Riding the Waves of Media Attention: Agenda Building Under Scarcity

How do non-elite actors sustain public visibility when attention is scarce, volatile, and largely driven by external events? This article examines how the families of Israeli soldiers Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul sought to maintain media visibility and political salience while their remains were held in Gaza between 2014 and 2025. Drawing on a mixed-methods design that combines a longitudinal analysis of 6,370 news items with in-depth interviews with 10 participants, the study identifies four phases of agenda building: strategic silence, strategic agenda building, agenda displacement, and contextual reconfiguration. The findings show that the families used symbolic action, narrative framing, and strategic media engagement to sustain a baseline level of visibility, while major attention waves were triggered mainly by external political developments. This article reconceptualizes agenda building as a temporal process of navigating and riding waves of media attention, contributing to research on agenda building, media attention, and mediated visibility in prolonged crises.