Fear Campaign? Agenda and Public Opinion During Costa Rica’s 2014 Presidential Election

Abstract

This exploratory article examines, based on the theoretical premises of the agenda-setting theory and quantitative-qualitative content analysis, the 2014 campaign coverage made by the country’s main news outlets –the daily newspaper La Nación and the televised broadcast Telenoticias– to demonstrate that topic selection in the coverage of both outlets gave prominence to subjective issues, which were crucial to understand the results of the first round during the 2014 presidential election.