Two tales of one crash: Intergovernmental media relations and agenda building during the Smolensk airplane crash

Abstract

This study aims to advance the theoretical and practical knowledge of political public relations, and influence that political profile of the media can have on the agenda-building process. The influences of agenda indexing are also discussed with regard to different media profiles. A quantitative content analysis was conducted to examine the influence of Polish and Russian government messages from presidents and prime ministers regarding the Smolensk plane crash on media coverage in both counties. Newspapers were categorized by political profile representing pro-government, mainstream, or opposition profile. Nearly all of the hypotheses were fully supported for the first, second, and third level of agenda building. Results of this study demonstrate that political public relations’ success and agenda indexing can be affected by a medium’s political profile, particularly in the case of opposition media. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed along with areas of future research.

Morality on the ballot: strategic issue salience and affective moral intuitions in the 2020 US presidential election

“…, 2011). This is illustrated by Myslik et al . (2019), finding Russian and Polish governmental communications transferred object attributes across pro-government, centrist, and opposing media organizations.…”

“…, 2022; Neil et al. , 2018; Myslik et al ., 2019; Seethaler and Melischek, 2019; Valera Ordaz, 2015; Zhang et al., 2017). From a management perspective, this underlines a strategy for maximizing organizational reach and impact while minimizing the expenditure of institutional resources, such as finances, labor, and time.…”

“…Second-level agenda-building research has highlighted associations between candidate attributes and news releases, media content, and public opinion (Fahmy et al, 2011). This is illustrated by Myslik et al (2019), finding Russian and Polish governmental communications transferred object attributes across pro-government, centrist, and opposing media organizations.…”

“…A practical implication of this study is data-driven support for the utility of news management strategies for public relations practitioners. While this study is set within a US context that presents a unique political and electoral model, the internationalization of agenda-building scholarship suggests effectively leveraging organizational communications in participatory democracies can lend support to transferring object salience, attributes, and networks to media coverage and opponent messaging, as well as aid in achieving organizational goals of managing public image, reputation, and expectations (Auwal et al, 2022;Neil et al, 2018;Myslik et al, 2019;Seethaler and Melischek, 2019;Valera Ordaz, 2015;Zhang et al, 2017). From a management perspective, this underlines a strategy for maximizing organizational reach and impact while minimizing the expenditure of institutional resources, such as finances, labor, and time.…”

“…Lastly, it should be noted that this study focused exclusively on a US presidential election. While extensive literature suggests the utility agenda-building in democracies other than the USA, like the United Kingdom (Neil et al, 2018), Spain (Valera Ordaz, 2015, Austria (Seethaler and Melischek, 2019), Russia and Poland (Myslik et al, 2019), Bulgaria (Camaj, 2018), Israel (Sheafer and Weimann, 2005), Nigeria (Auwal et al, 2022), and Hong Kong (Zhang et al, 2017), our method presents issues for comparative analysis. Namely, political attitude was measured on a binary scale (liberal-conservative) which fits the USA's two-party system but is not reflective of multi-party systems found in most democracies worldwide.…”