Agenda Setting

Agenda.

There are so many connotations behind the word agenda as far as the media is concerned.

I'm going to focus on media agenda setting for the purposes of this blog post.

To some people, agenda is an insidious manipulation. They immediately think that an agenda is a bad thing and will result in them looking like a fool. The truth is: agenda setting doesn't have to be a bad thing but it can be abused, like anything else.

What we've looked at in class shows that there are four different kinds of agenda:

1. The public agenda: what the public thinks is important
2. Policy agenda: what the "decision makers" think is important
3. Corporate agenda: what businesses and corporations think is important
4. Media agenda: what the media thinks is important

As the ones providing news to the people, the media plays a huge role in how the public receives, experiences and feels about the news.

The media agenda works on two levels:

1. What news is released to the public. This is basically where news bodies decide what is important for the public to know (usually using news values) and then they publish their stories based on that.

2. How the public should feel about the news. This is the part that worries people. As the people who convey the news, media organisations can decide how they want a story to be received by the public.

I think that it's incredibly important for journalists to understand agenda setting and the power that we have as a result of it. Our position as the people who give the news to the people makes it very easy for agenda to be abused and have "public interest" as a defence.