"Labor law. What labor law?" The other day I was attending the China 2007 Trends conference of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai (Amcham) when it issue of the labor law came up - be it rather marginally. My neighbor, an American journalist, seemed genuinely oblivious to one the debates that had been in the past year pretty high on the agenda. Well, at least my agenda.
Figuring out what is on the agenda, let alone set that agenda, has become an arduous job, not only for journalists, but also for different kinds of decision-makers. When you have to get tons of dead fish out of your lake or the tap water turns green, the world gives you at most a few seconds of their attention, mainly because disasters like this turn out to be rather photogenic. It only seems to make the people in those regions worried, while the rest of China or the world shrugs it off.
I grew up with a firm belief that we were at the brink of an atomic disaster, brought to us by the Cold War, including two presidents who were tampering with nucleair buttons that could wipe us away in seconds. That was of course a scary prospect, but it gave the Western world also for decades a way to frame the information they had to digest. Africa and Latin-America were still on the media-agenda, not because those continents were considered to be that important, but they had their roles in this bigger game, called the Cold War.
Since the beginning of the 1990s that way of framing our way of looking at the world has disappeared, the common agenda was lost. Russian president Putin tried to revive recently the old days by threathening to point his rockets on Europe., but his sentimental journey into the past was not really taken that serious. Efforts by the US Administration to rally support for the war against terrorism after 9/11 failed miserably, first in getting international support and then in keeping domestic support.
The ongoing media revolution has not increased the chances of getting all noses in the same direction, to put it mildly. First, the number of TV-stations exploded and diverted the attention from the seven, eight or ten o'clock news - depending in what country you would watch the news. After that explosion of new TV-stations, the internet proliferated and is turning around the old media models in an even more dramatic way. With the melting authority of the traditional media, the ability of setting any agenda needs new skills that are still heavily under construction.
You might still get a bit of the media together if your name is Hu Jintao or Paris Hilton, but for smaller events it just does not help to call only some friendly journalists. They will just not come.
For everybody who has an agenda, governments, NGO's, universities, companies and other players in society, getting a decent interest in that agenda will ask for new talents.
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