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Media Advocacy
Mass media are powerful in presenting issues and shaping opinions in the society, and media advocacy is an approach that attempts to influence media's coverage of an issue and to help a relevant policy achieve public awareness and support. According to Lawrence Wallack, Lori Dorfman, and their colleagues, the purpose of media advocacy is to contribute to the development of social and policy initiatives that promote health and well-being. In general, media advocacy efforts focus on issues related to health and human well-being, and the goal is usually to get more news coverage for a topic and to shape the relevant debates in a desired fashion.
Media advocacy efforts largely emphasize news coverage because news has a crucial impact on people at both the personal and public levels. At the personal level, news media may provide information and elicit changes in individuals' knowledge and attitudes about a topic, and it may even stimulate a person to take actions. At the public level, mass media can raise awareness of certain issues among the public and policymakers and can contribute to improving conditions in the society. For example, a news report on former president Ronald Reagan's colon cancer and publicity following the death of television journalist Katie Couric's husband, who had the same disease, motivated people to get tests to detect the same health problem. A series of newspaper articles on infant mortality led to legislative support for providing low-cost prenatal care.
How Media Advocacy Works
Several theoretical notions are often mentioned to explain why and how advocacy efforts through news media may work. In particular, agenda setting and framing theory provide good perspectives to understand the important role of news media in the process of advocating an issue or a public policy.
Agenda Setting
Agenda setting proposes that media can influence the public agenda regarding what issues are considered important; framing theory suggests that the way media frame or present an issue can influence how people think about it. Specifically, the initial research on agenda setting proposed that the media coverage and placement of an issue could influence the public to consider the issue an important topic. That is, the media agenda sets the public agenda: The issues selected and covered by media become the issues on the top of public's mind. For example, Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw analyzed media coverage of the 1968 presidential election. They found that issues receiving the most media coverage were also the issues voters considered important. This study was followed by many others that found much the same thing, leading to a large body of literature on agenda setting. In short, early research on agenda setting described that media determine what issues audiences think about.
More recent research on agenda setting suggested that media could further influence how audiences think about an issue. Scholars suggested that the media could also influence whether people associated positive or negative attributes with a policy or person. For example, Guy Golan and Wayne Wanta found that a political candidate who was covered more favorably in media was more likely to be perceived in a positive light. Such influence is called second-level agenda setting.
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- V-Chip (Violence Chip)
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- Externalizing Behavior
- Forbidden Fruit Hypothesis
- Formal Features
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- Information Processing, Active vs. Passive Models of
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- Aggression, Television and
- Cartoons, Violence in
- Desensitization Effects
- Electronic Games, Violence in
- Fear Reactions
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- Hip Hop, Violence in
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- Schemas/Scripts, Aggressive
- Sexualized Violence
- Television Violence
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- UNESCO Violence Study
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