Authors: Bogdanor
Summary: After giving a definition of the concept, the author turns towards the role of mass media in shaping and influencing people evaluation and preferences.
Political agenda is defined a "short list of issues regarded as the most important", while "agenda setting, or agenda building, is the process by which political issues are continually sifted and sorted according the importance attached to them".
Mass media do not determine people way of thinking but they exert an indirect influence on it, by selecting what to show and talk about and contributing this way to people evaluation, knowledge and ranking of issues. Moreover media enjoy a strategic position: given that all political organizations and interests aim at constructing political agenda, they are forced, in contemporary societies, to pass through them.
However, people attitude is not passive and blind: the process of agenda setting implies continuous interactions between audience and media.
Finally a crucial aspect of the role of mass media in agenda setting is their capacity and their power to keep matters and events "out of sight and out of mind" for their own commercial and political interests, with obvious consequences of influence on people opinions and preferencences.