The Third Level Agenda Setting Test

Since the end of 2019,the new crown pneumonia epidemic has broken out in various parts of the world one after another.At present,my country has entered the normalization stage of epidemic prevention and control.The epidemic is a major public health emergency,with the characteristics of difficult prevention and control,wide range of infection,and rapid spread.In an emergency public health incident,how to effectively guide public opinion is an important content and test that the party and the government face in the prevention and control of the epidemic.The research of public opinion in emergent public health events is very important,and the study of media's communication effect is an important part of the research of public opinion.Therefore,the study of the effect of media communication in the new crown pneumonia epidemic is an important aspect of public opinion research.The third-level agenda setting theory believes that the media constructs the logical relationship between the topic attributes in the event through news reports,thereby forming the cognitive logic of the entire event,and then affecting the public's cognitive logic.At present,there are few empirical studies on the third-level agenda setting theory in the Chinese context,and it rarely involves the field of emergent public health events.Therefore,as an empirical study of the third-level agenda setting theory,this article makes a certain contribution to the development of this theory in China.This article attempts to start from the perspective of media dissemination effect,based on the third-level agenda setting theory,using the new crown pneumonia epidemic as a case,using content analysis and social network analysis to construct traditional media,online media,and media(including the new crown pneumonia epidemic).Traditional media and online media)and the public's agenda networks,and compared and analyzed these agenda networks to obtain intuitively the dissemination of media in the new crown pneumonia epidemic,and conduct empirical research on whether the third-level agenda setting theory is valid in the Chinese context.The study found that traditional media agendas,online media agendas,and media agendas all have a positive correlation with the public agenda.The third-level agenda setting theory has been verified in the Chinese context.Among them,the online media agenda and the public agenda show a stronger positive correlation.Based on the research results,this article puts forward suggestions on how the party,government,and media can effectively guide public opinion in emergent public health incidents.