Constructing Reality (week 11)

“Agenda Setting is a theory, but like all good, solid theories is all a bit obvious really” exclaimed Dr Redman at today’s lecture. While news values is the degree of prominence that the news media put on certain stories, agenda setting is the way that these stories construct what is actually happening in the world for the audience. Maxwell McCombs describes the theory as the news media’s “ability to influence the salience of topics on the public agenda.” This essentially means that the frequency and prominence of the media’s coverage of an event dictates how important the audience deems the issue to be.

In an apparent paradox, news media organisations base the nature of their output on what they believe an audience will find interesting and important in accordance with the their news values, while, according to the theory of agenda setting, the nature of their output dictates what the audience perceives as being important and of interest.

The paradox of agenda setting: if news values are indeed based on what audiences see as important, then the nature of what information is reported to the audience flows in a continuous circle.

According to Miller (2007), there are four agendas that underlie agenda setting. The public agenda (what the public sees as being important), the policy agenda (issues that legislators and politicians see as salient) and the Corporate Agenda (issues that major businesses consider important) all filter through the media, who add their own agenda – the Media Agenda, before all this highly-processed information reaches the public.

A Complex Filtration System: in reality the apparent paradox is broken by factoring in the influences of PR and the media’s own agenda. By the time the ‘truth’ reaches the audience, it has been processed so heavily that it rarely reflects what the audience truly consider important.

With this understanding, we see the three key parts of the agenda setting theory. First, reality does not pass unaltered through the nebulous matrix that is the media. Secondly, the media concentrates on a few issues and subjects according to the four agendas, producing the ‘Media Reality’. Finally, the concentration on these issues leads the public to perceive these issues and subjects as of more importance than other issues, unless they happen to experience other issues first hand through direct impressions or discussion.

The Media Reality changes through time in the same way that fashion trends do, irrespective of what is actually happening in the world. The situation in Uganda was largely unknown until the KONY2012 Campaign spread throughout the media. 

If agenda setting acts to construct a distorted reality, than it can be seen that propaganda is simply an extreme example of agenda setting. When influences on the media are thrown out of balance by extreme social conditions – war, for example – a concoction of information that bears little resemblance to reality can be distributed to the public in a ‘hypodermic needle’ model.

Nobody knew the power of propaganda as much as Leni Riefenstahl, master of propaganda for the Third Reich, director of the disturbing ‘Triumph of the Will’ and personal friend of Adolf Hitler.

 Walter Lippman describes propaganda as “a tool to help shape images in the minds of human beings in support of an enterprise, idea or group. Propaganda can be used to substitute one social pattern for another.”

This emphasises the importance of minimal political and corporate influence on the media. I’m not suggesting a conspiracy theory suggesting that the media today is some kind of evil mind-control machine that sub-consciously dictates our blind-folded perception of reality, but rather that the media is a tool that has in the past been used in some terrible ways.

The media today is more a circus than a war machine, but agenda setting is still something that should always be kept in mind by the audience nonetheless; “the press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about” (Bernard Cohen,1963).