Setting the transgender agenda: intermedia agenda-setting in the digital news environment

ABSTRACT

Transgender issues have recently emerged as highly salient topics of political contestation in the United States. This paper investigates one relevant factor in that ascent: intermedia agenda-setting between digital-native and legacy press news. Through a content analysis of the top-five digital-native and top-five legacy press online news entities from 2014 to 2015, we investigate the dynamics of intermedia agenda-setting in the context of transgender topics, both at the level of attention to transgender topics in general and at the level of attention to specific issues related to the transgender community (e.g. anti-transgender violence). Results indicate significant causal effects of digital-native coverage on legacy press coverage at the level of general attention to transgender topics. However, results also indicate that at the level of specific transgender issues, digital-native coverage drives legacy press coverage on some issues, which legacy press coverage drives digital-native coverage on others. Implications for intermedia agenda-setting in the digital news media environment and for the future of transgender political rights movements are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Transgender
• intermedia
• agenda-setting
• digital journalism
• content analysis
• Granger causality

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank Ruthie Kelly for her work as a coder on this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Thomas J Billard http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0641-9278

Notes

1 For story topics with five or more instances in the 100-article intercoder reliability subsample (i.e. 7 of the 11 topic codes), per cent agreement ranged from 80% to 100%. Per cent agreement for the four topic codes with fewer than five instances would be uninterpretable and were thus not calculated.