Theory of Mass Communication Practices: Fake News and Online Media

1. Drawing on the Williams and/or Vargo reading for this week, which issue(s) do you think audiences have assigned salience to that might not otherwise be considered salient? How did social media drive the transfer of salience for these issues?
2. How has the proliferation of social media influenced the ways by which agendas are set and adopted? What about social media does extant agenda-setting research fail to account for?
Resources:
*Dearing, J. W., & Rogers, E. M. (1996). What is agenda-setting? (pp. 1-23). In Communication concepts 6: Agenda-setting (pp. 1-23). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. This introductory chapter to a textbook on agenda-setting describes key concepts in agenda-setting theory.
*Zoch, L. M., & Molleda, J.-C. (2006). Building a theoretical model of media relations using framing, information subsidies, and agenda-building (pp. 279-309). In C. H. Botan & V. Hazleton (Eds.), Public relations theory II. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. This chapter—a selection from a book about public relations theory—examines the role of media relations practitioners in providing information subsidies that contribute to agenda-setting and framing of the news.
*Vargo, C.J., Guo, L., and M.A. Amazeen. (2018). The agenda-setting power of fake news: A big data analysis of the online media landscape from 2014-2016. New Media & Society 20(5): 2028-2049. This study examines the agenda-setting power of fake news and fact-checkers who fight them through a look at the online mediascape from 2014 to 2016.
*Williams, C.B., Fedorowicz, J. Kavanaugh, A., Mentzer, K., Bennett Thatcher, J. and J. Xu. (2018). Leveraging social media to achieve a community policing agenda. Government Information Quarterly 35: 210-222. This research investigates the communication behavior and engagement strategies in the bilateral use of social media between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve.