The Reality of Reality.

Everyone has a different way of seeing the world. The way we look at reality is shaped by our experiences, our culture, our friends, our family and even our personality. But our perception of reality is also shaped by another thing: the media. The media don’t just report on the world around us; they filter and shape it, making certain issues more or less important. This, in turn, changes the way we look at things, because it changes our focus. This is one of the media’s favourite things: agenda setting.

Agenda setting is all about how the importance the media puts on an issue will impact on the importance society places on it. The simple fact of the matter is that if an issue isn’t in the news, chances are we won’t care about it that much. Agenda setting has two levels. The first is that the media suggests what the public should focus on through coverage. The second is that the media suggests how people should think about an issue. Both can be a little disturbing, when you think about it. The media has the power to tell us what to think about, and sometimes even how to think about it. So are we all just on the way to becoming little media drones, seeing the world exactly the way they want us to see it?

The short answer is no. Agenda setting isn’t all about turning us into Rupert Murdoch robots. Agenda setting feeds off news values, and it needs to exist to some extent, or we’d be being bombarded with endless amounts of news 24/7. People do need to think about the news they hear, however.  You can’t believe everything you see and hear in the media, and people should always stop and ask questions about what they’re being told.

The truth is that to some extent, the media is always going to affect how we see the world. If an issue is big in the news, chances are we’ll be thinking and talking about it. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing: news can open up our eyes to issues we didn’t know were happening before. But the flip side to this is that there’s a hell of a lot of important issues that aren’t given prominence in the media that deserve to be thought and talked about too. As for the other part of agenda setting, the part about changing the way we think about an issue, that’s where we need to be really careful. Because if we just accept everything we hear, we’re facing becoming little media drones. But thinking is the antidote to letting agenda setting shape our realities without our consent. So start thinking about the way you see the world, and what’s shaping it. And make sure you’re seeing your world the way you want to, not how someone else told you to. 

What's Your Value?

Values are funny things. When you ask someone what their values are, there tends to be a lot of umming and ahhing while they try to put it into words. Everyone has values, but we rarely stop and think about what they actually are. Values tend to be those intrinsic things that seem to be buried deep down inside of us, things that we just have. But values are relative, cultural things, and we weren’t born with them. Everyone has different values, and this rule doesn’t stop at news outlets. They have values too.

News values, however, vary slightly from the values held by people. Whereas a person’s values tend to be based upon what we see as important in life, news values are all about what makes news newsworthy. Exactly what factors make stories newsworthy is a topic of debate, with people of all different ages and from all different places trying to come up with ‘the list’ of news values. A perfect list, however, is impossible, because news values vary across countries, states, and even news outlets. The news values of ABC and Channel 9 are likely to be different, just as the news values in Australia are likely to be different to the news values in China. So how do we know what makes good news?

Despite all these differences, some news values are pretty universal. The idea of ‘if it bleeds it leads’ and ‘if it’s local it leads’ is seen across the world, with news of disasters, death and tragedy taking priority in the news. Proximity is also a big one. People want to hear about things that are close to home and that affect them, and so stories that are close geographically tend to get more news space too. There are lots of other factors, including currency, uniqueness, simplicity, exclusivity and size, plus a whole host of others that all change depending on where you are and what outlet you work for.

News values, however, aren’t hard and fast rules. Just like the values held by people, journalists often just have a sense for what makes news worthy, and for what their news values are. They don’t often think about it, and I dare say that if you asked a journalist exactly what their news values are there’d be a bit of umming and ahhing as well. But news values are important to understand, even if they are a bit illusive, and nobody can make ‘the list’. Everyone has news values, just like everyone has values.  And maybe it’d be worth doing some umming and ahhing and figuring out exactly what they are.