Agenda-Setting With Satire: How Political Satire Increased TTIP’s Saliency on the Public, Media, and Political Agenda

Abstract

Agenda-setting has mostly been investigated as the cognitive process set in motion by the salience of political issues in the traditional news media. The question, though, remained whether political entertainment shows-political satire, specifically-can also set the agenda. The current study investigates whether two episodes of Dutch satire show Zondag met Lubach (ZML) about the European Union-United States trade agreement Transatlantic Trade Investment and Partnership (TTIP) have triggered first-level agendasetting effects. For that purpose, three studies have been conducted to investigate the threestep agenda-setting process (i.e., learning, understanding, acting) from saliency in satire to saliency on the public agenda, but also on the media and political agenda. Study 1: A twowave panel survey shows that consumption of the satire show positively affected knowledge acquisition about TTIP, which is the first step in the cognitive process underlying agendasetting. Study 2: A randomized experiment demonstrated that exposure to ZML increased the perceived understanding of TTIP, which subsequently had a positive impact on the saliency of TTIP on the public agenda. Study 3: Longitudinal time-series data provide evidence that the saliency of TTIP on the public agenda-short term-and on the political agenda-long term-were positively affected by the ZML satire episodes. The study, altogether, demonstrates satire's ability to set the agenda of both the individual and aggregate level and emphasizes the persistent relevance of agenda-setting theory in today's high-choice media environment.

Comparing user-content interactivity and audience diversity across news and satire: differences in online engagement between satire, regular news and partisan news

“…Moreover, different underlying mechanisms have been identified through which satire may cause engagement -potentially also in the form of user-content interactivity: Satire might stimulate this via an affective path by evoking negative emotions (Chen, Gan, & Sun, 2017;Lee & Kwak, 2014) as well as via a cognitive path due to an increased sense of efficacy (Hoffman & Thomson, 2009;Hoffman & Young, 2011). Moreover, satire has the ability to make topics be perceived as relatively important Boukes, 2019a) and, thereby, stimulate participation through relatively undemanding acts of the citizenry . Both the evoked laugh as well as the narrative engagement caused by a piece of satire (Nabi, Moyer-Gusé, & Byrne, 2007) may eventually motivate its audience to "reward" its producers with a like or comment and the willingness to share it within their social networks (Yang & Jiang, 2015).…”

Perceived agenda-setting effect in international context: Impact of media coverage on American audience’s perception of China

“…However, agendasetting in international context, especially at the individual level, is scarcely observed (Guo, 2017). Recent individual-level agenda-setting studies focused either on specific media contents such as political satire (Boukes, 2019), or politicians' role in moderating political agenda-setting through media (Zoizner et al, 2017).…”

“…Few studies examined how media agenda affects public agenda at the individual level (Boukes, 2019;Guo, 2017). When the agenda-setting effect is considered, the salience of the issue, issue attributes or relationship between the issue attributes are measured to represent the aggregated public agenda.…”

Journalistinen uutissatiiri hybridinä genrenä - Noin viikon uutisten ja Uutisraportin tekijöiden itseymmärrys ja käsitteellinen rajatyö

“…Baym 2005;Faina 2013;Hersey 2013). Ajoittain satiiriohjelmat voivat jopa itse nostaa julkiselle agendalle monimutkaisia asiakokonaisuuksia kuten TTIP-sopimuksen tai Yhdysvaltain vaalirahoitusjärjestelmän (Boukes 2018). Silti journalistiseen uutissatiiriin on syytä suhtautua myös kriittisesti.…”