Agenda Setting
What is Agenda Setting?
- is a theory but it is obvious
- The Pre-Amble: Social Construction of Reality
o An individual’s conception of reality is socially constructed through a process of communication used shared language
o Reality exists, but the way we come ti know it, talk about it and understand it is mediated through social life
o The media play a large role in ‘construction; or ‘mediation’ the social world as we understand
- The Four Agendas
1. Public Agenda – the set of topic that member of the public perceive as important
2. Policy Agenda– issues that decision makers think are salient
3. Corporate Agenda– issues that big business and corporation consider important
4. Media Agenda– issues discussed in media
- Defintion
o Agenda setting is the process of the mass media presenting certain issues frequently and prominently with the result that large
- Reality ‘Reality’ and ‘Media Reality’
- Two Basic Assumptions of Media
o The mass media do not merely reflect and report reality, they filter and shape it
§ No possible way that we can deal with all the information and events in the world
§ So they media takes little bits that they think are the important
o Media concentration on a few issies and subjects leads the public to perceive those issues as more important than other issues
§ Currently we are interested in carbon tax but serious famine in Somalia (thousands are dying)
- Where did it come from?
o The Hypodermic Needle Model (1920’s Harold Lasswell)
§ The mass media injects direct influence into the audience
§ Limitations with this part of the theory it is all one way, non-thinking, biological uniformity of reactions
§ We act the same way and think the same way
o Walter Lippman (1922)
§ The mass media creates images of events in our minds
§ The pictures in our head are the things that we carry around of particular events
o Lippman – Propaganda
§ It is used as a toll to hep shape images in the minds of humans in support of an enterprise, idea or group.
§ Liquidate judgments, regain and innocent eye, disentangle feelings, be curious and open-hearted
o Lenny Riffensteing
o Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw
§ Surveyed those who were undecided on Nixon
§ Hypothesis – the mass media set the agenda by emphasizing specific details
Two main Types of Agenda
- First level
- Second Level
What it does?
- Transfers the issue salience from the news to the media public
- Transfer of issue salience for both issues and other objects such as political figures
- Elite media often set the agenda for issue in other media
Why?
- Because they can
- Noam Chomsky
The agenda Settin ‘Family’
1. Media Gate Keeping
2. Media Advocacy
3. Agenda Cutting
Media Gatekeeping
- the exposure of an issues
- What the media chooses to reveal to the public
- ‘How individuals control the flow of messages through a communication channel’
Media Advocacy
- The purposive promotion f a message through the media (e.g. health)
Agenda Cutting
- Most of the truth of the reality in the world doesn’t being represented
- Issues like AIDS but JB hair citu showed instead
- Because AIDS doesn’t get as much attention time in the media, the issue is cared about less
Agenda Surfing
- jumping on the bad wagon
- The media follows the crowd trends
- The media ‘srufs’ on the wave of topics originally mentioned in the opinion-leading media
- Bandwagon
Diffusion of News
- The process through which and important event is communicated to the public
- How, where, when news is released
- Who decides
- Wuite often the state government will release an important piece of news on a Sunday because Sunday is a slow news day
Portrayal of and Issue
- the way an issue is portrayed will often influence how it is perceived but the public
- Different media outlets with different protrayals can cause the public to formulate their own perception
Media Dependence
- The more dependent a person is on the media for information, the more susceptiple they are
- Examples are facebook, twitter
(end og family)
Strengths/Weakness
The 24 Hours news cycle
- Has changed the way things have happen in terms of the setting of agenda
- Arrived wit the cable channels
- Old School – realeased early in the morning then not released till 24hrs later
- Now – 24hr news, iPads, mobile phones with internet
- Now they have more than one primetime
- Media Agenda and Political Process
o Deciding what’s important
- Political Agenda Setting
o It is a two way street
What’s big at the moment?
- Carbon tax
- In the 80’s it was claaed greenhouse effect
o Talked about how earth was warming up
- Then called Global Warming
- Climate Change
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