Agenda setting in Taiwan's first presidential election, 1996 : a comparison of coverage in three newspapers and public perceptions of issues and candidates

This study aimed to examine agenda-setting in the context of Taiwan's first presidential election held in 1996 by comparing newspaper coverage and data from extended focus groups. Three major Taiwanese newspapers, the United Daily News, the China Times, and the Liberty Times, were content-analysed to investigate the newspaper agendas on important issues, campaign issues and candidates' images; eight focus groups with a total of 92 voters from Taichung were conducted to learn the public agendas on key issues and image attributes linked to presidential candidates. The use of extended focus groups in this study proved to be innovative and useful. By providing opportunities for participants to clarify and justify their responses, this research method helped avoid some methodological criticism surrounding previous agenda-setting research and gain further insights into understanding what issues and candidates' images were most important in the public minds and why their perspectives were formed in this way.;The results showed that Taiwanese newspapers do, to a certain degree, influence the public agendas on key campaign issues and salient image attributes linked to candidates Chen Li-an and Peng Ming-min. Participants with different gender and educational backgrounds generally showed similarities in their issues, campaign, and image agendas despite certain variations in order of importance. However, the study showed that education had some influence on agenda-setting of the press. It was found that the views of lesser educated female (LEF) participants on the five key campaign issues were closer to the newspaper coverage of those issues. On the other hand, higher educated participants, especially females, were more easily influenced by the newspapers in their perceptions of the top five substantive attributes linked to candidates Chen Li-an, Lee Teng-hui, and Peng Ming-min.