Agenda Setting

Since McCombs and Shaw’s pioneering study agenda setting has been established as an important research field in communication science. Primarily it is asked how the mass media influence what people think about. In the course of the years the causal relationship between issue rankings emphasized by the media and the public awareness of these issues has been explored numerous times.

The agenda setting function of mass media is also democratically well-founded. An important function of mass media is to point out problems to its recipients, to make them intensively search for further information e.g. through media use, to discuss these issues with others or to become politically active themselves. Then follows the question which consequences are desirable effects of a transfer of salience from the media to the public agenda. Not only a sole transfer should be the common objective but also democratically relevant resulting actions. Communication online and especially on social networking sites plays an increasingly important role in this context.

Status

completed