Recently or till today, the news has been reporting on a certain salient issue that has been happening since the beginning of last week: The Iran protests and its Twitter revolution.
In the American News, from the New York Times to
CNN and from other important news sources such as BBC, we see headlines covering the Iran Protests which were sparked off last week. In seeing this, we can really understand the powerful and evident agenda setting function of the media.
This entire week , the focus of the American media has been on the violence on the protest while last week the media talked more about how
the protests brought the Iranians together in use of social networking sites such as Twitter to plan and execute whatever they needed to. This shows how the media changes what it deems as important over time in a certain issue.
If you refer to the links below, you will see that the NY Times (online) talks about this issue on its front page and and the news story is seen to be very prominent when you first visit that website. Secondly, the article is referred to as 'Iran Tense Day after Violent Clashes'. It framed the issue in such a way that presented the Iran Protests as extremely violent and uncontrollable such as by saying that "militia forces used guns, truncheons, tear gas and water cannons to beat back thousands of demonstrators" and that "large numbers of have demonstrated their willingness to risk injury and even death". We can therefore tell protestors by the choice of words used in the articles by journalists on how they want to frame the issue to the public and in this case the framing it in terms of its rampant violence. Also if we looked at the other articles, the messages are all framed in a similar manner. This shows the ability of the media to set the agenda for the public which in turn becomes policy agenda.
Agenda setting is hence something that is not that obvious to the media consumer but something that is powerful enough to get people talking about certain issues while de-emphasizing other issues that might be of equal importance to people, which in more technical terms, is called priming. Just as i have picked out the example of the Iran protests issue and the media's coverage on it, there are many other examples of agenda setting such as the local H1N1 case. The media steps up its coverage on the issue when things supposedly get more serious, which then gets the public talking about it. Here, the media uses its influence to set the topic for the public and gets people talking. This is then typical of the moderate effects of the media through its agenda setting function. Unlike direct effects theories of media effects, agenda setting is on the other end of the pendulum where the effects are indirect, meaning that the effects of the media does not come through a one-step flow of information but rather a two-step flow of information from the media to the people. Here it means that the media, through agenda setting, can affect interpersonal channels of communication as well by setting certain issues above others.
In a nutshell, from the news media, we can tell how powerful the agenda setting function of the media can be and how the media can really get us to talk about something with our peers and to spread ideas and opinions just by making certain issues salient and others not.
Links for Reference:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/world/middleeast/22iran.html?_r=1&hp
(New York Times)
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/06/21/iran.election/index.html
(CNN)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8111352.stm
(BBC)
i think i see where you are getting at. Now that i look more carefully at the situation i read in the news i did realize a shift in the agenda. I did not see it until you posted about it. I myself had been quite active in talking about the situation in Iran. The media has done a good job in covering the issue. BUT, the twitter revolution was honestly amazing. Shows how powerful media and communication technology is.
ReplyDeleteI believe it is like propaganda back in the world war two days. Nowadays though, people already know about propaganda and its secrets and styles. So the media has to adopt more subtle ways of directing how one should view an issue. It is no longer whether a media is biased or not in its coverage of views. Now it whether the bias is subtle or not.
ReplyDeleteActually i feel the news media were the second to break the story and the agenda was actually set by the public. I was sort of following that crisis because of COM450. Iran controls all media and very little information was coming out of that country. the real news that came out about the protests was/is from the public. Hence i feel it was actually the public agenda that set the media agenda.
ReplyDeleteWe may have our own views on how and what is happening in Iran but at the end of the day, how the media tells its story of Iran in its own view is Very crucial because millions upon millions will be reading and digesting the story thus putting the story based on facts rather than view is more important but till today the media always set the normal folks like you and me into thinking a certain way, their way. Thus i feel its important that we do research on what is happing to get a overall view and then we can read the situation better.
ReplyDeleteThat is so scary... people are blinded sometimes.. different group of people tend to believe the info could be because they are part of the race or religions so their instinct is to support their own group instead of evaulating whether it is true or not..
ReplyDeleteIt is important that the public knows what is going on, especially here in Singapore where we might be too caught up with our own agenda. It is imperative as such that whatever the media portrays is true (which is sometimes difficult to expect). For the case of the Iran protests, there was a lot of focus on violence in the media agenda. Have to agree with you concerning that.
ReplyDeleteI have to agree with Justin's comment. The Iran story was actually disseminated initially by the people themselves, the public. Iranians and non Iranians alike who were involved in the protests or had heard about it through mouth to mouth messages were the ones who started spreading these issues around. The public did set the agenda first. I do get your point about the media agenda though and how they shifted their focus.
ReplyDeleteI love the way agenda setting is carried out, it is so structured and purposeful yet not very visible from the consumer of media. I agree that in places like Singapore, the government has a big role to play in agenda setting thus throwing the scale upside down. Instead of public agenda--> media agenda--> policy agenda we have policy agenda--> media agenda--> public agenda!! That is one interesting point i should have made long ago concerning agenda setting. So to all who think it all starts with the public's agenda, in the case for Singapore it is almost entirely incorrect.
ReplyDelete