Reality, Rewritten by Repetition

Lately, theories that explain how media and communication affect our thoughts and behaviors have been on my mind a lot. I once heard the phrase, and it really resonated with me: “The media do not tell people what to think, but what to think about” (Cohen, 1963). Perfectly, it encapsulates the agenda-setting theory. To put it differently, the gist of agenda-setting is how the news media select certain topics, and the public eventually associates these topics with greater importance simply because the media have discussed them more (McCombs & Shaw, 1972).

I often think about the occasions when I hear something reported in the news. Immediately, I think it must be something urgent. Perfectly, agenda-setting captures such a phenomenon (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). Decades ago, people like Walter Lippmann (1922) observed how, to a great extent, people were dependent on the media to draw their world picture, as the media covered the events happening around the globe, and later on, Bernard Cohen (1972) characterized such a situation, saying how the media decides for us “what to think about.” Really, if the news constantly covers an issue, we all start to act as if it is a major concern.

In my daily life, I am somehow like a sponge that absorbs without any effort the news that is presented or talked about. If I wake up and the phone is showing me a certain algorithm about a…