Missing News: Agenda-Setting, Algorithmic Personalisation, and the Inequality of Information
About this Session
Time
Thu. 16.04. 15:55
Room
Lobby
Speaker
by Alexander Hixson
This paper addresses the problem of absence in contemporary news: not only what is emphasised, but what is missing altogether. Classic agenda-setting research has shown how media direct attention to some issues at the expense of others (as shown by the seminal study of McCombs and Shaw 1972), yet it has largely assumed that audiences are at least exposed to major events. Less well examined is how omission—systematic invisibility—shapes what publics cannot know, particularly in algorithmically mediated environments. The question driving this study is therefore: how do media systems and personalisation pipelines not merely distort perceptions, but erase events from view? The first part of the study analysed coverage of the war in Ukraine between August and October 2025. Drawing on Ground News’ Blindspot feed and cross-referencing with independent sources such as ACLED (Armed Conflict Location & Event Data), I compiled a dataset of significant events. While much was reported widely across ideological divides, certain events were routinely ignored by either side of the political spectrum, with low coverage of left-wing sources on the fact that the US may authorise long range missiles against Russia, and low right-wing coverage of prisoner swaps. Earlier scholarship has not adequately addressed this phenomenon. Agenda-setting studies focus on salience, not absence; algorithm research emphasises polarisation, but has not investigated the pipeline of where entirely unrelated interests lead to a different social media news environment. What is missing is an account of how unequal exposure to international events can arise from structural omissions and from non-political entry points. The second strand of the project addresses this gap through a volunteer study in Tbilisi, Georgia. Participants follow pages seeded by ordinary interests—military history, gardening, cultural heritage—while their feeds are logged for four weeks. The study is designed to demonstrate whether even benign hobbies can act as gateways into unequal visibility of world events, where some perspectives risk being progressively filtered out. Taken together, these two strands demonstrate that inequality of information operates on two levels: through omissions across media ecosystems, and through algorithmic pathways that amplify absence from seemingly innocuous beginnings. The paper argues that agenda-setting must therefore be reconceptualised not only as a process of prioritisation, but also as one of systematic invisibility—where what is absent may shape public understanding more powerfully than what is present.
This paper addresses the problem of absence in contemporary news: not only what is emphasised, but what is missing altogether. Classic agenda-setting research has shown how media direct attention to some issues at the expense of others (as shown by the seminal study of McCombs and Shaw 1972), yet it has largely assumed that audiences are at least exposed to major events. Less well examined is how omission—systematic invisibility—shapes what publics cannot know, particularly in algorithmically mediated environments. The question driving this study is therefore: how do media systems and personalisation pipelines not merely distort perceptions, but erase events from view? The first part of the study analysed coverage of the war in Ukraine between August and October 2025. Drawing on Ground News’ Blindspot feed and cross-referencing with independent sources such as ACLED (Armed Conflict Location & Event Data), I compiled a dataset of significant events. While much was reported widely across ideological divides, certain events were routinely ignored by either side of the political spectrum, with low coverage of left-wing sources on the fact that the US may authorise long range missiles against Russia, and low right-wing coverage of prisoner swaps. Earlier scholarship has not adequately addressed this phenomenon. Agenda-setting studies focus on salience, not absence; algorithm research emphasises polarisation, but has not investigated the pipeline of where entirely unrelated interests lead to a different social media news environment. What is missing is an account of how unequal exposure to international events can arise from structural omissions and from non-political entry points. The second strand of the project addresses this gap through a volunteer study in Tbilisi, Georgia. Participants follow pages seeded by ordinary interests—military history, gardening, cultural heritage—while their feeds are logged for four weeks. The study is designed to demonstrate whether even benign hobbies can act as gateways into unequal visibility of world events, where some perspectives risk being progressively filtered out. Taken together, these two strands demonstrate that inequality of information operates on two levels: through omissions across media ecosystems, and through algorithmic pathways that amplify absence from seemingly innocuous beginnings. The paper argues that agenda-setting must therefore be reconceptualised not only as a process of prioritisation, but also as one of systematic invisibility—where what is absent may shape public understanding more powerfully than what is present.