Building the news media agenda: Spanish political parties' influence on traditional media and blogosphere agendas during 2011 electoral campaign

Abstract

This article aims to analyse the composition of partisan agendas during the Spanish General Election campaign 2011 and their sponsorship by different media actors (both traditional and digital), through a methodological approach that consists of content analysis applied to a corpus of 168 news pieces. Our goal is to empirically assess if the polarized pluralism of the Spanish media system leads traditional media outlets to adopt and disseminate the issue priorities emphasized by the political parties that belong to their respective ideological spheres. Moreover, this study examines if the Spanish political blogosphere is influenced by partisan agendas during the electoral campaign. The results show that while traditional newspapers clearly sponsor partisan agendas in their editorials, political blogs tend to promote a significantly more independent and open thematic debate.