Does Agenda-Setting Limit Society's Power to Seek Information?

The mass media act as the gatekeepers of information that is released to the general public. The controversy surrounding this issue addresses whether the agenda-setting function of today’s mass media has effectively narrowed media consumers’ ability to be interested in, and actively seek information relating to important topics such as war, genocide, politics, and international issues.
For my topic, I was researching whether the agenda-setting function of the mass media limits our ability and interest to seek information about important issues that may not be given high levels of salience in the mass media.
One side of the controversy would argue that agenda-setting DOES limit our ability to seek important information, therefore does act as a form of social control. The main concern of the mass media is not informing the public, but is generating high profit and high ratings. Therefore, they focus on entertainment related news over hard news, because that is what is most popular. The agenda-setting function of the media tells us not what to think, but what to think about, so if the media tells us about Britney Spears and Eliot Spitzer’s affair, that is what we’ll think about. If these issues are assigned a high level of importance by the mass media, media consumers will be disinclined to search for other issues to real importance such as issues relating to politics or world conflict. This side of the argument is reflected in the statistics on Google Trends, which keeps record of what people are searching for. Over a one month period of time, the majority of the top 50 searches everyday were related to entertainment news. In every US subregion, people searched exponentially more for “Lindsay Lohan” over “Barack Obama.”
The other side of the controversy would argue that the agenda-setting function doesn’t limit our ability to seek information. With increasing access to the internet, the public has free access to serious news source web sites such as NYT.com, cnn.com, and BBC.com. There are millions of web blog users which reflects how society is seeking information through alternative outlets as opposed to traditional media sources. Besides just web blogs, there has been an increase in readership and subscriptions to many serious news magazines such as The Economist and The New Yorker.
In my opinion, our ability to search for information is not compromised, but our ability to search for important “hard” issues has been. The media reports heavily on entertainment news, so society holds these “soft” stories to high importance which is reflected by the internet search patterns of Americans. I think the only way to break this cycle is to understand how the agenda-setting function of the media works, and to understand that the mass media does not necessarily have the public’s interests at the forefront of their reporting scope.



Searches for "New York Times" are declining, while searches for entertainment website "perezhilton" are rising.
You can compare other trends at : Googletrends.com
Look at the top 50 Google Search trends here: http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?sa=X ... notice that the majority of them are related to some form of entertainment news... not much related to hard news stories.

What do people care about? Entertainment or world issues? The mass media pays a great deal attention to entertainment news... reflected here:

Angelina Jolie vs. Darfur Genocide. I don't think it's because people don't care... it's because people don't know. Why don't they know? Because of the media's agenda-setting, which proves just how useful it can be in social control.

But... there is an huge increase in the trade of information on web blogs.

This takes alot of the power out of the hands of the mass media and puts the power into the media consumer's hands. This effectually reduces the affects of agenda setting on how we seek information.