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doing his or her job and meeting their
deadline. 38 For whatever reason, though,
many military leaders at all levels wrongly
assume that any media engagement
will be nothing more than a proverbial
minefield of ‘gotcha’ type questions
meant to make the service member
and their organisation look bad. It is a
fair point that journalists attempt this on
occasion, but such tactics are rare and
usually tied to the emotional appeal of
the subject matter in an effort to make a
good story. Gotcha-type questions aside,
military leaders should expect tough
questions (there is a difference), which is
completely fair and does not necessarily
mean a journalist has an ulterior motive.
Assuming the military leader is confident
in his or her PAO’s ability to do their job,
shying away from media engagements
is not recommended. Regardless of the
story subject matter and the potential
questions to be asked, with proper
training and preparation the military
leader will be able to successfully
respond and speak to the organisation’s
mission.
The Power of the Press
The military leader must also understand
and appreciate beyond the surface level
the intrinsic power of the mass media
to set and influence the public agenda,
which is second in importance only to
making money (first for state-funded
news organisations). American folk icon
Will Rogers once mused, “All I know is
just what I read in the papers.” Although
meant as a quip, Rogers articulated
succinctly the extent of source knowledge
most people rely on to discuss or debate
current events and who do not know,
or do not bother, to think critically and
ask if they are getting the whole story.
Walter Lippmann devoted an entire book
to the matter in 1922 and wrote, “The
only feeling that anyone can have about
an event he does not experience is the
feeling aroused by his mental image of
that event…The world that we have to
deal with politically is out of reach, out
of sight, out of mind.” To fill such a void,
Lippmann credited the mass media with
creating ‘pictures in our heads’ that serve
to fill a vacuum resulting from our not
having direct knowledge of any given
subject. This point concerned Lippmann
enough to conclude that “public opinions
must be organised for the press if they
are to be sound, not by the press as is
the case today.”
That the mass media is able to influence
on a large scale the public’s perception
of events – putting ‘pictures in our
heads’ – is not debatable when it has
been admitted to. For instance, former
New York Times executive editor Max
Frankel wrote of his own organisation’s
influencing power,
“It is the ‘house organ’ of the smartest,
most talented, and most influential
Americans at the height of American
power. And while its editorial opinions
or the views of individual columnists and
critics can be despised or dismissed, the
paper’s daily package of news cannot.
It frames the intellectual and emotional
agenda of serious Americans.”
The question then becomes ‘how do the
media do it?’ For that academia offers
two communication theories in particular
that serve as a lens through which the
military leader can analyse and, more
importantly, recognise the mass media’s
effect on the public in order to plan
accordingly.
The first is Agenda Setting Theory
(AST). In 1963 Dr. Bernard Cohen
posited that the mass media “may not
be successful much of the time in telling
people what to think, but it is stunningly
successful in telling its readers what to
think about.” This piqued the interest of
Dr. Maxwell McCombs who, along with
retired US Army officer Dr. Donald Shaw,
theorised that the mass media purposely
dictates the day-to-day public agenda by
reporting on issues that it deems salient,
which directly influences public opinion
regarding those issues. To test this
theory McCombs and Shaw conducted
a content analysis of media products
distributed in the vicinity of Chapel Hill,
North Carolina and noted what was
reported as salient during the 1968 US
presidential campaign. Simultaneously,
they conducted a survey of undecided
voters in the same area and asked each
voter what they deemed as important
campaign issues. What McCombs and
Shaw found was a strong correlation
between what the mass media reported
as salient campaign issues and the
campaign issues the surveyed audience
stated was important to them. This
breakthrough became known as the
‘Chapel Hill Study’ and gave birth to AST;
the study was published in 1972 and has
been replicated to date more than 400
times in various settings by academics
around the globe. 46 47 To say that the
mass media has a direct psychological
effect on the general public is an
understatement.
Agenda Setting Theory’s simultaneous linear and cyclic concept as postulated by Drs. Maxwell McCombs
and Donald Shaw.
38 Howard and Mathews, On Deadline, 70-71.
39 Staff Writer, “Vice News reporter tries to bait Army officer into undermining the POTUS,” Popular Military, November 16, 2018, https://popularmilitary.com/vice-news-reporter-tires-bait-army-
officer-undermining-potus/?utm_source=The+Salty+Soldier&fbclid=IwAR3lJx5DELXddkB_SpCPeHXRjCRWM_f1-g7On-xj4osoEzxyRe4zTz7Omkg.
40 Will Rogers, “Mr. Rogers announces a plan to write on topics he knows,” in Will Rogers’ Daily Telegrams, Volume 3: The Hoover Years, 1931-1933, eds. James Smallwood and Steven
Gragert (Stillwater, OK: Oklahoma State University Press, 1979), 219.
41 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1922), 9, 18.
42 Lippmann, Public Opinion, 19.
43 Max Frankel, The Times of My Life and My Life with the Times (New York: Random House, 1999), 414-415.
44 Bernard Cohen, The Press and Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 13.
45 Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw, “The agenda-setting function of mass media,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 36, no. 2 (Summer 1972): 176-187.
46 McCombs and Shaw, “Agenda-setting,” 176-187.
47 Maxwell McCombs, Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004), x.
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