Agenda-setting in the Media

Traditional media has had a gate-keeping role regarding the news that's presented to us. Thousands of stories happen everyday but only some of them make it into our newspapers and onto our television screens; media organisations filter what we see. This filtering depends on a range of factors including the media organisation's own ideology and bias, pressure from outside interest groups such as political parties and even the journalist's own personal views. Sometimes it'll depend on what other organisations are reporting on; even newspapers bow to peer pressure and follow the herd. 

Modern mass media experts now describe agenda-setting as a two layered process. The first layer refers to how the amount of coverage an issue is given in the media can change people's perception of how important that issue really is. This idea is often referred to as one in which the media doesn't tell people what to think, but it does tell people what to think about. If people see lots of media coverage about youth crime then they will tend to think that this is a major problem even if that may not actually be the case. Conversely, if the media doesn't give much coverage to an issue such a famine in Africa for example, people may not consider it to be important.

The second layer of agenda setting looks at how a story is presented; at how the media decides to focus attention on parts of a story that it decides are salient or important. To get a better understanding of this concept, I read a journal article that looked at the Australian media's coverage of
illicit drugs between 2003 and 2006. The researchers found that the media had concentrated the majority of their coverage (69.8 percent) on the crime and punishment aspect of illicit drugs rather than harmful effects they can have (4.8 percent). 

People don't just form their opinions from the media though, and if someone already has strong opinions on a subject they may be less influenced by what the media has to say. The subject also has to be of relevance to the reader or viewer. The media reform legislation was obviously  very important to media organisations themselves and this was reflected in the massive amounts of media coverage but the average "man or woman in the street" may have been left wondering how this news was of much significance to them personally.

We've already seen how media convergence has changed the way traditional media operates, now the internet may also be altering their gate-keeping role as well. If people are getting their news through avenues other than traditional media, agenda-setting may well become a "bottom upwards" model with individuals using social media to push their own agendas rather than governments and organisations pushing their agendas on people from the "top downwards."