Blog #9

 Agenda setting is a theory that was first introduced in 1972 by Dr. Maxwell McCombs and Dr. Donald Shaw.  It's the idea that the public's opinion is set by the media.  Nowadays we are always seeing media outlets and other companies constantly pushing their agenda onto people.  A good example of this is Facebook.  Current White House press secretary Jen Psaki came out and said that they were working with Facebook to censor certain content.   They're doing this to simply push their narrative and eliminate arguments from the opposing side.  You also see News Outlets all the time using people's human values and fear to their advantage in order to make them think what they want them to believe.  AN example of this is if you were to turn on CNN, they would be talking about how everyone needs to be vaccinated and that everyone should be wearing masks because we need to keep everyone safe since the Corona Virus is still very dangerous.  Then you would turn on FOX and they'd be saying the complete opposite.  They'd be saying that we need to fight back against the vaccine laws because it's a violation of our rights and we should be able to go to work without getting vaccinated.  Now the issue with this is that it makes it very hard to trust any sort of media.  All mainstream media has a bias towards their agenda and is just trying to change the public's perception of reality and they'll say anything in order to make us believe what they're saying.  

This plays a huge affect on different segments like race, gender, and sexuality because nowadays media is using minorities to gain more votes in elections.  News stations are constantly talking about how certain political parties are against things like same sex marriage, women getting paid the same as men, and equality of 
minority races.  When mainstream companies push this they're gonna get large groups of people to side with them.  Agenda setting also has a large impact on me.  Nowadays the people in my generation have no interest being friends with you if your political views are different then theres because media outlets have painted a picture that the opposing viewpoint is just so terrible which has completely divided GenZ.  Now obviously there are still some people out there, like myself, that don't care about your political views and don't treat it as a personality trait but the people that do view your views as that do exist and there's a lot of them.  People like that just simply make it a lot harder to make friends.   Also everyone in my generation is constantly on social media which is where you see a lot of political bias.  Like I said earlier, social media is choosing what to show us and what to take down in order to push their agenda.  When you have a bunch of young adults who just believe everything they read seeing that, they're going to eat it all up and believe every single word of it.