Lecture 10

Week 11’s Agenda setting lecture somewhat expanded on ‘News Values’. In essence, Agenda setting is a theory that suggests the more emphasis the media puts on a topic the more important it will be perceived as by the public. There are two different types of agenda setting. On the first level, the media suggests what the public should focus on through coverage and on the second level they suggest how they should think about this issue. Agenda setting was first theorized in 1920 using a needle analogy to describe the way the media directly ‘injects’ influence straight into our minds. Although today we see this as slightly sensational, due to our understanding that audiences are not always this ideal, it shows that the notion of agenda setting was realised very early.

In the lecture, the ‘Agenda Setting Family’ was outlined. This ‘family’ has seven different components including media gatekeeping, media advocacy, agenda cutting, agenda surfing, diffusion of news, portrayal of an issue and media dependency. Media gatekeeping is the term used for how individuals control the information released to the public. Media advocacy is when the media promotes a message, for example, ‘smoking kills’. Agenda cutting is the way the media misrepresents reality by reporting on a topic less than they should. This is where news values come in. Issues of less importance can be pushed ahead due to news worthiness. Agenda surfing is a term used to describe the media following the crowd or ‘jumping on the bandwagon’. The diffusion of news is the way in which an important event is communicated to the public. Portrayal of an issue is very a very important one. News corporations can warp their audiences portrayal of an event by how they present it to them. For example, choice of accompanying footage/images can vastly influence peoples perception of the story whether it be good or bad. Lastly media dependence goes by the notion that the more dependant a person is on the media the more vulnerable they are to agenda setting. This is particularly relevant in our society of tweeters and facebookers.