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Media agenda setting: when the media determines the agenda for which stories are considered important.Public agenda setting: when the public determines the agenda for which stories are considered important.The more a story is publicized in the mass media, the more it becomes prominently stored in individuals’ memories when they’re asked to recall it, even if it doesn’t specifically affect them or register as a prominent issue in their minds. There is psychological and scientific merit to the agenda-setting theory. Another way to look at it: Mass media organizations aren’t telling us what to think or how we should feel about a story or issue, but are giving us certain stories or issues that people should think more about. The second assumption is that the more attention the media gives to an issue, the more likely the public will consider that issue to be important. An example of this is seeing a sensational or scandalous story at the top of a broadcast as opposed to a story that happened more recently or one that affects more people, such as an approaching storm or legislative tax reform.
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The first is that the media filters and shapes what we see rather than just reflecting stories to the audience. The agenda-setting theory rests on two basic assumptions. Thus, agenda-setting theory was born, built on the notion that the mass media sets the agenda for what people should care about. presidential election that what people thought were the most important issues were what the mass media reported as the most critical. This theory refers to how the media’s news coverage determines which issues become the focus of public attention.įirst introduced in 1972 by college professors, Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw, they found in surveying North Carolina voters during the 1968 U.S. This is the crux of the agenda-setting theory. Whether it’s the President of the United States making an announcement or a severe storm battering a region, when it’s a story that affects people, the news media is on alert to cover it, providing viewers with the facts and information they need to understand what is happening.īut sometimes it may seem, with so much media focus and scrutiny on a single event, that the mass media is missing or even ignoring other important stories. So what’s happening here and why are these good examples of the Agenda Setting Function Theory in action?xĪlthough The Agenda Setting Function Theory has been around since 1970s, it’s still a great way to think about communication and media influence.When major news happens, the world’s mass media organizations take notice. Typically, they show a correlation between the number of news stories on an issue and how important people think the issue is. These stories could be framed to focus on humanitarian issues or whether Australia is meeting its international obligations.Ī number of studies have been done that make The Agenda Setting Function Theory seem pretty plausible. Here, the refugee story is framed as a social and economic burden on the Australian people. The Daily Telegraph and The Herald Sun, which are both owned by News Corporation, seem to frame the issue in a particular way with headlines like ’35 Asylum Sneakers’, ‘Costing us a packet’ and ‘Boat people in our suburbs’. In Australia, we see this happening with news reports about asylum seekers.
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News reports might focus on one particular aspect of an issues or report about something in a particular way. He argued that in addition to telling us what to think about, the media can also tell us how to think about a story.
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In 1998, McCombs increased the scope of this theory to include a phenomenon called ‘framing’. Again, it can’t tell us what to think but it can tell us what to think about. According to this theory, the media has the power focus public discussion on particular issues. Likewise, a story that appears on the front page is more important than a story that appears on page five. On the front page of a newspaper, for example, the importance of a story is indicated by the size of its heading. McCombs and Shaw argued that the media uses a number of cues to indicate the importance of an issue.