Should Media set the Agenda?
I believe that the mass media’s ability to set a common agenda for the community has been merely a side effect that arose from the technological limitation of mass media. This limitation is that the analog production technologies of mass media required that a common edition (or common program in broadcast) be produced for all readers (or all listeners and viewers).
In other words, because an editor could produce only a single edition at a time for all readers, he had to choose stories according to the greatest common interests of all readers until all the space in that edition (or time in that broadcast program) was filled. A side effect of this production limitation was that his choices set a common reading agenda for the community.
During the past four centuries of the mass media’s influence, media executives have grown so used to seeing this side effect that they’ve come to believe it is the mass media’s original purpose, rather than an incidental result of technological limitations.
[x]#1365 fan vrijdag 19 augustus 2005 @ 23:15:04
