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This chapter identifies, defines and explores four news media roles of conduit, facilitator, mediator and political actor through which the media participate with corporate, social and political actors in agenda-building processes. The framework of the media’s four agenda-building roles sheds light on how the news media perform their various roles as well as how other actors, such as organizations and media audiences, are able to mobilize the media performing these roles. This framework helps explain how and why media roles affect the way actors are able to influence the media agenda with the intention of shaping the public agenda.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the linkages between public relations efforts and policymaking activity during a non-election setting.

Using a time-lag design, this study used content analysis to examine public relations materials and policymaking activity during the first six months of US President Barack Obama’s second term. The public relations data were collected from the official White House website and social media. The policymaking data were collected from congressional calendars of business.

The data revealed varying degrees of support across the three levels of agenda-building for issues, attributes, and issue/attribute co-occurrence. Contrary to the expected relationship that public relations drives policymaking activity, the data suggest that policymaking activity was a stronger predictor of public relations material.

This study provides modest support for time-lag agenda-building effects across three levels. However, future experimental research is needed to truly assess causal relationships. Future research should also explore alternative sources of data for policymaking activity.

This study demonstrates that the efficacy of information subsidy types is not uniform and should be chosen strategically. Traditional subsidy types were most effective for driving issues, while digital subsidy types provided more useful outlets for driving issue attributes.

This study contributes to political public relations scholarship by exploring the temporal relationships between public relations efforts and policymaking activity in a non-election setting. The time-lag design serves as an exploratory inquiry into the agenda-building process.

While morality is ever-present in elections, scholars have yet to merge political public relations and Moral Foundations Theory. It is crucial to assess the complex morality present not only in social deduction, but also in political strategic communication. The current work aims to analyze the issue agendas and their relationships in the 2020 presidential campaign and assesses their moral strategy.

This study used a computer-assisted content analysis (N = 7,888) with each moral intuition coded from the Moral Foundations Dictionary. Datapoints included campaign tweets, Facebook posts, debate performances, remarks, news releases and nomination acceptance speeches. Coverage included articles from including The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN and Fox News to assess both liberal and conservative media.

Candidates' issue and moral agendas were correlated with each other and with the media's agenda. Comparatively, the Biden campaign has stronger correlations when it came to connecting with issues, stakeholders and moral intuitions in the media agenda than the Trump campaign. For issues, the Biden campaign prioritized COVID-19 and the economy, while the Trump campaign prioritized the economy and crime. The candidates also had similar moral strategies.

This study suggests effectively leveraging organizational communications in democracies can support the transfer of object salience, moral attributes and networks to media coverage, public discourse and opponent messaging. It can also help achieve organizational goals by managing public image, reputation and expectations.

This work expands the literature by taking a pluralist moral psychology approach in assessing the salience and correlation of five moral intuitions: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity. This study serves as a springboard for examining morality's impact on political public relations.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate whether or not public relations efforts in corporate social responsibility (CSR) influence the news media in corporate crisis situations.

The study conducted a content analysis of press releases and news media based on traditional human-coded cross-lag analyses and a machine learning technique, a novel method of big data analysis to test hypotheses.

Results indicate that CSR press releases indeed influenced the news media. During the crisis point, however, agenda-building was not observed.

Corporations need to continue CSR activities and provide public relations materials consistently even after a crisis, as an agenda-building role could be recovered.

The study examines the relationship between CSR and crisis situations in an agenda-building theoretical framework. The authors introduce agenda-building in the corporate sector with machine learning techniques.

The purpose of this chapter is to shed light on the interrelationships that exist between politicians' Twitter agendas, news websites agendas and public agendas at the first level during the 2019 Greek Parliamentary elections for the two front-runners of the elections, Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Alexis Tsipras. Three researches were conducted to assess the issues agendas of candidates' tweets, news websites coverage as well as the issue importance of the public for an 18-day period prior to the elections. At the issue level, although Twitter and media agendas align more, they are distinct from public agenda. Overall, Twitter proved to be an ineffective tool for influencing the news websites and public agendas during the 2019 Greek Parliamentary elections with online media agendas being slightly more powerful. Moreover, the public agenda did play a role in shaping Twitter as well as media content but in a counterbalancing manner. In addition, this study confirmed that agenda building and setting dynamics at both levels vary based on the issue and candidate being analysed.

