Abstract

The CNN-YouTube Presidential Candidate Debates provided a unique opportunity for the public to become involved in national political discussion. Although the debates’ questions were produced by the public, the videos appearing in the broadcasts were selected by a CNN selection committee; thus, prompting criticism that CNN established the agenda of the publicly created debates. Using content analysis, this study investigated the characteristics of the broadcast videos and the online video submissions to determine if significant differences in the videos’ characteristics existed between the two samples. The results indicate minimal differences between the samples, suggesting that agenda setting was not evident in the videos selected by CNN for broadcast during the CNN-YouTube debates.

Key Words: Political Debates, YouTube, Agenda Setting

^JCMRJournal of Communication and Media Research, Vol. 2, No. 1, April 2010, 67 – 77

About the author

LaChrystal Dawn Ricke is an Assistant Professor of Mass Communication, Sam Houston State University Huntsville, TX 77341,U.S.A.

Full Article

Words: 6,023

Pages: 11

To access full article, click on download.

Article Citation

Ricke, L. D. (2010): The public versus CNN: Agenda setting and the YouTube presidential debates in the United States. Journal of Communication and Media Research 2(1): 67 – 77.