Agenda-setting and the internet: The intermedia influence of internet bulletin boards on newspaper coverage of the 2000 general election in South Korea

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the intermedia influence of the Internet on traditional news media. Accordingly, this study examined the influence of Internet bulletin boards on newspaper coverage of the 2000 general election in South Korea at both first and second levels of agenda-setting through content analyses of major newspapers and the Internet bulletin boards during the campaign. Results of cross-lagged correlation analyses showed that newspapers influenced Internet bulletin boards at the first level of agenda-setting. Additionally, at the second level of agenda-setting, the influence of Internet bulletin boards on newspapers was found. Although reciprocity appeared in a few time spans, the results imply that the Internet funnels and leads public opinion as well as affecting the coverage of other media.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Dr. James Dearing for his invaluable comments on this manuscript.

Notes

Internet business in Korea proliferated throughout the late 1990s and into 2000. In Korea, Hitel and Chollian were the main ‘agoras’ in the cyberspace of the Internet because they were already well-known BBS service providers that also became major ISPs with the advent of the internet.

The Korean Constitution ordains basic duties of citizens, i.e. the duty to pay taxes, the duty to work, and the duty of national defense under the conditions as prescribed by law. Oftentimes the fulfillment of these duties, especially tax payment and military service, serves as a measurement for the voters to examine integrity of candidates.

This number is more than the actual total number of news stories because each news story coded was overlapped. The number of opinions on the bulletin boards coded is also more than the actual total number of opinions on the bulletin boards for the same reason.

The formula for calculating Rozelle–Campbell baseline is [(PX1Y1+PX2Y2)/2]{[(PX1X2)²+(PY1Y2)²]/2}^1/2.

Some cross-lagged correlations for the attributes of the candidates were very high. It should be noted, however, that the high correlations produced in this study may have been caused by using few number of categories (only four). In this case, the correlations are likely to be very high or low because Spearman's correlation coefficient is calculated based on the rank order of categories. For example, similar to our study, a previous study by Lopez-Escobar et al. (1998), which employed few categories, also showed very high correlations between variables.