When it comes to agenda-setting, it’s out with the old, in with the new media, researchers say.
几十年来,, 两家美国传统媒体巨头, 《博彩app推荐》 and The Washington Post, have had the biggest influence in setting the agenda for other news outlets. Journalists and bloggers around the country took their cues from the two outlets, creating a trickle-down effect in which content spread from these legacy media leaders toward smaller and newer publications.
However, this tradition no longer stands, according to a 新论文 led by CU Boulder, involving Boston University and recently published in the 新闻 & 大众传播季刊.
“We really wanted to test this idea that elite media still control what’s in the news,克里斯·瓦戈说, lead author and assistant professor of advertising, 公共关系和媒体设计, specializing in big data and analytics at CU Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information. “We suspected that this changed and I think our results really show that.”
Vargo和合著者郭磊说, an assistant professor of emerging media studies at Boston University, 看看大范围的媒体, 分析2,760 news websites and 48 million articles.
使用 Global Database of 事件, Language and Tone, an open-source initiative created at Georgetown University to monitor news outlets, Vargo and Guo identified individual topics that news sites covered, 以及主题之间的关联. The researchers grouped the data by media type, including articles from 《博彩app推荐》, The Washington Post and other traditional media (newspapers, 电视及电台频道), 党派新闻网站, non-党派新闻网站 and all other archived media sources in the database.
I was shocked to see partisan media were as effective as they were,” Vargo说.
Their findings show that while no one media type controls the broader agenda, partisan media now has the strongest influence, followed by emerging non-partisan media outlets – like BuzzFeed and Gawker – that are native to online platforms.
“I was shocked to see partisan media were as effective as they were,” Vargo说.
The trend of partisan sites like Breitbart, TownHall and Daily Kos influencing the agenda of other media outlets is troubling because it could lead to greater political polarization, Vargo说.
“然而, just because a story originates from partisan media, it does not mean the same partisan viewpoints will still be attached with it in other media,瓦戈和郭在报纸上说.
除了, while partisan media may have the strongest influence overall, other types of media were influential in different areas. 《博彩app推荐》, 例如, has the most influence on health care coverage, while emerging media sites have more influence over issues of social justice, 根据论文.
While big data studies like this are ideal for identifying larger trends in the media landscape, questions about how and why these trends happen will need to be addressed with further research.
“We can tell you what happened, but we weren't in the newsrooms,” Vargo说. “A great follow up to this study would be to go into newsrooms and try to see if these patterns are really happening – actually interview journalists and say, ‘Why do you think a news story is important? Why did you decide to cover this story?’”
Agenda-setting in the media is an area of research Vargo continues to build on. He currently is looking at data focused on fake news and fact-checking sites, and in the past he’s analyzed social media platforms like Twitter.
While Vargo’s previous research shows signs of change on the horizon, his most recent paper shows changes that already may have taken hold.
“In 2012 we did a series of papers that looked at how people were talking about the election on Twitter,他说. “What we found was people really did pay attention to these newer types of media, 比如党派媒体, 但这些消息来源并不是领导人. 从那时起, the scales have been tipping and I think this paper suggests that maybe they’ve already tipped the other way.”
