From the dawn of the mass media, the different mediums have found ways to try and control the way that we as Americans think. The idea of agenda setting is something that has been around since the 1920's. This idea of agenda setting, though not dealing directly with the media controlling the minds of the people, does look at the media's ability to control what we think about. It is able to do this by using a four step process of displaying issues in a way that people unconsciously believe an issue to be bigger than it actually is. While this idea of agenda setting is very interesting by itself, it becomes even more interesting when viewed as how it effects the media that Americans now encounter today. Perhaps the form of media that most readily uses agenda setting is the newspaper. To best look at the presence of agenda setting and the effect that it has, I looked at a specific newspaper for two weeks and viewed the occurrence of a certain subject. The subject that I chose was the war in Iraq, and with this issue I asked the question, does the newspaper USA Today use agenda setting to sway public opinion on the war in Iraq?.
Before looking at the research, it is first important to look at the theory that surrounds agenda setting. The first, and most important, aspect of agenda setting is that it focuses not on the media's ability to control what we think, but rather it's ability to control what we think about. In the book, The Emergence of American Political Issues, looks at this controlling idea of media. " This impact of the mass media- the ability to effect cognitive change among individuals, to structure their thinking- has been labeled the agenda-setting function of mass communication. Here may lie the most important effect of mass communication, its ability to mentally order and organize our world for us. .
In short, the mass media may not be successful in telling us what to think, but they are .