m. at the Myrtle Beach Education Center. The event is free and open to the public and is part of the American Studies Lecture Series on the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.

Holody will discuss how political communication occurs via three media effects: agenda setting, framing and priming. Agenda setting describes how topics regularly covered by the media tend to become important to the audience; framing suggests that how news media cover an issue tends to become how we think about the issue; and priming explains how issues high on the news agenda tend to become the issues on which people base their voting decisions.

"The amount of information that is available to us about any news topic can be overwhelming," Holody said. "Even a singular event can be viewed from innumerable perspectives. A presidential election is always extremely complicated, and this one in particular has been complicated, and surprising, for an extended period of time. It is important for us to understand, even if we do not directly search for news information about this election, that our perspectives on it are heavily filtered and perhaps even altered by how it is presented through news shows, articles and websites."

Holody's lecture is the third in a four-part series; the final lecture will be Saturday, Sept. 24, as Christian Smith, assistant professor of English, delivers "The Deliberative Rhetoric of the 2016 Presidential Election."

The Myrtle Beach Education Center is located at 900 79th Ave. N.

For more information on the presidential election lecture sequence, contact Carol Osborne, director of American Studies and Community Outreach, at osborne@coastal.edu or call 843-349-2658.