Political Agenda Setting

McCombs and Shaw looked into how people received their media content, the context, length, and place. This is what they called media agenda. In news magazines they would search for an article that received the editors full attention by being placed in a full column. News television segments was important if lasted over 45 seconds or was in the top three items while broadcasting. The five major issues that were overall prominent in media are: foreign policy, law and order, fiscal policy, public welfare and civil rights. Chapel Hill voters, without a commitment to a candidate, was asked to outline a key issue from the campaign without taking consideration of what a candidate has said. When the data was compared, the ranks of these issues were almost identical. McCombs and Shaw believed that the media was main responsible for the correlation between the media and public ordering of priorities.

When agenda setting occurs through a cognitive process this is called “accessibility,” this implies that when news media covers a particular subject frequently and prominently this leads becomes the more focused issue in the audience’s memory. (Iyengar & Kinder, 1987). Take Fox News for example, people who tune in for daily news will be more conservative and only here one side of a top political or social event but if you turn the channel to MSNBC you will encounter the exact opposite.

The newspaper picked for this assignment is November 24th’s The Philadelphia Inquirer. The paper has multiple sections. The section used to complete the assignment will be the first section. The Sunday front page is split into two sections. The front half of the page mostly has pictures about sections within the actual paper showing off the Arts & Entertainmen...

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... and media affiliations. He mainly involved with almost every aspect within the Philadelphia area. He graduated from Drexel University with a Bachelor of Science. He started his career at Philadelphia Media Holdings as a controller. He’s a senior executive at the Campbell Soup Company for the last twenty-eight years. The focus of his career has been rather focused on the financial side of business.

Stan Wischnowski has been with the Inquirer since August 2000 starting as a News Editor. He is the Executive Editor for the last year and eight months. Not much was said about these two leading people but the paper could be seen a democratic newspaper and they keep the paper with in this view. The fact that John F. Kennedy has recently taken up a large section of one of the pages could give to Hall and Wischnowski’s views play into their roles as gatekeepers.