Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Agendamelding And Covid-19: The Dance Of Horizontal And Vertical Media In A Pandemic, J. Benjamin Taylor, Milad Minooie, Chris J. Vargo

Faculty and Research Publications

How are attitudes formed in the 21st Century, and who sets the agenda for initial COVID-19 coverage in the United States? We explore these questions using a random sample of 6 million tweets from a population of 224 million tweets collected between January 2020 and June 2020. In conjunction with a content analysis of legacy media such as newspapers, we examine the second-level agendamelding process during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. The findings demonstrate that in the early weeks of the pandemic, public opinion on Twitter about the virus was distinctly different than the coverage …