Chris J. Vargo

University of Colorado Boulder | CUB · Advertising, Public Relations and Design

This paper presents an empirical study that tests an emerging media effects model, the Network Agenda Setting (NAS) Model and the theory of issue ownership. Big data analytics and semantic network analysis were used to examine the large dataset collected on Twitter during the 2012 U.S. presidential election. Results show that the news media can det...

An issue and event were tracked for 90 days on Twitter, cable television and large newspapers. The mortgage and housing crisis was an ongoing issue, and the BP oil spill was an ongoing event. As expected, the results suggest media as a predictor of Twitter for the two issue agendas studied. However, this study shows that the agenda-setting effects...

This study finds support for agenda melding and further validates the Network Agenda Setting (NAS) model through a series of computer science methods with large datasets on Twitter. The results demonstrate that during the 2012 U.S. presidential election, distinctive audiences “melded” agendas of various media differently. “Vertical” media best pred...

Prior research has reliably shown a positive relationship between political talk and political knowledge. This study sought to build upon this research by assessing the association between internet-based textual political expression and political knowledge. Notably, while online textual political expression is closely linked to traditional conceptu...

Sinclair Broadcast Group owns over 170 US television stations. Using agenda setting and agenda cutting as a theoretical lens, this study quantifies the effect of Sinclair ownership by analyzing over 340,000 news stories from six station websites over 4 years through time series modeling. Sinclair ownership negatively changes total news stories outp...

Using Gallup survey data and online news from 2015 to 2020, this study explored the degree to which audiences “meld” agendas from a wide array of news sources for the five most popular issues in the U.S.: the government and politicians, immigration, the economy, race relations, and healthcare. Overall, audiences of varying ideology had agendas that...

Based upon a 3-year data set of Tweets linking to native advertising from leading U.S. news publications, this study provides human content analyses (n = 1,527) of the practice of native advertising disclosure in the field – both on publisher websites and when shared on Twitter – and explores whether disclosures serve the inoculating function of re...

Building off of literatures in the areas of network heterogeneity, oppositional networks, cross-cutting exposure, incidental information exposure, and trust, we suggested that Facebook networks characterized by inclusion of people different from the self have the potential to facilitate the inflow of diverse and attitudinally-dissonant information,...

Recently, substantial attention has been paid to the spread of highly partisan and often factually incorrect information (i.e., so-called “fake news”) on social media. In this study, we attempt to extend current knowledge on this topic by exploring the degree to which individual levels of ideological extremity, social trust, and trust in the news m...

This study examined political advertisements placed by the Russian-based Internet Research Agency on Facebook and Instagram. Advertisements were computationally analyzed for four rhetorical techniques presumed to elicit anger and fear: negative identity-based language, inflammatory language, obscene language, and threatening language. Congruent wit...

Need for orientation (NFO) has long been accepted as an antecedent to agenda-setting effects. This study assessed whether NFO can go further to explain a specific behavior, why individuals share political news on Facebook. A new method is introduced that combines survey data with users’ Facebook accounts and their actual Facebook posts to reveal th...

Using a method incorporating both survey and trace data measures and the framework of social identity theory, this study presents a model for understanding political talk on Facebook. It found substantial and statistically significant relationships between offline civic engagement, bonded social capital, and political attitude extremity. It also id...

This study correlated self-report and trace data measures of political incivility. Specifically, we asked respondents to provide estimates of the degree to which they engage in uncivil political communication online. These estimates were then compared to computational measures of uncivil social media discussion behavior. The results indicated that...

50 years have passed since the seminal 1968 election study was conducted in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. A conference was held with formative theorists Drs. Shaw, Weaver and McCombs. Presentations clustered into 9 clear areas. First, there were areas undergoing theoretical expansion: (1) agenda building, (2) Network Agenda Setting (NAS), (3) Need F...

Despite the prevalence of fact-checking, little is known about who posts fact-checks online. Based upon a content analysis of Facebook and Twitter digital trace data and a linked online survey (N = 783), this study reveals that sharing fact-checks in political conversations on social media is linked to age, ideology, and political behaviors. Moreov...

This study examined how fake news, misinformation, and satire, affected the emerging media ecosystem during the 2016 U.S. presidential election through an integrated intermedia agenda-setting analysis, which studies broad attributes and myopic stories and events. A computer-assisted content analysis of millions of news articles was conducted alongs...

This study examines temporal trends, geographic distribution, and demographic correlates of anti-vaccine beliefs on Twitter, 2009-2015. A total of 549,972 tweets were downloaded and coded for the presence of anti-vaccine beliefs through a machine learning algorithm. Tweets with self-disclosed geographic information were resolved and United States C...

This study contributes to international news flow literature methodologically, by significantly expanding its scope, and theoretically, by incorporating intermedia agenda-setting theory, through which we reveal how news media in different countries influence each other in covering international news. With a big data analysis of 4,708 online news so...

This study examines the agenda-setting power of fake news and fact-checkers who fight them through a computational look at the online mediascape from 2014 to 2016. Although our study confirms that content from fake news websites is increasing, these sites do not exert excessive power. Instead, fake news has an intricately entwined relationship with...

This study explores frequency of election-related chatter as an antecedent to agenda setting. In this study, we conducted a longitudinal analysis of 38 million tweets from the 2012 election. Users who participate more in election talk align more with partisan media than less active users. Users who participate less align less with partisan media an...

Using the 2012 presidential election as a case study, this work set out to understand the relationship between negative political advertising and political incivility on Twitter. Drawing on the stimulation hypothesis and the notion that communication with dissimilar others can encourage incivility, it was predicted that (1) heightened levels of neg...

Using 414,322 tweets drawn from 143,404 individual Twitter users located in all 435 U.S. congressional districts, this study employed big data and automated content analysis techniques to explore the degree to which socioeconomic status (SES), social capital potential (the degree to which a congressional district has the potential for interconnecte...

This large-scale intermedia agenda–setting analysis examines U.S. online media sources for 2015. The network agenda–setting model showed that media agendas were highly homogeneous and reciprocal. Online partisan media played a leading role in the entire media agenda. Two elite newspapers—The New York Times and The Washington Post—were found to no l...

This study assesses brand messages on Twitter (i.e., tweets broadcasted by a brand) and the contributory engagement a tweet receives. It presents a typology for brand messages that accounts for 92.6% of messages found. Findings offer mild support for self-concept and self-enhancement as drivers of engagement. This research also tests assumptions ma...

This article presents an empirical study that investigated and compared two “big data” text analysis methods: dictionary-based analysis, perhaps the most popular automated analysis approach in social science research, and unsupervised topic modeling (i.e., Latent Dirichlet Allocation [LDA] analysis), one of the most widely used algorithms in the fi...

In a world of big data, with more information at the audience's fingertips than ever, gatekeepers such as media and political parties still play a huge role in mediating issues to the general public. Recognizing this issue, this study investigated the first and second levels of intermedia agenda setting between political advertisements, newspapers,...

World leaders and citizens alike use a mix of traditional (e.g. newspapers, magazines, radio, and television) and social (e.g. Twitter, and Facebook) media to redefine community in the digital age. Nations confront challenges from collectives that are asserting their voices into national and regional issues. This dynamic change is made possible by...

World leaders and citizens alike use a mix of traditional (e.g. newspapers, magazines, radio, and television) and social (e.g. Twitter, and Facebook) media to redefine community in the digital age. Nations confront challenges from collectives that are asserting their voices into national and regional issues. This dynamic change is made possible by...