Find the pace, stop all the clocks, set the agenda.

Before I really get into it, there are four agendas that first need to be looked at. They are:

1. The public agenda
2. Policy agenda
3. Corporate agenda
4. Media agenda

And all of them are interrelated. 

Now, what we as the public perceive to be reality, is really a jumbled-up mixture of what reality actually is and how the media has augmented it to make a media reality. Mass media filters and shapes the reality that we believe in. What this means is that when a story is very prominent in the media and is receiving a lot of media attention, we as the public then believe that this must be more important than other stories. (Obviously this is not always true). 

The easiest way to think about agenda setting is to put it into a simple list, the agenda setting family. 

This is one crazy family, and they are made up of...

• Media gatekeeping: what the public is told/not told. 

"I am the gatekeeper, are your the keymaster?"

• Media advocacy: purposeful promotion of a message

"Don't shoot the messenger!"

• Agenda cutting: amount of attention - how much the public cares

"I'm not finished,"

Agenda surfing: follows the trends; the bandwagon effect

"He's a morph,"

• Diffusion of news: how, when and where news is released, who decides? 

Jagrafess

All of these things are linked to how issues are portrayed in the media. But how they are portrayed depends greatly on how the public perceives them. When portrayals vary it is usually because the public find their own perceptions. 

The more dependent the public is on the media, the easier and more influenced they are by what the media says.