Research On The Relationship Between The President Agenda And The Press Agenda

That agenda setting theory concludes that the press has strong effect on determining the public "What to think". In daily life, the news media can build certain topics and events in the minds of the public. Here comes the question——Who decides the press "What to think"? The facts prove that the state, government, pressure groups or special interest groups are all able to set a topic for the press artificially. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between the top news-maker of America——the president——and the media agenda. On the basis of reading kinds of literatures and drawing on previous researches, this paper proposes the following research hypothesis:the president agenda appears in his state of the Union address will influence after the coverage after it. In one word, the president’s agenda influence on the press agenda.To test this hypothesis about the president’s role as news-maker and agenda-setter, Obama 2014 state of the Union address was content analyzed to determine the major issues and themes that the president and his staff chose to speak about. The issues were ranked-ordered on the basis of the number of column inches accorded each topic and resulted in the identification of eight issue categories. Next, all news stories on these eight issues were identified and counted in the Washington Post, New York Times and evening news broadcasts of ABC, CNS and NBC for a two-month period surrounding the president’s State of the Union address.Finally, it shows that, consistent to the hypothesis, the post-speech correlations are stronger for all the news media than the correlations in the prior to the State of the Union address.On the basis of the content analysis, this article further explore the relationship between the contemporary American government and the media through the following three aspects:the "fourth power", a tool for political propaganda and the media’s influence to the presidential election.