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Article Excerpt
Introduction
The emergence and growth of the political blogosphere may force those interested in policy making to reconceptualize how issues arrive on the political agenda. (1) Indeed, because political blogs provide easily accessible and frequently updated information about the attitudes of politically active citizens, journalists are increasingly relying on them as a shortcut for determining whether an emerging political issue is worth discussing. When coupled with the fact that mainstream media coverage is an important influence on the issues that policy makers choose to discuss (Dearing & Rogers, 1996), the audience that political blogs are attracting with journalists means that political bloggers are becoming important actors in the agenda-setting process.
This paper empirically assesses the role that political bloggers play in the agenda-setting process by asking: what is the relationship between the media and blog agendas? More specifically, this paper tracks mainstream media coverage and blog discussion of 35 issues during the 2004 presidential campaign to test the hypothesis that the media agenda exerts a substantial impact on the blog agenda against the increasingly popular hypothesis that the blog agenda exerts a strong influence on the media agenda. Using a computer-assisted, quantitative content analysis of ten randomly selected A-list political blogs and 50 randomly selected, non-A-list political blogs over the five-month period from July 1 to November 30, 2004, I find that on the vast majority of issues there was a complex, bidirectional relationship between media coverage and blog discussion rather than a unidirectional media or blog agenda-setting effect. Furthermore, I find that bloggers and journalists respond to each other's coverage within a few days. To put all of this differently, the relationship between mainstream media and political blogs is a high-speed, two-way street rather than a slow moving, one-way road leading from media coverage to blog discussion or vice versa.
Literature Review
In order to describe the fact that the small number of issues actually under consideration at any given moment is only a small subset of the larger population of issues that could, theoretically, be placed under consideration, political scientists have developed the concept of an "issue agenda." An issue agenda is the "collection of issues which are given attention at any given time" (McCarthy, Smith, & Zald, 1996, p. 293). Not all arenas of political life, however, have the same issue agendas. Indeed, building on the work of Rogers and Dearing (1988), McCarthy et al. (1996) distinguish between four distinct, yet interrelated agendas in the political realm: the media agenda (the set of issues that receive attention in the mass media), the public agenda (the set of issues that are accorded importance by the mass public), the governmental agenda (the set of issues that receive attention in one or another governmental arena), and the electoral agenda (the set of issues that receive attention from candidates for public office). Extending the concept of an issue agenda into the arena of Internet politics, I define the "blog agenda" as the collection of issues that receive attention in the blogosphere.
There has been a great deal of speculation about how the blog agenda influences these other, more established agendas. A particularly large body of theorizing has focused on the extent to which the blog agenda interacts with the media agenda. (2) Drawing on this literature, it is possible to extract two competing hypotheses about the relationship between the blog and media agendas. The first hypothesis is derived from the long tradition of research in mass communications on the so-called media agenda setting hypothesis. In its most basic form, the media agenda setting hypothesis states that media coverage--by providing the public with cues about the significance of various political issues--will exert a strong influence on the relative importance that the public attaches to these issues. Beginning with the groundbreaking work of McCombs and Shaw (1972), this fairly simple proposition has been tested using a wide variety of research designs and has been expanded upon to include the influence of a large number of moderating and intervening variables (Zhu & Blood, 1997). Regardless of the methods used, however, most studies of the media agenda setting have found a strong relationship between the media and public agendas. Indeed, in his review of the literature on the media agenda setting hypothesis, McCombs (2000) concludes, "The power of the news media to set a nation's agenda, to focus public attention on a few key public issues, is an immense and well documented influence" (p. 1).
Although the media agenda setting hypothesis was formulated to describe the relationship between the media and public agendas, there are two reasons to expect that it will also account for the relationship between the media and blog agendas. First, political bloggers rarely do any original reporting and, as a result, they tend to rely primarily on established media outlets for their information. Adamic and Glance (2005), for example, find that political blogs link to news articles more than they link to other blogs, and Scott (2005) finds that mainstream media sources are the dominant source in the tour A-list blogs in his study. Second, political bloggers are likely to follow news coverage because they view themselves as a "fifth estate" (Cornfield, Carson, Kalis, & Simon, 2005). McKenna and Pole (2004), for example, find that A-list political bloggers act as "watchdogs" for the coverage presented in the mainstream media, and McKenna (2007) finds that so-called policy bloggers frequently fact check the media's coverage on the issues they blog about. In short, the blog agenda may be very much like the public agenda in the way that it responds to the media agenda.
