Agendamelding

The present study tests the agendamelding theory, which posits that public agenda is the result of a process whereby audiences “meld” agendas from various media along with their personal agenda to form a coherent picture of society. To that end, the contributions of the traditional media agenda, the social media agenda, and the personal agenda of Iranian audiences to their public agenda are independently measured and compared against values predicted by theory. The findings indicate a strong social media agenda-setting effect in Iran (ρ = .83, p < .05) and a weak, non-significant traditional media agenda-setting effect (ρ = .28, p = .48). On average, actual contributions closely mirror values predicted by theory, suggesting that agendamelding is a viable theory for studying the audience-media relationship.