Would you say media coverage is based more on Lippman theory, or Dewey theory?

Question

In case you geniuses who think you know the difference between medias (liberal, conservative, democratic, republican) don't know the difference between these two men.

Lippman
Agenda-setting theory is the creation of public awareness and concern of salient issues by the news media. Agenda-setting theory’s central axiom is salience transfer, in other words, the mass media have the ability to transfer importance of items on their mass agendas to the public agendas. Media agenda is the set of issues addressed by media sources and public agenda is the issues the public consider important (Miller 2005). In 1963 Bernard Cohen stated, “The press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about (Griffin, 2006).” Agenda-setting theory was introduced in 1972 by two scholars, Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw. The two scholars studied the role of the media in 1968 presidential campaign..smore detail

campaign in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and found that the media influenced the public on what issues to think about. The study was groundbreaking and has been influential in the field of communication.

The theory explains the correlation between the rate at which media cover a story and the extent that people think that this story is important. This correlation has repeateadly been shown to occur.

DEWEY
Since the mid-1990s, Deweyan ideas have experienced revival as they are a major source of inspiration for the public journalism movement. His definition of "public," as described in The Public and Its Problems, has profound implications for the significance of journalism in society. As suggested by the title of the book, Dewey's concern was of the transactional relationship between publics and problems. Also implicit in its name, public journalism seeks to orient communication away from elite, corporate hegemony toward a civic public sphere. "The 'public' of public journalists is Dewey's public."[6]


Dewey gives a concrete definition to the formation of a public. Publics are spontaneous groups of citizens who share the indirect effects of a particular action. Anyone affected by the indirect consequences of a specific action will automatically share a common interest in controlling those consequences, i.e., solving a common problem.
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Since every action generates unintended consequences, publics continuously emerge, overlap, and disintegrate.

Answer 1

Either method has it's merit. The problem I see currently is there have been a drift from reporting the news in an attempt to create news or reporters having an activist agenda. The activism by reporters have a tendency to remove the view point of the opposition regardless of the validity as they champion their on cause. The cause is not the unbiased presentation of events around them, but an attempt to sway the opinion of the public through subterfuge and half truths.

In many instances, stores that should not have been reported at all or sensastionalized for the sole purpose of selling their media and have no news worthyness to the population as a whole.

Do we really care that Brittany Spears went without underwear one night? Have we seen too much of Paris Hilton. Why has the weather channel taken on a liberal political activist position to tout green house gas as a cause of global warming, even though most meterolgist do not believe it to be true? The news is that global warming is not caused by CO2 emmissions and many scientific studies have shown other causes to be more probable? The real news is the harm caused by too much political correctness and no guts to print opposing viewpoints. Since when is ****** a homophobic word? It may be a considered a slur, but why should the person using the word be considered homophobic and not insensitive? I've been around long enough to remember when people with the genetic predisposition of a greater concentration of melinin skin pigmintation were considered to be ******, nigro, colored, black, african american, etc. The name changes but a rose is a rose is a rose. I would hope that the kids today were more sensitive to race than my great grand mother do the environment she was raised. I think my great grand mother is just as much a victim if she says something that is considered a racial slur by the youth of today, when it was common practice when she was growing up. The news media has helped create the concept that social injustice is a one way street that happens to minorities, as defined by the current political climate.

Sorry, News should be news, editorials should be editorials, and entertainment is entertainment and so much for my soap box.