Media Influence: Culture, Gatekeeping, and Agenda-Setting

Theory of Culture and Television

Stages: Fiction television viewers watch a world that differs substantially from the real world. Heavy TV consumers live in a world dominated by television, making the experience a displacement of reality. That is, they are influenced in their perception of social reality by television content. Social representations from the world of television are not absorbed selectively.

Parsons' View on Media Influence

Parsons places the media between what he calls the subsystems of culture, education, and religion. For him, media primarily carry out an integrative function. This function integrates subsystems and various sub-collectivities into a complex social system, achieved through the mechanism of influence. Influence is a way to cause an effect on the attitudes and opinions of others through their intentions to act.

News Principles

Principle of Universality

Nothing that happens is excluded from the possibility of becoming news; what happens, happens. Known people appear in the news much more than unknown individuals, but anyone, anywhere, can do something that attracts attention.

Principle of Neutrality

News is not classified as good or bad, but simply as news or non-news. Within the news category, items are ranked by importance, determining whether they receive prominent placement or are relegated to a corner of the inside pages. News value is considered morally neutral.

The Gatekeeper Concept in Media

Gatekeepers are individuals or groups who have the power to decide whether to pass or block certain information. Influences on gatekeepers are diverse, including: the authority of the media owner and the possibility of sanctions, professional ethics, the informal influence of colleagues, personal values, knowledge, experiences, tastes, and the external social structure. The work of the gatekeeper is also conditioned by two other factors:

1. The available space for news.
2. The timing of when news is received.

Agenda-Setting Theory Explained

To describe and clarify external reality, the media present the public with a list of topics for opinion and discussion. This is the general idea of the agenda-setting concept, based on two related proposals:

1. The media select certain topics for predominant coverage.
2. This prominence later determines which issues are considered relevant by the public.