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Article published In:
The Agenda Setting Journal
Vol. 4:2 (2020) ► pp.173–194

When politics intervene in non-political news flow

Trans-regional intermedia agenda-setting between Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan on online air pollution news

ORCID logo | Boston University

While intermedia agenda-setting scholars have examined the process from a global perspective, trans-regional intermedia agenda setting, especially in non-western context, remains understudied. By analyzing the time-series data of news coverage on air pollution, a non-political topic, from online news media in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan from 2015 to 2018, this study revealed a triangular first-level agenda-setting relationship among the three regions and identified the changing agenda setters across years, which disproves the imperialistic stereotype that there is a one-way control from mainland China media. The study also revealed the significant yet unconventional moderating effect of the political stance of news organizations in the trans-regional information flow. This study contributes to the intermedia agenda-setting literature by introducing the method of controlling the real-life situation in the Granger Causality test and by showing that non-political issues can also be politicalized in the salience transferring process.

Keywords: intermedia agenda-setting, political stance, news flow, environmental communication, air pollution, mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan
Article outline
  • Intermedia agenda-setting
  • News media in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan
  • Air pollution as the topic
  • Method
    • Data collection
      • News coverage
      • PM2.5 density
    • Time-series data processing
    • Agenda-setting relationships
  • Findings
  • Discussion
  • References
Published online: 2 September 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/asj.18019.zha
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