The Agenda Setting Journal - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2017

In choosing and displaying news, editors, newsroom staff, and broadcasters play an important part in shaping political reality. Readers learn not only about a given issue, but also how much importance to attach to that issue from the amount of information in a news story and its position. In reflecting what candidates are saying during a campaign, the mass media may well determine the important issues – that is, the media may set the "agenda" of the campaign.

Agenda-setting research has been performed for more than four decades, both in traditional and online media, and the tools employed for this task have been very much accepted by media researchers around the world. Nevertheless, analysis of the public agenda in new media, particularly across social networks, requires re-thinking these same tools, which creates a series of methodological and theoretical challenges. The present paper seeks to illuminate these challenges and propose possible solutions for some of them.

This study investigated whether English-language news media, which increased coverage of two large, well known private universities in Japan, increased their salience in the minds of international residents in Japan. Based on the agenda-setting theory of media influence, the authors made use of university enrollment trends as an indicator of public salience and found that the English-language media contributed to the growing prestige of the universities among the non-Japanese population. Academic reality in Japan underwent little change during that period with the top ranking government-funded universities, whose coverage in the English-language media did not increase, remained more prestigious within the local context, as is evident from local university rankings. This study also demonstrates that the media can exert an agenda-setting influence on institutions of higher learning, a domain that has not been traditionally investigated. The study also addresses the influences of the international, English-language press in the context of a non-English speaking country, Japan, and how the, “need for orientation” (NFO), might have been a factor.

Using agenda-setting theory, this study explores the effects of news sources on public opinion on the issue of the same-sex marriage over 10 years. It examines immediate substantive salience, immediate affective salience, cumulative substantive salience and cumulative affective salience of the news sources cited in news articles from The New York Times from 2003 to 2013 and compares the coverage to public opinion polls. Four findings merit notice. First, news sources with a clear standpoint had counter effects on public opinion. Second, the salience of news sources is as influential as the affective attribute salience of news sources on public opinion. Official sources had the power to influence public opinion the most. Thirdly, the influence of the media is stronger than the influence of news sources on influencing public opinion. Fourth, LGBTQ sources were the least used sources in the same-sex marriage coverage.