Agenda-setting
Agenda-setting describes how coverage shapes which issues the public deems important: media say less what to think than what to think about.
Agenda-setting is the idea, drawn from media-studies research, that coverage shapes less what people think about an issue than which issues they consider important at all. A theme covered daily becomes a public problem; a theme absent from the headlines does not exist, however serious it is.
The founding study is Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw's, run in Chapel Hill in 1972: the issues voters named as priorities closely tracked those local media were foregrounding. The concept has been debated and refined since, but its core still holds.
For a reader the practical upshot is simple: a newsroom wields real power through its ordering choices alone, without writing a line of opinion. That is why the question "why this story today, and not that one?" is often more revealing than hunting for bias in the copy itself.
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