Research On The Network Relationship Between The Explicit And Implicit Agendas Among The Media In The Topic Of Vaccine Safety

In view of the close tie between vaccine safety and all members of the society,vaccine accidents are likely to cause mass panic.Apart from the exposure of the absence of government oversight of vaccine safety,the crisis brought by such accidents has been exacerbated by information posted on social media by various subjects.The resulting drop in vaccination rates will undoubtedly pose a negative impact on the prevention and control of infectious diseases in China and even the vaccine industry as a whole.Therefore,it is of necessity to analyze the dissemination effect of such information in the public by comparing the similarities and differences of the subjects' views on vaccine safety.As one of the classical theories of media effect research,the agenda setting theory,which has witnessed a history of more than50 years,has developed multiple directions including the third-level agenda setting and intermedia agenda setting,with research methods being increasingly scientific and sophisticated.Among them,the explicit and implicit research of agenda network,as the deepening of media effect research in the third-level agenda setting,has been identified as a new direction of agenda setting research by scholars in the field,thus demonstrating a shift from the conscious cognitive research to the exploration of unconscious cognitive research.Based on researches on agenda setting theory and vaccine safety at home and abroad,techniques including natural language processing and machine learning are adopted in this paper to seek for the improvement of explicit and implicit agenda network analysis methods.Taking two vaccine safety accidents,i.e."Shandong illegal vaccine scandal" and "Changsheng Bio-technology vaccine scandal",with extensive influence in recent years as examples,this paper analyzes the agenda network of main participants in such Weibo communities as government affairs accounts,official media,commercial media,opinion leaders and the public from the explicit and implicit perspectives,while the agenda guidance between other subjects and the public is inferred from causality.According to the results,in agenda framing and agenda topics,except for the five basic frameworks of "popular science refutation","causal background","countermeasures and suggestions","news facts" and "moral judgment",topics related to other vaccine safety events have been found,which are individually named as "related events" framework.Besides,all subjects are faced with the lack of relevantinformation in the framework of "popular science refutation".In terms of the explicit agenda network,"the flow of problematic vaccines" has been focused by all subjects.The release of information on the flow of problematic vaccines and the emphasis on the re-vaccination measures are taken as a significant improvement in the release of information on vaccine safety incidents,compared with the voices of government affairs accounts and official media on Shandong illegal vaccine scandal and Changsheng Bio-technology vaccine scandal.The correlation between the two demonstrates a considerable improvement compared to Shandong illegal vaccine scandal,indicating the publicity department's more rigorous standards and requirements on the media's coverage of vaccine safety accidents.In the aspect of implicit agenda network,the results greatly differ from that of the explicit agenda network.Words with emotional predispositions or related to subjects involved are placed at the center of the network,suggesting the transitivity and implicit semantic intensity of such words despite their low co-occurrence frequency.However,official discourse differs from public discourse in terms of emotional characteristics in a large part.The sentiment of the official discourse is aggregative and emphasizes the controllability of the overall situation,that is,the belief that vaccines are safe and reliable except in some inflow areas.Public sentiment,by contrast,is more confrontational and points to institutional deficiencies such as a possible loophole in vaccine regulation behind the accident.With regard to agenda guidance,the initial intention of government affairs accounts to "empathize" with the public has not been perceived.In spite of the public's reversed agenda setting for other subjects,this applies only to subjects that do not conflict with official interests while the scale of response remains up to the authorities.As the innovation of this paper,it clarified the boundary between explicit and implicit relationship in theory.The criterion of co-occurrence distance between elements in the past is shifted to the redefined "co-occurrence" and "transitivity" as the dividing basis of the two,with the method of measurement being as well specified.In terms of research objects,government affairs accounts and opinion leaders are included in the research scope of agenda setting,and the media are subdivided into official media and commercial media.According to the conclusion,suggestions are made to relevant subjects,especially government affairs accounts and official media,that is,to identify the difference between information supply and communication effect.An appropriate information strategy does not necessarily imply effectivecommunication to the public,highlighting the role of an agenda that values and responds to the public.Also,topics within the "related events" framework should be addressed and the behavior of taking advantage of "hot spots" should be avoided.Furthermore,the conclusions drawn in the paper provide a reference for scholars in the field of agenda setting to clarify the relationship between QAP correlation analysis and Granger causality test under the third-level agenda setting theory and possible doubts in the unit selection of Granger causality test.