Читать книгу Setting the Agenda - Maxwell McCombs - Страница 25

For most of the 1990s and 2000s, attention to the agenda-setting effects of online media centred on how news websites, blogs, bulletin boards, candidate websites, and search engines influenced – or were influenced by – traditional media, a phenomenon commonly referred to as ‘intermedia agenda setting’. In general, the evidence showed a two-way relationship between mainstream media and online media, where both agendas mutually reinforced each other.⁴⁰ With the arrival of social media platforms and new partisan outlets in the mid 2000s, these initial findings about the reciprocity of issue agendas largely replicated.⁴¹

In comparison to intermedia agenda-setting, fewer studies have documented the effect of online media agendas on the public agenda. Nevertheless, an initial overview of this research found strong support to the basic agenda-setting hypothesis.⁴² For example, an analysis of candidate websites during the 2010 US Senate election found they were successful at influencing the salience of seven issues among Indianapolis voters.⁴³ Turning to online news media, the increased salience for an array of national issues among viewers of CNN online and for foreign affairs among participants in an experiment who viewed the New York Times online were noted above.⁴⁴ In South Korea, two alternative online news services, OhmyNews and PRESSian influenced the salience among the public of the deaths of two schoolgirls by a US military vehicle, an issue that resulted in massive anti-US protests.⁴⁵ The homogeneity of issue agendas between online and traditional media certainly contributes to the strong influence of digital channels on the public’s priorities, a topic that we will discuss shortly.⁴⁶

With the rise of social media over the last decades, researchers have focused on the role played by platforms such as Facebook and Twitter on influencing the public agenda. A study conducted in Spain examined whether news consumption through Facebook was associated with having an individualized agenda that diverged from the aggregated public agenda of most important problems.⁴⁷ By combining survey and web-tracking data, the authors found that the more an individual uses Facebook as a gateway for news, the less likely she will mention the top two issues in the public agenda, which at the time were unemployment and corruption. While statistically significant, the effect was small. Specifically, those who did not use Facebook for news had a 47 per cent probability of mentioning unemployment or corruption as the most important issues. This probability decreased to 35 per cent for the average Facebook user. Nevertheless, when compared to the total list of important issues mentioned by survey respondents, the influence of Facebook was not statistically significant.

Another study⁴⁸ analysed the reciprocal influence of tweets sent over two years by 36 news media and different random samples of users in the United States. First, the correlation in issue attention between media outlets and the different groups of users (namely, ‘attentive’ public, general public, Democratic supporters, and Republican supporters) varied from +0.55 to +0.79. These correlations suggest moderate to strong relationships between issues agendas. Second, and most importantly, the time-series analyses allowed to establish whether these correlations stem from the ability of the media to set the public agenda on Twitter, or, conversely, resulted from public discussions influencing the subsequent news agenda. The results were rather consistent:

Notably, in each case, the power of shifts in media attention to predict subsequent shifts in attention among all audiences is greater than the reverse, confirming that media outlets play a crucial role in leading political attention.⁴⁹

In general, then, the available studies confirm that the transfer of salience from the media agenda to the public agenda takes place not only with traditional news outlets, but also with new interactive, digital platforms.⁵⁰ That is, when people use media, the potential of that media’s content to set the agenda of public concerns remains.