Presented By

Saira Ayub

Attroba Adan

Adeel Taswar

Zaheen Butt

Agenda is a Planer List of Matters to be acted upon.

It means a Plan or Goal that guides someone’s

behavior and that is often kept secret.

When a baby starts going to school, the agenda on

which his teachers work would include entertaining

him with toys, cartoons and poems etc so that the

child could adjust in that organized environment

easily.

When a company has to launch a new product, they

would make it’s advertisement in a colorful and

presentable way. Their entertaining advertisement

would be their agenda to promote their product.

When a villager comes to a town or a city, he is

unaware of the environment. If we want to make him

active and confident, we would meet him with a

welcoming attitude, a smile, a handshake or a hug

so that he may feel comfortable and may approach us

anytime.

Mass Communication plays an important role in our

society. Its purpose is to inform the public about

current and past events.

Mass communication is defined in “Mass Media” as

the process whereby professional communicators use

technological devices to share messages over great

distances to influence large audiences.

Agenda setting is defined in “Mass Media” as the

process whereby the mass media determine what we

think and worry about. The media uses gate

keeping and agenda setting to “control our access to

news, information, and entertainment”.

Gate keeping is a series of checkpoints that the news

has to go through before it gets to the public.

Through this process many people have to decide

whether or not the news is to be seen or heard. Some

gatekeepers might include reporters, writers,

and editors.

Walter Lippmann

A journalist first observed this function, in the

1920’s.

Lippmann then pointed out that the media

dominates over the creation of pictures in our head.

He believed that the public reacts not to actual events

but to the pictures in our head. Therefore the agenda

setting process is used to remodel all the events

occurring in our environment, into a simpler model

before we deal with it.

The Agenda Setting Function of the Mass Media was

first put forth by Maxwell McCombs and Donald

Shaw in 1960’s.

They originally suggested that the media sets the

public agenda, in the sense that they may not exactly

tell you what to think, but they may tell you what to

think about.

In choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom

staff, and broadcasters play an important part in

shaping political reality. Readers learn not only

about a given issue, but also how much importance is

attached to that issue from the amount of information

in a news story and its position. In reflecting what

candidates are saying during a campaign, the mass

media may well determine the important issues—that

is, the media may set the “agenda’’ of the campaign.

• enacts the subjects that aremost important.

First level

• decides what parts of thesubject are important.Second

level

This process is divided into three parts according to

Rogers and Dearing in their book Agenda Setting

Research.

The first part of the process is the importance of the

issues that are going to be discussed in the media.

Second, the issues discussed in the media have an

impact over the way the public thinks, this is referred

as public agenda.

Third, the public agenda, ultimately, influences the

policy agenda.

Following are a few factors which may affect AgendaSetting:

1. The combination of gatekeepers, editors andmanagers.

2. External influences.

These external influences may be from non- mediasources, government officials and influentialindividuals.

“If the media has close relationship with the elite

society, that class will probably affect the media

agenda and the public agenda in turn”.

It gives media, the power to establish what news wesee or hear and what part of news is important to seeor hear i.e. establishes Media Agenda.

It retrieves the opinion of the public.

Agenda setting is very important in the politicalaspect because the public agenda influences thepolicy agenda which means that candidates will tryto focus on issues that the public wants to hear aboutand solve.

In conclusion, the agenda setting theory has

many beneficial uses in our society and it is

the most important part of our

communication.