Agenda Cueing in Multi-Source Media Environments

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

Abstract

Agenda cueing is a low-effort agenda-setting mechanism in a dual-process model developed by Pingree and Stoycheff (2013). It occurs when individuals view perceived media agenda as a reflection of journalists' issue importance judgments, and use this cue in forming their own most important issue response. Agenda cue uptake can occur regardless of actual exposure to the substantive content of media coverage. Later work applied the same logic to Twitter agenda, where social media users were the source of an agenda cue (Stoycheff et al. 2018).
All experimental agenda cueing studies to date used a highly specific stimulus: a summary report of last week's media or Twitter coverage that showed what share of the overall number of publications or posts the most covered topics received. This allowed researchers to isolate the agenda cue from the coverage itself, making sure that it is not engaging with the content that influences respondents' issue prioritization. However, this format of treatment carries a potential validity threat. It is possible that the powerful agenda-setting effects of such cues that these studies reported were due to the "distilled" character of the treatment. It is not clear whether news consumers can actually pick up agenda cues in high-choice digital media environments for themselves.
This study will report the results of a pre-registered agenda cueing experiment. Instead of coverage summary reports, it will use a series of realistic news portal screenshots where headlines will not be clickable, thus remedying the shortcomings of previous studies. Agency cues embedded in the newsfeed interface will attribute its curation to either news professionals ("Editor's choice") or peers ("Recommended by users") to test the expectation of differential effects of agenda cues coming from different gatekeepers. Moderating effects of respective media literacy constructs, media gatekeeping trust and social gatekeeping trust, will be tested. The study is designed as a 2 (Emphasized issue) X 2 (Source of the cue: news media or other users) fully factorial, between-subjects experiment. Issues will be emphasized by both prominence and frequency of appearance in the newsfeed. The sample (N=1500) will be recruited on Amazon MTurk. The study will advance our understanding of the mechanisms of agenda setting in high-choice digital media environments.

Author

• Kirill Bryanov, National Research University - Higher School of Economics