Political Agenda Setting in the Hybrid Media System: Why Legacy Media Still Matter a Great Deal

Abstract

This article examines the roles of the media in the process of political agenda setting. There is a long tradition of studies on this topic, but they have mostly focused on legacy news media, thus overlooking the role of other actors and the complex hybrid dynamics that characterize contemporary political communication. In contrast, through an in-depth case study using mixed-methods and multiplatform data, this article provides a detailed analysis of the roles and interactions between different types of media and how they were used by political and advocacy elites. It explores what happened in the different parts of the system, and thus the paths to attention that led to setting this issue in the political and media agendas. The analysis of the case, a partial policy reversal in the United Kingdom provoked by an immigration scandal known as the “Windrush scandal” reveals that the issue was pushed into the agenda by a campaign assemblage of investigative journalism, political and advocacy elites, and digitally enabled leaders. The legacy news media came late but were crucial. They greatly amplified the salience of the issue and, once in “storm mode,” they were key for sustaining attention and pressure, eventually compelling the government to respond. It shows that they often remain at the core of the “national conversation” and certainly in the eye of a media storm. In the contemporary context, characterized by fierce battles for attention, shortening attention spans and fractured audiences, this is key and has important implications for agenda setting and beyond.

Traditional and Online Media: Relationship between Media Preference, Credibility Perceptions , Predispositions, and European Identity

“…Another reason for this positive effect can be explained by research on intermedia agenda-setting and legacy media literature, which shows traditional and online media entities are "homogenous", and the legacy media is still highly influential in driving online content (Harder et al, 2017, p. 276;Langer & Gruber, 2020). This implies that if the traditional media choses to cover the EU positively, it is likely that similar content permeates the internet.…”

“…By contrast, the theory of intermedia agenda-setting and the dominance of legacy media dictate that media agendas tend to be highly homogeneous and reciprocal (Curran, 2012;Vargo & Guo, 2017). This implies that the intrinsic differences between online, especially websites, and traditional media tend not to matter especially, when the legacy media still matters (Langer & Gruber, 2020), and the content between the two essentially remains the same. However, the influence of legacy media may not be as strong on social network sites where user-generated content defines the contours and content of legacy media's landscape (Ismail et al, 2019, p. 169).…”

Estrategias comunicativas en Twitter y portales institucionales durante la segunda ola de Covid-19: análisis de los gobiernos de Alemania, España, Portugal y Reino Unido

“…La coyuntura actual provocada por la COVID-19 ha hecho que la comunicación se revele como una herramienta esencial para la gestión de la crisis auspiciada por la pandemia. Los gobiernos han tenido que diversificar sus estrategias comunicativas para adaptarlas no solo atendiendo a los medios de comunicación tradicionales (Barroso Simao et al, 2016), que han visto alterado su monopolio del mensaje informativo (Langer y Gruber, 2021), sino también elaborando información para herramientas como las webs y las redes sociales, que permiten alcanzar al ciudadano sin mediación alguna (Kreiss y McGregor, 2018). También necesitan de un dominio de códigos comunicativos nuevos y diversos para cada uno de ellos, obligan a mantener una actitud activa de escucha y respuesta al ciudadano, y exigen un seguimiento y control del mensaje para gestionar bulos y fake news (Bennett y Livingstone, 2018), que pueden propiciar otras crisis que van más allá de la sanitaria.…”

COVID-19 has led to a global increase in web searches for bats: a risk for conservation ?

“…In this study we distinguished between traditional media, characterized by a top-down information flow, from media companies to news consumers, and the "new" media, like social media, characterized by a crowdsourced propagation of news. This classification is widely adopted in the social sciences, as the two media systems coexist and interact, but have minor overlap [17] .…”