Opinion Leadership via Conversation: How Opinion Leaders Talk About the Media

Opinion leadership is an influential concept in communication research. Although opinion leadership is established through the transmission, classification, and interpretation of mass media content in everyday communication, studies that focus on opinion leaders' social interactions are rare. This study uses observation and survey data from 681 real groups consisting of 1,899 individuals to investigate two main questions: First, how often do opinion leaders refer to the mass media in face-to-face interactions? Second, what specific functions do their media references fulfill for them and their conversational partners? Our study carves out how salient media content is in opinion leaders' speech contributions, how opinion leaders evaluate the media information brought in, how they enforce the content if opposing opinions prevail in the group, and what functions their media references fulfill in the communication process. Our results show that opinion leaders refer much more frequently to mass media content than others and are more likely to contribute their own, mostly positive evaluations of media content. Consistent with the original concept of opinion leadership we find that opinion leaders' media references are not limited to relaying and enforcing political viewpoints, as many later studies suggest. Instead, they often serve entertainment and affective functions.