Lei Guo

Fudan University · School of Journalism

Local journalism is in decline in the United States. As one way to assess the state of local journalism, this study examines the information flows between local and national media in the online media ecosystem. Focusing on metropolitan journalism, this paper empirically investigates whether and when a city’s local news coverage can influence nation...

In response to Perloff's (this issue) essay examining the development and future of agenda setting, a series of scholars offer their own reactions to the essay and the broader issues it raises. © 2022 Mass Communication & Society Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

We propose a five-step computational framing analysis framework that researchers can use to analyze multilingual news data. The framework combines unsupervised and supervised machine learning and leverages a state-of-the-art multilingual deep learning model, which can significantly enhance frame prediction performance while requiring a considerably...

This study incorporates the examination of citizenship norms in testing the Citizen Communication Mediation Model (CCMM) in China, exploring to what extent online political expression mediates the impact of informational use of social media on offline civic engagement and how beliefs in citizenship norms moderate the CCMM. Results based on a two-wa...

When journalists cover a news story, they can cover the story from multiple angles or perspectives. These perspectives are called "frames", and usage of one frame or another may influence public perception and opinion of the issue at hand. We develop a web-based system for analyzing frames in multilingual text documents. We propose and guide users...

News media structure their reporting of events or issues using certain perspectives. When describing an incident involving gun violence, for example, some journalists may focus on mental health or gun regulation, while others may emphasize the discussion of gun rights. Such perspectives are called "frames" in communication research. We study, for t...

Despite several transient spikes in response to the deadliest mass shootings, the U.S. population continues to perceive gun violence as less important than other issues, and public opinion remains divided along partisan lines. Drawing upon literature of compelling arguments and partisan media, this study investigates what kind of news framing—episo...

In China, the discussion of “fake news” often revolves around online rumor. In addition to politically motivated rumors, a large portion of profit-driven, sensational rumors permeate China's Internet. This study examines the diffusion of day-to-day online rumors on Weibo, WeChat, and mainstream news websites—the three major online news platforms in...

When journalists cover a news story, they can cover the story from multiple angles or perspectives. A news article written about COVID-19 for example, might focus on personal preventative actions such as mask-wearing, while another might focus on COVID-19's impact on the economy. These perspectives are called "frames," which when used may influence...

This study examines a networked global media system by discerning what drives international news flow in multiple dimensions. A network analysis of news coverage from news websites in 67 countries and their interactions in 2015 reveals that structural factors not only predict a country’s international attention – but also its transnational intermed...

This study examines how online news and Twitter framed the discussion about genetically modified mosquitoes differently in response to Zika as the issue-attention cycle progressed. Results show that Twitter discussions relied on recurring frames. By contrast, online news media used a wider variety of benefit and risk frames than Twitter, which help...

This study examines the “fake news” problem in China where the media environment is tightly controlled. Focusing on online rumors that are not politically sensitive, this article seeks to shed light on a commercialized dimension of China’s online media landscape in addition to a highly politicalized one that previous research has emphasized. Based...

Using data from a content analysis of partisan media and a public opinion survey administered in Hong Kong, this study incorporates selective exposure and deliberation literature into the network agenda-setting (NAS) model to test media effects on people’s perception of the relationship between Hong Kong and mainland China. This study advances the...

We report results of a comparison of the accuracy of crowdworkers and seven NaturalLanguage Processing (NLP) toolkits in solving two important NLP tasks, named-entity recognition (NER) and entity-level sentiment(ELS) analysis. We here focus on a challenging dataset, 1,000 political tweets that were collected during the U.S. presidential primary ele...

This study investigated the network agenda setting (NAS) model with data gathered from Taiwan’s 2012 presidential election. Networks of important objects and candidate attributes in the news were compared with the counterparts generated from public opinion. The overall correlation between the media and public network agendas was positive and signif...

With the wider penetration of information and communication technologies (ICTs), digital divide scholars have turned attention from physical access to the difference in usage. Based on a national representative survey conducted in mainland China (N = l,004), this exploratory study contributes to the literature by explicating a new typology of socia...

Crowdcoding, a method that outsources “coding” tasks to numerous people on the internet, has emerged as a popular approach for annotating texts and visuals. However, the performance of this approach for analyzing social media data in the context of journalism and mass communication research has not been systematically assessed. This study evaluated...

While the political influence of the Internet, especially social media, on people’s attitude toward their governments has been widely discussed in western democracies, the situation in authoritarian regimes such as China has not yet been adequately addressed. The current Chinese administration considers social media ‘the main battlefield for public...

China’s online news environment is complex and rapidly changing. The paper explores the diversity of China’s online news landscape and questions whether it remains dominated by the official news sources. Based on two agenda-setting concepts—media agenda diversity and intermedia agenda setting, the study examined how China’s official and commercial...

Due to concerns about human error in crowdsourcing, it is standard practice to collect labels for the same data point from multiple internet workers. We here show that the resulting budget can be used more effectively with a flexible worker assignment strategy that asks fewer workers to analyze easy-to-label data and more workers to analyze data th...

We investigate how the online news and Twitter framed the discussion about genetically modified mosquitoes, and the interplay between the two media platforms. The study is grounded in the theoretical frameworks of intermedia agenda setting, framing, and the issue-attention cycle and combines methods of manual and computational content analysis, and...

