The Political Agendas of Three Newspapers and City Governments

Abstract

The political power of writers has been suspect for a long time. The record goes back at least as far as Plato. In l'%e Republic, he tells us the authorities will always have to control poets and dramatists carefully. Otherwise, they will soon lead the common people out of the paths of goodness and mercy laid down by their betters. The Lord Chamberlain of England was specially charged with keeping a close eye on the likes of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Some years after their time, Andrew Fletcher was also proclaiming the political power of popular communcation when he declared: "Let me write the songs of a country and I care not who writes its laws."For more than 150 years it has been traditional to speak of the press as the fourth estate. In some way it was supposed to be analogous to the British Lords spiritual, the lords temporal, and the Commons. Yet the press has seldom been acknowledged as a legitimate political institution -except perhaps in the United States. Elsewhere the terms used are those of usurpation and illegitimacy. That has not stopped either the practitioners or the students of politics from speaking of the press as a potent political force.Despite their importance to the governing process, the mass media are not primarily political institutions. At heart, they are entertainment and commercial institutions. And most people pay attention to them for non-political reasons. Perhaps that helps explain why political scientists have given little serious study to the mass media. That has been largely left to students of sociology, advertising, applied psychology, and cultural communications. For politics, the bulk of the relevant inquiry during recent years has been limited to electoral and voting effects, political development, socialisation, and something called public opinion.

Communication Research and Development Policy: Agenda Dynamics in an African Setting

“…Varied levels of support for media agenda-setting have also been identified on election and non-election issues among audiences in other developed countries (5,12,23,52,53,65). Even in a U S .…”