The effect of the Internet on homogeneity of the media agenda: A test of the fragmentation thesis

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 84, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 745-760

  Lee, Jae Kook ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

INFORMATION; INTERNET; MEDIA ROLE; PUBLIC ATTITUDE;

EID: 42449141151     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769900708400406     Document Type: Article

References (67)

1. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge: Blackwell Books, 1996);
2. Cass Sunstein, Republic.com (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001);
3. Steven H. Chaffee and Miriam J. Metzger, "The End of Mass Communication?" Mass Communication & Society 4 (autumn 2001): 365-79.
4. Maxwell E. McCombs, "A Look at Agenda-Setting: Past, Present and Future," Journalism Studies 6 (August 2005): 543-57.
5. Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw, "The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media," Public Opinion Quarterly 36 (summer 1972): 176-87.
6. Maxwell E. McCombs, Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).
7. Chaffee and Metzger, "The End of Mass Communication?";
8. John Havick, "The Impact of the Internet on a Television-Based Society," Technology in Society 22 (April 2000): 273-87.
9. James G. Webster and Patricia F. Phalen, The Mass Audience: Rediscovering the Dominant Model (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1997);
10. Sunstein, Republic.com..
11. Sunstein, Republic.com, 48.
12. W. Russell Neuman, The Future of the Mass Audience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
13. W. Lance Bennett, "The UnCivic Culture: Communication, Identity and the Rise of Lifestyle Politics," PS: Political Science and Politics 31 (December 1998): 740-61;
14. Markus Prior, Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
15. Neuman, The Future of the Mass Audience, 167.
16. Elihu Katz, "And Deliver Us from Segmentation," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 546 (July 1996): 22-33.
17. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society;
18. Bruce Bimber, "The Internet and Political Transformation: Populism, Community, and Accelerated Pluralism," Polity 31 (autumn 1998): 133-60;
19. Andrew L. Shapiro, The Control Revolution (New York: Public Affairs, 1999);
20. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000);
21. Sunstein, Republic.com.
22. Chaffee and Metzger, "The End of Mass Communication?" 374.
23. McCombs, "A Look at Agenda-Setting: Past, Present and Future," 544-45.
24. Jeongsub Lim, "A Cross-Lagged Analysis of Agenda Setting among Online News Media," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 83 (summer 2006): 298-312.
25. Marilyn Roberts, Wayne Wanta, and Tzong-Horng Dzwo, "Agenda Setting and Issue Salience Online," Communication Research 29 (August 2002): 452-65;
26. Byoungkwan Lee, Karen M. Lancendorfer, and Ki Jung Lee, "Agenda-Setting and the Internet: The Intermedia Influence of Internet Bulletin Boards on Newspaper Coverage of the 2000 General Election in South Korea," Asian Journal of Communication 15 (March 2005): 57-71.
27. D. Charles Whitney and Lee B. Becker, "Keeping the Gates for Gatekeepers - the Effects of Wire News," Journalism Quarterly 59 (spring 1982): 60-65.
28. Stephen D. Reese and Lucig H. Danielian, "Intermedia Influence and the Drug Issue: Converging on Cocaine," in Communication Campaigns about Drugs, ed. Pamela Shoemaker (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989), 29-46.
29. Roberts, Wanta, and Dzwo, "Agenda Setting and Issue Salience Online";
30. Lee, Lancendorfer, and Lee, "Agenda-Setting and the Internet: The Intermedia Influence of Internet Bulletin Boards on Newspaper Coverage of the 2000 General Election in South Korea";
31. Lim, "A Cross-Lagged Analysis of Agenda Setting among Online News Media."
32. "You've Got Blog," The New Yorker, November 13, 2000, 102.
33. Pew Internet and American Life Project, "The State of Blogging," January 2005, available at http://www.pewinternet.org /pdfs/PIP_blogging_data.pdf (accessed May 20, 2007).
34. Jens F. Jensen, "Interactivity: Tracing a News Concept in Media and Communication Studies," Nordicom Review 19 (June 1998): 185-204;
35. Sally J. McMillan, "A Four-Part Model of Cyber-Interactivity: Some Cyber-Places Are More Interactive Than Others," New Media & Society 4 (June 2002): 271-91.
36. Stephen D. Reese, Lou Rutigliano, Kideuk Hyun, and Jaekwan Jeong, "Mapping the Blogosphere: Professional and Citizen-Based Media in the Global News Arena," Journalism 8 (August 2007): 235-61.
37. Reese et al., "Mapping the Blogosphere: Professional and Citizen-Based Media in the Global News Arena."
38. Mark Tremayne, Nan Zheng, Jae Kock Lee, and Jaekwan Jeong, "Issue Publics on the Web: Applying Network Theory to the War Blogosphere," Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12 (October 2006): 290-310.
