CHAPTER 10: SUMMARY, CONCLUSION(S) & RECOMMENDATIONS 199-208
4.6 Framing and Agenda-setting: Determinant of Media Independence .1 Framing
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4.6 Framing and Agenda-setting: Determinant of Media Independence
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2005, during an mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) vaccination exercise in the UK to curb some diseases, allegation emerged that the vaccines came with undeclared side effects. However, a group of journalists framed the incident as consisting of parental conflict who were concerned for their children while the government was eager to lessen expenditure through giving protection to prevent three diseases in one immunisation (Abercrombie and Longhurst, 2007:142). By this, framing create an essential doorway for reasoning about language use in combination with the connection between journalists and their audience (Zelizer, 2004:142).
4.6.2 Agenda Setting
Agenda setting, on the other hand, is defined as
a type of social learning where individuals learn about the relative importance of issues in society through the amount of coverage the issues receive in news media. Thus, the more coverage an issue receives, the more concern individuals have with the issue. In other words, individuals learn how concerned they should be through the amount of coverage the issue receives (Wanta, 1997:2).
In the same vein, the principal proposal of the theory of agenda-setting is that the significance of elements in the news influences the significance of those elements among the audience. This process of influence starts with the agenda of objects receiving vital attention in the media (Carroll and McCombs, 2003:36-37). In agenda-setting parlance, the term „salience‟
explains the degree of significance of news item. Thus, „salience‟ is defined as the act of
“making a piece of information more noticeable, meaningful or memorable to [an] audience”
(Wanta, 1993:53). Newspapers vividly expose their assessment of the significance of a news item through the style of presentation: size of the headline and its position within the paper (Sutherland and Galloway, 1981:26; Carroll and McCombs, 2003:37). Newspaper and other media forms together put across the entire populace matters of the day and through this, fix the agenda for “inquiry, debate and discussion that continues in legislatures, courts, businesses, universities, churches and homes throughout the country” (Gauthier, 1999:197).
In all the media platforms, continuous attention (repetition) given to an object makes it a more commanding message above other offerings with respect to its salience. Society then applies these salience cues that the media publishes to organise their personal agendas so as to make a choice regarding persons, issues and other objects they consider significant (Carroll and
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McCombs, 2003:37). For instance, if a specific newspaper continuously presents headline stories on energy, the reading audience (populace) will deem the issue of energy as more salient compared to if the same subject story has been run infrequently on inside pages. As a result, energy will be a highly rated „agenda‟ compared to others like economy and taxation (Sutherland and Galloway, 1981:26). It is for this and other motives that McCombs & Shaw (1972) referred to Lang and Lang as saying: “[t]he mass media force attention to certain issues. They build up public images of political figures. They are constantly presenting objects suggesting what individuals in the mass media should think about, know about, have feelings about” (McCombs and Shaw, 1972:177). Furthermore, this becomes clearer in the words of Wayne Wanta, a former editor of a newspaper who noted that “as journalists we decide which issues were deserving of prominent display and which issues were to be ignored. It was our job as journalists to tell the public what was important. Before this, we call this news judgment instead of the term agenda- setting” (Wanta, 1997). That is, having informed the citizens and organised a debate, the media then conveys society‟s consensus that the debate generated to the government (Curran, 2002:225).
Agenda-setting viewed from the perspective of both the traditional and attribute effects still encompass the transfer of salience. This ushers in the two-stage notion that is also labeled as the first and second levels in agenda-setting. It connotes that those elements that are significant on the media agenda become significant subsequently on the public agenda. By this, the media, which may prove effective in telling public what to think about, may also prove effective in telling public how to think about it (McCombs, 2005:546). Thus, level one deal with the salience of objects which encapsulates “public issues, public figures, or corporate entities”; while level two concerns the salience of the characteristics of these objects (Carol and McCombs, 2003:38).
The above position is confirmed by McCombs and Shaw who did research on agenda-setting among undecided eligible voters preparing to vote in the 1968 elections in the United States. The results showed that significant correlations exist between political subjects that received much coverage in the news and what electorates deemed as vital issues in the election (McCombs and Shaw, 1972). Thus, the manner in which news is put across to the public can shape opinion and persuade people‟s voting decisions, leading to either to establish a government or remove presidents (Anderson and Gabszewicz, 2005:1). To define the two levels in agenda-setting, the first considers the object‟s salience which includes candidates, issues, organisations, and public
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officials among others while the second focuses on the salience of the attributes (Kiousis and McCombs, 2004:38).
The concepts of framing and agenda-setting is being applied in this study because it is expected to aid the researcher to study and analyse the pattern of newspaper editorial presentations so as to make an argument into the present-day Ghanaian media and to suggest a way forward. Overall, both framing and attribute agenda-setting pulls attention to the viewpoints of communicators and their audiences, how they perceive headlines in the news and more specifically, to the special prominence that certain attributes or frames have in the message.