Syed Faisal Mukhtar Kazmi

Roll No: 13181556-032

 Contents
What Is agenda Setting..............................................................................................2
History of Agenda Setting.........................................................................................3
Types of Agenda setting............................................................................................4
Public Agenda Setting............................................................................................4
Media Agenda Setting............................................................................................4
Policy Agenda Setting............................................................................................4
Level of Agenda Setting............................................................................................5
The Cognitive Effects of Agenda-Setting..................................................................5
Role of Mass Media...................................................................................................5
References.................................................................................................................8

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What Is agenda Setting
Agenda-setting theory describes the "ability [of the news media] to influence the
salience of topics on the public agenda. Mass Communication plays an important role in
our society its purpose is to inform the public about current and past events. Mass
communication is defined in Mass Media, Mass Culture as the process whereby
professional communicators use technological devices to share messages over great
distances to influence large audiences. Within this process the media, which can be a
newspaper, a book and television, takes control of the information we see or hear. The
media then uses gatekeeping and agenda setting to control our access to news,
information, and entertainment (Wilson 14). Gatekeeping is a series of checkpoints
that the news has to go through before it gets to the public. Through this process many
people have to decide whether or not the news is to bee seen or heard. Some
gatekeepers might include reporters, writers, and editors. After gatekeeping comes
agenda setting.

History of Agenda Setting

The theory of agenda-setting can be traced to the first chapter of Walter Lippmann's
1922 book, Public Opinion. In that chapter, "The World Outside And The Pictures In Our
Heads," Lippmann argues that the mass media are the principal connection between
events in the world and the images in the minds of the public. Without using the term
"agenda-setting," Walter Lippmann was writing about what we today would call
"agenda-setting." Following Lippmann, in 1963, Bernard Cohen observed that 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. The world will look
different to different people," Cohen continues, "depending on the map that is drawn for
them by writers, editors, and publishers of the paper they read." As early as the 1960s,

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Cohen had expressed the idea that later led to formalization of agenda-setting theory by
McCombs and Shaw.

Walter Lippmann, a journalist first observed this function, in the 1920s. Lippmann then
pointed out that the media dominates over the creation of pictures in our head, he
believed that the public reacts not to actual events but to the pictures in our head.
Therefore the agenda setting process is used to remodel all the events occurring in our
environment, into a simpler model before we deal with it. Researchers Maxwell
McCombs and Donald Shaw have then followed this concept.

McCombs and Shaw as pointed out by Littlejohn have best described the
agenda setting function in their book Emergence of American Political Issues. In this
book the authors point out that there is abundantly collected evidence that editors and
broadcasters play an important part as they go through their day to day tasks in
deciding and publicizing news.

This impact of the mass media- the ability to effect cognitive change among among
individuals, to structure their thinking- has been labeled the agenda-setting function of
mass communication. Here may lie the most important effect of mass communication,
its ability to mentally order and organize our world for us. In short, the mass media may
not be successful in telling us what to think, but they are stunningly successful in telling
us what to think about. (McCombs and Shaw, 5)

The common assumption of agenda- setting is that the ability of the media to influence
the visibility of events in the public mind has been apart of our culture for almost half a
century. Therefore the concept of agenda setting in our society is for the press to
selectively choose what we see or hear in the media.

Types of Agenda setting

1. Public Agenda Setting

2. Media Agenda Setting
3. Policy Agenda Setting

Public Agenda Setting

Public agenda setting, in which the public's agenda is the dependent variable (the
traditional hypothesis)

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Media Agenda Setting

Media agenda setting, in which the media's agenda is treated as the dependent variable
("agenda building")

Policy Agenda Setting

Policy agenda setting, in which elite policy makers' agendas are treated as the
dependent variable ("political agenda setting")

Level of Agenda Setting

Agenda Setting has two levels. As mentioned in Theories of Communication, the first
level enacts the common subjects that are most important, and the second level
decides what parts of the subject are important. These two levels of agenda setting lead
path into what is the function of this concept. This concept is process that is divided into
three parts according to Rogers and Dearing in their book Agenda Setting
Research. The first part of the process is the importance of the issues that are going to
be discussed in the media. Second, the issues discussed in the media have an impact
over the way the public thinks, this is referred as public agenda. Ultimately the public
agenda influences the policy agenda. Furthermore the media agenda affects the public
agenda, and the public agenda affects the policy agenda. (Littlejohn, 320)

The Cognitive Effects of Agenda-Setting

Agenda-setting occurs through a cognitive process known as "accessibility. "
Accessibility implies that the more frequently and prominently the news media cover an
issue, the more instances that issue becomes accessible in the audience's memories.
When respondents are asked about the most important problem facing the country, they
answer with the most accessible news issue in memory, which is typically the issue the
news media focus on the most. The agenda-setting effect is not the result of receiving
one or a few messages, but is due to the aggregate impact of a very large number of
messages all dealing with the same general issue. Mass-media coverage in general
and agenda-setting in particular also have a powerful impact on what individuals think
that other people are thinking, and hence tend to allocate more importance to issues
that have been extensively covered by mass media.

