 This video looks at agenda setting, with a focus on the notion of agenda attributes. The material here is resourced from Maxwell McComb's 2002 conference paper entitled, The Agenda Setting Role of the Mass Media in the Shaping of Public Opinion. At its most basic agenda setting theory asserts that the media teach the audience how much importance to attach to a topic on the basis of the emphasis placed on it in the news. However, as McComb's explains, agenda setting doesn't end there. To explain this, let's start by calling each media item an object, as McComb's does. Objects are the sites of focus, such as specific events, political candidates or public issues like unemployment or terrorism. These sites of focus combine to set the agenda. In McComb's paper, he writes about objects, stating that each of these objects has numerous attributes, those characteristics and traits that describe the object. For each object, there is also an agenda of attributes, because when the media and the public think and talk about an object, some attributes are emphasized, and others are given less attention, and many receive no attention at all. This agenda of attributes cultivates how members of the public actually envision each object in their mind. In examining research done on this process, McComb's asserts that images held by the public of political candidates and other public figures are the most obvious examples of attribute agenda setting by the news media, but it can also work in other respects for issues themselves. Of course, the impact and significance of this process is concerning, because as McComb puts it, influencing the agenda of attributes for an issue or political figure is the epitome of political power. This is because if the media can determine the way an issue, politician, policy or event is understood by the public, then the outcomes of elections and cultural responses are subject to that agenda. In simple terms, we see the world through our media. In the West, we rarely, if ever, see war first hand or get to meet a prime ministerial candidate, just as two examples, so everything we know about the world is really predicated on how objects are mediated to us, and if they are even mediated at all. Thank you for watching.