CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
Background to the study
In January 2018, a tweet about a primary school teacher in Ghana who teaches his pupils Information and Communication Technology (ICT) with a blackboard version of Microsoft Office went viral on Twitter. A Twitter user had copied the post from Facebook and mentioned Information Technology companies like Microsoft and Google in the tweet. Within few hours after the tweet had gone viral, the story appeared and gained prominence on major online news networks like the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Guardian UK, Cable News Network (CNN), Tech Crunch and Joy News Channel in Ghana. The teacher, Richard Appiah Akoto, suddenly became a household name and discussions on quality education featured prominently on social media platforms in Ghana and, perhaps, globally. Subsequently, links of news stories on global media organizations were also shared by social media users. On social media platforms like Instagram where links could not be shared, screenshots of the news stories, as well as pictures of this teacher, were shared with the headlines as captions or comments. Both new and legacy media played a role in getting this news out there and subsequently raising several issues on Ghana’s educational system.
The media play a very important role in society today. Inasmuch as they are regarded as the “fourth estate of the realm”, acting as a check on government and other institutions (Luberda, 2008), they also give people what to think about every day (McCombs, 2004; McCombs & Shaw, 1972). The amount of attention the media devote to particular issues does not only influence how the public is going to accept the issue but also drives the kind of importance people attach to the given issue. These issues are regarded as the media’s agenda. For some years now, a good number of empirical studies have perhaps given support to the fact that issues that form the mainstream media agenda may also influence the public agenda (McCombs & Shaw, 1976). On a daily basis, traditional media may publish a number of issues that they expect their audiences to engage with.
The underlying assumption of media agenda-setting is the power of the media to direct “what the public think about rather than what to think”.
The assumption was further explored by Dearing and Rogers (1996) to ascertain what influences the media’s agenda itself. Scholars have proposed that there is an interplay among media houses whereby apart from their audiences, they also influence one another. According to Dearing and Rogers (1996), “news people operate in a special kind of environment, without much contact with their audience members and so they take their cues about an issue’s priority from other media”. These hints derive not only from an issue agenda’s considerable importance, but also from its interest to the audiences and media consumers over which these media outlets compete. Presumably, with time, issues picked up by some media outlets also tended to influence what other news media put out. This later version of agenda-setting is what is referred to as intermedia agenda- setting. Intermedia agenda-setting focuses on how different media influence one another’s news agenda (Banducci, S., 2018; Sikanku, 2012). News media differ in power across the world. Those that are in powerful nations play several important roles in shaping the global news agenda. Furthermore, media firms with greater access to more quality news sources tend to have a greater influence on smaller news media who may not have a wide network of correspondents and or access to news sources (Cui and Wu, 2017).