Competing for Attention: Information Subsidy Influence in Agenda Building during Election Campaigns

This study adopts the agenda-building perspective to compare contributions of political news releases and advertisements on media content during political campaigns, scrutinizing their relative linkages with news content within a single analysis. Newspapers, news releases, and candidates' ads in nine 2006 statewide campaigns were analyzed. Findings revealed that the salience of issues in news releases and ads was correlated with their salience in the news media. However, news releases were more effective in building the agenda of issues, while ads appeared somewhat more consequential in forming the attribute agenda for the news media.

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