Abstract
Media are said to set the public agenda. However, the actual scenario of a public agenda among the Malay and Chinese communities in Malaysia has yet to be ascertained. This study employs both content analysis and survey to examine media and public agenda of two major ethnic groups during the 2008 General Elections. In total, 9,135 news items, relating to elections, were obtained from three major languange newspapers, comprising Utusan Malaysia, Berita Harian, Sin Chew Daily, Nanyang Siang Pau, The Star, and New Straits Times, during the campaign period. There were 12 important issues identified. Overall, the study found media agenda had no significant rank-order correlation with the public agenda, or the important issues raised by 1,454 Malay, Chinese, and Indian respondents nationwide. The same happens to the Malay media agenda with Malay public agenda. The study found the Chinese media agenda to have a significant rank-order correlation with the Chinese public agenda suggesting the newspapers influence among the Chinese readers on what to think about. Ethnic newspapers therefore could be setting the agenda for the various ethnic groups during elections.
Highlights
Barisan Nasional (BN), a 14-party coalition, scored an impressive win in the Malaysian General Election and State Elections of 2004
There are several reasons for the significant loses suffered by BN during the 12th Malaysian General Elections held in 2008
This study was carried out to understand the nature of media converage and the issues deemed as important by the general public by using the perspective of agenda setting
Summary
Barisan Nasional (BN), a 14-party coalition, scored an impressive win in the Malaysian General Election and State Elections of 2004. The field of political communication as defined by Graber and Smith (2005), encompasses the construction, sending, receiving, and processing of messages that potentially has a significant direct or indirect impact on politics In the former, an approach used has been on the agenda setting role of the mass media (McCombs and Shaw, 1972) or the effects media have on public opinion through the concept of the spiral of silence approach (Noelle-Neuman, 1979; Taylor, 1982). The methodology used is content analysis, a method that has been described as analyzing the manifest content of the media (Berelson, 1952; Neuendorf, 2002) This is a study on what selected Malaysian newspapers reported during the campaigns of the 2008 elections.
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