Group Members

 Muhammad Hammad Rohail (15371556-031)

 Shahroz Ul Hassan (15371556-037)
 History of Agenda Setting Theory
 First introduced in 1972 in public opinion by
Drs. Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw.

 Theory was developed as a study on the 1968

presidential election.
What is Agenda Setting ?
 Explanation
 In 1963, Bernard Cohen noted that
Media may not be successful much of time in telling people
what to think but it is successful in telling what to think
about.
 In 1998, McCombs increased the scope of this theory to
include a phenomenon called ‘framing’.
 He argued that in addition to telling us what to think
about, the media can also tell us how to think about a
story.
 News reports might focus on one particular aspect of an
issues or report about something in a particular way.
 Proper Definition
 Agenda Setting as defined in “ Mass Media,
Mass Culture” is the process whereby the mass
media determine what we think and worry about.
 Agenda setting describes a very powerful
influence of the media – the ability to tell us what
issues are important.
When analyzing agenda setting, there are two basic
assumptions to be considered:
1: Media and the press filter and shape reality rather
than reflect it.
2: When media focuses on just a few issues and
subjects, the public tends to perceive those issues
as more important.
 Who sets the Agenda ?
 Media set the agenda
->It shows that media is powerful in popularizing
different stories, events
-> But also recognize that public is free to chose
how they think about things
Facebook and Cambridge
Analytica Scandal
 In 2016 presidential election Donald Trump elected
 Cambridge Analytica= A British data firm owned by
Robert Mercer and he was “Republican“donor.

 Cambridge Analytica
1:influenced behaviour of voters in 2016 presidential
election.

2: for helping the “Leave” side in the Brexit

referendum(Separation of Britain from European
Union).
 This firm got access 50 million Facebook users
for Donald trump’s election campaign.
 In 2014, Dr. Alexander Kogan a psychological
professor at Cambridge university was paid
$800,000 by CA to develop an app,
thisisyourdigitallife , to harvest data of
Facebook users.
 Cont..
 This app was downloaded by 270,000 people
(these people granted permission for data
collection), it extracted personal information of
each of the user’s friends without consent. Kogan
then passed on all the data collected through his
app to CA and other cimpanies.
 What did CA to the collected
data ?

 This helped to make personality and

psychological profiles of millions of people.the
data were used by CA to tailor its political
advertisements for a group of individuals , whose
likings and interests were already known to them.
 After making profiles people were used to watch
adds as they want to. Which favour the Donald
Trump, e.g Fund raising adds for the serious issues
 Investigation
 Robert Mueller suggested the CA to claim that
Russia is involved in whole procedure.
 Facebook’s Reaction
 Facebook said it removed this app in 2015, when
the violations came to light for the first time.
 People gave their information on their will and
no password is hacked.
 Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica after that.
The Agenda Setting Theory Model

Gatekeepers and Media Public Policy

Reality influential media Agenda Agenda Agenda

Audience perception
of Reality
 types
 Media Agenda: What we see in news broadcast,
read newspapers. Media agenda is delivered by
Gatekeepers(journalists etc)
 Public Agenda: Media agenda has influence on
public agenda e.g protest
 Policy Agenda: Media agenda and Public agenda
has influence on Policy agenda. E.g politicians
will be forced to talk about things which are
discussed by media and public.
Key Terms
 Shahroz Ul Hassan(037)
 Levels of agenda-setting
 Agenda setting has two levels which set the
public agenda and influence public opinions.
1- First level of agenda setting
2- Second level of agenda setting
 first-level of agenda setting
 The first-level of agenda setting deals with the
transfer of object salience from the mass media to
the public (e.g. McCombs & Shaw, 1972). It
mainly focuses on the issues, events or political
figures of the media agenda, and how the media
agenda impacts audience perceptions about what
issues are worthy of attention (McCombs, 1992).
 Second-level of agenda setting
 The second level of agenda setting expands the original
definition of agenda setting and focuses on the transfer of
attribute salience .
 More recent research into agenda setting has
demonstrated that the media not only tell the public what
to think about but how to think about it — the
fundamental principle of second level agenda setting
 second level agenda setting recognizes that objects must
have descriptors if they are to have any meaning to the
public.
 Two dimensions- substantive and effective attributes
 framing
 A frequently cited definition of framing states
that a media frame is a “central organizing idea
for news content that supplies a context and
suggests what the issue is through the use of
selection, emphasis, exclusion and elaboration”
 the process of inclusion and exclusion within a
given perspective
 The ‘meaningful context’ is the frame that shapes
a news story.
 Framing the news
 Selection
 Emphasis
 Exclusion
 Elaboration
 Framing techniques
 Metaphor: To frame a conceptual idea through
comparison to something else.
 Stories (myths, legends): To frame a topic via
narrative in a vivid and memorable way.
 Contrast: To describe an object in terms of what
it is not.
 who sets the agenda?
 Until the 1970s, the traditional question in agenda
setting research was “who sets the agenda?”
 The pattern of news coverage that defines the
media’s agenda results from exchanges with
sources that provide information for news stories,
daily interactions among news organizations
themselves, and journalism’s norms and traditions.
 policy agenda setting, the process by which
governments make decisions about which social
issues will be the focus of attention and action.
 The Cognitive Effect of Agenda-
Setting
 Agenda-setting occurs through a cognitive
process known as "accessibility. " Accessibility
implies that the more frequently and prominently
the news media cover an issue, the more
instances that issue becomes accessible in the
audience's memories. When respondents are
asked about the most important problem facing
the country, they answer with the most accessible
news issue in memory, which is typically the
issue the news media focus on the most.