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Article published In:
The Agenda Setting Journal
Vol. 3:2 (2019) ► pp.165–185

Consensus building on trust in government

Contrasting media and neighborhood effects in a case study of older Texans

| Texas State University San Marcos
| Xcel Energy

This study contrasts the effects of news media to those of neighborhood in building consensus regarding trust in government. Consensus building is a consequence of agenda setting at a societal level. It conducts a secondary data analysis from an online survey with a panel of 983 older Texans from November/December 2015. We found significant correlation between trust and following the news, accessing TV news, using digital media, online news and newspapers. We found that news media in general and online news increased consensus both within education and location; radio and television increased consensus for education and digital media for income. Our spatial auto-correlation test found a minimal tendency of similar values of trust to be clustered. We cannot infer that neighborhood contributes in the formation of trust. We found evidence, in a case study of older Texans, that the news media may bring us closer together than next-door neighbors

Keywords: consensus building, consequence of agenda setting, neighborhood effect, community building, government trust
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Theory/literature review
    • Neighborhood effect
  • Method
  • Analysis
    • News and consensus building of trust
  • Discussion
  • References
Published online: 25 September 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/asj.18011.mac
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