On "Agenda-Setting" In BBS

Guided by the theory of Agenda-Setting, the present thesis takes the occurrence and development of "South China Tiger" event in Nation-building Forum and Sina Forum as the subject. The method of stratified random sampling is adopted to select 323 effective samples from the two forums on the Internet, and a basic statistical analysis, Mann-Whitney Test, Correlation Analysis of the effective samples are conducted from the perspectives of the amount, sources and properties of the invitation letters, the time, layers, number of responders, attitude and properties of the response letters, and the review frequency with the help of SPSS 11.5 on the basis of content analysis. Through studies and discussion, the conclusions can be drawn as following:(1)The Agenda-setting exists in BBS.(2) There are differences between BBS and traditional media in agenda-setting.(3)There are not only common denominators but also differentia in different types of Internet forums in agenda-setting.Based on the research results, the author puts forward two proposals:BBS should play its self-disciplinary role for major media; a group of core net citizens should be cultivated for BBS.