First Observation of Agenda Setting Theory

3. Presented By
 Saira Ayub
 Attroba Adan
 Adeel Taswar
 Zaheen Butt

6.  Agenda is a Planer List of Matters to be acted upon.
 It means a Plan or Goal that guides someone’s
behavior and that is often kept secret.

7.  When a baby starts going to school, the agenda on
which his teachers work would include entertaining
him with toys, cartoons and poems etc so that the
child could adjust in that organized environment
easily.

8.  When a company has to launch a new product, they
would make it’s advertisement in a colorful and
presentable way. Their entertaining advertisement
would be their agenda to promote their product.

9.  When a villager comes to a town or a city, he is
unaware of the environment. If we want to make him
active and confident, we would meet him with a
welcoming attitude, a smile, a handshake or a hug
so that he may feel comfortable and may approach us
anytime. All these efforts to make him comfortable
would actually be an agenda on which we are
working for the sake of his convenience.

10.  Mass Communication plays an important role in our
society. Its purpose is to inform the public about
current and past events.
 Mass communication is defined in “Mass Media” as
the process whereby professional communicators use
technological devices to share messages over great
distances to influence large audiences.

12.  Agenda setting is defined in “Mass Media” as the
process whereby the mass media determine what we
think and worry about.
 The media uses gate keeping and agenda setting to
“control our access to news, information,
and entertainment”.

13.  Gate keeping is a series of checkpoints that the news
has to go through before it gets to the public.
 Through this process many people have to decide
whether or not the news is to be seen or heard.
 Some gatekeepers might include reporters, writers,
and editors. After gate keeping comes agenda
setting.

14.  Is Phenomena ko sb se pahle
 Walter Lippmann
He was a journalist first observed this function,
in the 1920’s.
Lippmann then pointed out that the media
dominates over the creation of pictures in our head.

15.  He believed that the public reacts not to actual events
but to the pictures in our head. Therefore the agenda
setting process is used to remodel all the events
occurring in our environment, into a simpler model
before we deal with it.

16.  The Agenda Setting Function of the Mass Media was
first put forth by Maxwell McCombs and Donald
Shaw in 1960’s in Public Opinion Quarterly.
 They originally suggested that the media sets the
public agenda, in the sense that they may not exactly
tell you what to think, but they may tell you what to
think about.

17.  In choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom
staff, and broadcasters play an important part in
shaping political reality. Readers learn not only
about a given issue, but also how much importance is
attached to that issue from the amount of information
in a news story and its position. In reflecting what
candidates are saying during a campaign, the mass
media may well determine the important issues—that
is, the media may set the “agenda’’of the campaign.

18. • enacts the common subjects
that are most important.First
level
• decides what parts of the
subject are important.Second
level

19.  This process is divided into three parts according to
Rogers and Dearing in their book Agenda Setting
Research.
 The first part of the process is the importance of the
issues that are going to be discussed in the media.

20.  Second, the issues discussed in the media have an
impact over the way the public thinks, this is referred
as public agenda.
 Third, the public agenda, ultimately, influences the
policy agenda.

21. Following are a few factors which may affect Agenda
Setting:
1. The combination of gatekeepers, editors and
managers.
2. External influences.
These external influences may be from non- media
sources, government officials and influential
individuals.

22. “If the media has close relationship with the elite
society, that class will probably affect the media
agenda and the public agenda in turn”.

23.  It gives media, the power to establish what news we
see or hear and what part of news is important to see
or hear i.e. establishes Media Agenda.
 It retrieves the opinion of the public.
 Agenda setting is very important in the political
aspect because the public agenda influences the
policy agenda which means that candidates will try
to focus on issues that the public wants to hear about
and solve.

24.  In conclusion, the agenda setting theory has
many beneficial uses in our society and it is
the most important part of our
communication.