Intermedia Agenda Setting in Business News Coverage

Abstract

While business news coverage has risen around the world in recent decades, scholarly research into this area has been limited. Scholarship on media coverage of public affairs topics has generally found that coverage patterns converge across news media outlets. This study probes for evidence of intermedia agenda setting among seven elite business news outlets in their coverage of transformational events: corporate proxy contests. The results find that the amount of news stories each outlet devoted to coverage of 25 large proxy contests in the U.S. stock market over a five-year period was highly similar. Intermedia convergence across this news content was also found to a lesser extent regarding issue and stakeholder salience but not, for the most part, with peripheral media favorability. This moderate overall overlap in coverage across media outlets suggests that the notion of a complementary media agenda remains largely intact. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.