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Role of Mass Media

Mass communication plays an important role in our society. Its purpose is to inform the
public about current and past events. Mass communication is defined in " Mass Media,
Mass Culture" as the process whereby professional communicators use technological
devices to share messages over great distances to influence large audiences. Within
this process, the media (a newspaper, book, television program, etc) takes control of
the information we see or hear. The media then uses gatekeeping and agenda-setting
to "control our access to news, information, and entertainment". Gatekeeping is a series
of checkpoints that the news has to go through before it gets to the public. Through this
process, many people have to decide whether or not the news is to be seen or heard.
Some gatekeepers include reporters, writers and editors. After gatekeeping comes
agenda-setting. One of the most critical aspects in the concept of an agenda-setting role
of mass communication is the time frame for this phenomenon. In addition, different
media have different agenda-setting potential. Although the influence of the media
agenda can be substantial, it alone does not determine the public agenda. Information
and cues about object and attribute salience provided by the news media are far from
the only determinants of the public agenda. This substantial influence of the news
media has no way overturned or nullified the basic assumption of democracy that the
people at large have sufficient wisdom to determine the course of their nation, their
state, and their local communities. In particular, the people are quite able to determine

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the basic relevance to themselves and to the larger public arena of the topics and
attributes advanced by the news media. The media set the agenda only when citizens
perceive their news stories as relevant. The spectacular failure in the U.S. of the
intensive news coverage on the ClintonLewinsky scandal to set the public agenda and
sway public opinion, an effort that failed despite gargantuan and persistent coverage
frequently described as All Monica, all the time, speaks in a loud voice about the limits
of media influence. Overwhelmingly, the 8 U.S. public rejected the relevance of that
scandal as the basis of their opinion about the presidents success or failure in
governance. The presence or absence of agenda-setting effects by the news media
can be explained by a basic psychological trait, our need for orientation. Innate within
each one of us is the need to understand the environment around us. Whenever we find
ourselves in a new situation, there is an uncomfortable psychological feeling until we
explore and mentally grasp at least the outlines of that setting. Recall, for example, your
initial feeling upon visiting a foreign city. This innate need for orientation also exists in
the civic arena, especially in those elections where citizens are faced with unfamiliar
candidates or referendum questions on which they are less than fully knowledgeable. In
all these situations, and many more, people experience a need for orientation. Because
it is a psychological trait, the degree of need for orientation varies greatly from one
individual to another. For some individuals in any situation, there is a high need for
orientation. For other individuals, there is little or no need for orientation at all. They just
arent interested. Need for orientation is defined by two components: relevance and
uncertainty. Relevance is the initial defining condition that determines the level of need
for orientation for each individual. If a topic is perceived as irrelevant or very low in
relevance then the need for orientation is low. Individuals in this situation pay little or
no attention to news media reports and, at most, demonstrate weak agenda-setting
effects. For individuals among whom the relevance of a topic is high, their degree of
uncertainty about the topic determines the level of need for orientation. If this
uncertainty is low, that is, they feel that they basically understand the topic, then the
need for orientation is moderate. These individuals for whom a situation has high
relevance and 9 low uncertainty will monitor the media for new developments and
perhaps occasionally dip into a bit of additional background information. But they are
not likely to be avid consumers of news reports about the topic. Agenda-setting effects
among this group are moderate. Finally, among individuals for whom both the relevance
and their uncertainty about a situation are high, need for orientation is high. These
individuals typically are avid consumers of the news, and strong agenda-setting effects
typically are found among these individuals. Table One illustrates two patterns that vary
according to individuals levels of need for orientation: attention to the news and
agenda-setting effects. Both frequent use of the news media to follow an election and
the agenda-setting effects of the news media on the perceived importance of the issues
steadily increase with the level of need for orientation among members of the public.

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References
[1]W. Lippmann, Public opinion, 1st ed. New York: Free Press, 1965.
[2]"Agenda-setting theory", En.wikipedia.org, 2016. [Online]. Available:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda-setting_theory. [Accessed: 30- Nov- 2016].

[3]McCombs, M; Reynolds, A (2002). "News influence on our pictures of the

world". Media effects: Advances in theory and research.

[4]Jump up^ McCombs, M; Shaw, D (1972). "The agenda-setting function of mass

media". Public Opinion Quarterly. 36 (2): 176. doi:10.1086/267990.

[5]Jump up^ McCombs, M (2005). "A look at agenda-setting: Past, present and
future.". Journalism Studies. 6 (4): 543557. doi:10.1080/14616700

[6]"Agenda Setting", Zimmer.csufresno.edu, 2016. [Online]. Available:

http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~johnca/spch100/7-4-agenda.htm. [Accessed: 30-
Nov- 2016].

[7] Littlejohn, Stephen W. Theories of Human Communication. Seventh

Edition.Albuquerque, New Mexico. Wadsworth, 2002.

[8]"Agenda-Setting Theory", Boundless, 2016. [Online]. Available:

https://www.boundless.com/political-science/textbooks/boundless-political-
science-textbook/the-media-10/the-role-of-the-media-in-politics-71/agenda-
setting-theory-396-718/. [Accessed: 30- Nov- 2016].

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