50 years have passed since the seminal 1968 election study was conducted in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. A conference was held with
formative theorists Drs. Shaw, Weaver and McCombs. Presentations clustered into 9 clear areas. First, there were areas undergoing
theoretical expansion: (1) agenda building, (2) Network Agenda Setting (NAS), (3) Need For Orientation (NFO), and (4)
agendamelding. Beyond the established areas, (5) new theoretical directions were proposed. Other work tested and validated the
theory in the current digital and political landscape. This included work on (6) the current U.S. political climate, and (7)
agenda setting in unique international conditions. Methodological boundaries were pushed, with presentations focused on (8)
qualitative agenda setting and (9) best practices for big data and on social media. This article summarizes the aforementioned
themes and synthesizes comments raised in discussion at the conference.
Alkazemi, M. F., & Wanta, W. (2018). The effect of oil prices on the media agenda: A model of agenda building. Newspaper Research Journal, 391, 232–244.
Beam, R. A., & Meeks, L. (2011). So many stories, so little time. In W. Lowrey & P. Gade (Eds.), Changing the news: The forces shaping journalism in uncertain times (pp. 230–248). New York, NY: Routledge.
Bennett, W. L., & Livingston, S. (2018). The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline of democratic institutions. European Journal of Communication, 331, 122–139.
Camaj, L. (2014). Need for orientation, selective exposure, and attribute agenda-setting effects. Mass Communication and Society, 171, 689–712.
Canes-Wrone, B. (2001). A theory of presidents’ public agenda setting. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 131, 183–208.
Davis, C. A., Varol, O., Ferrara, E., Flammini, A., & Menczer, F. (2016). Botornot: A system to evaluate social bots. In J. Bourdeau (Ed.), Proceedings of the 25th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web (pp. 273–274). Geneva, Switzerland: International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee.
Freelon, D. (2014). On the interpretation of digital trace data in communication and social computing research. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 58(1), 59–75.
Friedman, A. (2016). Hashtag journalism: The pros and cons to covering twitter’s trending topics. Columbia Journalism Review.
Guo, L., Chen, Y. N. K., Vu, H., Wang, Q., Aksamit, R., Guzek, D., … & McCombs, M. (2015). Coverage of the Iraq War in the United States, Mainland China, Taiwan and Poland: A transnational network agenda-setting study. Journalism Studies, 16(3), 343–362.
Guo, L., & Vargo, C. (2015). The power of message networks: A big-data analysis of the network agenda setting model and issue ownership. Mass Communication and Society, 18(5), 557–576.
Guo, L., & Vargo, C. (2018). “Fake news” and emerging online media ecosystem: An integrated intermedia agenda-setting analysis of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Communication Research. Advance online publication.
Himelboim, I., McCreery, S., & Smith, M. (2013). Birds of a feather tweet together: Integrating network and content analyses to examine cross-ideology exposure on Twitter. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 18(2), 154–174.
Kümpel, A. S., Karnowski, V., & Keyling, T. (2015). News sharing in social media: A review of current research on news sharing users, content, and networks. Social media + society, 1(2), 1–14.
Kwak, H., Lee, C., Park, H., & Moon, S. (2010). What is Twitter, a social network or a news media? In M. Rappa & P. Jones (Eds.), Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web (pp. 591–600). New York, NY: ACM.
Lee, J., & Xu, W. (2018). The more attacks, the more retweets: Trump’s and Clinton’s agenda setting on Twitter. Public Relations Review, 44(2), 201–213.
Lee, S. Y., & Riffe, D. (2017). Who sets the corporate social responsibility agenda in the news media? Unveiling the agenda-building process of corporations and a monitoring group. Public Relations Review, 43(2), 293–305.
Levendusky, M. (2013). How partisan media polarize America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Lippmann, W. (1922). Public opinion. New York, NY: Routledge.
Lynch, T. (2017). President Donald Trump: A case study of spectacular power. The Political Quarterly, 88(4), 612–621.
Maher, T. M. (2001). Framing: An emerging paradigm or a phase of agenda setting? In S. D. Reese, O. H. Gandy, Jr., & A. E. Grant (Eds.), Framing public life: Perspectives on media and our understanding of the social world (pp. 99–110). New York, NY: Routledge.
Marshall, T. C., Lefringhausen, K., & Ferenczi, N. (2015). The Big Five, self-esteem, and narcissism as predictors of the topics people write about in Facebook status updates. Personality and Individual Differences, 851, 35–40.
McCombs, M. (2005). A look at agenda-setting: Past, present and future. Journalism Studies, 6(4), 543–557.
McCombs, M. (2018). Setting the agenda: Mass media and public opinion. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.
McCombs, M. E., & Shaw, D. L. (1993). The evolution of agenda-setting research: Twenty-five years in the marketplace of ideas. Journal of Communication, 43(2), 58–67.
McCombs, M. E., Shaw, D. L., & Weaver, D. H. (2014). New directions in agenda-setting theory and research. Mass Communication and Society, 17(6), 781–802.
Min, Y., Ghanem, S. I., & Evatt, D. (2007). Using a split-ballot survey to explore the robustness of the ‘MIP’ question in agenda-setting research: A methodological study. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 191, 221–236.
