The Reposted Agenda: Topic Dominance and Ethical Issues in Bangladeshi Media’s Facebook News Distribution

Abstract

News media frequently share news content on social media. While audience behaviour regarding news sharing has been extensively studied, the practices of the media outlets themselves in this regard remain underexplored. This study examines the characteristics, frequency, and ethical standards of repetitive news sharing by Bangladeshi traditional media on Facebook. Using manual content analysis and computer-assisted textual analysis (CATA), the study analyses 764 repeatedly shared news posts collected from the Facebook pages of five leading media outlets. News items were coded on three dimensions, news topics, genre and ethical characteristics, and a textual analysis of 6,528 headline terms was performed using Voyant Tools to identify dominant themes and collocations. Findings reveal that traditional media mostly repeat hard news (71.7%). Politics is the most covered topic, followed by sports and crime. Despite Bangladesh being an agricultural country, agriculture is among the least frequently shared topics by traditional media on Facebook. In contrast, soft news, while being shared less often, contains much higher percentage of unethical elements than hard news. Repeated headlines have 24.30% unethical characteristics, with exclamation marks (9.90%) and clickbait (6.50%) being the most frequent. A textual analysis reveals that political actors and major sporting events such as the World Cup are also dominant in the repeated news agenda. The study highlights the need for greater ethical consistency in social media news distribution and calls for broader thematic diversity. Keywords: News sharing, news topic, news genre, social media, traditional media.