Nt1310 Unit 1 Case Study

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1) Of the wide variety of topics I have learned in this class, I have found that the most important lesson I have learned is the ways in which the media use framing to engage in agenda-setting in the public sphere. Prior to this course and specifically our fourth case study, I feel as I possessed a more superficial understanding of how such actions took place. There was an understanding that all forms of media possess bias to some extent, and that oftentimes the media will choose which stories to cover and which to ignore to push their own agendas. What I did not fully understand however, were the intricacies and subtleties involved in the framing of issues to set the media’s agenda. Leaving this course, I feel that I am far better prepared to identify …show more content…
As Littlejohn and Foss would argue, the media organizations use first-level agenda setting to establish the San Bernardino shooting as an important issue. Each outlet then seeks to shift how we think about our environment through their coverage, using second-level agenda-setting to tell readers how to interpret the San Bernardino shooting by focusing on either gun control or terrorism issues. Such framing represents the media agenda, which they hope will become the public agenda as this inevitably becomes the policy agenda. Although one cannot say without absolute certainty, it is reasonable to infer Fox News hopes for radical Islamic and/or domestic terrorism and national security issues to become the policy agenda, whereas those at CNN hope for gun violence to stay on the policy agenda. CNN may even hope to keep terrorism off of the agenda given their complete lack of coverage from that angle, just as Fox may hope to keep gun control reform off the agenda given their own lack of coverage from such an