The Agenda Setting Journal - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2021

Using the network analysis method, the third level of the agenda-setting proposes that the associations between the elements on the media agenda are transferred to the public agenda. Focusing on five health issues in Turkey, this paper proposes a new perspective to third level researches. A media agenda content analysis was conducted on 13 nationwide and five local newspapers for six months and at the end of it, a public agenda survey on 400 people was conducted in Aydın, a city in Turkey. Findings show that there is a significant similarity between all the diseases chosen as a sample and taken from the newspapers and the public agenda network. The high correlation has been ranked in descending areas as: AIDS, cancer, obesity, diabetes and blood pressure. The concepts of “need for orientation” and “obtrusive and unobtrusive issues” may serve as explanations for these findings.

This paper analyzes the role of social media in electoral processes and contemporary political life. We analyze Costa Rica’s 2018 presidential election from an agenda-setting perspective, studying the media, the political and the public agendas, and their relationships. We explore whether social media, Facebook specifically, can convey an agenda-setting effect; if social media public agenda differs from the traditional MIP public agenda; and what agenda-setting methodologies can benefit from new approaches in the social media context. The study revealed that social media agendas are complex and dynamic and, in this case, did not present an agenda-setting effect. We not only found that the social media public agenda does not correlate with the conventional MIP public agenda, but that neither does the media online agenda and the media’s agenda on Facebook. Our exploration of more contemporary methods like big data, social network analysis (SNA), and social media mining point to them as necessary complements to the traditional methodological proposal of agenda-setting theory which have become insufficient to explain the current media environment.

This study systematically reviewed empirical intermedia agenda setting (IAS) research published between 1997 and 2019, in terms of the level of agenda-setting, the methodologies – including the coding strategies and time-series analytical techniques – the types of media, and the flow of IAS effects. According to our results, previous IAS studies exhibited the following trends: (1) an overwhelming majority of the IAS studies was anchored by the first agenda-setting level, whilst examinations of the NAS model and multiple levels have increased in recent years; (2) excessive IAS studies performed content analyses, (3) applied manual coding strategies, (4) conducted cross-lagged correlation analyses to examine time-series effects, (5) and focused on newspapers and Twitter; (6) most IAS research confirmed the flow from one traditional media to another traditional media, whereas more recent studies also revealed the flow from traditional to emerging media, and their reciprocal relationship; (7) the majority of IAS studies confirmed the elite-to-non-elite flow of IAS effects. Based on these findings, this study encourages futures IAS researchers to attach more importance to (1) contextual diversity, (2) balanced examinations of each agenda-setting level, (3) methodological innovations, (4) technological pluralism, and (5) providing more evidence for the flow of IAS effects across different types of media.

Despite an abundance of research dedicated to the first level agenda setting process in political elections, there is a considerable gap within the literature regarding how the amount of media coverage granted to minority candidates – people of color and women – influence their salience in public opinion. The current study seeks to address this gap by analyzing the effects of online coverage of minority candidates and their subsequent performance in national polling data from June 1, 2019 to November 20, 2019. The present study utilizes a time-series analysis to compare three information formats: Twitter accounts of major media organizations, online web mentions of candidates from these organizations, and the candidates’ own Twitter presence. The presented findings illustrate important relationships – specifically, where candidates of color were able to set their own agenda through their Twitter accounts as opposed to coverage that they received from the media.