Today in agenda-setting

You can learn a lot about what a story's supposed to be by looking at the stories it's supposed to be like -- here, the sidebars accompanying the afternoon's No. 2 story at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network.

The AP thumbsucker makes sense, but when you get to "USDA Sets New Standards" (glossed at The Fox Nation as "Obama unloads 160 pages of school snack regulations") and "More Americans Delaying Retirement," you get a clearer picture. This isn't a Second Amendment package, it's a Kenyan Muslim Perfidy package: the usurper is coming for your guns and your potato chips!

In agenda-setting terms, the first thing that comes to mind is issue salience. The brain is a busy place; it has a limited carrying capacity for issues, and -- quite reasonably -- we take a lot of cues from what we read and see about which issues to pay attention to and how to rate them. At the first level of agenda-setting, where the media's ranking of issues inspires a public ranking of those issues, Obama's devilry has been back and forth with Iranian Peril and Missing Moms all day.
Read more »