Networked agenda flow between elite U.S. newspapers and Twitter: A case study of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement

Abstract

The rise of social media has engendered several debates over traditional media’s agenda-setting power. This study analyzes 4189 newspaper articles and over 1.23 million tweets about the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement from the perspective of network intermedia agenda-setting (IAS). The findings show that both platforms attach significance to the substantive attributes of policing, violence, and systemic racism. Notably, while the newspapers’ overall agenda had a supportive tone, Twitter used a condemning tone. Moreover, the newspapers were more influential in terms of IAS, particularly in setting political and cultural attribute agendas. No IAS effects were found on the affective attributes. Furthermore, the IAS effects on the combined substantive and affective attributes have shrunk significantly. The newspapers were more influential in terms of the bundled substantive attribute agendas as well. This study advances agenda-setting research by examining multiple network agenda dimensions and introducing an affective attribute scale. These are intended to help understand which media could exert a stronger influence on what attribute agendas and how.

Gun Control Agendas in Networked Digital Environment: An Intermedia Comparison Between News Outlets, Activism Media, and Ephemeral Websites

“…Furthermore, the use of computational content analysis (i.e., STM) enhances the methodological toolkit for intermedia agenda-setting research. While previous research has employed predefined content analytic schemes to identify agenda salience among different media types (e.g., Hunt & Gruszczynski, 2021), recent studies have begun to utilize inductive approaches such as topic modeling, especially for large-scale data (e.g., Su, 2023). This study expands on these efforts by demonstrating the utility of STM as an analytic framework to inductively identify agendas and statistically compare their intermedia salience.…”

“…It found, although traditional media had leading effects, social media also influenced on gaining public attention. Su (2023) employed a computational approach to investigate network agendas, elite U.S. newspapers, and Twitter users set for the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and used Granger causality to test the intermedia agenda-setting effects. The study found that both platforms had similar agendas yet with different narrative tones, and there was a significant reciprocity between the mainstream media and social media, even though the former had a more substantial impact on the latter.…”

Intermedia Attribute Agenda Setting Between the U.S. Mainstream Newspapers and Twitter: A Two-Study Analysis of the Paradigm and Driving Forces of the Agenda Flow

“…The original agenda-setting theory hypothesizes the transfer of issue salience from the media toward the public, which is termed the first-level agenda setting (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). Subsequent researchers proposed the concept of attribute agenda setting as its second level, gauging more nuanced effects (e.g., Guo & Vargo, 2020; Kiousis et al, 1999; Lopez-Escobar et al, 1998; McCombs et al, 1997; Su, 2022). The “issue” of the first level refers to an object or a set of objects, while the “attribute” of the second level represents the “characteristics and properties that fill out the picture of each object” (McCombs et al, 1997, p. 704).…”

“…While copious studies have been dedicated to examining Twitter’s role through the lens of IAS and has lent rich credence about the interaction paradigm between Twitter and legacy outlets (Conway et al, 2022; Valenzuela et al, 2017), many of them were only committed to describing the directionality of the agenda flow without adequately delving into the underlying societal, cultural, and organizational forces that shape the phenomena per se. Bearing in mind the omission of qualitative works, researchers have called for in-depth interviews to reveal nuances in the agenda-setting effects (e.g., Su, 2022). Therefore, departing from Study 1, we interview American newspaper journalists to provide evidence about the latent factors that shape the IAS effects in Study 2.…”

“…Since the germinal Chapel Hill study (McCombs & Shaw, 1972), scholars have empirically investigated the agenda-setting effects using various cases, which included but were not limited to elections, protests, climate issues, and health crises (e.g., Guo & Vargo, 2020; Su, 2022; Wonneberger & Vliegenthart, 2021). Admittedly, these studies have well painted a picture of the direction of agenda flows, whereas the factors that have driven the agenda flow and empowered the stronger agenda setter have yet to be analyzed.…”