Page 247 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Med a and the Cr s s of Values

agenda setting: all MoniCa all the tiMe
In late January 1998, all the major media in the United States and many other countries
were focused on the upcoming visit of Pope John Paul II to Cuba. Of the pontiff’s many
trips, this was considered one of the most historic, since he would be meeting with Fidel
Castro, an avowed Marxist dictator who had officially banned the practice of the Catholic
religion in his country. The event was featured on the cover of several major news maga-
zines and the anchors of the major network nightly news were heading to Havana for live
coverage of the visit. On Friday, January 23, Tom Brokaw of the NBC Nightly News an-
nounced that every edition of the following week’s news would include features about the
contemporary situation in Cuba.
The next day, Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern, revealed that she had been
conducting a sexual affair with President Bill Clinton. Within hours, all coverage of the Pope’s
visit to Cuba ended, and virtually every television channel, every newspaper, every maga-
zine, and every Internet blog was devoted almost exclusively to the sexual scandal. The
historical visit of the Pope to Cuba, with its ramifications for the relationships of the United
States, the Catholic Church, and Communism, was forgotten.
What put the Lewinsky story at the top of the media agenda? What made this story such
a significant matter? The people’s right to know? The well-known power of sexual scandal to
sell newspapers and raise ratings? A “vast right-wing conspiracy” against a popular liberal
President? This and many other examples of the media’s ability to set the agenda of pub-
lic discourse and the motives that drive the agenda-setting process fascinate media critics
across the political, moral, and ideological spectrum.

viewers, or listeners; (c) the rights and duties of government to control media
activity; (d) the rights and obligations of those who own or control the means
of media production; and, finally, (e) the aesthetic values of the media as art
forms.

mEDia ConTEnT
A great deal of the popular discussion of values in the media revolves around
the question of content. Studies of media effects keep revolving around the pre-
sentation of sexuality, violence, gender, race, and politics and their influence on
media consumers. It has often been pointed out that the concern about such in-
fluence over the centuries has usually emerged from the elite members of a cul-
ture and their perception of the lower classes as helpless in the face of the media
onslaught. The thinking that developed in the 1920s and 1930s, for example,
used the model of the media as a “magic bullet” or a hypodermic needle, trans-
mitting messages to the mass of poorly educated, passive, and easily influenced
media consumers, whose opinions and behaviors were bound to be heavily
influenced by the media’s overwhelming messages, such as Hitler’s (and some
would say Roosevelt’s) political propaganda, the sexual allure of Hollywood