Reality? ... Or part of the agenda?

My last post was left questioning our news values – is there true importance in what we call the news, or has it been overrun with the commercialisation of media and social life?

Lecture 10 (in week 11) opened a new standpoint for analysis of this issue. It was proposed that while reality exists, it is mediated by our social life; our perceptions and values are socially constructed. The media play a large role in forming the social world that we know and understand. While we perceive it to be reality, the media filter and shape what is and isn’t presented to us. As there is so much news, filtering is vital. However, the commercialisation of media can become a problem, manipulating and shaping what we are presented as news. Media concentration on a few issues and subjects leads the public to perceive those issues as more important than others.

Agenda setting is the process of presenting certain issues more frequently and prominently to make them appear more important than others.

There are four interrelating agendas within agenda setting:

·         Public agenda: topics which members of the public think are important

·         Policy agenda: issues that decision/policy makers think are salient

·         Corporate agenda: issues that big businesses/corporations think are important

·         Media agenda: issues discussed in the media

The mass media set the agenda by emphasising specific topics and this determines how the public agenda is formed. The stuff that the media puts out, the public deem as important. Do you think that this is okay? The controversial question of matter is whether the media agenda is controlled by the policy or corporate agenda.

During the lecture we discussed some ideas of Walter Lippmann, one of the ‘fathers of communication’. I could easily write for pages about his theories and examples but briefly, his most well known work was on his theories of the formation of public opinion. Lippmann described how the media create pictures in our minds. For example, images of 9/11 are embedded within our heads; it is unlikely that we would think of the event without picturing such an image as this:

“Propaganda is used as a tool to help shape images in the minds of human beings in support of an enterprise, idea or group”.

Mitt Romney

Mr. Redman’s example was of Mitt Romney, the nominee of the Republican Party for the President of the United States. Romney’s biggest setback in his campaign is that he is a Mormon. There is nothing wrong with following this religion, but the public have preconceived notions of what Mormonism is about. In response and in support of the group, a campaign of ads has targeted audiences (or voters) to reconstruct their views of what or who a Mormon is. You may have seen similar ads in Australia.

Lippmann argued that we rely on pre-constructed images in our mind to formulate judgements rather than by critically thinking. Instead “in truly effective thinking the prime necessity is to liquidate judgements, regain an innocent eye, disentangle feelings, be curious and open-hearted".

Dr. Redman loved that statement! A good journalist should be able to step that little bit back, observe and understand an event without being corrupted by it.

There are a number of different aspects to consider within agenda setting. These were called the ‘agenda setting family’.

·         Media gate keeping: What the media chooses to reveal to the public. How much exposure a topic gets.

·         Media advocacy: The purposive promotion of a message i.e. smoking is bad for your health.

·         Agenda cutting: Issues with little coverage in the media are cared about less. Most truths or realities that are going on in the world aren’t represented.

·         Agenda surfing/bandwagon effect: the media follows the crowd or trend (or sets it on) i.e. the Kony campaign.

·         The diffusion of news: the process through which an important event is communicated to the people. How, where and when news is released. For example the news was released a couple of days after Osama Bin Laden was killed that the event had occurred.

·         Portrayal of an issue: The way an issue is portrayed will influence how the public perceive it. However, when different media outlets portray an issue in different ways, the public are left to make up their own mind.

·         Media dependence: The more dependant people are on the media, the more susceptible they are to media agenda setting.

Like any good theory, the agenda setting theory has explanatory power, predictive power and can be proven false. Its weaknesses lie in the fact that news cannot create or conceal problems, for people who have already made up their mind the agenda setting effect is weakened, and new media changing agenda setting with more access to different platforms and 24 hour news.

Clearly there is a lot to be said about agenda setting, but is it always a bad thing? In some cases is it necessary? Agenda setting may not be about controlling what people think but telling them what they should think about.