An investigation of inter-media agenda setting of the drugs-in-professional-sports issue

The mass communication hypothesis of agenda setting has been expanded beyond the traditional media-to-public model used so often in mass communication research. This study examines the relationship of agenda setting within the professional sports journalism community by examining the coverage of one issue, drug usage in professional sports, over an eight-year period when drugs-in-sports stories became almost a staple of the American sports page and nightly sportscasters' scripts. The study examined a sports issue, an area into which relatively little mass communication research has been conducted. Drugs-in-sports stories run counter to the positive, sports-affirming messages often conveyed in much sports coverage.;The coverage of that issue in the daily media, as defined by elite newspapers and network television broadcasts, was compared with the coverage in five mass-circulation magazines. Because daily media are consumed by the need to fill their allotted space every day, it was hypothesized that magazines, with less deadline stress, would tend to set the dailies' agendas more often than dailies set magazines' agenda. Other hypotheses concerned differences in type of story covered, type of drug covered, sources used, journalist rankings of newsworthiness of drug types, and journalist rankings of media coverage.;Some limited evidence was found to support the main hypothesis that magazines tended to set the dailies' agenda in issue-oriented stories more often than dailies set magazine agendas. The data also supported the hypothesis that magazines tend to set dailies' agendas in issue-oriented stories, but also that tend to set agendas in certain event-oriented stories as well.;Other hypotheses concerning agenda setting were not accepted. Newspaper journalists seemed to rate their coverage more highly than did their magazine counterparts.