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Agenda Setting

iratisaenz
12 feb 2015
2 Min. de lectura

"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 C. Cohen, 1963

Still on the public opinion context we moved on now to the agenda setting. The Agenda-setting theory is the theory that the mass-news media have a large influence on audiences by their choice of what stories to consider important and how much prominence and space to give them. that is, Agenda setting describes a very powerful influence of the media: the ability to tell us what issues are important.

Agenda-setting theory was introduced in 1972 by Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw in their study of the role of the media in 1968 presidential campaign in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In the research they focused on two elements: awareness and information.

Agenda-setting is the creation of public awareness and concern of significant issues by the news media. Two basis assumptions underlie most research on agenda-setting:

The press and the media do not reflect reality; they filter and shape it.
Media concentration on a few issues and subjects leads the public to perceive those issues as more important than others.

Reality is too complex and cahotic that we need someone to tell us what is important and what is not; and this is what press and media do. They do not reflect reality , they filter and shape it. Thus, we do not know reality, we just a perception of it trought media. This is what media does:

Select and omit most of the things.
Frame it, that is, decide from what angle to tell the story.

Here are some examples of framing:

The end of ETA

Trail of Blood

We also saw some examples in class. The following is the example we found in the Basque Country where we can see two different images of the same protest that took place in Bilbao in support of the Basque prisoners.