ABSTRACT
Although the Network Agenda Setting (NAS) Model is new, its focus on news media’s role in constructing connections has been implicitly discussed in the course of the media effects research for several decades. For instance, the compelling argument concept asserts that the salience of certain attributes in the news media can significantly modify the public’s perceived salience of the object that possesses that attribute (Ghanem, 1996, 1997). This establishes a connection between an object and an attribute, bridging the first and the second level of the agenda-setting theory. In this way, for example, a set of news stories that accuse a political leader of drug abuse could make audience members consider drug problems as a whole as an important issue at the time. The compelling argument concept implies that the news media can bundle an object and an attribute to make them salient simultaneously in the public’s minds (Guo, 2013).
