Why Is Your Story More Important Than Mine - Lecture Eleven

Like most things in this course, I hadn't heard of agenda setting before I stepped in to the lecture theatre on one faithful Monday afternoon. It was simply another aspect of journalism that I never thought about. To everyone out there like myself who doesn't know what agenda setting is, let me enlighten you. Agenda setting is when the media presents issues frequently to the audience that results in large numbers of the public perceiving those issues are more important that other ones. Within this, there are two assumptions of media agenda. Firstly, mass media don’t reflect and respect, they filter and shape it. Secondly, media concentrates on few issues and this leads to the public perceiving those issues as more important that the other issues.

Throughout the lecture I began to form a problem with agenda setting. I thought about the story that I had chosen to do for my annotated bibliography, a suicide from a nineteen year old girl who was a victim of bullying. Her story was publicised all over the news for weeks when it had happened, however there are many similar cases that don’t even get a mention in the newspapers. Does media agenda decide that person is not important? Or why is one case of this happening more important than the other? The news chooses an agenda when it hasn’t been publicised for a while. That way it is fresh, new and interesting to the reader, attracting their attention. However as soon as a similar event takes place, the news is not so quick to publish it because the audience may see it as ‘another suicide story’.