Contrary to this media agenda setting hypothesis, it has been suggested that the blog agenda is becoming a more important influence on the media agenda than vice versa. Attention to the blog agenda's influence on mainstream media coverage first emerged in response to the controversy surrounding Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's (R-MS) resignation in 2002. On December 5, 2002, Lott shocked the audience at former "Dixiecrat" Strom Thurmond's (R-SC) 100th birthday party by saying:
I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead we wouldn't have had all these problems over all of these years either. (Bloom, 2003, p. 2)
Despite the fact that many members of the mainstream media were in attendance at the event, none of the prime-time news shows airing that night mentioned Lott's statement and none of the major national newspapers included a story about the issue the following morning (Bloom, 2003). A number of prominent political bloggers, however, saw the quote in a story on ABC News's daily online column, The Note (http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/TheNote) and began blogging about it immediately. Indeed, within 24 hours of Lott's remarks being reported, popular liberal blogs, such as Escahton (http://www.atrios.blogspot.com) and Talking Points Memo (http:// www.talkingpointsmemo.com), and popular conservative blogs, such as Instapundit (http://www.instapundit.com), had discussed the issue at length and had even provided links to previous statements on racial issues by both Thurmond and Lott (Bloom, 2003). Over the course of the next week, more bloggers began writing about the issue and the mainstream media began to take notice. On December 10, the New York Times covered the story for the first time and each of the three nightly network news shows discussed Lott's remarks. A number of these stories even discussed the role that bloggers played in attracting the media's attention to the story. (3) In short, the mainstream media covered the Lott story only after bloggers had discussed it at length, and it appears, therefore, that the blogosphere had an important impact on the media agenda.
In addition to this particular instance of blog influence, there is growing evidence that journalists take their cues tot what to cover from blogs. Most notably, a December 2004 survey of mainstream media journalists found that 84 percent of journalists had visited a political blog in the past 12 months and approximately 30 percent of those reported visiting a political blog at least once a day on a regular basis (Roth, 2004). Moreover, many influential journalists, including Paul Krugman, Howard Fineman, and Fareed Zakaria, have said that blogs form a critical part of their information-gathering activities (Drezner & Farrell, 2004b; Smolkin, 2004). When coupled with the fact that bloggers are being frequently cited as sources in the media's coverage of major political events (Hennessy & Martin, 2006), this evidence suggests that journalists are increasingly attuned to the discussions taking place in the blogosphere.
Although most research suggests that only A-list blogs will exert an influence on the media agenda (Smolkin, 2004), there are two ways that less popular blog discussion may have an impact on mainstream media coverage. First, as Drezner and Farrell (2004a) point out, A-list bloggers frequently provide links to posts on less popular blogs that they find interesting or unique. To the extent that journalists follow these links from A-list blogs, less popular blogs can exert a direct influence on the media agenda. Second, as a result of the fact that they rely on the aggregate number of bloggers discussing an issue, less popular blogs can have an impact on the so-called "buzz" indicators created by Web sites such as Blogdex (http:// www.blogdex.com), Day Pop (http://www.daypop.com), and Blog Pulse (http:// www.blogpulse.com). If journalists turn to these indicators for ideas about what to cover, less popular blogs may be able to have an important impact on the media agenda.
Methodology
Although the notion of a blog agenda is conceptually clear, it does present some significant measurement and sampling problems. Indeed, unlike the agendas discussed earlier, (4) there is no immediately obvious way to measure the blog agenda, and as a result, there are important questions about how to proceed in tracking the issues that are given attention by bloggers. Which blogs, for example, should be used to gather data on the issues on the blog agenda--only A-list blogs, only less popular blogs, or a mix of both? Similarly, how should "attention" be measured--by keyword use, link topics, amount of discussion, or some other factor?
Fortunately, a number of online organizations have suggested different ways to track which issues are being discussed in the blogosphere. MIT Laboratory's Blogdex project, for example, measures the issues that bloggers are talking about by tracking which links are popular in the blogosphere at any given time. Using a similar methodology, Technorati (http://www.technorait.com) records the links that bloggers are using in the 50 million blogs they track in order to show what is popular in the blogosphere. Rather than focusing on the links bloggers use, Blog Pulse indexes a sample of blog posts by keyword in order to determine which people, issues, and news bloggers are discussing. Adopting a somewhat different method of analyzing keywords, Day Pop provides insight into what...
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