4. Discussion
To communicate is to select(Luhmann, 1984/1995) and itis primarily through selection of media that organisations select meanings for themselves and for their ‘significant others’. That is covered in McLuhan’s dictum the medium is the message (McLuhan & Fiore, 1976) and in the term mediation as defined by Silverstone (1999) – ‘the circulation of meaning’ (p. 13). The power of modern mass media in Western societies (and consequently of media relations function of public relations trying to influence them) is based on the assumption of their effects (Harlow, 2013; Kepplinger, 2015), with agenda-setting being among the strongest(Perse, 2015; Weaver, 2015). “This theory advances the theme that reporters serve as gatekeepers to filter news events and by, their reporting, set an agenda.” (DeSanto, 2013, p. 22). Agenda-setting theory is founded on a chapter from Walter Lippmann’s classic book on Public Opinion titled “The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads.” The first level agenda-setting theory addresses the question: “What are the pictures about?” The second-level agenda-setting theory addresses the question: “What are the dominant characteristics of these pictures?” And the third level agendasetting theory addresses the question: “What are the pictures in our heads?” (Guo, Vu, & McCombs, 2012, p. 54). Journalists set media agenda and media agenda sets public agenda. But what if sources (organisations) bypass journalists and directly communicate with stakeholders they are interested in? And what if they do this not by broadcasting – addressing wide audiences in public space, thus creating public sphere (Bentele, 2013), but by narrowcasting – communicating really only with stakeholders they are interested in? In that case hybrid forms of communication that are focused on content strategy (native advertising, brand journalism and content marketing) not only bypass agenda-setting mass media, they themselves constitute the power of public relations agenda-setting. This is in line with what Ihlen and Pallas (2014) observed: “Tracking the history of mediatisation of the corporation by looking at how the discipline and practice of public relations have grown, the growthofthepractice ofpublic relations canbe readeither as a consequence ofincreasedimportance of communicationin general and the media in particular or as a consequence of how public relations has outgrown the traditional media relations function.” (p. 435) And here a fundamental question emerges: was not the social role of journalists and the traditional mass media in Western (liberal) societies in that they embedded influence as the circulating medium of the social community, as value commitments were the medium for the fiduciary subsystem, money for economic subsystem and power for political subsystem in Parsons modern sociology (Lidz, 2001)? If so, is it possible that influence if being transferred from journalism to public relations?
