Lecture #10-Agenda setting

Agenda setting. It happens.
I'm not sure if it should. People should be able to talk about what they want, right?
Apparently that's not what happens though. This was the big thing I thought about during this lecture. The first quote we got was a really good one, describing what agenda setting was and what it does.

“Agenda setting is the process of the mass media presenting certain issues frequently and prominently with the result that large segments of the public come to perceive those issues as more important than others.  Simply put, the more coverage an issue receives, the more important it is to people.”

  Coleman, McCombs, Shaw, Weaver, 2008

That's a pretty true statement. There are examples of it all over the news, all the time. Most recently it's been the Peter Slipper and Craig Thompson scandals. The treasurer of Australia released the budget for the nation, and the media barely gave it a second glance. That was some pretty heavy agenda setting.

There are four agendas, for four different groups of people, but they are all interrelated.

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

All of these agenda's influence each other, which is good. Imagine what would happen if only one of these four set the agenda.

Since this was a journalism lecture, we mainly stuck to the Media Agenda section.
There are, apparently, two main assumptions of M.A. One is that mass media filters and shapes reality. That directly and intentionally manipulates 'reality' by choosing what news the public consumes. The second is that media concentration on a few things causes the public to think these things are more important.
This seems more likely from a purely speculative stand point, and being a part of the public I can see that the media isn't 'filtering and shaping reality' in an intentional way. The media does have the important job of deciding what makes the news each day. This is a case of filtering the news, because not everything can be on the news, and someone has to decide what makes it and what doesn't.
This goes back to what we learnt in our last lecture about news values, and is very close to agenda setting.

The first level of media agenda setting is choosing what the public should think about. For several years it's been things like the 'war on terror' and climate change/global warming. These things wouldn't be in the public mind if the media hadn't continued to put them in the news.

The second level is more subtle, and boils down to what the owners of the media outlets opinions are. This is describing to the public how they should think about certain issues. This is far more dangerous, and part of our duty as journalists is to remain impartial and simply report on things. 

This is why I think agenda setting shouldn't happen.

Australia does not have a spokesman for the media. There is a media 'watchdog' but it rarely does anything to call out outlets that begin to agenda set.
America, however, does. A man by the name of Alex Jones has a national radio show in the US. Most of it is hilarious conspiracy stuff, but he very aggressively pursues the truth, particularly in the media.
I recommend you check him out.