This paper aims to explore the links among health authorities’ public relations efforts, news media coverage, and public perceptions of risk during the H1N1 pandemic outbreak.

This study used a triangulation of research methods by comparing public relations materials, media coverage, and public opinion. The data were collected from a federal government web site, national newspapers, and national polls.

The data revealed a positive relationship between information subsidy attention and media attention to the H1N1 disease as well as the severity attribute. The salience of the severity attribute in information subsidies was linked with increased H1N1 salience in media coverage, extending the testing of the compelling-arguments hypothesis to an agenda-building context. However, there was no association between salience of the severity attribute and public risk perceptions.

The study provides evidence for public relations effectiveness. However, the limited influence of the severity frame on the public's risk perception suggests a gap between news coverage and the public's view. Framing that effectively empowers the public to engage in desired behavior should be further studied for the success of a public health campaign. The study is limited to examining the severity attribute. A future study should pay more attention to different issue attributes or other frames. The media sample was limited to newspapers and thus lacks generalizability.

The study contributes to public relations scholarship by demonstrating how information subsidies influence media agendas and public opinion in a health communication context. The public health authorities’ role in influencing media agenda should be stressed.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concepts of key messages and key message integrity, and examines their viability for communication management scholars and practitioners in evaluating media relations activities. Key message integrity addresses not only what messages transfer, but also how well.

The authors analyzed 18 nonprofit organizations’ key messages and the messages’ integrity levels using content analysis on one month of their news coverage. In-depth interviews with eight of their media relations practitioners helped validate the concepts and the results.

The authors found five unique categories and functions of key messages: information concerned with dissemination, raison d’être concerned with purpose, categories concerned with positioning, resource management concerned with accounting for resources, and social relevance concerned with legitimacy. Findings also revealed varying levels of transmission and message integrity across the categories. Interviews revealed insights into challenges for communicating organizational key messages to the news media.

This study lays the foundation for additional research on key messages and key message integrity as useful metrics for communication management scholars and practitioners.

The use of sources in news coverage affects news audience’s perceptions of news events. To extend existing research on inter media agenda-setting and agenda-building effects of CSR-related news, the purpose of this paper is to explore the representation and share of voices in CSR-related news by investigating and comparing the use of sources in press releases and news coverage.

This study content-analyzed the 202 CSR-related press releases published by the two electricity providers in Hong Kong and 1,045 news articles related to the press releases over a five-year period. A total of 402 quotes from the press releases and 1,880 quotes from the news coverage were analyzed, including the types of sources cited, the tone of the sources and variations in the use of sources across seven different CSR themes.

Although company representatives were quoted the most in both the press releases and news coverage, NGOs, government representatives and industry analysts were the most frequently cited for negative comments in the news coverage. Differences were found between the press releases and news coverage in terms of how frequently different sources were cited, the tone attributed to those sources, and the choice of sources across different CSR themes.

The findings reflect that corporations are not necessarily the most influential voice in CSR and that other groups also have their views represented in the news media. The representation of these voices differed by CSR themes. Corporations are advised to further explore what and how different voices are represented in the news coverage in relation to their CSR activities and to consider these voices when making decisions about CSR.

Transformative value is a central tenet of transformative service research (TSR) because it affects individual and community well-being, quality of life and sustainability. Although transformative value plays a significant role in well-being, the literature suffers from a lack of sound interdisciplinary conceptual frameworks that delineate how transformative value is created in services throughout the service consumption process. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine the nature and role of service communications during the various stages of the service consumption process to enable the creation of transformative value for people and the environment.

To achieve the above goal, the authors integrate agenda-setting theory (media theory) combined with framing and relational dialectics (communication theories) as well as TSR.

In line with the objectives of the study, the authors propose an integrative framework named Transformative Value Creation via Service Communications (TVCSC) that explains how firms set their transformative corporate agendas through their dialectics with consumers, society and media. This transformative agenda is reflected in the marketing mix of their services (7Ps) as communicated with various means, physically and digitally (sales/frontline personnel, advertising, CSR, social media and website). Recommendations for a transformative marketing mix are provided. Furthermore, TVCSC illustrates how value is co-created in all customer–firm interactions via relationship dialectics throughout the service consumption process to result in transformative value outcomes.

The proposed framework identifies several research gaps and provides useful future research directions.

This is the first comprehensive framework that explains how transformative value is created through the various communications in services and is the outcome of value co-creation interactions of the service consumption process.