Agenda-setting: the power of the Times (Signifying Nothing: how does saying nothing at all become so loud?)

Friday, 5 September 2003

Agenda-setting: the power of the Times

Why do Virginia Postrel and Glenn Reynolds suddenly care about the two-week Memphis blackout in late July and early August? Simple: the New York Times had an op-ed about it.

(Virginia’s reaction is common. I got stares of disbelief when I told people in Ann Arbor about the Memphis power outage when the Great Northeast Blackout hit the town. “Surely we would have heard about this,” was the common refrain.)

Of course, Signifying Nothing readers knew about it at the time, even though half of SN (Brock) was offline due to the power outage and the other half (i.e. me) was 750 miles away.

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Welcome to Signifying Nothing, a weblog featuring serious (and frivolous) commentary from Chris Lawrence, an associate professor of political science at Middle Georgia State University in Macon, Georgia.
Chris was also formerly a contributor to Outside The Beltway.
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Signifying Nothing formerly featured the stylings of Brock Sides, a left-leaning philosopher turned network administrator currently residing in Memphis, Tennessee who now blogs at Battlepanda, and Robert Prather, a libertarian-leaning conservative economist and occasional contributor at OTB.

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