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The purpose of this chapter is to shed light on the interrelationships that exist between politicians' Twitter agendas, news websites agendas and public agendas at the first level during the 2019 Greek Parliamentary elections for the two front-runners of the elections, Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Alexis Tsipras. Three researches were conducted to assess the issues agendas of candidates' tweets, news websites coverage as well as the issue importance of the public for an 18-day period prior to the elections. At the issue level, although Twitter and media agendas align more, they are distinct from public agenda. Overall, Twitter proved to be an ineffective tool for influencing the news websites and public agendas during the 2019 Greek Parliamentary elections with online media agendas being slightly more powerful. Moreover, the public agenda did play a role in shaping Twitter as well as media content but in a counterbalancing manner. In addition, this study confirmed that agenda building and setting dynamics at both levels vary based on the issue and candidate being analysed.

While morality is ever-present in elections, scholars have yet to merge political public relations and Moral Foundations Theory. It is crucial to assess the complex morality present not only in social deduction, but also in political strategic communication. The current work aims to analyze the issue agendas and their relationships in the 2020 presidential campaign and assesses their moral strategy.

This study used a computer-assisted content analysis (N = 7,888) with each moral intuition coded from the Moral Foundations Dictionary. Datapoints included campaign tweets, Facebook posts, debate performances, remarks, news releases and nomination acceptance speeches. Coverage included articles from including The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN and Fox News to assess both liberal and conservative media.

Candidates' issue and moral agendas were correlated with each other and with the media's agenda. Comparatively, the Biden campaign has stronger correlations when it came to connecting with issues, stakeholders and moral intuitions in the media agenda than the Trump campaign. For issues, the Biden campaign prioritized COVID-19 and the economy, while the Trump campaign prioritized the economy and crime. The candidates also had similar moral strategies.

This study suggests effectively leveraging organizational communications in democracies can support the transfer of object salience, moral attributes and networks to media coverage, public discourse and opponent messaging. It can also help achieve organizational goals by managing public image, reputation and expectations.

This work expands the literature by taking a pluralist moral psychology approach in assessing the salience and correlation of five moral intuitions: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity. This study serves as a springboard for examining morality's impact on political public relations.

The purpose of this paper is to better understand agenda setting by international human rights organizations in the online environment and at the same time contribute to agenda‐setting theory. The role of non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) in the area of human rights is clarified, and agenda setting and related concepts are discussed.

The study focuses on how attention is drawn to human rights issues in online communication by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International. A content analysis of online forums of HRW and Amnesty International was conducted by monitoring their web sites and Facebook and Twitter pages over a period of three months. In addition, two expert interviews with representatives of Amnesty Finland were conducted to better understand how the organization's online communication activities relate to its policies in drawing attention to human rights.

Based on this study, drawing attention to human rights issues is a goal that leads to active online communication. NGOs aim at attracting attention to their issues online by initiating a dialogue via online forums and motivating the public to participate in activities that may influence the media and the political agenda. The existing agenda‐setting research tends to emphasize the role of journalists in setting the public agenda, and mentions NGOs primarily as a source for journalists and as a political player. The online environment shows, however, that these NGOs mostly aim at setting the public agenda to create social change, while the media and political agenda are also not forgotten.

This study suggests that the interdependence of the media, public and political agendas is more complex than has thus far been considered in agenda‐setting theory, especially in the current online environment. It investigates online agenda setting by two international NGOs, but does not discuss the role of the media or the public at large in their relationship with these NGOs. As this study has a limited time frame, a content analysis over a longer period and interviews with representatives of a wider variety of NGOs could be a next step. Future research could also compare the online communication of NGOs with that of profit organisations.

The findings show how agenda setting is supported by intricate multi‐platform activities in the present‐day online environment by the organizations studied in order to initiate a dialogue on societal issues. This suggests that in the online environment, the media, public and political agendas are becoming increasingly interrelated and within this triangle the public agenda seems to be gaining further in importance.

The impact that NGOs have on today's society is growing, and hence studying their online agenda setting is valuable from the perspective of corporate communication. International NGOs early on recognised the value of online communication.

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 on Twitter are not equal in regard to issues and events. The agenda-setting effect of the media appeared to be stronger for the issue observed here. Moreover, initial evidence is provided that agendas for the ongoing events were more volatile than ongoing issues. For ongoing events, it appears that agendas are most reflective of the real-world cues that initiate them. This suggests that when real-world cues are largely absent, the media are less salient, and the agenda is more stable and ongoing. Finally, increased temporality appears to better reveal agenda-setting effects for events. Relaxed temporal measures appear to reveal the agenda-setting effect of ongoing issues more effectively. Events are not all equal; neither are issues. As such, the media and Twitter behave differently. This distinction has not yet been made in the literature.

