I often find titles to news articles intriguing, interesting, and sometimes even funny. The way that the media presents certain ideas can be twisted. In this photo below, we see a photo of two magazine front covers. The Time Magazine cover reads An American tragedy, while the Newsweek magazine reads a trail of blood. The picture on the cover is OJ Simpson, which we know went through a very controversial and public trial years ago. The OJ Simpson trial created a lot of divide in people as they questioned whether he was innocent or guilty. We see the two magazines portraying their different opinions through the just the titles, along with the photo used and the coloring of each article. We see how each article is attempting to evoke different emotions and feelings from the reader about OJ Simpson, giving them an opportunity to think about OJ a certain way.

Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw present to us the idea of agenda setting. Agenda setting theory is based on the idea of the media agenda. They define the media agenda as “the pattern of news coverage across major print and broadcast media as measured by the prominence and length of stories.” (376) They say that “the mass media have the ability to transfer the salience of issues on their news agenda to the public agenda.” (376)From this theory, we learn that the media has an agenda to display to the public in order to present us ideas and topics to think about. This is where the public can step in and fall into the medias agenda. The public then use an “index of curiosity” which is “a measure of the extent to which individual’s need for orientation motivates them to let the media shape their views.” (378) The media agenda can then lead into the framing of what they would like their audience to think ABOUT. McCombs and Shaw say that “need for orientation arises from high relevance and uncertainty.” This is how they say the audience begins to look for an agenda, in order to understand, leading to the media shaping their views.

The magazine covers mentioned and shown above is a great example of how the media sets an agenda, and can then go on to shape and frame how they want their audience to think about a topic. With the controversy behind the OJ Simpson trial, the audience had the index of curiosity that McCombs and Shaw discussed. This then allows the audience to pick up the magazine, or just see it in the store and form an opinion about the trial through the language used on the front cover. The coverage of the OJ trial and the prominence of it in the media when it was happening is also a general example of the media agenda. It was printed endlessly and covered prominently. OJ is a well-known public figure, therefore prompting the media to se an agenda behind it for years and years to come. With all that said, we see through the magazine covers and the OJ trial examples of many ideas presented in McCombs’  and Shaw’s Agenda- Setting Theory.