Читать книгу Setting the Agenda - Maxwell McCombs - Страница 11

Walter Lippmann is the intellectual father of the idea now called, for short, agenda setting. The opening chapter of his 1922 classic, Public Opinion, is titled ‘The World Outside and the Pictures in our Heads’, and summarizes the agenda-setting idea even though Lippmann did not use that phrase. His thesis is that the news media, our windows to the vast world beyond direct experience, determine our cognitive maps of that world. Public opinion, argued Lippmann, responds not to the environment, but to the pseudo-environment constructed by the news media.

Still in print nearly a century after its original publication, Public Opinion presents an intriguing array of anecdotal evidence to support its thesis. Lippmann begins the book with a compelling story of ‘an island in the ocean where in 1914 a few Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans lived’. Only the arrival of the mail steamer more than six weeks after the outbreak of the First World War alerted these friends to the fact that they were enemies.⁵ For Lippmann, who was writing in the 1920s, these are contemporary updates of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, with which he prefaces the book. Paraphrasing Socrates, he noted ‘how indirectly we know the environment in which nevertheless we live […] but that whatever we believe to be a true picture, we treat as if it were the environment itself’.⁶