Fact check: Who has more agenda setting power in the media? How does legacy media's readership and circulation compare to online platforms and other ways of sharing information?

1. Summary of the results

The question of agenda-setting power in media reveals a complex, interconnected landscape where traditional hierarchies have been fundamentally disrupted. Research shows that no single agenda consistently leads the others, with mutual influences observed across different platforms ^[1]. However, the dynamics vary significantly by issue type - for certain topics like environmental issues, social media agendas, particularly from political party accounts, can be more predictive of traditional media coverage ^[1].

Legacy media circulation has experienced dramatic decline, with total estimated circulation of U.S. daily newspapers at 20.9 million in 2022, representing an 8% decline for weekday and 10% decline for Sunday circulation from 2021 ^[2]. However, the picture becomes more nuanced when examining readership versus circulation - 66% of American residents now access newspaper media via smartphones, indicating that digital platforms have become integral to legacy media distribution ^[3].

Online platforms have gained substantial market power, with companies like Facebook and Google dominating digital advertising through user data leverage ^[4]. New media platforms enable interactive, personalized content dissemination where users both consume and produce information, fundamentally different from legacy media's one-way communication model ^[5].

2. Missing context/alternative viewpoints

The original question lacks several crucial contextual factors that significantly impact agenda-setting power:

• Algorithmic influence: The role of algorithms in determining content visibility on digital platforms creates potential echo chambers and can amplify certain issues over others, representing a new form of agenda-setting power not controlled by traditional editorial processes ^[5].
• Quality and accountability differences: Legacy media maintains structured processes including editorial oversight, fact-checking, collaborative reporting, and institutional accountability that enable deeper, more rigorous reporting across multiple topics ^[6]. This institutional framework provides a different type of influence compared to the democratized but less regulated online information ecosystem.
• Trust and misinformation dynamics: Research from the 2022 Brazilian presidential elections demonstrates that legacy media consumption was associated with fewer beliefs in electoral misinformation, while digital-born media and platform use showed minimal or inconsistent effects ^{[7] [8]}. Trust in news played a significant moderating role, with higher trust reinforcing the protective effects of legacy media consumption ^[7].
• Local news vacuum: The collapse of local news creates information vacuums that can be filled by misinformation and partisan content, potentially undermining democratic discourse ^[4]. This represents a critical gap in the information ecosystem that affects agenda-setting at the community level.

3. Potential misinformation/bias in the original statement

The original question, while neutral in tone, contains an implicit assumption that agenda-setting power can be easily quantified through simple readership and circulation comparisons. This framing potentially misleads by:

• Oversimplifying the measurement of influence: The question focuses primarily on quantitative metrics (readership/circulation) while ignoring qualitative factors like trust, credibility, and the depth of reporting that significantly impact actual agenda-setting power.
• Creating a false binary: The framing suggests a competition between "legacy media" and "online platforms" when research shows these systems are closely interconnected with mutual influences rather than operating as separate, competing entities ^[1].
• Ignoring platform-specific dynamics: The question fails to acknowledge that different types of issues may have different agenda-setting leaders, and that the relationship between traditional and digital media varies significantly by topic and context ^[1].

The question would benefit from recognizing that agenda-setting power in the modern media landscape is distributed, interconnected, and context-dependent rather than residing clearly with any single type of media platform.