Which Media Outlets Led The Attentional Interplay During The Changsheng Vaccine Scandal?

The advent of new media such as the internet has not only brought about the new media ecology in contemporary society but also driven researchers to reconsider the conclusions drawn by traditional intermedia agenda-setting studies.By applying the intermedia agendasetting theory in the new media ecology,existing studies have come to three different conclusions,that is,the traditional-media-leading theorem,the social-media-leading theorem and the interaction and differentiated resonance theorem.Despite these contributions,this study identifies three gaps in previous literature: First,limited researches have been conducted to examine the intermedia attentional interplay in Chinese media context within the methodological framework of time series analysis;Second,limited attention is paid to the agenda-setting dynamics between different actors within the social media;third,insufficient studies have been conducted to investigate the intermedia agenda-setting in the new media ecology with a shorter-than-one-day time-lag.In the face of these existing tendencies in previous studies,my project aims to analyse the intermedia agenda-setting between a)four media actors under the traditional paradigm and b)five social media actors within Weibo with the case of 2018 Changsheng Vaccine Scandal.With the framework of time-series-analysis,it is found that Weibo is the most influential agendasetter among four media outlets under the traditional paradigm,unidirectionally reverse-setting the agenda of all the other outlets.In contrast,the agenda-setting ability of Chinese government website is more robust than newspapers and news websites and weaker than Weibo.At the same time,Middle-V individual account with 200.000 to 1.000.000 followers are the most influential agenda-setter in the Weibo sphere,unidirectionally setting the agenda of all the other actors in Weibo with the time-lag of at least two hours.On the contrary,Big-V individual account with more than 1.000.000 followers lags far behind in the attentional interplay in Weibo.The account held by the Chinese government and party organs,again,is the second most influential actor in Weibo,setting the agenda of all the other actors other than Middle-V account.In sum,although Weibo can still set the reverse-agenda of traditional media with the active coverages of Middle-V account,the growing influence of government account,the weak agenda-setting power of news media and the mismatch between individual account's communication potential and actual communication power signals that Chinese media environment has entered the “weak public opinion era”.