This chapter identifies, defines and explores four news media roles of conduit, facilitator, mediator and political actor through which the media participate with corporate, social and political actors in agenda-building processes. The framework of the media’s four agenda-building roles sheds light on how the news media perform their various roles as well as how other actors, such as organizations and media audiences, are able to mobilize the media performing these roles. This framework helps explain how and why media roles affect the way actors are able to influence the media agenda with the intention of shaping the public agenda.

This paper aims to explore the links among health authorities’ public relations efforts, news media coverage, and public perceptions of risk during the H1N1 pandemic outbreak.

This study used a triangulation of research methods by comparing public relations materials, media coverage, and public opinion. The data were collected from a federal government web site, national newspapers, and national polls.

The data revealed a positive relationship between information subsidy attention and media attention to the H1N1 disease as well as the severity attribute. The salience of the severity attribute in information subsidies was linked with increased H1N1 salience in media coverage, extending the testing of the compelling-arguments hypothesis to an agenda-building context. However, there was no association between salience of the severity attribute and public risk perceptions.

The study provides evidence for public relations effectiveness. However, the limited influence of the severity frame on the public's risk perception suggests a gap between news coverage and the public's view. Framing that effectively empowers the public to engage in desired behavior should be further studied for the success of a public health campaign. The study is limited to examining the severity attribute. A future study should pay more attention to different issue attributes or other frames. The media sample was limited to newspapers and thus lacks generalizability.

The study contributes to public relations scholarship by demonstrating how information subsidies influence media agendas and public opinion in a health communication context. The public health authorities’ role in influencing media agenda should be stressed.

Governments in Australia are in the process of implementing accrual reporting for their departments and governments as a whole. The central issue of this paper is to provide an explanation as to how general purpose financial reporting became a significant issue for governments in Australia. Agenda‐setting literature provides the framework within which to analyse the specific events and strategies used by public sector accountants to promote accrual technologies. The main finding of the research is that accrual technologies have been promoted by public sector accountants working from within government institutions, and often aligned with the organised accounting profession. Prior to the late 1980s the Auditors‐General were the main actors involved, however, more recently, accounting technologies have been promoted by accounting policy units within Treasuries and Departments of Finance. The paper concludes with a call for future research on the implications of such accounting changes for organisational and social functioning.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate whether or not public relations efforts in corporate social responsibility (CSR) influence the news media in corporate crisis situations.

The study conducted a content analysis of press releases and news media based on traditional human-coded cross-lag analyses and a machine learning technique, a novel method of big data analysis to test hypotheses.

Results indicate that CSR press releases indeed influenced the news media. During the crisis point, however, agenda-building was not observed.

Corporations need to continue CSR activities and provide public relations materials consistently even after a crisis, as an agenda-building role could be recovered.

The study examines the relationship between CSR and crisis situations in an agenda-building theoretical framework. The authors introduce agenda-building in the corporate sector with machine learning techniques.

News media have been shown to have a significant influence in the selection and perception of issues in political campaigns. This has become known as “agenda‐setting”. The evolution of the agenda‐setting literature is traced and the links with political campaigning and political marketing are identified. Although the term is widely used in Australasia, Europe and North America, there is no previous empirical research on agenda‐setting in Greece. The article outlines a content analysis of press coverage over the period of the campaign for the European elections in Greece in 1999. The results are contrasted with an analysis of party manifestos and press releases and with public opinion prior to the campaign. Differences between the three agenda groups are identified.

This paper aims to shed light on the impact of personalized news media on the shared issue agenda that provides democracies with a set of topics that structure the public debate. The advent of personalized news media that use smart algorithms to tailor the news offer to the user challenges the established way of setting the agenda of such a common core of issues.

This paper tests the effects of personalized news use on perceived importance of these issues in the common core. In particular, the authors study whether personalized news use leads to a concentration at the top of the issue agenda or to a more diverse issue agenda with a long tail of topics.

Based on a cross-sectional survey of a representative population sample (n = 1,556), we find that personalized news use does not lead to a small common core in which few topics are discussed extensively, yet there is a relationship between personalized news use and a preference for less discussed topics. This is a result of a specific user profile of personalized news users: younger, more educated news users are more interested in topics at the fringes of the common core and also make more use of personalized news offers.

The results are discussed in the light of media diversity and recent advances in public sphere research.

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate about algorithmic news dissemination. While, currently, much attention is reserved for the role of platforms as information gatekeepers in relationship to the news media, maybe their ability to enable or hinder the audience in discovering and distributing news content is part of what really characterizes their influence on the market place of ideas.