Date of Award
9-15-2014
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Journalism, MSMC
First Advisor
Mary Pitts
Committee Members
Gilbert Fowler; Holly Hall
Call Number
LD 251 .A566t 2014 A42
Abstract
This study was designed to examine the agenda of traditional newspapers of Saudi Arabia and the agenda of Saudi Twitter users, and to compare between the two agendas. The salient issues in both traditional Saudi newspapers articles and tweets by Saudi users had to be content analyzed to accomplish the study's goal. The top three Saudi newspapers in circulation were chosen to draw the article sample, and a list of fourteen Saudi Twitter accounts were chosen based on how often their tweets got retweeted. The users whose tweets got the highest retweets were selected for analysis. The findings showed that the top five salient topics of issues in newspapers of Saudi Arabia were foreign affairs, civil defense, culture and media, labor, and justice. On the other hand, the top five topics of issues in tweets were social affairs, Islamic affairs, culture and media, terrorism, corruption. Findings showed that there was a weak but significant correlation between the agenda of Saudi newspapers and the agenda of Saudi Twitter users. Results supported previous studies by showing that religious communication in social media was high for Saudi Arabian users, and that a social movement existed in Twitter as Saudi users were working on raising the awareness toward corruption by heavily retweeting tweets that discuss the topic of corruption.
Rights Management
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Almistadi, Mohammed, "Trendsetters Vs. Agenda Setting: A Comparison of Agendas in Twitter and Newspapers of Saudi Arabia" (2014). Student Theses and Dissertations. 779.
https://arch.astate.edu/all-etd/779
