Political Bloggers in Malaysia and the New Opinion Leaders

The exponential growth of blogs has created an exciting new wave in political discourse from among ordinary citizens, civil societies to the powers that be. While traditional media may still reach far greater influence among the public, yet there are evidence that blogs increases the level of participatory democracy among citizens and sets the agenda for the traditional media. The main aim of this paper is to examine the agenda-setting effect between blogs and the traditional media. Employing mass communication theories as agenda-setting, this paper examined the elite and random socio- political blogs from across the political spectrum in order to search for the existence of blog agenda in the traditional media and consequently to identify new opinion leaders in Malaysian blogosphere. Content analysis conducted on political issues in blogs and in the traditional media provides evidence to investigate the salient issues in blogs and the traditional media. The general result of this study shows that despite the agenda of blogs being generally similar to that of the traditional media, leading blogs do play an influential role in setting the blog agenda while assuming opinion leadership at the same time. At the attribute level, the political affiliation in the blogosphere do – to a certain extent – reflects the national sentiment of public opinion. This paper contributes to the mass communication studies and political communication through its identification of the opinion leadership blogs as complementary and competitive agenda setting force in the context of the Malaysian political blogosphere.