Agenda-setting Theory - Role of Public in Agenda-Building Process

Role of Public in Agenda-Building Process

The agenda-building perspective ascribes importance not only to mass media and policymakers, but also to social process, to mutually interdependent relation between the concerns generated in social environment and the vitality of governmental process. Thus according to Cobb and Elder, the agenda-building framework makes allowances for continuing mass involvement and broaden the range of recognized influences on the public policy-making process.

This idea of mass involvement has become more prominent with the advent of the Internet and its potential to make everyone a pamphleteer. Increase in the role of citizens in agenda setting sheds light on a new direction in the traditional agenda-building research.

Kim and Lee noted that the agenda-setting research on the Internet differs from traditional agenda-setting research with respect that the Internet is in competition with traditional media and has enormous capacity for contents' and users’ interactivity. Lee, Lancendorfer and Lee argued that "various opinions about public issues are posted on the Internet bulletin boards or the Usenet newsgroup by Netizens, and the opinions then form an agenda in which other Netizens can perceive the salient issue". Scholars also stated that the Internet plays role in forming Internet user’s opinion as well as the public space.

Kim and Lee studied the pattern of the Internet mediated agenda-setting by conducting a case study of 10 cases that have a great ripple effect in Korea for 5 years (from 2000 until 2005). Scholars found that a person’s opinion could be disseminated through various online channels and could synthesize public opinion that influences news coverage. Their study suggests ‘reversed agenda effects’, meaning that public agenda could set media agenda. Maxwell McCombs also mentioned "reverse agenda-setting" in his recent textbook as a situation where public concern sets the media agenda.

According to Kim and Lee, agenda-building through the Internet take the following three steps: 1) Internet-mediated agenda-rippling: an anonymous netizen’s opinion spreads to the important agenda in the Internet through online main rippling channels such as blogs, personal homepages, and the Internet bulletin boards. 2) agenda diffusion in the Internet: online news or web-sites report the important agenda in the Internet that in turn leads to spreading the agenda to more online publics. 3) Internet-mediated reversed agenda-setting: traditional media report online agenda to the public so that the agenda spread to both offline and online publics. However, scholars concluded that the Internet-mediated agenda-setting or agenda-building processes not always occur in consecutive order. For example, the agenda that was reported by traditional media can come to the fore again through the online discussion or the three steps can occur simultaneously in a short period of time.

Several real-world examples provide evidence that the Internet-community, particularly bloggers, can push their own agenda into public agenda, then media agenda, and, eventually, into policy agenda. For instance, in 2005 Eason Jordan, the chief news executive at CNN, abruptly resigned after being besieged by the online community after saying, according to various witnesses, that he believed the United States military had aimed at journalists in Iraq and killed 12 of them. Similarly, in 2002 Senate majority leader Trent Lott had to resign due to his inappropriate racist remarks that were widely discussed in the blogosphere. However bloggers attract attention not only to oust journalists and politicians. An online investigation on technical problems with electronic voting machines started by an activist Bev Harris in 2003 eventually forced traditional media outlets to address issue of electronic voting malperformance. This in turn made Diebold, a company that produces these machines, to acknowledge its fault and take measures to fix it.