Week 9 - Agenda Setting

Agenda Setting is very important in understand how the news world works. As Dr. Redman puts it "Agenda setting is a theory but like all good solid theories is all a bit obvious really"  

Agenda setting is how individuals conception of reality is socially constructed through a process of communication. This means that a person perception of the world is constructed through the media they listen, watch or read.

Like the Journalism Blog all of these topic are interrelated and that they are not constrained just to journalism. There are four different agenda groups

§  Public agenda - what the public thinks is important. 

§  Policy agenda – what politician think are important

§  Cooperate agenda – what big corporations think are important
§Media agenda – issued discuss in the media

You ask where is agenda setting came from, to be honest probably from the first mass print, however the first theory in agenda setting came from the 1920's from Harold Lasswell which said "the mass media "injects" direct influences into the audience. Also known as the "magic bullet"." 

At the time the largest media was the newspaper and films, therefore that is how allot of peoples perception of events was made. However the precetion of people could be used for "evil" which Adolf Hilter used, this was called propaganda, he used film to show even one in the world on the 3rd Reich was the best thing ever to happen and people should be worried. For the short answer, Hitler's plan world people saw into this race and were scared especially when they knew they were that "ayran" race. However lets go depper into the agenda setting family:

In the agenda family there are seven members which are:

o   Media gate keeping

§  How individuals control the flow of message through a communication channel – who controls the news, however this has become less of an issue with the internet as freedom to write is encouraged. 

§  Fox vs MsnBc are a gate keppers, on is very left winged and the other right winged. Therefore they show different news topic and if they show the same they have different opinions.

o   Media advocacy

§  The purposive promotion of a message through the media,

§  i.e health issues, or even political.

o   Agenda cutting

§  Most the truth or reality that is going on in the world isn’t represented

§  Issues like AIDS take a backseat to Justin Bieber’s new haircut.

o   Agenda surfing

§  Bandwagon effects: how existing public opinion influences other towards that opinion.

o   The diffusion of news

§  The process through which an important event is communicated to the public

§  How, where, when the news is released.

o   Portrayal of an issue

§  The way an issue is portrayed will often influence how it is perceived by the public. Different media outlets with different portrayals can cause the public to formulate their own perception.

o   Media dependence

§  The more dependent a person is on the media for information, the more susceptible that person is to media agenda setting

§  Facebook and twitter can cause this. 

These seven member show how the agenda setting is created how how news media used their way in creating agenda. However like most theories there are strength and weakness to it. The strengths are that 

•It has predictive power because it predicts that if people are exposed to the same media, they will feel the same - say that people will view the world a certain way if they only have a selected number of media outlets. 

issues are important. 

• If people aren’t exposed to the same media, they won’t feel the same issues are important, that if they have a wide range of media exposure the people can look at the world and organised which things are more important than others such as celebrity news vs the famine in Africa. 

•It has organizing power because it helps organise existing knowledge of media effects.

However it also has weaknesses 

• For people who have made up their minds, the effect is weakened.- this implys if some has made their mind up on a topic theyll stick to their 'guns' and not change and also:

•NEW MEDIA is a whole new ballgame in terms of Agenda setting - as the media grows and the the Earth gets olders, new problems arise and that means new agenda setting keeps on changing. Which brings us finally on to:

24/7. 

The news today is basically 24/7, as suppose to pervious generation where there was only the 6pm news, news and the media are at our finger tips. However to think we can chose what we want to watch and what type of agenda we cannot, as the media is will chose what is important, such as when a election campaing starts, the media will chose only to look at a couple of main evnts such as a Carbon Tax or Refugess and forget the rest of the world. Showing that people cannot only have one or two news sources if the want the whole picture, they need to look around and see that not all the news outlets play nice, as they pick wants on the agenda tonight.