Agenda-Setting Dynamics during COVID-19: Who Leads and Who Follows?

Lāsma Šķestere () and Roberts Darģis
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Lāsma Šķestere: Communication Faculty, Riga Stradiņš University, LV-1007 Riga, Latvia
Roberts Darģis: Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Latvia, LV-1586 Riga, Latvia

Social Sciences, 2022, vol. 11, issue 12, 1-13

Abstract: The outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) has altered the way news media and social media set their agendas. The growth of social media raises questions about its potential power to set the media agenda. We gathered social media posts and online news site articles to examine agenda-setting dynamics, aiming to explore causal relationship between news media and social media. We used a computer-assisted text analysis to discover the main topics of discussion at the first wave of the pandemic in Latvia. The results revealed that (1) statistics about the pandemic, as well as prevention and control measures were the main topics on social media and in online news sites, and that (2) vector autoregression models provide more empirical support for the influence of online news sites on social media than reverse.

Keywords: intermedia agenda-setting; COVID-19; time series analysis; online news media; social media (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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