Abstract
Purpose This paper aims to shed light on the impact of personalized news media on the shared issue agenda that provides democracies with a set of topics that structure the public debate. The advent of personalized news media that use smart algorithms to tailor the news offer to the user challenges the established way of setting the agenda of such a common core of issues.
Highlights
D etermining a shared issue agenda within the public sphere is one of the central functions of news media in democratic societies (Chaffee and Metzger, 2001)
This paper adds to the ongoing debate about the fragmentation of the public sphere (Sunstein, 2009; Pariser, 2011) and curated news flows (Thorson and Wells, 2015) by providing empirical evidence of the effects of personalized news use on the issue agenda
The common core defines the agenda of the public sphere, namely, issues that are being discussed by the majority of the population (McCombs and Shaw, 1972)
Summary
D etermining a shared issue agenda within the public sphere is one of the central functions of news media in democratic societies (Chaffee and Metzger, 2001). Since the advent of the mass media in the twentieth century, it has been the role of newsrooms of newspapers and TV news to select relevant events and topics and decide upon their relative importance, by determining what is placed on the front page and what is published in the midsection of the newspapers (White, 1950) When these news agendas are roughly similar, news media are able to put core issues on a common agenda and discuss them from different viewpoints. As Napoli (2011) observed, diversity of exposure “resided very much at the margins” of policy debate and making “despite the centrality of the concept” (ibid.) to the rational of interventions in the media sector. A shared common core of issues is generally considered to be a crucial condition in modern democracies because it enables some of the core principles of democratic societies: Free market place of ideas
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