This study examined the echo chamber phenomenon and opinion leadership on Twitter based on the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Network analysis and ‘big data’ analytics were employed to analyze more than 50 million tweets about the two presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, during the election cycle. Overall, the results sugges...

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 advances agenda-setting theory by applying it to understand the media influence on the public’s perception of health issues. The longitudinal analysis compared news indices, public opinion polls, and reality indicators in the United States from 2001 to 2010. The results show that news media, especially print media, did have some agenda-s...

The South China Sea dispute is one of the most complicated geopolitical issues of the twenty-first century. While this international conflict revolves around military and economic disputes, in today’s information age international politics also hinges on how each country presents the dispute in the news and whose “story” wins. Based on the Network...

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 entry reviews agenda-setting literature from two theoretical and methodological perspectives: aggregate- and individual-level media effects. The literature suggests that all three levels of agenda-setting have found solid evidence at the aggregate level. That is, the news media are able to transfer the salience of objects, attributes, and netw...

In China, the emergence of WeChat—a comprehensive mobile application—has introduced millions of older adults to the digital world. This study conceptualizes the use of WeChat among Chinese older adults from the theoretical framework of alternative media. Based on four focus group discussions in Shanghai, China, with 35 individuals aged 50 years or...

This article discusses how LGBT activists in China employ different ICTs for their causes and the challenges that they face. The discussion is based on a review of relevant studies and some preliminary results from an ethnographic study of an LGBT organization Shen Lan in Tianjian, a major port city in northeastern China. The study suggests that in...

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...

Opinions about the 2016 U.S. Presidential Candidates have been expressed in millions of tweets that are challenging to analyze automatically. Crowdsourcing the analysis of political tweets effectively is also difficult, due to large inter-rater disagreements when sarcasm is involved. Each tweet is typically analyzed by a fixed number of workers and...

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...

Opinions about the 2016 U.S. Presidential Candidates have been expressed in millions of tweets that are challenging to analyze automatically. Crowdsourcing the analysis of political tweets effectively is also difficult, due to large inter-rater disagreements when sarcasm is involved. Each tweet is typically analyzed by a fixed number of workers and...

Most alternative media research has examined media content and the production process, largely ignoring another important component: the audiences of alternative media. To narrow this gap, this study investigates audience participation in one alternative media outlet: community radio. Case studies were conducted on 2 U.S. community radio stations t...

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...

Walter Lippmann's description in Public Opinion of the news media as the bridge between “the world outside and the pictures in our heads” is particularly apt for the two goals of this study: exploring a new perspective in agenda-setting theory grounded in network analysis, which, in turn, provides the setting for a comparative analysis of the Iraq...

This study examines the Network Agenda Setting Model, the third level of agenda-setting theory. It seeks to expand the model's scope by testing five years (2007-2011) of aggregated data from national news media and polls. The study finds evidence that the news media bundled issue objects and made them salient in the public's mind. Findings of the s...

This study examines representations of African Americans, Latinos, and Asians in YouTube videos, exploring whether YouTube serves as a type of alternative media where the status quo is contested. Results show that most videos analyzed perpetuated racial stereotypes. Further, videos that included stereotypes, most of which contained user-produced co...

Considering the debate over U.S. immigration reform and the way digital communication technologies increasingly are being used to spark protests, this qualitative study examines focus group discourse of immigration activists to explore how digital media are transforming the definitions of “activism” and “activist.” Analysis suggests technologies ar...

This chapter examines three distinct aspects of the agenda-setting influence of the news media on the public as well as the psychological principles that explain when this influence is strong and when it is weak. The continuing evolution of the theory of agenda setting has now extended over nearly a half century, from the seminal 1968 Chapel Hill s...

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...

Asian/Asian Americans, a minority group traditionally and systematically ignored by the American mainstream media, have become extremely vocal on YouTube. This study analyzes the YouTube-based vernacular discourses created by two of the most well-known and influential Asian American YouTube celebrities: Ryan Higa and Kevin Wu. For analysis, we prov...

This article presents the innovative application of social network analysis to agenda setting research. It suggests that the approach of network analysis enables researchers to map out the interrelationships among objects and attributes both in the media agenda and the public agenda. Further, by conducting statistical analysis, researchers are able...

This study used an international perspective to analyze how newspapers in the United States and China framed a specific global sweatshop issue: a continuous spate of suicides at the Foxconn Technology Group, a major supplier to Apple, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 92 newspaper articles appearing in US...

In the field of citizen media research, considerably less attention has been paid to countries other than the US and those in Western Europe. This article is a case study that focuses on citizen media in Beijing – specifically, the Dazhalan Project. Combining in-depth interviews and textual analysis, the article demonstrates the uniqueness of citiz...

In light of continuing trends of globalization, media scholars are increasingly examining and comparing transnational issues. This study argues that although such research is timely and necessary, it requires a more structured approach. By analyzing existing cross-national framing studies, this study exposes gaps in the literature that a new model...

Using a cross-cultural framework, this study relies on survey data to examine how activists in China, Latin America, and the United States use social networking sites for their mobilizing efforts. Activists in China assigned greater importance to social media to promote debate. Those in Latin America expressed more apprehensions about the ease of u...