Lecture Ten: Agenda Setting

In today’s lecture we learned how the media constructs reality, otherwise known as agenda setting. We were given a simple definition which basically states that an individual’s conception of reality is socially constructed through a process of communication using shared language. Reality does in fact exist, however, how we perceive it is socially mediated. The key players in constructing this social reality are the media.

There are four agendas that the media has: Public agenda, policy agenda, corporate agenda and media agenda. All four agendas are inter-related and used by the media.
From the lecture the main point that I found was that the media influences stories and has the ability to shape and filter the stories so that the public views them in a certain way. The news story hierarchy of importance is also shaped by the media. By having a heavy concentration on certain stories, the public will begin to see these stories as more important than others.

Two main types of agenda setting were identified:

First level agenda setting theory: The media suggests what the public should focus on through coverage.

Second level agenda setting theory: The media suggests how people should think about an issue.

It is obvious that the media has tight control over what the public gets to hear about in terms of the news. Not only can they control what we view, but at times how we think about certain stories. This can be achieved by simply presenting a story a certain way. This quote from Bernard Cohen sums it up perfectly: “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.” The media do it because they can. It’s as simple as that.