In 1922 influential newspaper columnist and intellectual Walter Lippman in his book Public Opinion hypothesized that the media constructs our view of the world by creating “pictures in our heads.” Fifty years later mass communication researchers Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw studied media content and public opinion during the 1968 presidential election and verified that Lippman was correct. They called the phenomenon agenda setting.
McCombs and Shaw’s article in Public Opinion Quarterly in 1972 was titled “The Agenda Setting Function of the Mass Media,” and is considered by mass communication and media researchers and academics the most important theory in the study of mass communication.
According to an article by Renita Coleman, Maxwell McCombs, Donald Shaw in The Handbook of Journalistic Studies (2009):
Agenda setting is the process of the mass media presenting certain issues an ideas frequently prominently with the result that large segments of the public come to perceive those issues as than others. Simply put, the more coverage an issue receives, the more important it is to people.
In other words, agenda-setting research suggested that the media tells us what to think about, not necessarily what to think. That was before the internet – in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s – when the mass media consisted of radio, television, newspapers and magazines.
Google was founded in 1998, Facebook was founded in 2004, Twitter in 2006 and Google bought YouTube also in 2006. In 2007 Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. After 2007 the definition of the mass media changed. It was now the fragmented media, and many people started getting their news from social media and from content that was not created or edited by trained journalists who were aware of agenda-setting theory and their responsibility to disseminate information about important issues.
As people began abandoning mass media for social media, mass media audiences declined. In order to lure back audience, radio and especially television and cable news became more celebrity and entertainment oriented. Ratings were the goal for newsrooms, not necessarily truth-telling.
Thus, the agenda became fragmented, confused, and in order to boost ratings television producers began booking Donald Trump. The new agenda was unwittingly set.
Post Trump, the media seems to have learned its lesson. Facebook and Twitter have banned Trump. You rarely see Trump’s name or picture in The New York Times or Washington Post, or Trump being mentioned on TV news, except for Fox News.
As reported in Ad Week’s TV Newser newsletter on June 11, “NBC News President Noah Oppenheim Discusses Company’s Streaming Endeavors and Combating Disinformation.”
So, the new agenda seems to be to “combat disinformation,” which I think is a good thing. The rules of journalism have changed, particularly about agenda setting, and new rules have yet to be clearly defined. As NBC News president Oppenheim said:
“How do we persuade people who have already kind of wandered into the fever swamp of conspiracy theories and falsehoods?” This is a quandary that I think all of us are going to be grappling with for a long time to come. I don’t know what the solution, what the fix is for those who have already kind of fallen prey to that, but I think it’s something we all have to work hard on.”
Responsible news media must work hard to set a new agenda and put pictures of the real world in people’s heads.
