Week 11: Agenda Setting

Agenda setting theory. It's self explanitory. It's deciding what's important, about what the public should focus on and how they should think about an issue. It's almost brain washing. Propaganda was brought up in the lecture and that is basically brain washing. The media have so much power in the images and the events that they choose to promote, and the angle in which they choose to view that particular event.

This is a good chart. It presents two 'realities'; the media reality and the actual reality. The actual reality goes through a process of selection or agenda cutting whereby the result is the media reality serving the media agenda and both realities feed down to the public perception of realitiy (this is almost sounding like the martix) serving the public agenda. Interesting process...

But it makes sense. It's very much linked to news values as it has to do with deciding what's important and what the public would be most interested in watching/reading/listening to. It's sad that people are more interested in seeing that Beiber has a new haircut rather than hearing about the continuing conflict in Syria or Will Smith slapping a journalist rather than reading about the economic crises that some countries are facing in Europe. But I am guilty of exactly this, of avoiding "hard news" stories and reading about celebrities or movies. Also if you don't cater to what the public want to hear then people aren't going to watch/read/listen to your news.

It works both ways really. A media company has total control over what they show their audience but then if they aren't showing the right things people might not watch/read/listen.

But, like what was said in the lecture, there are strengths and weaknesses to the theory. The strengths are pretty obvious and there is much more that could be done in the way of further research but the weaknesses do stick out. For example, people aren't all the same and so they might no be as ideal as the theory assumes they are, if someone has made up their mind on a particular topic (Julia Gillard and the Carbon Tax for instance) then no amount of trying to make it look like the best thing in the world will be able to convice those people any different and the fact that news cannot be created or concealed. Also in the case of new media, the game is completely changed.