The media may not influence what you think, but they’re responsible for the topics you think about.

The stories our news media chooses to cover have a huge impact in many different ways — if the news doesn’t report on an international tragedy, how are we going to know about it and how is the United States going to provide aid?

Agenda-setting: it’s a term that the media-savvy throw around regarding the way mass media control the issues on our minds. Media scholar Richard Campbell defines agenda setting as: “when the mass media pay attention to particular events or issues, they determine — that is, set the agenda for — the major topics of discussion for individuals and society.”

Yes it’s a mouthful, but an interesting one if you take the time to think about it. The media may not influence what you think, but they’re responsible for the topics you think about. If people haven’t seen or heard anything about a given world event, it might as well not even exist.

This is when agenda-setting goes from interesting to scary. Can we really trust our regular news sources to give us the most important information about what’s really going on in the world in 30 minutes of news? Do these news entities have other agendas besides just reporting the news?

Elana Levine, an assistant professor in the Journalism and Mass Communication department and a resident expert on all things media and media studies, points out that the bottom line for news agencies is usually, not surprisingly, money. News channels need ratings too, so they report what gets people’s attention.

An example of an important story that wasn’t covered as extensively as it should have been is the terrible earthquake that rocked northern Pakistan last October. The monster quake racked up a death toll of as many as 100,000 and left millions freezing in the mountains.

There was initial reporting on this story as it developed, but once it lost its breaking news status, it disappeared from the airwaves. It wasn’t until late the next month that the story got any more attention, because Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie decided to pay a good will visit to the disaster zone. This story of tragedy was completely overshadowed by the entertainment value of two stars.

Another story that is notoriously underreported story is the ongoing genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region. In what the United Nations has called “the world’s worst current humanitarian crisis,” as many as 300,000 people have been slaughtered and almost two million people have been displaced.

How is it possible that America, the most technologically and socially advanced country in the world, is largely ignorant of events as massive as these two? It’s not just the fact that these are far off places — the tsunami that battered the coast of Southeast Asia proved that.

It’s a lack of attention from the news media and failure by our governmental and private leaders to latch onto these situations as something we could be providing aid to. The American people are generous and willing to donate to causes just like these, but we need to know about them first. With a news media like ours that is chiefly concerned with cash rather than actually reporting, there’s little chance for change on the horizon.

What we can do is take the initiative to be aware of what’s going on in the world. In a country like ours with largely domestic and local puffed-up news, we can’t rely on the media for all our information.

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