by A. South

Created on: April 14, 2008

Media theorist G. Ray examined the relationship between news coverage and public perception of the importance of issues and the bias in media and the public bias created through media coverage.

Through his research, Funkhouser examined not only the relationship between news coverage and public perception of issues, but also the prominence of the issues in reality. His basic idea was that media coverage does not, cannot reflect "reality." Instead, the media are forced to provide a snapshot of what appears to be reality at a particular moment in time.

He triangulated media coverage, public opinion and a measure of reality and found a strong correspondence between public opinion and media coverage, but that media coverage did not accurately reflect reality. He concluded: "The news media are believed by many people to be reliable information sources, but the data presented here indicate that this is not necessarily the case.

The media essentially uses four different methods to create bias and alter the public's perception of issues. Those methods are:

1)Agenda setting: the media's capability, through repeated news coverage, of raising the importance of an issue in the public's mind.

2)Priming: a psychological process whereby media emphasis on particular issues not only increases the salience of those issues, but it activates in people's memories previously acquired information about those issues. That information is then generalized and used in forming opinions about persons, groups, or institutions linked to the issues; OR the process in which the media attend to some issues and not others and thereby alter the standards by which people evaluate election candidates.

3)Framing: a frame can be defined as a central organizing idea for news content that supplies a context and suggests what the issue is through the use of selection, emphasis, exclusion and elaboration. Essentially, it involves salience and selections.

4)Exemplification: the act or process of showing or illustrating by example. In terms of news coverage, exemplification can be viewed as one of the vehicles commonly used in journalistic practice, that provide a frame for a topic and, consequently, influences or manipulates the "pictures in the audiences' heads."

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