Ninth Lecture: Agenda Setting

“The press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about” - Bernard Cohen (1963) 

Media plays a large role in agenda settings by constructing the social world. The social construction of reality is one's conception of reality constructed through the process of communication.
"Agenda setting is the process of the mass media presenting certain issues frequently and prominently with the result that large segments of the public come to perceive those issues as more important than others. Simply put, the more converge an issue receives, the more important it is to people." - Coleman, McCombs, Shaw, Weaver (2008)
In agenda settings there is four agendas; public agenda, policy agenda, corporate agenda, and media agenda. Public agenda is topics that the public see as being important. Policy agenda is affairs that decision makers, such as legislators, think are important. Corporate agenda releases topics that are only important to big businesses and corporations. Media agenda reports only issues discussed in the media. All four agendas are interrelated:

There is two assumptions that are made about media agenda setting. The first is that mass media filters and shapes what they report about reality. The other is the media only concentrates on a few issues, which leads the public to believe they are more important than other issues.
There is some functions that agenda setting has, called the agenda setting family.
They are as followed:
- Media gatekeeping: when the media chooses to expose an issue to the public, this can be seen on Fox news and NBC news.
- Media advocacy: when a message such as health is promoted through the media.
- Agenda cutting: when some issues are not represented and take the backseat to issues that involve celebrities.
- Agenda surfing: when the media follows stories that have already been covered in opinion-leading media.
-The diffusion of news: is how the media decides how to communicate the release of news. The how, where, when is all very heavily manipulated.
- Portrayal of an issue: the public will perceive an issue a certain way by the way the media portrays it.
- Media Dependence: when a person  becomes dependent upon media for information they become very receptive to media agenda setting. A common media dependency is to Facebook.
I am very addicted to Facebook, but I don't depend upon it for my information about news and politics.


Lecture Nine Readings:


- The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media - Maxwell E. McCombs, Donald L. Shaw
- Agenda Setting - Renita Coleman, Maxwell McCombs, Donal Shaw, David Weaver