Focus: Lecture - Agenda Settings

In the previous weeks we had seen a lot of fancy stuffs on the surface in the world of news and Journalism, but in this week's lecture, we are getting serious and deeper and over the next 3 or so lecture we're going to talk about journalism studies. But today, we're delighted to be introduced on the very backbones of news reporting and a little bit of politics. It's called agenda setting.

Agenda setting, to say it in a few words, is something that is like a theory, but it's also obvious to everyone. It's usually set by news companies and corporations that deliver news to the public audience.

Did you know that our social life has the power to construct a complete different reality on top of its own? It's called Social Construction of Reality. Everyone's perception towards the reality is different, and we are usually influenced by the communication between people and the common language that we use every day. So in short, social life constructs the world as we see it and it mediates us to along on how to come to know and understand the world.

On the other hand, the media has provided a big step on fabricating the known world to us and we wonder... What does journalism has to do with these?

Well, before that, we have to understand that there are 4 different kinds of agenda:

1. Public agenda
2. Policy agenda
3. Corporate agenda
4. Media agenda

Each of them help contribute to the reality and getting the world to work in order. As per this course, we are going to focus on agendas that are important to journalists.

Usually, the more important an issue is, the media will report it in more coverage about it, therefore giving us an impression of priority. Of course, not every incident around the world can be simply reported on a 30-minute news bulletin, so as a journalist, we have to select a couple of news that is noteworthy to the public, and the selection they picked forms a "media reality", and combining with the reality as we've known since we are born, this comes down into the public media.

The big scope of Public Media

By doing this, we have the knowledge about certain things of a certain issue. Also, by doing this, mass media not only merely reflects the reality, but also helps shape and filter it, concentrate it into something we can digest every day.

Let's talk about a little bit of history. The whole idea of agenda comes from the 20s where a man called Harold Lasswell, believes that the mass media injects direct influence into the audience. But consider in that period, the only available sources of mass media are newspapers, radio, films and posters. It's pretty true by that time. But this doesn't stop there, Walter Lippmann in 1922 says that:

"the mass media creates images of events in our minds".

Fascinating. The important part of this quote is "image". Image gives us a big deal of impression about how reality portrays: not only how it works, but also how it represents inside our heads, something we remember dearly on a particular event like 9/11 attack. Also, the use of propaganda:

[...] "helps shape the images in the minds of human beings in support of an enterprise, idea or group. Propaganda can be used to substitute one social pattern or another."

He advised that even with all the critical thinking that helps us from truly judging things using the images in our head, the basis of it is to liquidate judgments, regain an innocent eye, disentangle feelings be curious and open-hearted. Such an influential man. And that means basically, we should not be gullible on things around us because we need to think, analyse and assess the world around us. Simply believing in the reality people shaped is not necessarily useful to our lives.

Well, for what it's worth, what does agenda setting do? What is its purpose?

There are two main levels for agenda setting. One's being the "what" for the public to focus on in the coverage, and the other being "how" for the public to think about the attributes of issues.

To simply highlight them, their purpose is to transfer important news from the new media to the public, to transfer important news for both the issue and other objects such as political figures, and to set the agenda for issue in other media.

Noam Chomsky has once said the real mass media is to simply diverting people from knowing everything, and get them to do something else. This concerns to the facts of media gatekeeping, in which the media controls the exposure of an issue and what is to be revealed next.

Also, the media also has to do something to advocate on a particular issue like promoting "ban smoking" and "AIDS prevention". They provide messages to the public to encourage them to educate themselves.

Being a constant source for audiences, the news agenda has to do cuts on particular topics to leave space for "new" news to come out. That's called agenda cutting. The truth of the world is not represented quite clearly in front of the public (not all the time), and people might be thinking the reality is not as bad as it sounds.

News comes out so suddenly at times where people tend to freak out, one example is when the US President Barack Obama announces the death of Osama Bin Ladin, and the whole world screams out their throats and celebrate on the streets. But look at the time and day when the news is announced. It's on the weekends, and it's at night where everyone is chilling at their homes and places. The decision is made through the diffusion of news, it takes care of when, where and how which an important event is communicated to the public.

An issue can be multifaceted and can be portrayed as several different perspectives, the way how media's portrayal of an issue will often influence the public on how they perceive the message. It can be portrayed in a good side, but it can also be in a bad side. For instance, people's perception towards Indigenous Australians are not constantly in a same form, as some might see them as druggies and thugs, while other sees them as hard-working learners that want to make a change for their communities.

With all these theories going on in the agenda, it does not necessarily represented perfectly in real life as some media consumers might not be as well-informed as others, and some has biased standpoints as others. Also, for those who has made up their minds of standing in which part of the opinion-conitnuum, the news reports will do minimal effect on them.

However, with the recent changes in the news and journalism industry, take 24-hour news cycle for example, the news agenda will not be constant all the time - it changes depending on different situations. It has done a great deal for daily newsreader because not only they can follow the news in real-time, they do not need to make a big sacrifice on changing their stances as a news develops. Politically speaking, the change of agenda setting has the use of pulling pollies into different parts of a chess table, in which the media agenda will manipulate them into doing different roles and having different opinions, help politicians to decide what is important in the community. It definitely affect what they would say and promise during their campaign, and that, in short, the media agenda somehow sets the "agenda" for the campaign.

With such a deep influence to the public as well as different classes of people in the society, agenda setting has undoubtedly creates a whole new dimension of the world where everything is filtered and diluted into a rather unrealistic point-of-view towards the world. Seems like the news has done quite a change to human minds as well. Great lecture!

D.