Agenda-Setting Theory

One day I was reading the newspaper, and an article caught my attention. The headline of the article read “Trans Fat” in big letters. The method to make the words stand out like they did is called framing, which the central organizing idea for news content that supplies a context and suggests what the issue is through the use of selection, emphasis, exclusion, and elaboration. Not knowing much about the topic, I had uncertainty about it so I read the article. After finishing the article, it had more relevance to me and applied to me life as an athlete. This is the first level of agenda-setting because it included the transfer of salience of an attitude object in the mass media’s pictures of the world to a prominent place among the pictures in our heads. Now every time I go out to eat, I always ask the server how much trans fat is in the meal I am interested in ordering. This is the second level of agenda-setting, because it includes the transfer of salience of a bundle of attributes the media associate with an attitude object to the specific features of the image in our minds. By reading the article, I now know that trans fat stays in your body for the duration of your life and you can’t work it off. Because of this, I always watch what I eat. In this case, the media was making people more conscious about what they eat, and without the media publicizing topics like this, I would have never known about the potential dangers of trans fat.