Agenda Setting, Exams of Mass Communication

Download Agenda Setting and more Exams Mass Communication in PDF only on Docsity! Agenda Setting Theory developed by Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw in the late 1960s • McCombs and Shaw argued that the “Mass media have the ability to transfer the salience of items on their news agendas to the public agenda.” As they put it : “We judge as important what the media judge as important.” Agenda Setting • As a theory agenda setting represented a shift from the limited effects paradigm that was dominant at the time because it questioned Lazarsfeld’s Selective Exposure thesis which argued the media merely reinforced or amplified exisiting beliefs Agenda Setting • McCombs and Shaw’s study defined media agenda by studying coverage of issues in nine print and broadcast sources. • They used position and length of story as main criteria of prominence in print media and placement in first three stories or a discussion over 45 seconds for broadcast Agenda setting • Issues prominent in the media were: • Foreign policy • Law and Order • Fiscal Policy • Public Welfare • Civil Rights Agenda Setting Using a correlational time analysis found that public’s concerns trailed the media’s agenda Further support for the agenda-setting thesis was provided by an experiment run by Yale researchers Iyengar, peters and Kinder Agenda Setting • Showed newscasts to three groups of New Haven residents for four days and had them fill out a questionnaire • Each group saw a different version of the newscast with a daily focus on national defense/inflation/environment • Result was the upward movement of those issues on the people’s lists of concerns Agenda Setting Who sets the agenda for the media ? • Intermedia effect • Events • Public relations professionals • Interest aggregations Framing By the mid-1990s, agenda-setting theory evolved and scholars began to argue that the media do influence the way we think as a result of a specific process known as framing. Framing • What is framing ? • According to James Tankard, a media frame is • “ The central organizing idea for news content that supplies a context and suggests what the issue is through a use of selection, emphasis, exclusion and elaboration.” • "News frames are almost entirely implicit and taken for granted. They do not appear to either journalists or audiences as social constructions but as primary attributes of events that reporters are merely reflecting. • News frames make the world look natural. They determine what is selected, what is excluded, what is emphasized. In short, news presents a packaged world." Examples of Framing Rats Bite Infant An infant left sleeping in his crib was bitten repeatedly by rats while his 16-year-old mother went to cash her welfare check. A neighbor responded to the cries of the infant and brought the child to St. Joseph's Hospital where he was treated and released into his mother's custody. Examples of Framing Rat Bites Rising in City's "Zone of Death“ Rats bit eight-month-old Michael Burns five times yesterday as he napped in his crib. Burns is the latest victim of a rat epidemic plaguing inner-city neighborhoods labeled the "Zone of Death." Health officials say infant mortality rates in these neighborhoods approach those in many third world countries. A Public Health Department spokesman explained that federal and state cutbacks forced short staffing at rat control and housing inspection programs. Examples of Framing Rats Bite Infant: Landlord, tenants dispute blame • An eight-month-old Milwaukee boy was treated and released from St. Joseph's Hospital yesterday after being bitten by rats while he was sleeping in his crib. Tenants said that repeated requests for exterminations had been ignored by the landlord, Henry Brown. . Brown claimed that the problem lay with the tenants' improper disposal of garbage.