The news media and its audience: Agenda setting on organic food in the United States and Germany

What are the agenda-setting effects between the news media and its audience regarding organic food? This longitudinal text-mining study investigates the relationship between topics mentioned in news articles and reader comments published the online news outlets nytimes.com (USA) and spiegel.de (Germany) from 2007 to 2020. Topics are modeled using a neural network approach based on clustered multilingual sentence embeddings. Results show that the salience of topics in news articles significantly influences their salience in reader comments but not vice versa. Metrics for agenda distance and agenda diversity confirm the media’s agenda-setting role and additionally point out periods of time when events caused the media and public attention to diverge. The news media drives public opinion on organic food in the US and Germany by determining the discussion topics and is thus an important player in the promotion of organic food consumption to be considered by marketers and policy makers.