media agenda

All of us hv some kind of agenda.. media is no different.. Some bit of manipulation, manoeuvring wud be there. The question is, what is the degree and to what extent & what for? That’s where public need s shud be cautious of what is consuming. A free media (with  or with out agenda) is better then a controlled or govt. sponsored media

Himanshu tnx for ref.

The title could be “Agenda setting between Media and the Public”

  The power of the news media to set a nation’s agenda, to focus public attention on a few key public issues, is an immense and well-documented influence. Not only do people acquire factual information about public affairs from the news media, readers and viewers also learn how much importance to attach to a topic on the basis of the emphasis placed on it in the news.

It should be noted that the use of term “agenda” here is purely descriptive. There is no pejorative implication that a news organization “has an agenda” that it relentlessly pursues as a premeditated goal. The media agenda presented to the public results from countless day-to-day decisions by many different journalists and their supervisors about the news of the moment.

The public agenda – the focus of public attention – is commonly assessed by public opinion polls that ask some variation of the long-standing Gallup Poll question, “What is the most important problem facing this country today?”.

Comparisons of the media agenda in the weeks preceding these opinion polls measuring the public agenda yield significant evidence of the agenda-setting role of the news media.

The agenda-setting influence of the news media is not limited to this initial step of focusing public attention on a particular topic. The media also influence the next step in the communication process, our understanding and perspective on the topics in the news.

The objects are the things on which the attention of the media and the public are focused.

In turn, each of these objects has numerous attributes, those characteristics and traits that describe the object. For each object there also is an agenda of attributes because when the media and the public think and talk about an object, some attributes are emphasized, others are given less attention, and many receive no attention at all. This agenda of attributes is another aspect of the agenda-setting role of the news media.

So in nutshell Media does influence the pictures in our heads.

Although the influence of the media agenda can be substantial, it alone does not determine the public agenda. Attitudes and behaviour are usually governed by cognitions – what a person knows, thinks, and believes. Hence, the agenda-setting function of the mass media implies a potentially massive influence whose full dimensions and consequences have yet to be investigated and appreciated.

This is a vast research topic to better understand kindly read

 Maxwell McCombs-

 The Agenda-Setting Role of the Mass Media

in the Shaping of Public Opinion

MEdia doe not have any agenda. MEdia is a very wide ranging word. Being a media person living in a media industry and being a media has all together different meaning. Definately media persons and media owners have their own personal agenda but i do not believe media has at all any agenda. If any agenda they have in common then it is how to "COMMODITISE CONTENT AND MEDIA AS A WHOLE"