Everything we see, hear or read in the news has a predetermined agenda, as every media outlet has the ability to choose what makes it into their news cycle as well as the ability to determine how the topic will be portrayed and from which angle it will be told - just another reason why we shouldn’t believe absolutely everything we see, hear and read to be fact, nor should we believe it to be the entire story.
Agenda Setting can be broken into four main categories:
Public Agenda - what the public perceives to be important.
Policy Agenda - what decision makers see as salient.
Corporate Agenda - issues which corporations see as important.
Media Agenda - topics discussed in the media.
Agenda Setting can distort the audience’s perception of reality. For example, Justin Bieber’s new hair cut or how much weight Britney Spears has lost, may make it into the news but that does not mean they are the two most important and prominent stories of the day.
Dr. Redman used a fantastic example, asking how many students in the lecture theatre were aware that East Timor was currently in the middle of a HIV Aids epidemic - I certainly wasn’t, maybe one or two students were. It can be seen that the news stations I had chosen did not report on this as they did not see the crisis in East Timor to be part of their agenda as a news outlet.
An easy way to see how the Media can warp the public’s view of reality is through the below diagram:
So why do they do it? Why do Media outlets have set agendas? Simply put, because they can!
(More words of wisdom from Dr. Redman).
Agenda Setting is an inevitable part of news today, so it is imperative that as consumers we regain our innocent eye, as Walter Lipmann said in 1922, we must consume our news without corruption and in a constant awareness of agendas, motives and bias.
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