ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the relationship between the theory of agenda setting and scandals pre-social media environments, before situating agenda setting and scandals within the altered dynamics of the new media ecology. It describes the relationship between the theory of agenda setting and scandals through an examination of several main media points: pre-social media, but in the era of the Internet and the World Wide Web; and post-2014 to the present, with the palpable rise of bots, algorithms, and malicious activity through computational propaganda within social media architectures. The growth of alternative media outlets, social media streams, and networked collectives online had a palpable effect on the agenda setting process. The crisis in the media’s agenda setting authority is evidenced by the lack of resonance of Trump–Russia scandal’s significance with conservative partisan publics. Active publics could set the scandal agenda for the media if they were in the right place at the right time.
