The Agenda Setting Media

"Newspapers and television news, even the tightly edited pages of a tabloid newspaper or internet web site, do considerably more than signal the existence of major events and issues."

By definition the media inherently has the responsibility of agenda setting for the entire country. If the media had not harped on the issue of illegal immigration and the protests that occured, would Congress have been forced to addressed the issue through legislation? Agenda setting seems to have malicious conotations attached to it, but in reality it is really just a form of priority setting. The problem with this is that although the media is supposed to hold the public's interest as the most important thing when considering stories, it has conflicting interests with what will receive the highest ratings and what stories the advertisers are going to be the most happy with. Not to mention with the failing resources, media has to consider what stories are the most economically smart to cover. It means that the media might skip over important issues since they are not the most exciting or downplay the importance of another issue because of conflicting interests. Hopefully with the growing number of news sources, people will become more media literate and begin to seek out stories of importance on their own. With a growing number of news sources also comes a media watchdog aspect between all of them, if something becomes important on the web or from a smaller source then the bigger news media companies will be forced to pick up the story. Although agenda setting is not inherently bad, the conflicting interests of mainstream media can make it a negative thing for the public.