The Agenda-Setting Theory was established by Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw. They believed that the, '"mass media [has] the ability to transfer the salience of items on their news agendas to make them public agendas"' (Griffin 359). In other words they believed that the media had the ability to form the publics opinion but that's not what their intention was. According to McCombs and Shaw, the media's agenda is to tell the public what they should be thinking about opposed to what they should be thinking and the ideas and opinions they should inevitably be conceiving.
The chapter on agenda-setting by Griffin goes into more detail about all aspects of the theory and how it's been tested and countered. One part of the chapter that most grabbed attention was not a quote but an actual section title within the chapter entitled, "Who Sets The Agenda For The Agenda Setters?" And within that section Griffin talks about an experiment that three gentleman by the names of Iyengar, Peters, and Kinder attempted to conduct that increased awareness to the global issues of economic inflation, national defense, and environmental pollution. The three men found that they were limited to choose what stories to do their experiment on from only stories that had been aired. Only three quarters of the stories that come across a news desk are actually aired on television. There is a lot of blame and fingerprinting to who is actually to blame but what I think it all boils down to is that we all want to make ourselves look good. I don't believe there is a conspiracy that all the news editors in the universe prevent all news from circulating and I don't agree that the subjects themselves that are being reported on all for the media to make themselves look good. Everyone is to blame because even if we don't make ourselves look good at one point in time you're either going to help someone else look good or buy into whatever agenda-setting techniques they've used to help form your opinions on what they want you to think about. Do you agree?
I'll leave you with this clip from an episode of West Wing. The entire time I read the section on agenda-setting I couldn't get this episode out of my head and I was so glad I was able to find a great clip on it.
In the following clip the White House's Press Secretary C.J. Cregg acts as the agenda setter for the media who acts as the agenda setter for the rest of the government and the American people.
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Everyone is to blame because even if we don't make ourselves look good at one point in time you're either going to help someone else look good or buy into whatever agenda-setting techniques they've used to help form your opinions on what they want you to think about. Do you agree?
ReplyDeleteI do agree with you, I think that it is all about making someone look good and making someone else look bad. The clip made the white house look good and made congress look bad. I do think that the various news agencies set their agendas for us to follow, even if they say they are objective. The stories they cover determines what they want us to see. We have some variety on what we watch, but they all do the same thing. They push us one way or the other.