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Policy Agenda-Setting of the Public on Local Government in the New Media Era and Chinese Context: a Case Study

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Policy Agenda-Setting of the Public on Local Government in the New Media Era and Chinese Context: a Case Study ANZCA08 Conference, Power and Place. Wellington, July 2008 Policy agenda-setting of the public on local government in the new media era and Chinese context: A case study Qiu Hongfeng and Anne Dunn Zhejiang University of Media and Communications, China, and University of Sydney, Australia Qiu Hongfeng is currently a PhD student at the University of Sydney. He is also an Associate Professor of the Department of Journalism and Communications at Zhejiang University of Media and Communications, China. He has published articles on online public sphere, broadcasting convergence, print media in digital era. He can be reached via [email protected]. Anne Dunn is Senior Lecturer and chair of the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. She has published articles on broadcast journalism and new media, media ethics, and narrative in news. She can be reached via [email protected]. Abstract The study uses content analysis on an anti-PX project event happened in a Chinese city of Xiamen last year to explore whether and how, if any, the local residents can set policy agenda at three different levels on the local government by virtue of new media. The study also distinguishes the different roles ecdemic traditional media and local traditional media played in this process under contemporary Chinese media system. The study draws conclusions that a mobile phone short message, online forums and ecdemic traditional media played central roles in setting policy agenda on the local government at the first level; ecdemic traditional media and online forums contributed to the transfer of framing effects to the local government; However, ecdemic traditional media and online media can not solely impose the priming effects on the local government; the changed national environment policy and the new mechanism to appraise government officials might be the underlying determinants of the framing effects. Introduction On December 16, 2007 the residents of Xiamen city, one of the five Special Economic Zones in east coast China, claimed victory after the municipal government announced it would not proceed with a controversial PX chemical project1. Worried it might bring about an environmental disaster, a majority of residents resisted the project for more than six months. Residents in this case relied on mobile phones, electronic bulletin boards (hereafter EBB), blogs and Internet chat rooms as channels or forums to mobilise civic activities against the local government, which originally tried to silence the opposition. With the involvement of ecdemic traditional media2, the public agenda was grudgingly accepted as a policy agenda and eventually the local government conceded and abandoned the project. This case can typically illustrate ANZCA08: Power and Place: Refereed Proceedings: http://anzca08.massey.ac.nz 1 ANZCA08 Conference, Power and Place. Wellington, July 2008 some aspects of the uniqueness surrounding policy agenda-setting of the public on local government in a Chinese context. The study attempts to explore: (a) how the public can reach the threshold of policy agenda-setting since the agenda issue was undesirable for the local government; (b) what role traditional media played during the process under Chinese media system; and (c) after the successful policy agenda- setting on the government at the first level, whether and how framing and priming effects were transferred from the public and traditional media to the local government. As only a few ecdemic traditional media reported the PX project before this agenda issue was successfully imposed on the local government as policy agenda, this study relies on content analysis mainly on news stories in three ecdemic print media. The first section reviews some previous studies on agenda-setting, including how government controls the public through setting agenda on media, agenda interaction between online media and traditional media, and the agenda-setting of online media on the public. The second section depicts the agenda consonance, competitions, and conflicts between different parties involved in this case. The last section sets out the role ecdemic traditional media and new media played at the first level and in transferring framing effects and priming effects of agenda-setting on the local government. Literature Review: Agenda-setting of government on the public Since 1972 when McCombs and Shaw hypothesised a causal relationship between the salience of media coverage and the salience of public concerns on political issues, more than 400 studies replicating their research methodology have ensued (McCombs, 2005), some of which were