News Agendas, Framing Contests and Power

Abstract

What gets in the news and how news is portrayed is a product of struggles between groups who hold competing definitions of reality. In earlier times newspapers were often one of the main means by which people in Western societies received information about issues of public importance. Now of course we have a multitude of media platforms including television and smartphones and we can upload wikis, blogs, tweets and YouTube clips at the touch of a button. How influential is this increasingly fragmented media scene on our cognitive maps of the world and, in particular, our attitudes towards environmental issues? And what determines the opportunities of news sources to shape news agendas?

The great blockbuster myth of modern journalism is objectivity, the idea that a good journalist or broadcaster simply collects and reproduces the objective truth. It has never happened and never will happen because it never can happen. Reality exists objectively but any attempt to record the truth about it always and everywhere necessarily involves selection.

(Nick Davies, 2008: 111)

All I know is just what I read in the newspapers.

(Will Rogers, American political humourist)