The Agenda-Setting Function (1)

Scholars have long known that media have the potential for structuring issues for the public. One of the first writers to formalize this idea was Walter Lippmann, a prominent American journalist. Lippmann believed that the public responds not to actual events in the environment but to "the pictures in our heads," which he calls the pseudo-environment: "For the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations, and combinations. And all together we have to act in that environment, reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it." The media offer us that simpler model by setting the agenda for us. The agenda-setting function has been described by Donald Shaw, Maxwell McCombs, and their colleagues, who wrote:

Considerable evidence has accumulated that editors and broadcasters play an important part in shaping our social reality as they go about their day-to-day task of choosing and displaying news... Thus the impact of the mass media - the ability to effect cognitive change among individuals and to structure their thinking - has been labeled the agenda-setting function of mass communication. Here may lie the most important effect of mass communication, its ability to order and organize our world for us mentally. In short, the mass media may not be successful in telling us what to think, but they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about.

In other words, agenda-setting establishes the salient issues or images in the public's minds. Agenda setting occurs because the media must be selective in reporting the news. News outlets, as gatekeepers of information, make choices about what to report and how to report it. What the public knows about the state of affairs at any given time is largely a product of media gatekeeping. Further, we know that how a person vote is determined mainly by what issues the individual believes to be important.
For this reason, some researchers believe that the issues reported during a candidate's term in office may have more effect on the election than the campaign itself. There are two levels of agenda setting. The first establishes the important general issues, and the second determines the parts or aspects of those important issues. In many ways, the second level is as important as the first because it gives us a way to frame the issues that constitute the public and media agendas. For example, the media may tell us worldwide oil prices are an important issue (first level). Still, they also tell us how to understand this development as it impacts U.S. economics (second level).