The Media’s Conditional Agenda-Setting Power: How Baselines and Spikes of Issue Salience Affect Likelihood and Strength of Agenda-Setting

Abstract

Whether agenda-setting effects occur and how strong they are appear to be strongly context-dependent. The baseline public and media salience of an issue and the extent of abrupt changes in salience have been mentioned as potential contingent conditions, but without any empirical follow-ups. First, this study demonstrates how agenda-setting effects unfold on a day-to-day basis, finding that only one fourth of the results ( p < .05) are in line with the original agenda-setting hypothesis. Second, it tests how (a) the baseline intensity of public and media salience and (b) strong temporary increases (“spikes”) in public and media salience impact the likelihood and strength of agenda-setting effects. Higher baseline public salience and stronger spikes in media salience systematically influence the likelihood and strength of agenda-setting effects. Agenda-setting scholars should systematically check, report, and possibly control for baseline intensity and spike momentum of media and public salience, which is also easy to implement.

Do Terrorists Get the Attention They Want?

“…These thresholds are based on Balcells and Torrats-Espinosa (2018) and acknowledge that it may take up to 24 hours until even highly salient news diffuses throughout the population ( Rogers 2000 ); at the same time, effects may decrease and eventually disappear. Our thresholds are also largely in line with Geiß (2019) , who finds that public responses to media impulses tend to peak around seven days, with television news wearing out more quickly. We analyze symmetric samples, and we disregard those who were interviewed before/after the specific thresholds.…”

“…Using the proposed research design, future research can address key questions such as how the intensity of coverage on one issue is influenced by the intensity of coverage on other issues and whether attention to terrorism contributes to the rise and fall of a specific topic. Given the media reporting of prominent attacks, this research also contributes to the long-lasting debate around the extent to which media salience changes first and public salience follows suit (e.g., Brosius and Kepplinger 1995 ; Geiß 2019 ).…”

“…Terrorist attacks possess some of the main attributes of such killer issues, such as threatening personal consequences, symbolic value, and change in knowledge ( Brosius and Kepplinger 1995 ). Simultaneously, by producing an immediate shock in media attention, terrorism has a greater agenda-setting potential compared with issues that attract less media attention ( Geiß 2019 ). By focusing on the extent to which audiences view terrorism as an important issue in the aftermath of an attack, we thus also contribute to research on agenda-setting ( Brosius and Kepplinger 1995 ; Geiß 2019 ) and its consequences for policymaking ( Hetherington and Suhay 2011 ; Bove, Böhmelt, and Nussio 2020 ; Helbling and Meierrieks 2020b ).…”

Rhetorical Presupposition as Counteraction to Manipulation in Media Discourse

“…Under conditions of digital communication getting increasingly more fragmented, correctness and truthfulness of information have become subject of heated debates. Thus, the problem of distortion and misinformation is related not only to information itself being truthful, but to its discursive construction as well (Geiß, 2019;Hameleers, Minihold, 2020).…”

Linking Media Content and Survey Data in a Dynamic and Digital Media Environment – Mobile Longitudinal Linkage Analysis

“…However, methods and designs need to adapt to a media environment, in which the agenda-setting function of mass media seems to shrink and is heavily dependent on the circumstances, e.g. the salience of an issue or temporal context (Geiß 2019).…”