Agenda Setting

This week’s lecture looked at the topic of agenda setting, and the role the media plays in the construction of public opinion. Agenda setting is can be simply summed up as: The more coverage an issue receives, the more important it is to people. There are four different agendas, public agenda, policy agenda, corporate agenda, and media agenda. With regards to media agenda setting, assumptions are made about the audience, such as mass media do not merely reflect and report reality, they filter and shape it. Walter Lippman, a newspaper columnist, wrote in 1922 that ‘the mass media creates images of events in our lives’. This is particularly true in today’s media landscape, when many people turn to visuals for news. It seems that agenda setting was first ‘discovered’ in 1968 during Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign, when media researchers surveyed 100 undecided voters on key issues. They were testing the hypothesis that the mass media set the agenda by emphasising specific topics. There are two main types of agenda setting theory, the first level, at which the media suggest what the public should focus on through media coverage, and the second level, at which the media suggests how people should think about an issue. It is also evident that elite media set the agenda for issues in other media, for example the larger publications and news channels will run stories that smaller outlets will pick up on and use. There is also what is termed to be an agenda setting ‘family’.

A new issue faced by the agenda setting theory is the 24 hour news cycle. This means that there is less time for a single issue to be pushed forward and gain large amounts of attention, as there is a large volume of stories being produced in shorter time frames. There is also a new ‘prime time’, in that you cannot always guarantee that people will consume their news at 6pm as they did prior to the advent of new media.