Importance Of Agenda Setting In Mass Media

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Today, in modern society, mass media has become the dominant method of social communication, providing every individual with an unending stream of information. When information is transmitted through mass media, it tends to become symbolic in nature, i.e. representing social and cultures norms and values. This information has the ability to influence the way we think or how we perceive events occurring in our lives.
In the 1968 "Chapel Hill study", Max McCombs and Donald Shaw formally developed a theory called the Agenda-setting theory in a study on the 1968 American presidential election. Agenda-setting theory refers the "ability of the news media to influence the importance of topics on the public agenda." With agenda setting being a social …show more content…

The press and the media do not reflect reality; they filter and shape it
2. Media concentration on a few issues and subjects leads the public to perceive those issues as dominant.
These core statements were established by measuring the changes in importance through the use of surveys with the presence of more frequent news coverage.
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. From the perspective of agenda setting, the analysis of the relationship between traditional media and new virtual spaces has witnessed growing momentum.
Regarding the manipulation process through mass media, Schiller identifies five myths that structure the content: myth of individualism and personal choice, the myth of neutrality, the myth of unchanging human nature, the myth of the absence of social conflict and the myth of media …show more content…

Mass-media is actually not neutral and it conceals the true nature of things and helps with the manipulation process. The essence of neutrality is to affirm that institutions are above any social conflict and that they are impartial.. The control mechanism of the neutrality myth is to nurture the fact that no special groups of interest are controlling the majority. In reality, there is no perfect neutrality of mass-media in any country or culture in the world. Economical or political bias will determine mass-media to take

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