Intermedia and interlingual agenda setting: News coverage of the Ebola virus on Twitter (Preprint)
UNSTRUCTURED The 2014 Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak captured substantial media attention around the world. This paper investigates the media coverage of Ebola in five pairs of English and Arabic international television media outlets (BBC, CNN, SkyNews, RT, and France24) by examining the headlines of 298,559 news stories that those respective organizations posted on their official Twitter accounts. Over the course of approximately one year’s worth of coverage on these networks, Ebola was mentioned in the headlines of 4,138 stories, which constitutes 1.38% of the total news coverage of all media outlets. Building on the theory of intermedia agenda setting that outlines the ways in which major news organization influence the agendas of other news outlets, the findings reported here indicate strong, time-ordered patterns where English language coverage consistently precedes and helps to significantly explain the distribution of Arabic media coverage. In addition to providing evidence of intermedia agenda setting from a comparative perspective in this context, this paper expands on this theory and suggests that it can be applied to multilingual outlets from the same news organizations.