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- Volume 3, Issue 2, 2019
The Agenda Setting Journal - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2019
Volume 3, Issue 2, 2019
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Consensus without focus
Author(s): Jill A. Edy and Patrick C. Meirickpp.: 108–122 (15)More LessAbstractGenerating public consensus on issue priorities is one of the most important functions of news agenda setting. However, the nature of that consensus is not well understood. Agenda setting might build a public consensus focused on a limited set of priorities, but it also has potential to build a consensus that broadens the public’s issue agenda by generating shared concerns about problems beyond the bounds of personal experience. Evidence shows that from 1968–2010, broadcast news’ agenda-setting effect tended to broaden the public agenda rather than focus it. This tendency of news agenda setting to broaden the public agenda is not affected by the news agenda’s breadth or by which issues dominate the news, although issue-level agenda setting effects may, under some circumstances, focus the public agenda. If broadcast news does not focus the public agenda, it is unlikely a focused agenda will be generated by a more fragmented media ecology.
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Diffusion as a future perspective of agenda setting
Author(s): Hans-Bernd Brosius, Mario Haim and Gabriel Weimannpp.: 123–138 (16)More LessAbstractThe changing media environment has led to fragmentation of both media and audiences and thus to new flows of news items across channels and time. It has become challenging to clearly distinguish public and media agendas and their relationships. Our traditional way of counting single news items to determine an issue’s importance does not apply online. Articles are not scheduled into fixed publication cycles, they are moved, updated, or shared. Moreover, the variety of channels through which users encounter news loosens the connection between news items and their original source. We suggest “diffusion” as a concept to identify agenda-setting effects. News items are assigned different degrees of relevance by users clicking, liking, or sharing it. In turn, such relevance can affect others in assigning prominence to news items. The diffusion process results in a shared agenda which is constantly modified and updated by the entire community of online actors.
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Agendamelding
Author(s): Milad Minooiepp.: 139–164 (26)More LessAbstractThe present study tests the agendamelding theory, which posits that public agenda is the result of a process whereby audiences “meld” agendas from various media along with their personal agenda to form a coherent picture of society. To that end, the contributions of the traditional media agenda, the social media agenda, and the personal agenda of Iranian audiences to their public agenda are independently measured and compared against values predicted by theory. The findings indicate a strong social media agenda-setting effect in Iran (ρ = .83, p < .05) and a weak, non-significant traditional media agenda-setting effect (ρ = .28, p = .48). On average, actual contributions closely mirror values predicted by theory, suggesting that agendamelding is a viable theory for studying the audience-media relationship.
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Consensus building on trust in government
Author(s): Vanessa De Macedo Higgins Joyce and Zahra Khanipp.: 165–185 (21)More LessAbstractThis study contrasts the effects of news media to those of neighborhood in building consensus regarding trust in government. Consensus building is a consequence of agenda setting at a societal level. It conducts a secondary data analysis from an online survey with a panel of 983 older Texans from November/December 2015. We found significant correlation between trust and following the news, accessing TV news, using digital media, online news and newspapers. We found that news media in general and online news increased consensus both within education and location; radio and television increased consensus for education and digital media for income. Our spatial auto-correlation test found a minimal tendency of similar values of trust to be clustered. We cannot infer that neighborhood contributes in the formation of trust. We found evidence, in a case study of older Texans, that the news media may bring us closer together than next-door neighbors
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Attention to issues and facts
Author(s): Chris J. Vargo and Toby Hopppp.: 186–207 (22)More LessAbstractNeed for orientation (NFO) has long been accepted as an antecedent to agenda-setting effects. This study assessed whether NFO can go further to explain a specific behavior, why individuals share political news on Facebook. A new method is introduced that combines survey data with users’ Facebook accounts and their actual Facebook posts to reveal the historical news sharing behaviors of 741 U.S. citizens. Computer-assisted content analysis is employed to analyze nearly a million messages for the presence of political news content. Results suggest that a key component found in need for orientation – attention to relevant issues and facts – predicts observed political news sharing on Facebook. Other demographics such as age and gender also predict news sharing behavior. In all, the model employed here significantly predicts news sharing while commonly regarded antecedents to political sharing, including news consumption and political interest, fail to do so.
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Redirecting the agenda
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Disruptor-in-chief?
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