Seeing Past Each Other: The Rise of Agenda Diversity

• In Event: What's the Buzz? News Agendas in the Contemporary Media Environment

Abstract

Since the early 1990’s, agenda diversity has risen precipitously in the United States. An offshoot of the vast literature on agenda setting, agenda diversity represents the public’s degree of disagreement over which issue in the country is most important. Thus, as agenda diversity increases citizens move away from a clear, singular collective public agenda. We then confront the possibility that we can no longer agree on what the critical problems are, never reaching a stage where we can deliberate on how to solve them since we do not agree on what the problems worthy of attention even are. Existing investigations of agenda diversity (e.g., McCombs and Zhu, 1995; Tan and Weaver, 2013; Edy and Meirick, 2018) focus almost entirely on changes at the national, aggregate level as the causes of shifts in agenda diversity. Building off of these works, I theorize that innovations in the process of communication and information exposure have led to this increasingly balkanized public agenda. Shifting the focus to individuals rather than aggregate trends, I propose that each citizen holds a set of stiff, insulated attitudes toward the importance of issues thanks to the ease of selective exposure brought on by modern communication technologies. It is those insulated attitudes–created and maintained through selective exposure–which are driving increasing agenda diversity. To test this theory, I propose using a multi-part research design that examines the effects of media use on individuals’ contributions to national agenda diversity using survey analysis and an experiment. I first analyze survey data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey 2016, finding that individuals’ use of cable news and the internet predict increased contributions to agenda diversity compared to those using other or no forms of news media. To investigate the proposed mechanism specifically–selective exposure to familiar issues–I perform a participant-preference experiment. In this experiment, individuals are either exposed to a single news story, no news story or can select one news story from a set of many. I expect to find that those participants who can select a news story contribute significantly more to increased agenda diversity than those in the control or forced-exposure conditions. I further expect that the forced-exposure condition–mimicking the broadcast news representative of the mid-to-late 20th Century when agenda diversity was at its lowest–contributes significantly less to increasing agenda diversity than the control condition. Findings to this effect would demonstrate a clear connection between selective exposure and rising levels of agenda diversity, helping to illuminate the cause of a critical but oft-omitted concept—agenda diversity.

Author

• John Wagner, University of New Mexico