Newton, J. (2013). The burden of visual truth: The role of photojournalism in mediating reality. New York, NY: Routledge.
Pasek, J., & Dailey, J. (2019). Why don’t tweets consistently track elections? Lessons from linking Twitter and survey data streams. In T. Stroud & S. McGregor (Eds.), Digital discussions: How big data informs political communication (pp. 68–93). New York, NY: Routledge.
Peter, J. (2003). Country characteristics as contingent conditions of agenda setting: The moderating influence of polarized elite opinion. Communication Research, 301, 683–712.
Phua, J., Jin, S. V., & Kim, J. J. (2017). Uses and gratifications of social networking sites for bridging and bonding social capital: A comparison of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. Computers in Human Behavior, 721, 115–122.
Scott, J. (2017). Social network analysis (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Shaw, D. L., McCombs, M., Weaver, D. H., & Hamm, B. J. (1999). Individuals, groups, and agenda melding: A theory of social dissonance. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 111, 2–24.
Shaw, D. L., Minooie, M., Akiat, D. & Vargo, C. (in press). Agendamelding: How we use digital media to create personal community. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Skewes, E. (2018). Time delays are not enough; Media must call out lies. Journal of Media Ethics, 33(2), 97–99.
Trump, D. J., & Schwartz, T. (2009). Trump: The art of the deal. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.
Vargo, C. J., & Guo, L. (2017). Networks, big data, and intermedia agenda setting: An analysis of traditional, partisan, and emerging online US news. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 941, 1031–1055.
Vargo, C. J., Guo, L. & Amazeen, A. (2017). The agenda-setting power of fake news: A big data analysis of the online media landscape from 2014 to 2016. New Media & Society. 201, 2028–2049.
Vargo, C. J., Guo, L., McCombs, M., & Shaw, D. L. (2014). Network issue agendas on Twitter during the 2012 US presidential election. Journal of Communication, 641, 296–316.
Weimann, G., & Brosius, H. B. (2015). A new agenda for agenda-setting research in the digital era. In G. Vowe & P. Henn (Eds.), Political communication in the online world: Theoretical approaches and research designs (pp. 26–44). New York, NY: Routledge.
Weaver, D. H., Zhu, J. H., & Willnat, L. (1992). The bridging function of interpersonal communication in agenda-setting. Journalism Quarterly, 69(4), 856–867.
Zhu, J. H. (1992). Issue competition and attention distraction: A zero-sum theory of agenda-setting. Journalism Quarterly, 69(4), 825–836.
Cited by (11)
Cited by 11 other publications
Kim, Bumsoo, Han Lin & Yonghwan Kim
2024. Interplay of agenda setters in the digital age: The associative issue network between news organizations and political YouTube channels. Computers in Human Behavior 155 ► pp. 108169 ff.
Ren, Ruqin & Jian Xu
2024. It’s not an encyclopedia, it’s a market of agendas: Decentralized agenda networks between Wikipedia and global news media from 2015 to 2020. New Media & Society 26:11 ► pp. 6235 ff.
Zhang, Menghan, Ze Chen, Xinyan Liu & Jun Liu
2024. Theory and practice of agenda setting: understanding media, bot, and public agendas in the South Korean presidential election. Asian Journal of Communication 34:1 ► pp. 24 ff.
Zhang, Menghan, Xue Qi, Xinyan Liu & Ke Zhang
2024. Who Leads? Who Follows? Exploring Agenda Setting by Media, Social Bots and Public in the Discussion of the 2022 South Korean Presidential Election. Sage Open 14:2
Zhang, Siyu
2024. Media Network and Citizen Journalism: The Transition from Agenda Setting to Agenda Loop. Communication Studies► pp. 1 ff.
Buturoiu, Raluca, Nicoleta Corbu & Mădălina Boțan
2023. New Avenues for Agenda-Setting Research: Network Agenda-Setting, Agenda-Melding and Intermedia Agenda-Setting. In Patterns of News Consumption in a High-Choice Media Environment [Springer Studies in Media and Political Communication, ], ► pp. 31 ff.
Buturoiu, Raluca, Nicoleta Corbu & Mădălina Boțan
2023. Agenda-Setting: 50 Years of Research. In Patterns of News Consumption in a High-Choice Media Environment [Springer Studies in Media and Political Communication, ], ► pp. 11 ff.
Buturoiu, Raluca, Nicoleta Corbu & Mădălina Boțan
2023. Conclusions. In Patterns of News Consumption in a High-Choice Media Environment [Springer Studies in Media and Political Communication, ], ► pp. 201 ff.
Perloff, Richard M.
2022. The Fifty-Year Legacy of Agenda-Setting: Storied Past, Complex Conundrums, Future Possibilities. Mass Communication and Society 25:4 ► pp. 469 ff.
Zhou, Shuhuan & Xia Zheng
2022. Agenda Dynamics on Social Media During COVID-19 Pandemic: Interactions Between Public, Media, and Government Agendas. Communication Studies 73:3 ► pp. 211 ff.
Blankenship, Justin C. & Chris J. Vargo
2021. The Effect of Corporate Media Ownership on the Depth of Local Coverage and Issue Agendas: A Computational Case Study of Six Sinclair TV Station Websites. Electronic News 15:3-4 ► pp. 139 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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