Lecture Eleven: Agenda Setting

I never quite realised, or wanted to believe, the power media has on our society. One would like to believe that we are all free citizens, with our own mind to make our own decisions and formulate our own opinions about issues and stories circulating our globe today. I’m pretty positive, despite our personal liberties, there is a large number of people out there who believe everything they hear, read and view. Blindly sitting on their couch, watching the evening news, processing the information, formulating judgements and retaining the facts – but never stopping to ask themselves: what am I really seeing here?

There is no doubt that media spin and propaganda has been a valuable tool to infiltrate the vulnerable minds of citizens throughout history. Hitler’s Third Reich spent a large amount of time, effort and money to build a media campaign to spread fear and hatred of Jews throughout Germany, making degradation, torture and murdering of Jewish people somehow acceptable at that time.

Now, of course this is an extreme example. But it does show the power of the media in warping its clientele to perceive something a certain way, in this case, in a manipulative, dishonest and unethical way. Modern journalists, we should hope, do not set out with the aim to destroy our fellow human beings. However, there is always an agenda. It is very hard to read an article, watch a news broadcast or listen to a radio interview without picking up a particular point of view on an issue, a topic or a person. In the journalism world, this is called ‘Agenda Setting’. 

Lippman said “Propaganda is used as a tool to help shape images in the minds of human beings in support of an enterprise, idea or group”. Looking at the image here, can you  disagree with this statement? The cover on the left depicts OJ Simpson as a common criminal, his mugshot is the focus, 'trail of blood' perpetuating his 'murderous' tendencies. Contrary to this is 'TIME's cover of the same issue, idealizing Simpson in a dramatic frame of black, 'An American Tragedy' emotionally entitling the cover. Seeing these two side by side on a magazine stand must make one wonder of the impartiality of today's journalists.  

Now, not all readers are laughably gullible, I recognize that. They're not all as dumb as what I somewhat made them out to be, granted. 

I LOVE THIS QUOTE.

One could say... The media decides what is important in this country and the world. They decide what us readers should be most concerned about. The more coverage an issue or story has, the more public opinion and support there will be towards that cause. One example that comes to mind is the whole KONY phenomena. Notice how no body seemed to remotely care about the plight of child soldiers in Uganda before this aesthetically pleasing and heart-wrenching  film went viral. On one had, I supposes that shows a somewhat positive side of journalism... But i'll bet you a well-written article on starving children in Africa or the AIDS epidemic will be pushed back to page twenty-four of your daily paper, while the front cover bears a photograph of a cute gorilla, headlining "BOOBOO NEW AT THE ZOO". 

Whatever, it's all too politically corrupt and totally messed up for me to even go into that right now. All I can take away from this, is one day, I hope to bring people's attention to the real issues of the world.