Tipping the Twitter vs. News Media Scale? Conducting a Third Assessment of Intermedia Agenda-Setting Effects during the Presidential Nomination Season

Two previous studies investigated the relationship between newspaper issue agendas and those of candidate and campaign Twitter feeds during the presidential nomination seasons in 2012 and 2016. Both found the intermedia agenda-setting power resided with newspapers. This study replicates the previous two by examining the issue agendas of the nation’s top newspapers and those of candidate and campaign Twitter feeds during the 2020 presidential nomination season. Computer-assisted content analysis and time-series analysis suggest that intermedia agenda-setting power was more even-handed during the 2020 nomination seasons compared to 2012 and 2016, although this finding depends on the metric used.