Question 9

The Onion news clip is about Oprah and the Fox news clip is about Whipped lighting show types of gatekeeping and agenda-setting functions. Gatekeeping is the process in which media corporations filter information before it is told to the public, whereas agenda-setting is how a media corporation makes their viewers think based off of what types of stories they show. Baym argued that people, especially the younger demographic, have stopped watching what we think of as the “normal” news. They have moved towards comedy news, for example The Daily Show with John Stewart because it “resembles much of the mainstream news media” (264) without the seriousness. In The Onion video, they are making fun of Oprah’s big give always (a show where she gives away presents to the audience) by giving the audience a one way plane ticket to Chicago where they can be buried in Oprah’s tomb and how news corporations actually televise it as news when in reality, it is completely worthless for people to know. It is the agenda-setting theory that leads them to do so because they know that is what their viewers want to see. This is similar to the Fox news clip where they are discussing an alcoholic whipped cream and comparing it to Four LoKo, a very controversial alcoholic drink. In both cases, the news corporations filter and only tell the viewers what the corporations wants them to know (i.e., they are gatekeeping in order make the viewer agree with their bias on a certain news story).