Media agenda-setting shapes policy regardless of journalists’ intentions

Evidence

We do not mean our results to be taken as an indication of political mischief at the networks. In deciding what to cover, editors and journalists are influenced most by organizational routines, internal power struggles, and commercial imperatives (Epstein, 1973; Hirsch, 1975). This leaves little room for political motives. Unintentional though they are, the political consequences of the media’s priorities seem enormous. Policy makers may never notice, may choose to ignore, or may postpone indefinitely consideration of problems that have little standing among the public. In a parallel way, candidates for political office not taken seriously by news organizations quickly discover that neither are they taken seriously by anybody else. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1497

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on media and the public sphere from Communication as Culture and Troubling Transparency — connects to: Media-attention-seeking tactics did not change government war policy. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 77