We all watch news on TV or read newspapers for the purpose of being informed about what is happening on the world. We rely on mass media for that and think that stories the stories that they make as news are the most important. That is to say that mass media concentrates on some news and forgets on some other ones or give them less importance. Two theories are involved in that. The first one is agenda setting theory which states that media gives us what to think about rather than what to think and that by focusing on some events and disregarding others. And the second one which is Walter Lippmann’s news distortion theory which is a consequence of the first one and which states that by focusing on some news, media gives us a pseudo view of the world and he calls that a pseudo-environment. In my paper, I will focus on agenda setting theory, give concrete examples about how this theory is applied and I will also show the correlation between those two theories and how they are interleaved.

Agenda-setting is the dynamic process "in which changes in media coverage lead to or cause subsequent changes in problem awareness of issues" (Brosius & Kepplinger, 1990, p. 190; Lang & Lang, 1981). That is to say that Agenda setting theory is the theory that mass-news media have a large influence on audiences by their choice of what stories to consider newsworthy and how much prominence and space to give them and that is the job of gatekeepers. The main postulate of this theory is salience transfer which is the ability of the mass media to transfer issues of importance from their agendas to public and audience’s agendas. A prove for that is the one that people attribute importance to a specific news according to how much this news is exposed.

An example for this theory is the fact that there was a perceptible difference between the coverage on the tsunami that hit South-East Asia in December 2004 and the earthquake that hit Pakistan in October 2005. The tsunami received far