dedicated to disputing the myth of ‘who sets the agenda for the mass media’ (Gilberg, Eyal, McCombs & Nicholas, 1980; Weaver, Doris, McCombs & Chaim, 1981; Weaver & Elliott, 1985; Shoemaker & Reese, 1991; Dearing & Rogers, 1992). To answer this question is to address how the mass media is controlled, and by whom. In a study on the influence of President Nixon’s second State of the Union address in 1970, Gilberg et al. concluded that the press set an agenda on the president “rather than the reverse presidential influence on the subsequent press agenda” (1980, p.587). However, two decades later the role of political leaders on setting media agenda was ANZCA08: Power and Place: Refereed Proceedings: http://anzca08.massey.ac.nz 2 ANZCA08 Conference, Power and Place. Wellington, July 2008 strongly demonstrated as influential in another study on the ‘War on Iraq’ issue in three major American newspapers. The author concluded that heavy reliance on official sources more than on Iraqi sources resulted in both the first and second level of agenda-setting effect3 of White House on mainstream newspapers (Tajima et al., 2003). Namely, the Bush Administration not only controlled the American people in terms of “what to think about” (Cohen, 1963, p.13), but also manipulated them in terms of “how to think about some objects” (McCombs, Llamas, Lopez-Escobar & Rey, 1997, p.704) on this issue successfully. Unlike studies on the influence of national leaders, Weaver & Elliott studied the influence of Bloomington City Council on the local newspaper coverage and found, in number, there was no high positive relation between the local newspaper and the local official agenda; while on topics, the local newspaper mirrored the prior concerns of the city council. Thus, the study suggested that the local newspaper played a role as “a transmitter” more than “a filter” of the city council agenda (Weaver & Elliott, 1985, p.91). According to Shoemaker and Reese, media agendas are results of interactions between media organization, individual media workers, media routines, sources and ideology, among which government exerts frequent controls and official sources “dominate nearly all news content” (Shoemaker & Reese, 1991, p.269). Through a worldwide tendency towards budget-cutting on hard news coverage, especially the shrinkage of overseas dispatch of journalists, the news media have become more reliant on national government as a steady source, which facilitates government to manoeuvre the public through information control. It is believed that agenda-setting and framing effects of government on mass media and then the public are more salient in countries where the mass media are defined as the mouthpieces of the government or ruling party. Inter-media agenda-setting between new media and traditional media However, it might be too simple to imagine the pubic from such a negative perspective in the new media era. Recently studies have been done to address whether and how, if at all, personal or public agenda, by virtue of alternative media, can influence mainstream media agenda. ANZCA08: Power and Place: Refereed Proceedings: http://anzca08.massey.ac.nz 3 ANZCA08 Conference, Power and Place. Wellington, July 2008 Regarding agenda-setting between the traditional media, Noelle-Neumann & Mathes reinterpreted a study of Halloran and his colleagues on multi-media coverage of an anti-Vietnam demonstration in London in 1968 and reconfirmed that there existed opinion leader media whose reporting perspective or article topic was taken up by other media as “a frame of reference” which “set off a chain reaction in the media system in each instance” (Noelle-Neumann & Mathes, 1987, p.401). Further, Noelle- Neumann & Mathes defined the similarity on topics, focuses and evaluation between those media as “consonance” effects (Noelle-Neumann & Mathes, 1987, p.404). In 1991 Mathes & Pfetsch studied whether three ‘counter-issues’ in West German alternative media can contribute to the agenda-building of mainstream media. They found a ‘spill-over effect’, suggesting issues spilled over from the alternative media to liberal mainstream media not only at topic salience level but also at framing level (Mathes & Pfetsch, 1991). In 2003 three South Korean students launched a study on reciprocal agenda-setting on the 2002 World Cup between two traditional media (The New York Times and The Washington Post) and Google newsgroups. They concluded that “there were agenda setting effects on online users in general, but reverse agenda-setting was not found” (Lee, Choi & Lee, 2003). However, this result might be completely different if the issue related to a far-reaching public interest. Another study, concerning agenda- setting of EBB on newspapers’ coverage of the 2000 South Korea presidential election, illustrated a salient influence of the former on the latter at the second level of agenda-setting.
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