Agenda setting functionOne of the aspects of mass media was to set an agenda for its audience. Looking at the recent news coverage in Channel News Asia from the international news on US presidential election to Asia news on Malaysia election, what make these news so phenomenal? The answer lies in the repetitive nature of these news being broadcasted in the local TV station. Why were those news being repeated so many times? It was to raise public awareness regarding the importance of such issues, which may not be true in reality. Let us compare with the current news regarding a victim of gun shot by a local policeman in Outram park MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) station. The latter news would be more important to raise the public and government awareness of local police. As a police, his/her job is to maintain the effectiveness of the law but not to kill the wrongdoers. Whatever the reason is, taking away one’s life is a crime (except for capital punishment).Here, the local media is not really effective and accurate by prioritizing the wrong issue; the media should give more importance to the policeman incidents rather than the US and Malaysia election. This is an effect of priming, whereby the media attend to some issues over the others thereby altering the standard by which people evaluate the issue. Therefore, the public was mislead by the information broadcasted by the media.Another interesting issue raised was, why should the media prioritize the election news rather than the local policeman shooting incident? Well, first of all, the government might want to please the large number of Americans settling in Singapore by broadcasting the progress of presidential election. Or maybe the US is perceived as the ‘super power’ whereby any issue originated from that country would raise the concerns of people worldwide. Such agenda set by the media could easily distort the audiences’ view of the degree of importance of certain news. what do you guys think?
