Global Agenda Setting: A Big Data Analysis of International News Flow (Top Faculty Paper)

• In Event: Studying International News Flows: Media Hierarchies and Intermedia Agenda Setting

Abstract

Existing international news flow studies are limited in its scope and measurement. Examining the salience of specific countries in foreign news can hardly test how information “flows” from country to country. This study analyzed the current international news flow with a big data analysis of 4,708 online news sources from 67 countries around the world in 2015. We also expanded the information news flow literature by incorporating the theoretical perspective of intermedia agenda setting and investigated how news media in different countries influenced each other in covering major topics. Overall, the results showed that stronger, wealthier countries not only continued to be more newsworthy than the rest of the world, they were also more likely to set the media agenda of less powerful countries. However, the study also demonstrated that the core-peripheral information flow structure is not as stable as was found earlier.

Authors

• Lei Guo, Boston University

• Chris J. Vargo, U of Colorado Boulder