Agenda Setting

Hurrying back to uni after a day trip to the lovely suburb of Paddington for a belated Mother’s Day lunch, I arrived for this weeks lecture on agenda setting and how the media constructs reality.

We began with an investigative discussion on how each individuals perception of reality is constructed by communication and shared language. Though reality does exist, our awareness of it is formulated through empirical social interaction and experiences.  The media is the major force in sculpting the publics view of reality and thus the media has a significant role in constructing what people think.

There are four interrelated areas of agenda setting – the public agenda, policy agenda, corporate agenda and media agenda. The mass media do not only reflect society but sculpt and form it and thus the media’s tale on issues can influence the publics reaction to them – creating the images we form in our minds. Bruce used the classic example of the 9/11 image of the plane making contact with the World Trade Centre.

Discussing the historical origins of agenda setting we explored the use of propaganda to develop a public opinion. Leni Riefenstahl in Nazi Germany was an expert in the art of using images to project a certain message to the wider population. In 1968 a survey conducted during The Presidential Campaign in North Carolina indicated that the mass media set the agenda by emphasizing certain topics.

There are two predominant types of agenda setting theory; the ‘what’ and the ‘how.’ The first level agenda setting theory which emphasizes the salience of certain issues looks at what the public should focus on through coverage. The second level agenda setting theory is essentially the way the media determines how the public should think about an issues.

We then looked at the agenda setting family, each member of this special family plays a different role;

Media gatekeeping: how individuals control the flow of messages through a communication channel.

Media advocacy: the purposive promotion of a message

Agenda cutting: most of the truth or reality that is going on in the world isn’t represented

Agenda surfing: the media follows the crowd and trends

The diffusion of news: the process through which an important event is communicated to the world

The portrayal of an issue: how the media can show a topic in disparate lights.

We also looked at the contemporary shift in the 24 hour news cycle and the changing ‘prime times’ over the last few decades. It is interesting to note how the media plays such a large part in societal interest through agenda setting.