Media and the Social Agenda

Harvard Sociology Professor Nathan Glazer finds little evidence to support the assumption that objective conditions shape public consciousness. The issues that might legitimately claim our attention are literally boundless, yet we are unable to focus on more than a handful at a time--between five and seven, to be exact, according to the agenda-setting research of Professor Maxwell McCombs of the University of Texas. The issues may be real enough, but there is no easy way to set priorities among them on the basis of the "facts." Nor do most of us have personal experience with the social issues that compete for our attention, McCombs points out. We rely on secondhand information to tell us what is important. "The facts, themselves," Glazer adds, "become shaped by the need to compete with other claims." As a result, rhetoric, drama, and the art of gaining access to the mass media are central to our efforts to call attention to social problems from the very beginning. Shaping the facts to make them more compelling--"creative epidemiology," as Michael Pertschuk, Co-Director of the Advocacy Institute, terms it--is a practice well known to advocates for particular social causes.

If the media shape the public agenda, what shapes the media's agenda? McCombs argues that only about one-third of the stories in the mass media "thrust" themselves onto the agenda because of their objective importance to the public. Natural disasters or other public catastrophes, for example, fall into this category. The rest are there because they fit the conventions of journalism: they fill the need for drama, controversy, or human interest; they come from established and "reliable" sources; or they have been deemed worthy of coverage by The New York Times or The Washington Post. Equally important, the conventions of journalism--the choice of experts, the search for drama, "balance," or controversy--shape the way an issue is framed in the public mind. The mass media tell us not only what to think about, McCombs observes, but also how to think about it.

The unfolding story of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s illustrates the process, as Professor Everett M. Rogers of the University of New Mexico reveals in his analysis of media coverage, polling data, and federal funding statistics. For nearly two years after the New England Journal of Medicine recognized the association between the syndrome and homosexual men, AIDS was virtually ignored by the major national print and broadcast news media, the public, and federal funding agencies. The discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus in 1983 sparked somewhat more interest in the scientific aspects of the disease and its transmission. But it was not until a Hollywood leading man and a young schoolboy succumbed to the disease--two people with whom the white, middle-class, heterosexual mainstream could identify--that the media and the public recognized AIDS as a social phenomenon and a threat to public health. "The media discovered AIDS not because of statistical measures of its world importance," Rogers asserts, "but because two famous people--Rock Hudson and Ryan White--got it and gave the story a human touch."

Rosenberg confesses to indulging in a bit of "creative epidemiology" himself to get the media's attention, by presenting injury mortality statistics in a way that will drive the point home, especially as it relates to gun violence and the young. This strategy has worked, as Pertschuk discovered in this Washington Post item: "Firearms kill more teenagers than cancer, heart disease, AIDS, and all other biological diseases combined." However, Rosenberg fears that his own agency's statistics, emphasizing the disproportionate risk among black youth, may relegate the problem to the social margins in the public mind, much as epidemiologists' early association of AIDS with the homosexual community did.

Unquestionably, violence has captured both the media's and the public's attention as a matter of critical concern. Stories like the kidnapping and murder of 13-year-old Polly Klaas make the news and seize the public imagination without any help from advocacy groups or creative statistics. Opinion poll after opinion poll shows that Americans now consistently place violence high on their list of concerns. But how far along are we toward understanding the phenomenon of violence and addressing it as a public health concern? And what role can (or do) the mass media play in that process?

"There's been a shift from media focus on the ignorant or weak-willed smoker to a focus on the transnational tobacco companies as the functional and moral equivalent of the Medellin drug mafia.
"With all due respect to journalists, producers, editors, and publishers, this outpouring of well-framed media coverage has not exactly come about through spontaneous generation. The most important form of mobilization has been scientists, health professionals, activists, and nonsmokers, as skilled media advocates."
Michael Pertschuk
Co-Director, Advocacy Institute