Rationale

The concept of agenda-setting theory posits that the media impacts the public’s perception of issues that are important to them. Based on the content of Fox News discussed in the previous paragraphs, Fox devoted more coverage to immigration than CNN. As such, we would expect Fox viewers to be more likely to identify immigration as the most important issue, when asked, than if they had been a CNN viewer.

Hypothesis

H₀ (null): There is no relationship between viewers’ preferred network (Fox vs. CNN) and whether they see immigration as the top issue.

H₁ (alternative): Fox viewers are more likely than CNN viewers to see immigration as the top issue.

Variables & method

Independent variable: PreferredNetwork (Fox vs. CNN)

Dependent variable: Immigration (Top issue vs. Not top issue)

Method: Chi-square test of independence

Results & discussion

The chi-square test demonstrated whether there was a significant relationship between network preference and identifying immigration as the top issue.

Chi-square statistic: r round(chitest$statistic, 2)

Degrees of freedom: r chitest$parameter

p-value: r signif(chitest$p.value, 3)

In the event the p-value is less than 0.05, we reject the null hypothesis and conclude that Fox viewers were significantly more likely than CNN viewers to indicate immigration as the top issue. This finding confirms agenda-setting theory and demonstrates how media coverage can shape audience’s characterizations.

# Load dataset
FetchedData <- read.csv("https://drkblake.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/TopIssue.csv")
write.csv(FetchedData, "TopIssue.csv", row.names=FALSE)
data <- read.csv("TopIssue.csv")
# Load packages
library(gmodels)
library(ggplot2)
# Crosstabulation
crosstab_table <- CrossTable(data$PreferredNetwork, data$Immigration,
                             chisq=TRUE, prop.chisq=FALSE)
# Chi-square test
chitest <- chisq.test(table(data$PreferredNetwork, data$Immigration))
chitest_table <- chitest
chitest_table
# Graph (stacked bar chart)
graph <- ggplot(data, aes(x=PreferredNetwork, fill=Immigration)) +
  geom_bar(position="fill") +
  labs(y="Proportion", title="Immigration as Top Issue by Network Preference") +
  scale_fill_discrete(name="Immigration")
graph