Content area
Full Text
During the broadcast era, there were relatively few media outlets. Their programming was able to reach broad audiences, and, therefore, that programming held significant influence over the public agenda. In the present media environment, however, there are far more media sources, allowing for the tailoring of media consumption to suit individual audience members’ interests, and thus threatening the long-held ability of the mass media to shape the public agenda (Chaffee and Metzger 2001; McCombs 2005; Prior 2007; Williams and Delli Carpini 2011). This shift from mass broadcasting to large audiences toward niche media reaching more narrowly targeted and attentive audiences is commonly referred to as audience fragmentation and is widely believed to be a source of change in political behavior and public opinion. McCombs (2005, 545) points out that the heterogeneous media available on the Internet, for example, can lead to diverse agendas among the public, a “situation that would spell the demise of agenda setting as we have known it.” Subsequently, a public that does not share a common agenda may find it impossible to come together and engage in collective action because its members disagree on what is important to society (Chaffee and Metzger 2001). The fragmentation of audiences, and the increased ability of those with low levels of political interest to avoid the news agenda altogether (Prior 2007), call into question the continuing ability of the mass media to reach and inform the general public and, therefore, foster consensus on the important issues of the day (Chaffee and Wilson 1977; McCombs and Zhu 1995; Tan and Weaver 2013).
As the audience for mass media contracts, the number of people who report getting their news through social media is growing (Gottfried and Shearer 2016). Social media may engender an agenda-setting effect through the social sharing of political news and, relatedly, through increased incidental exposure to political information among those who might otherwise choose to avoid it. This study asks the following question: can social media convey an agenda-setting effect in an environment marked by abundant media choice and increased individual selectivity? Despite the potential for social media to shape the public agenda in the contemporary media environment, significant challenges to the study of these effects have left this question unanswered.
One way in...