Agenda setting - a manipulation??

At the very beginning of the lecture, it was stated that similarly to news values, agenda setting was a concept that was quite obvious. Which I personally don’t agree with, however, throughout the lecture it was evident that it was not a very difficult idea and that it was very important in journalism.

There were four parts to the agenda setting; Public agenda, Policy agenda, corporate agenda and media agenda, which are all interrelated. To me, agenda setting seemed like ‘how well a media manipulates the audience.’ The media sets an agenda which suggests what the public should focus on and further, how they should think about an issue. So, is this bad or good? Two weeks ago we learned about ethics, so, if agenda setting manipulates the thoughts of the general public ethically, I believe it is good. However, if they set the minds of the audience in an unethical way, such as Adolf Hitler and Leni Riefenstahl it would not be considered as ‘good.’

There were many strength and weaknesses of agenda setting within media, such as explanatory power, predictive power, organising power and many more. There were, however, also some weakness as people may not be well informed, deeply engaged, thoughtful and sceptical. I believe the strength of the agenda setting could also become a weakness depending on what information for what purpose is manipulated to the general public. The strength and weakness seems like it did not really matter, what actually mattered was what information was set to agenda.

Through this lecture, I started to think that the concepts of journalism can be considered as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ according to the journalist. If a journalist only writes for their benefit and manipulate or affect the public in anyways, the strength of any concept, in this case agenda setting, would no longer be considered as strength. Also, it was evident that ethics is everywhere and that if the journalist is ethical, then whatever they write would an ethical product.