Cascading Activation Revisited: How Audiences Contribute to News Agendas Using Social Media

Benjamin Till Landis,William L Allen

doi:10.1080/21670811.2021.1962728

Abstract

Social media have become conduits through which audiences can challenge elites in media and politics. Recent updates to cascading activation, originally developed to explain how frames flowing from powerful figures gain public dominance, give greater theoretical scope for audiences to exert influence. Yet empirical understanding of how and in what circumstances this happens with respect to agenda-setting—another core media effect—is not well-developed, especially given the affordances of digital technologies. We address this gap by connecting theorization on cascades to developments in intermedia agenda-setting. Specifically, we analyze the dynamics surrounding the perceived reluctance by ARD-aktuell, the newsroom of Germany’s public broadcasting consortium, to use its prime-time broadcast “Tagesschau” to report the arrest of a refugee accused of murdering a German woman in December 2016. By presenting finely grained timelines linking content analysis of 5,409 Facebook comments with Tagesschau editorial responses and parallel media coverage of this event, we contribute further conditions under which audience-informed cascades may occur: notably, when publicly funded news organizations are involved, and the issue at stake invokes both domestic and international aspects which sustain disagreement.

Highlights

Social media have become conduits through which audiences can challenge elites in media and politics
Recent theoretical modifications to the cascading activation model (Entman and Usher 2018), as well as large-scale empirical research showing the dynamics of public attention to issues on social media (e.g., Boynton and Richardson, Jr. 2016), acknowledge that digital technologies and platforms open up alternative pathways whereby audiences contribute to public agendas that, in turn, might spill-over into more conventional cascades
We aim to connect scholarship on cascades, which is usually concerned with the ways that elites set and convey dominant news frames, to work on agenda-setting which does not use the language of cascades yet attempts to document the dynamics among audiences and different media

Summary

Introduction

Social media have become conduits through which audiences can challenge elites in media and politics. Empirical understanding of how and in what circumstances this happens with respect to agenda-setting—another core media effect—is not well-developed, especially given the affordances of digital technologies. While an agenda-setting analysis proceeding from this moment might provide valid evidence of this, we argue it would be incomplete This would downplay the possibility for, and significance of, audience-led debates occurring both online and through competing media before Merkel’s intervention on broadcast television. Recent theoretical modifications to the cascading activation model (Entman and Usher 2018), as well as large-scale empirical research showing the dynamics of public attention to issues on social media (e.g., Boynton and Richardson, Jr. 2016), acknowledge that digital technologies and platforms open up alternative pathways whereby audiences contribute to public agendas that, in turn, might spill-over into more conventional cascades. Understanding about how and under which circumstances such interaction might happen is limited, partly due to the lack of granular detail in existing empirical work that tends to focus on identifying macro-level media dynamics spanning months or years

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