Agenda Setting

Want to read the rest of this paper? Join Essayworld today to view this entire essay and over 50,000 other term papers

of information causes the media to pick and choose information that it feels is relevant to the audience. This is where presents itself. is the idea that the media choose topics that it thinks are important and focuses its broadcasts around this topic. McCombs and Shaw fully developed the theory of in respect to public agenda in a study in the early 1970’s. Their cross-sectional study involved the effects of media on public opinion. They revealed that there were indeed correlations between the two, which backed the ideas of Cohen (Brosius 5). They derived that, “the basic agenda-setting hypothesis asserts that the issues and information presented on the media agenda become over time the issues and information on the public agenda (Leckenby). This brings us to the two factors that influence an audience when presenting information through a media: the vividness of presentation and the position of a story (Baran 302). These factors, along with others, induce the audience to ...

Get instant access to over 50,000 essays. Write better papers. Get better grades. Already a member? Login

also affects the salience of an issue. If an article on gun violence in schools is on the front page of The Washington Post, the audience perceives that particular story as having great importance within the scheme of current news topics. Since the audience deems the cover story as more newsworthy than the missing cat on page 12, the audience will believe that gun violence in schools is a crucial, contemporary issue. This causes the public to set gun violence in schools as a current public agenda (Baran 302). The theory of has its positives and negatives. The theory itself is relevant to the way our society perceives critical social issues. Every time there is an airplane crash, the media ...

Succeed in your coursework without stepping into a library. Get access to a growing library of notes, book reports, and research papers in 2 minutes or less.

CITE THIS PAGE: