Using time series analysis to measure intermedia agenda-setting influence in traditional media and political blog networks

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 88, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 176-194

  Meraz, Sharon ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

MEDIA ROLE; POLITICAL IDEOLOGY; TIME SERIES ANALYSIS;

UNITED STATES;

EID: 79958084630     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769901108800110     Document Type: Article

References (92)

1. Sharon Meraz, "The Blogosphere's Gender Gap: Differences in Visibility, Popularity, and Authority," in Women, Men, and News, ed. Paula Poindexter, Sharon Meraz, and Amy Schmitz Weiss (NY: Routledge, 2008), 129-51;
2. Tim Cavanaugh, "Let Slip the Blogs of War," in We've Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture, ed. John Rodzvilla (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2002);
3. Lakshmi Chaudhry, "Can Blogs Revolutionize Progressive Politics," Salon, February 6, 2006, available from http://www.inthesetimes. com/article/2485/can-blogs- revolutionize-progressive-politics /.
4. Several books treat the changing dynamics of media economics in the twenty-first century. For example, see Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (NY: Hyperion, 2006);
5. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007);
6. Axel Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (NY: Peter Lang, 2008);
7. Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (NY: Penguin Group, 2009).
8. See, "Internet Most Popular Information Source: Poll," Reuters, June 17,2009, available from http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne /idUSTRE55G4XA20090617.
9. Meraz, "The Blogosphere's Gender Gap: Differences in Visibility, Popularity, and Authority."
10. Many newsrooms have begun transitioning from blogging applications to microblogging platforms, like Twitter, and social networking platforms, such as Facebook, in an effort to reach out to the younger audience, as well as more active web publics. As of 2010, few academic articles have been published on the usage and utility of social media in the newsroom.
11. See "Huffington Post and Politico Lead Wave of Explosive Growth at Independent Political Blogs and News Sites This Election Season," ComScore, October 22, 2008, available from http://www.comscore.com/ Press-E vents/Press-Releases/2008/10/Huffington-Post-and-Politico- Lead-Political-Blogs;
12. Lee Rainie and Aaron Smith, "The Internet and the 2008 Election," Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2008 [cited 2010]; available from http://www.pewinternet.Org/PPF/r/252/report- display.asp.
13. Mayhill Fowler, "Bill Clinton: Purdum a 'Sleazy' 'Slimey' 'Scumbag,'" The Huffington Post, June 2, 2008, available from http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/bill-clinton-purdhum-asl-b-104771.html;
14. Mayhill Fowler, "Obama: No Surprise that HardPressed Pennsylvanians Turn Bitter," The Huffington Post, April 11, 2008, available from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/ obama-no-surprise-that-ha-b-96188. html.
15. For examination of the role of political bloggers in the 2002 resignation of Trent Lott as Senate Republican leader, see Thomas Edsell and Brian Faler, "Lott Remarks on Thurmond Echoed 1980 Words," Washington Post, December 11, 2002, available from http://www.washington post.com/ac2/wp-dyn/ A37288-2002Dec10;
16. John Mercurio, "Lott Apologizes for Thurmond Comment," CNN, December 10, 2002, available from http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/12/ 09/ lott.comment/. For the role that Josh Micah Marshall played in bringing about the 2007 resignation of Alberto Gonzales,
17. see Noam Cohen, "Blogger, Sans Pajamas, Rakes Muck and a Prize," New York Times, February 25, 2008, available from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/ 25/business/media/25marshall.html.
18. Jay Rosen, "The Uncharted: From Off the Bus to Meet the Press," The Huffington Post, April 14, 2008, available from http://www.huffing tonpost.com/jay-rosen/the-uncharted-from-off-th-b-96575.hhnl.
19. One of the more comprehensive overviews of the usage of Granger causality in agenda-setting studies is detailed by Stuart Soroka in his book, Agenda Setting Dynamics in Canada (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2002). The most notable studies of the usage of Granger causality for measuring agenda-setting effects include the following: Hans-Bernd Brosius and Hans Mathias Kepplinger, "The Agenda Setting Function of Television News: Static and Dynamic Views," Communication Research 17 (April 1990): 188-211;
20. Kim Smith, "Newspaper Coverage and Public Concern about Community Issues: A Time Series Analysis," Journalism Monographs 101 (August 1987): 1-32;
21. William J. Gonzenbach, The Media, The President, and Public Opinion: A Longitudinal Analysis of the Drug Issue, 1984-1991 (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996). Though intermedia agenda setting is not the primary focus of the following paper, the authors provide evidence of intermedia agenda-setting effects in the influence of the newspaper agenda on TV:
22. Stefaan Walgrave, Stuart Soroka, and Michiel Nuytemans, "The Mass Media's Political Agenda-Setting Power: A Longitudinal Analysis of Media, Parliament, and Government in Belgium (1993 to 2000)," Comparative Political Studies 41 (June 2008): 814-36.
23. Sharon Meraz, "Is There an Elite Hold? Traditional Media to Social Media Agenda Setting Influence in Blog Networks," Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 14 (April 2009): 682-707.
24. See Jennings Bryant and Dorina Miron, "Theory and Research in Mass Communication," Journal of Communication 54 (December 2004): 662-704.
25. David Weaver, "Thoughts on Agenda Setting, Framing, and Priming," Journal of Communication 57 (March 2007): 142-47.
26. Maxwell McCombs, Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004).
27. McCombs, Setting the Agenda, 114.
28. Stephen Reese and Lucig Danielian, "InterMedia Influence and the Drug Issue: Converging on Cocaine," in Communication Campaigns About Drugs: Government, Media and the Public, ed. Pamela Shoemaker (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1989): 29-45.
29. Esteban Lopez-Escobar, Juan Pablo Llamas, Maxwell McCombs, and Federico Rey Lennon, "Two Levels of Agenda Setting among Advertising and News in the 1995 Spanish General Elections," Political Communication 15 (March 1998): 225-38;
30. Marilyn Roberts and Maxwell McCombs, "Agenda Setting and Political Advertising: Origins of the News Media," Political Communication 11 (July-September 1994): 249-62.
31. Jeongsub Lim, "A Cross-Lagged Analysis of Agenda Setting Among Online News Media," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 83 (summer 2006): 298-312.
32. Lopez-Escobar et al., "Two Levels of Agenda Setting among Advertising and News in the 1995 Spanish Elections."
33. Thomas P. Boyle, "Intermedia Agenda Setting in the 1996 Presidential Primaries," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 78 (spring 2001): 26-44;
34. Roberts and McCombs, "Agenda Setting and Political Advertising."
35. John Tedesco, "Issue and Strategy Agenda Setting in the 2004 Presidential Election: Exploring the Candidate-Journalist Relationship," Journalism Studies 6 (May 2005): 187-201;
36. Gyotae Ku, Lynda Lee Kaid, and Michael Pfau, "The Impact of Web Site Campaigning on Traditional News Media and Public Information Processing," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 80 (autumn 2003): 528-47.
37. McCombs, Setting the Agenda, 106.
38. Kaye D. Sweetser, Guy J. Golan, and Wayne Wanta, "Intermedia Agenda Setting in Television Advertising and Blogs During the 2004 Election," Mass Communication and Society 11 (spring 2008): 197-216.
39. Michael Cornfield, Jonathan Carson, Alison Kalis, and Emily Simon, "Buzz, Blogs, and Beyond: The Internet and National Discourse in the Fall of 2004," Pew Internet and American Life Project, 2005 [cited 2010]); available from http://www.pewtrusts.org/uploadedFiles/ wwwpewtrustsorg/News/ Press-Releases/Society-and-the-Internet/ PIP-Blogs-051605.pdf.
40. Tedesco, "Issue and Strategy Agenda Setting in the 2004 Presidential Election," 187.
41. Jason Yu and Debashis Aikat, "News on the Web: Agenda Setting of Online News in News Web Sites of Major Newspaper, Television, and Online News" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, New York, 2009).
42. Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance, "The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided They Blog" (2005 [cited 2006]), available from http://www.blogpulse.com/papers/2005/AdamicGlanceBlog WWW.pdf;
43. Sharon Meraz, "Event Blogging the 2004 Conventions: Media Bloggers, Non-Media Bloggers, and Their Network Connections" (paper presented at the annual meeting of AEJMC, San Antonio, TX, 2004);
44. Mark Tremayne, Nan Zheng, Jae Kook 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.
45. Adamic and Glance, "The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election," 8;
46. Meraz, "Event Blogging the 2004 Conventions";
47. Tremayne et al., "Issue Publics on the Web," 14.
48. Most of the most popular political blogs are written by former journalists. Blogs like Talking Points Memo, Politico, and the Huffington Post were all started by former journalists or continue to employ journalists that depart the traditional media industry. The maturation and growth of the left-leaning blogosphere is well-documented by Matt Stoller, "What Is This New Movement, TPM Café, January 15, 2007, available from http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/ jan/15/what-is-this-new-movement.
49. Fowler, "Bill Clinton";
50. Fowler, "Obama."
51. Walter Lippman, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1922);
52. Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw, "The AgendaSetting Function of Mass Media," Public Opinion Quarterly 36 (summer 1972): 176-87.
53. Cornfield et al., "Buzz, Blogs, and Beyond: The Internet and National Discourse in the Fall of 2004," 17.
54. Meraz, "Is There an Elite Hold?";
55. Cornfield et al., "Buzz, Blogs, and Beyond";
56. Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell, "The Power and the Politics of Blogs," Public Choice 134 (January 2008): 15-30;
57. Cameron Marlow, "Audience Structure in the Weblog Community" (paper presented at the annual meeting of AEJMC, New Orleans, 2004).
58. Though many of these blog aggregators use their own individual algorithms for determining popularity and relevance, and though the actual position of the political blog may differ in popularity as it relates to other genre-related blogs in technology and entertainment, all of these lists correlated on the most popular political blogs when this sample was developed in 2007. These twelve popular partisan blogs were ranked as more popular in a relative sense than other political blogs present in these top 100 blog lists.
59. The selection of moderate blogs involved a more complicated methodology, since moderate blogs rarely make it to top 100 blog lists due to lower audience readership. As such, popular moderate blogs were identified through the following techniques: (a) presence in the three aforementioned aggregators (Technorati, Truth Laid Bear, and BlogPulse); (b) popularity in the "Moderate Blog Advertising Network," a network listing the most popular moderate blogs and the dollar amount to advertise on each blog present in the network; (c) nomination in the Weblog Awards, a popular blog contest running since 2003, which takes net nominations for the most popular blogs, including those writing about politics; and (d) frequency of appearance in blogroll listings within both elite partisan popular blogs and within the blogrolls for other moderate blogs. The use of all of these techniques made it possible to select a sample of popular moderate blogs based on frequency of appearance in all of these indicators.
60. Reese and Danielian, "InterMedia Influence and the Drug Issue: Converging on Cocaine," 6.
61. Conducting intercoder reliability studies for quantitative studies are essential, even for data that is coded in nominal content categories.
62. See Matthew Lombard, Jennifer Snyder-Dutch, and Cheryl Campanella Bracken, "Content Analysis in Mass Communication: Assessment and Reporting of Intercoder Reliability," Human Communication Research 28 (October 2002): 587-604;
63. Steven Lacy and Daniel Riffe, "Sampling Error and Selecting Intercoder Reliability Samples for Nominal Content Categories," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 73 (winter 1996): 963-73;
64. Richard H. Kolbe and Melissa S Burnett, "Content Analysis Research: An Examination of Applications with Directives for Improving Research Reliability and Objectivity," Journal of Consumer Research 18 (September 1991): 243-50.
65. See Klaus Krippendorff, Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2004).
66. The majority of time series analysis utilizing Granger causality has been done at the issue agenda-setting level, though the logic of Granger causality is highly appropriate for testing intermedia agenda setting (see citation 40). Aforementioned issue agenda-setting studies using Granger causality include the following:
67. Brosius and Kepplinger, "The Agenda Setting Function of Television News: Static and Dynamic";
68. Gonzenbach, The Media, The President, and Public Opinion;
69. Smith, "Newspaper Coverage and Public Concern about Community Issues";
70. and Soroka, Agenda Setting Dynamics in Canada.
71. Though it was not the original intent, one of the few studies to reveal intermedia agenda-setting effects using Granger causality is one conducted by Walgrave, Soroka, and Nuytemans, "The Mass Media's Political Agenda-Setting Power," 12.
72. See John R. Freeman, "Granger Causality and the Time Series Analysis of Political Relationships," American Journal of Political Science 27 (May 1983): 327-58.
73. George E.P. Box and Gwilym M. Jenkins, Time Series Analysis: Forecasting and Control (San Francisco: Holden-Day Publications, 1976).
74. In utilizing Granger causality analysis to measure agenda-setting effects, it is common to substitute the words "agenda setting" for cause. In such situations, cause is a word that denotes agenda-setting effects. Upon running Granger causality tests, with the outcome of significant Ftests or t-tests, the independent variable in the equation is said to "Granger cause" the other.
75. Meraz, "Is There an Elite Hold?";
76. Marcus Messner and Marcia Watson Distaso, "The Source Cycle: How Traditional Media and Weblogs Use Each Other as Sources," Journalism Studies 9 (June 2008): 447-63.
77. Adamic and Glance, "The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election";
78. Meraz, "Is There an Elite Hold?";
79. Meraz, "Event Blogging the 2004 Conventions";
80. Tremayne et al., "Issue Publics on the Web."
81. Chris Bowers and Matt Stoller, " The Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere: A New Force in American Politics," New Politics Institute, August 10,2005, available from http://www.newpolitics.net/node /87?full-report=1;
82. Stoller, "What Is This New Movement";
83. Matt Stoller, "Moving Away from the 1960s Left," MyDD.com, December 31, 2006, available from http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/12/31/14534/ 097.
84. Amanda Ernst, "Huffington Post Defies Expectations, Reaches New Heights Post Election," FishBowlNY, June 2, 2009, available from http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlny/new-media/huffington- posts-traffic-more- than-doubles-year-over-year-149222.asp.
85. Meraz, "Is There an Elite Hold?"
86. The role of links as the currency for search engine visibility is documented in several articles and studies. Some pivotal articles include the following: Pan Bing, Helene Hembrooke, Thorsten Joachims, Lori Lorigo, Geri Gary, and Laura Granka, "In Google We Trust: Users' Decisions on Rank, Position, and Relevance," Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 12 (April 2007): 801-23;
87. Jon Kleinberg, "Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment," Journal of the ACM 46 (September 1999): 604-32;
88. Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, and Terry Winograd, "The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web," (1999 [cited 2010]), available from http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090 /422/.
89. See Meraz, "Is There an Elite Hold?" for a full review of the literature on issue characteristics and its effects on agenda setting.
90. Also see David Weaver, Doris Graber, Maxwell McCombs, and Cham Eyal, Media Agenda-Setting in a Presidential Election: Issues, Images, and Interests (New York, NJ: Praeger, 1981).
91. Meraz, "The Blogosphere's Gender Gap," 139.
92. Eric Lawrence, John Sides, and Henry Farrell, "Self Segregation or Deliberation? Blog Readership Participation and Polarization in American Politics," Perspectives in Politics 8 (March 2010): 141-57.