Analyzing the Twitter's Agenda-setting Function on National Press : A Case Study of Election Campaigns in Pakistan

Abstract

The purpose of this research paper is to analyze the influence of political tweets and the media coverage in the context of political situation in Pakistan. From the theoretical perspective of inter-media agenda setting theory, this paper empirically investigates the significant issues present in Twitter postings by leading politicians at national level and then understand the effect on the traditional media agenda. In this regard, descriptive statistics of political tweets and the coverage analysis from the Pakistani press, both English and Urdu languages, disclose that nearly half of political tweets are covered in the news media prominently, indicating that Twitter has the enough capability to move the salience of issues expressed in tweets to the media agenda. The results also disclose that Twitter agenda is prioritized by the newspapers, while covering several topics, such corruption, bad governance and election riggings. Moreover, our findings emphasize that the proper and strategic use of Twitter could be resulted in designing effective and efficient political campaigns, especially at the time of election in order to ensure favorable media coverage.