What do you do when you set your agenda for the day?
Maybe you look at the number of tasks you must complete and you list them in order of priority. Who determines which tasks are most important? You do!
In the same you way you set your agenda, so does the news media.
With each news cycle, news organizations look at all the current news and they determine which stories are most important.
However, as I'm sure you can imagine, each news organization is run by people, and those people have their own ideas of which topics are most important for the public to know.
It's for this reason you can go to two news organizations' outlets, which supposedly should be covering the same news, and you may see very different news stories.
Or you may see the same story covered in two very different ways. For example, click through the slideshow of screenshots of two major news networks's home pages.
Is one news organization wrong? Is one right?
Not necessarily. Both headlines could be accurate, but one headline gives a different impression of reality than the other.
The difference between your personal agenda and the news' agenda is that yours doesn't dictate others' ideas of what is important. The news' agenda, however, does.
It is one of the responsibilities of news to not only sift through the daily happenings of the world, but to report them accurately. Accurate doesn't only mean correct though; it means that it gives the correct impression of reality.
Do you think think the news is giving an accurate representation of the world? Comment below!
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