Highlighting The Image Of The Local Government Institutions In Mass Media Based On The Results Of The Content Analysis

Mass media image plays a major role in influencing public opinion. The premise of this paper is that the setting of an agenda represents an interactional process between the mass media agenda, the political agenda, and the public agenda. Therefore, by studying the image of local government institutions in mass media, one can make inferences about the political agenda and the public agenda. This paper builds on the conventional methodological guidelines of conducting imagological analyses and it uses secondary data collected from the local print media to illustrate how various types of mass media image profiles can be built. Firstly, we have operationalized the local mass media image of local government institutions using the following dimensions: formal institutions, informal institutions, (non)political leaders, (non) political parties and associations. Secondly, we have calculated specific mass media image indexes, based on previous content analysis results. Thirdly, we have graphed the mass media image profiles of the local government institutions. In this way, we have illustrated a step by step procedure of applying established image analysis techniques in the study of the local mass media agenda of the local government institutions. The main advantage of this procedure is that it can help predict not only the local mass media interest for particular local public administrative themes, but also the impact of the mass media image of local government institutions (local and central) on the local public.