The Importance Of The Agenda Setting Theory

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On March 8th of 2014 Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was declared missing. On board there were 227 passengers, from 14 different countries, over half of the passengers were from china. along with 12 crewmembers. The flight was heading to Beijing International Airport in China from Kala Lampur Airport in Malaysia. The search for the plane was later said to be the largest search and rescue in history. The last known location was some where along the Gulf of Thailand. So that is where the search started. Eventually the search was focused in the south Indian Ocean.

There were many speculations as to what happened to the plane. And the investigation and search for what happened and where the plane is still on going.

I will be looking at this event through the Agenda Setting Theory. Max McCombs and Donald Shaw officially created this theory in 1972. However this theory can be traced back long before then. In was first noticed in Walter Lippman’s 1922 novel, Public Opinion. In the book Lippman states that the mass media is the connection between the world’s events and the thoughts of the public (Agenda Setting Theory). Then later, in 1963, Bernard Cohen said, “the press may not be as successful most of the time in telling the readers what to think, but is very successful in telling the readers what to think about.” These thoughts eventually led McCombs and Shaw to create the Agenda Setting theory.

It took the 1968 presidential elections for McCombs and Shaw to start the creation of the official Agenda Setting Theory. During the campaign McCombs and Shaw looked at the public’s opinions on the propositions. They specifically looked at how the public was mainly focused on the propositions that were heavily televised and talked about....

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... people of both countries have to have ambitions. Both also have a low uncertainty avoidance. The people of the United Kingdom , with a score 35, are okay with not having a clear picture of what the day will bring. The people of China, with a score of 30, are adaptable to what comes.

Where the two countries differ is in their individualism as well as their power distance. China is a very collectivist country, they scored a 20 on their individualism. They think more of “we” instead of “I”. They like to think of groups rather than individuals. The United Kingdom on the other hand is a individualistic country. They scored one of the highest of the individualistic scores, a 89. Meaning the think of the individuals instead of the group.

The final difference between the two is the power distance. The United Kingdom has one of the lower scores of power distance.

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