Agenda Setting and Framing Theory
Agenda setting isn’t something that you hear very often, but indeed it is very important to try to understand how media spreads and how things are decided over different forms of media. Well, if you don’t know what Agenda setting is, it is basically the thought that news media creates media that they want you to see or hear. For example, that could mean the news media creating a stigma around a certain group of people and then distributing it causing the consumers, such as us, to start creating swayed opinions.
Agenda theory is something that you most likely see almost every single day, no matter it being the news, social media, or any other kind of media. We usually don’t even notice them. We consume this kind of media just like the rest of it, and we allow ourselves to create swayed opinions about certain subjects, and we don’t even know it. I think that this is a terrible thing to do to our society, but can we do something about it? I think people as a group can come together and complete anything that we put our minds to, but if we barely notice it when we come across it because we are so used to seeing this stuff, how do we weed it out from the rest of the media? I really don’t know the answer to that question and worry about how common it has become.
The framing theory is like the agenda theory but for different reasons. Framing theory is about when something is presented by the media, it is put into a certain light to cause the consumers to create thoughts and opinions based on the way it is shown to them. I enjoy sports heavily, mostly football.
I believe that this technique is used in favor of certain football players, either in college or the NFL. I feel like the media loves certain players at certain positions. The biggest thing I see is quarterbacks that play in the NFL. The media loves players that are nice back to the media and that have great personalities. If someone is not so nice to the media or standoff-Ish to the media, you can see that they portray that person in a bad light and that can most certainly make fans of the sport frame their opinions. Aaron Rodgers is a big name in the NFL that is portrayed in a bad light in the media, and they will always show his bad moments, make sure that the people know that he is rude to the media, and make sure to ask him tough questions to try to catch him saying something that they can twist and show it to the consumers. A couple of players in the NFL that are loved by the media are Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes. They have great personalities and love the media, so the media will bend over backward to make sure that they are always in a great spot for people to love them. Even in games that they lose, they will make sure to show the good moments throughout those games. One more small thing that I see is subtle ways that this can happen by the wording. There is a major difference between saying “Someone lost this game” and “They fell a little short”. These are phrases I see all of the time and these subtle lines can structure how you perceive that piece of media.
