Agenda Setting in the Internet Age

Agenda setting was suppose to be a theory that would suffer a serious hit from the emergence of the Internet.  A basic assumption of the theory is that those who don’t receive information either first hand through direct experience or second hand through talking with others would need to rely on the media to tell them what issues are important.  But what if people could bypass the media and seek out information on their own or have only certain type of information that interests them sent their way (a la the notion of the Daily Me)?  Aren’t people now setting their own agenda?  To some degree yes.  But the media have hardly become irrelevant in the agenda-setting process.  As Pew Research studies have shown, when people go online for news they largely turn to mainstream news sites and news aggregators.  And while Technorati reports that half of Internet readers have visited blogs and that news and politics are two of the most popular topics of blogs, blogs still rely heavy on mainstream news organizations as sources of their posts.

A recent study of intermedia agenda setting by Marcus Messner and Marcia Watson Distaso in the June 2008 issue of Journalism Studies reaffirmed the importance of the traditional media on the blogosphere, but also the increased influence of blogs on journalistic reporting.  Blogs rely heavily on traditional media for information gathering. But  journalists read weblogs to capture the zeitgeist and blogs certainly can create a buzz that draws the attention of the news media.  The authors found a sharp increase in the number of times the New York Times and the Washington Post used blogs as sources of news, indicating they are increasingly viewing them as credible sources of news.  On the other hand, when they examined what sources were used by 120 bloggers they found that 73 percent of the sources came from other media.

Messner and Distaso used intermedia agenda setting to answer the broader question of who sets the media agenda.  This study, among others, show that the traditional agenda-setting model of the press influencing the issue salience of the public only provides a partial understanding of the role of the media in the agenda-setting process. Researchers need to turn more attention to agenda building, understanding the three-way relationship between the press, audiences and sources.  Cobb and Elder developed the notion of agenda building in the early 70s in political science to look at forces influencing the policy agenda.  The Langs picked it up in their book The Battle for Public Opinon which focused more on the three-way relationship between press, the audience and political actors.  A quick EBSCO search confirms that agenda-building research is gaining steam.  That is a good sign, demonstrating that researchers are looking at more complex models of how the media influence issue salience.  What do you think? Do media still have important roles in influence what issues we judge as important?