39. "Blog-Gate: Yes, CBS Screwed up Badly in 'Memogate' - but So Did Those Who Covered the Affair," Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 2005, 30.
40. Susan C. Herring, Inna Kouper, John C. Paolillo, Lois Ann Scheidt, Michael Tyworth, Peter Welsch, Elijah Wright, and Ning Yu, "Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis 'From the Bottom Up'" (paper presented at the Thirty-Eighth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Los Alamitos, 2005).
41. Herring et al., "Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis 'From the Bottom up.'"
42. Ravi Kumar, Jasmine Novak, Prabhakar Raghavan, and Andrew Tomkins, "Structure and Evolution of Blogspace," Communications of the ACM 47 (December 2004): 35-39.
43. Herring et al., "Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis 'From the Bottom up.'"
44. Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance, "The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election: Divided They Blog" (paper presented at the Third International Workshop in Link Discovery, Chicago, IL, 2005).
45. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society;
46. Putnam, Bowling Alone;
47. Bimber, "The Internet and Political Transformation: Populism, Community, and Accelerated Pluralism";
48. Shapiro, The Control Revolution;
49. Sunstein, Republic.com.
50. Reese et al., "Mapping the Blogosphere: Professional and Citizen-Based Media in the Global News Arena."
51. It was reported that the blog readership increased by 58% between February 2004 and November 2004. This suggests that the number of blogs and discourse on the blogosphere exponentially grew during the campaign. See Pew, "The State of Blogging."
52. Adamic and Glance, "The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election: Divided They Blog";
53. Reese et al., "Mapping the Blogosphere: Professional and Citizen-Based Media in the Global News Arena";
54. Tremayne et al., "Issue Publics on the Web: Applying Network Theory to the War Blogosphere."
55. For example, Reese and Danielian, "Intermedia Influence and the Drug Issue: Converging on Cocaine";
56. Whitney and Becker, "Keeping the Gates for Gatekeepers - the Effects of Wire News."
57. Sean Aday, Steven Livingston, and Maeve Hebert, "Embedding the Truth: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Objectivity and Television Coverage of the Iraq War," The Harvard International Journal of Press /Politics 10 (winter 2005): 3-21.
58. Prior, Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections, 273.
59. The 2004 ANES codes respondents' answers to the question into twelve different categories. Domestic issues related to welfare such as health care and education fall into "Social welfare." "Agriculture" includes issues related to farm economy, food shortage, and subsidies. "Natural resources" deals with use and preservation of natural resources, environment protection, and development. "Labor" is about issues related to labor and union-management problems. "Racial problems" is about general issues related to race. "Technology" is about issues specific to science and technology. "Public order" deals with issues regarding order in society such as crimes, narcotics, abortion, and homosexuality. "Economy and Business" is about issues specific to people's economic life such as taxes, inflation, and international trade. "Foreign affairs" is about issues related to international relations except economic ones. War in Iraq is coded into this category. "National defense" deals with defense issues in general such as defense budget, draft, and nuclear war. "Functioning of government" is about issues related to appropriateness of government works. People's trust in politics and candidates' campaign are also included in this category. "Non-political" deals with all other things unrelated to political or public affairs. Entertainment and sports are included in this category.
60. Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw, "The Evolution of Agenda-Setting Research: Twenty-Five Years in the Marketplace of Ideas," Journal of Communication 43 (spring 1993): 58-67.
61. William A. Scott, "Reliability of Content Analysis: The Case of Nominal Scale Coding," Public Opinion Quarterly 19 (autumn 1955): 321-25.
62. Daniel Riffe, Stephen Lacy, and Frederick G. Fico, Analyzing Media Messages: Using Quantitative Content Analysis in Research (Mahwah: Erlbaum, 1998).
63. McCombs and Shaw, "The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media";
64. Roberts, Wanta, and Dzwo, "Agenda Setting and Issue Salience Online."
65. McCombs and Shaw, "The Evolution of Agenda-Setting Research: Twenty-Five Years in the Marketplace of Ideas."
66. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this point.
67. An anonymous reviewer raised this point. I thank her or him for the valuable comment.