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.

摘要

社交媒体已成为观众挑战媒体和政治精英的渠道。级联激活的最新更新最初是为了解释从强大人物身上流出的框架如何获得公众主导地位，为观众施加更大的理论影响力提供了更大的理论空间。然而，对于议程设置（另一个核心媒体效应）如何以及在什么情况下发生这种情况的经验性理解还没有得到很好的发展，特别是考虑到数字技术的可供性。我们通过将级联理论与中间媒体议程设置的发展联系起来来解决这一差距。具体来说，我们分析了德国公共广播联盟的新闻编辑室 ARD-aktuell 所感知的不情愿的动态，