Between

Inter-media Social Media

Agenda Setting and Traditional Media
Effects
Inter-media Agenda Setting

• This idea was presented by Danielian & Reese in 1989.

• Explain that “ elite media” has an influence in agenda

setting for other media groups or small media groups. 
McCombs and Bell (1996) noted that :
News organizations affect one another's agendas. For that
journalists live in "an ambiguous social world" so that they will
"rely on one another for confirmation and as a source of ideas“.

Later in 2011 McCombs and Funk concluded in "Shaping the

Agenda of Local Daily Newspapers: A Methodology Merging the
Agenda Setting and Community Structure Perspectives“ , that
inter-media agenda setting is a new path of the future agenda
setting research, which presented a detail explanation of the
balance between local and national influence on the issue
agenda of local daily newspapers.

Popular daily publications such as The New York Times and The

Washington Post are "agenda setters" within the United States
Media. These publications have a direct effect on local newspapers
and television networks that are viewed on a less elite scale.
 According to McCombs (2004) one of the critical factors is
“the interactions and influence of the various mass media on
each other”. This interplay among different media outlets thus
constitute the inter-media agenda-setting effects.

 Website networks favor other websites that tend to have a

higher viewing. This type of relationship is known as Power
Law which allows the media to have a stronger effect on
agenda setting. “

In general, inter-media agenda-setting research is concerned

with measuring the extent to which news content transfers
between various media.
Kushin (2010) found some evidence of bi-directional
influence of agenda setting between the two media.

NO.1 NO.2

The direction of The opposite direction

influence predominantly of influence from the
between the two media news media to social
from social media to the media.
news media.
Measuring media salience:
There are three core elements to measure media salience:
attention, prominence and valence.
• Attention is usually evaluated by the complete volume of
stories or space dedicated to topics in the media.
• Prominence means that the importance of issues is
communicated through the positioning of a story within a
media text.
• valence refers to affective elements of news

As for inter-media agenda setting research, the attention

approach “has been valuable for measuring salience
Vliegenthart and Walgrave (2008) pointed out
three main differences:

Agenda Setting vs. Inter-media agenda setting

1) Agenda setting theory 1) while inter-media agenda

involves “individuals” and setting deals with
“personal priorities”. “institutions/organizations”.

2) while it is a “behavioral
2) It is “attitudinal” when process” when one medium
media set the public transfer salience to another.
agenda for individuals.
3) However, inter-media agenda
3) Agenda setting usually is setting is “a deliberate action
“an unconscious process”
(p. 861).
Guo and Vargo (2015) found that traditional news media still
set the public agenda by determining the public’s
identification of a political candidate with the entire networks
of issues in the 2012 U.S. presidential election.  

similarly, suggested that the online version of traditional

media keeps the power of first-level agenda setting even
though a significant difference between the slant of traditional
news and the Twitter sentiment appeared.

Scholars argued that mainstream media still affect the salience

of issues discussed on computer-mediated platforms such as
blogs.
Inter-media agenda setting theory indicates
that salience can transfer from one
medium to another.
Reasons of Transferring salience :
 Firstly, Dearing and Rogers (1996) argued that when news professionals
did not have much contact directly with their audience, they turned to
learn an issue’s priority from other news media.

 Secondly, when other media copy a medium’s decision to consider an

issue as newsworthy and cover it, the first medium’s news selecting
decision is validated indirectly. That is to say, inter-media agenda setting
effect helps “uphold the news norms within the journalistic community”
(Vliegenthart & Walgrave, 2008, p. 860).

 Thirdly, due to the competitive environment of media markets, one

medium is likely to follow peer media’s decision when the decision has
been proven to be popular and beneficial (Mathes & Pfetsch, 1991).
 Auto Correlation

Time 1 Time 2
Social Media Social Media
Cr
os tion
sL e la
ag rr
ge
d Co
Co
ged rre Synchronous
g lati correlation
s La on
o s
Cr

Time 1 Time 1
Traditional Media Traditional Media
Auto Correlation
Time Lag
The time frame is one of the most essential factors when testing
agenda setting effect (Wanta & Hu, 1994). According to Winter and
Eyal (1981), generally speaking, “the optimal effect span” is four to
six weeks . But scholars have also noticed that the finest time lag
varied according to different types of media. They found different
time lag for different media:
 For national network newscast is one week
 For local newscast is two weeks,
 For regional newspaper is three weeks.
 The longest is eight weeks for national news magazines.

The time frame is another consideration when conducting agenda

setting studies. According to Lee (2005) when examining the inter-
media agenda setting effect between the Internet and newspapers,
four time periods had stronger evidence than two time periods.
Scholarships
Study # 01
Inter-media Agenda Setting in the Social Media age: How Traditional
Players Dominate the News Agenda in Election Times. (2017)

• Discuss three assumptions that cannot be applied to online and

social media unconditionally: one, that media agendas should be
measured on an issue level; two, that fixed time lags suffice to
understand overlap in media content; and three, that media can be
considered homogeneous entities.

• Conclude that news dissemination processes are mainly aligned with

media platforms’ (lack of) publication schemes. News Web sites and
Twitter are both comparatively fast to carry news stories, attesting
their prominent agenda-setting role. Television news and
newspapers, have fewer occasions to publish and are consequently
relatively slow to cover news. Their ability to set other media
platforms’ agenda is therefore limited. Speed (or immediacy) is a key
factor to estimate media platforms’ agenda-setting capacities.
Study #02
Characterizing Political Talk on Twitter: A Comparison Between Public
Agenda, Media Agendas, and the Twitter Agenda with Regard to Topics
and Dynamics (2019)

• Compare this Twitter agenda with the public agenda

measured by a representative survey and the agendas of
newspapers and television news programs captured by
content analysis. Conclude that Twitter agenda had little
relationship with the public agenda.

• Political talk on Twitter was somewhat stronger connected

with mass media coverage, although following channel-
specific patterns most likely determined by the attention,
interests, and motivations of Twitter users.
Study #03
Agenda-setting theory and the new media (2017)
Proposed the new directions and types of agendas and
relationships between them as well as new levels of agenda-
setting.
Network agenda setting model, also referred to as the third
level of agenda-setting, was proposed by McCombs and his co-
workers in the publication of 2014. It assumes that the media
agenda can transfer into the public agenda not only the
salience of issues and their attributes, but also the sets of
attributes (bundles), sets of related attributes and issues, or
bundles of several issues.
so
The more frequently news media report on one or two objects
or features at the same time, the greater the chance that the
link will also become fixed in the receivers’ minds.
 Agenda-melding the mutual impact of media agendas, the
mixing of agendas and mutual complementation of their
content contributes to the strengthening of mainstream
media coverage and increasing its coherence, although it is
important to note that the inter-media agenda-setting process
is probably more intense in relation to the agenda of topics
and less intense with respect to the set of attributes.

 Real world agenda the scale of “agenda cutting” and omitting

important issues by news media. A wider visibility of the real
world in the media enables the media to exert influence on a
greater number of issues; however, account should also be
taken of the fact that social media signal the presence of
problems which are “cut out” by traditional media and in this
context, the impact of traditional media on public opinion is
weaker.